17. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 440-480

Book VII: A Spy in Orbit and a Game of Chance, 73. Palm Tree Disguises; 74. Keeping the Military on the Leash; 75. "Use 'em or Lose 'em"; 76. LeMay and Tommy Power as the Wild Cards; 77. Avoiding Götterdämmerung; 78. Buying Time for the Empire to Implode. Epilogue: The Schriever Luck, 79. Johnny von Neumann Finds Faith but Not Peace; 80. "The Slowest Old Trev Has Ever Gone in a Cadillac"; 81. Losing It All and Forgiving a Brother; 82. "Only in America"; 83. A Reunion With Hap

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At the end of May 1962, a Soviet delegation had obtained Fidel Castro's permission to place its missiles in Cuba, and between July and October Soviet freighters and passenger ships began moving the missiles and the troops to the island. Forty-one thousand, nine hundred two Soviet officers and men and thirty-six missiles, with launchers and nuclear warheads, had arrived by the time the crisis broke. Khrushchev retained the power to command the launch of the ICBMs, but the military could use any tactical weapons it saw necessary in case of an American invasion. That the transport went undetected can be blamed on the CIA, which was in disarray after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, as well as the grounding of the U-2 spy planes after one had been shot down in China in September. An earlier U-2 had photographed surface-to-air missiles in western Cuba in August. And finally, most people simply didn't believe that the Soviets would be insane enough to put long-range missiles in Cuba.

The Soviets got caught when U-2 flights over Cuba resumed in October. The Joint Chiefs recommended air strikes to take out the missile sights, but Kennedy was concerned about retaliation and ordered a naval blockade. The military still wanted to strike and to follow up with an invasion, and LeMay pulled out the old comparison to Neville Chamberlain. But Kennedy, who had been reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, and didn't want to blunder into World War III, stood firm. No one knew of the tactical nukes in Cuba or that the Soviets were prepared to use them to repel an invasion. This would almost certainly have provoked the United States to use its own tactical weapons, "incinerating much of Cuba and its inhabitants and would-be Russian defenders." It would also have empowered the ultrahawks like LeMay and Thomas Power. Kennedy "raised the alert to DEFCON 2, a single step short of all-out nuclear conflict, on Wednesday, October 24.... All of SAC went to the highest possible state of readiness." The potential was there for the destruction of "the entire Northern Hemisphere."

Khrushchev was, fortunately, not a lunatic, though he realized he had been a fool. He backed down and started negotiating, getting a promise from Kennedy not to invade Cuba and to remove the missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of the missiles and light bombers. The Americans lifted the naval embargo in November, and the Soviets removed all but a brigade of 3,000 soldiers from Cuba. The missiles in Turkey were slowly removed: The last one left in July 1963, three months after the ones in Italy were removed and only a month before the ones in England.

As it turned out, the most significant effect of the nuclear stalemate was "to help buy the time needed for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own internal contradictions." The Soviet Union, its agriculture crippled by the system of collective farms, was forced to import corn and wheat from the United States. The only exportable products it produced were petroleum and natural gas, most of which went to Eastern Europe to prop up the fractious states it supported there. Where Khrushchev at least attempted to make reforms, Brezhnev was corrupt and cynical; he once told his brother, "All that stuff about Communism is a tall tale for popular consumption. After all, we can't leave the people with no faith." He was also responsible for the disastrous campaign in Afghanistan in 1979. Gorbachev's civil liberties reforms in the 1980s brought about a significant change but he could make no headway in improving the standard of living because of the "sclerotic economic system." Trying to hold the Soviet Union together, he let the Eastern European satellites go their own way in 1989. Boris Yeltsin finally dissolved the Soviet Union.

The nuclear stalemate was dubbed "Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. There was nothing mad about the grim equation. It made perfect sense by enforcing a nuclear peace." The madness lay in allowing the arms race to escalate: "Technology was in the saddle of a horse named Fear in a race of human folly." On the other hand, the rocket technology made possible the peaceful exploration of space: John Glenn rode an Atlas into orbit in February 1962 and the Titan II made the moon landing possible. The development of communications satellites made a global economy possible and transformed everyday life: "most people who slide their credit cared into the electronic reader on a gas pump or an automated teller machine have no idea their card's validity is being checked via space."

The question became not the quantity and quality of American military power, but whether the leaders of the United States would wield it wisely or foolishly, as the war in Iraq would so aptly illustrate. 

John von Neumann was diagnosed with cancer in 1955, was hospitalized in April 1956 and died in February 1857, age 53. Trevor Gardner, frustrated by the economies of the Eisenhower administration, resigned from his position as assistant secretary of the Air Force for research and development in February 1956. He returned to private business and wrote magazine articles denouncing the government's ineptness; these became fuel for the "missile gap" myth. He was regarded as "too controversial" for a government position, and died of a heart attack in September 1963, age 48. John Bruce Medaris found his space program handed over to a civilian agency known as NASA in 1959; he left the Army and became an Episcopal priest. Ed Hall, who never forgave Schriever, did forgive his brother Ted when he learned Ted was a spy.

Schriever became a four-star general in July 1961, but didn't get along with Robert McNamara and decided to retire in August 1966, just before his fifty-sixth birthday. His marriage to Dora went on the rocks in 1968 when he had an affair with another woman. They separated amicably but didn't divorce because Dora was a devout Catholic. In 1986 he met the retired pop singer Joni James, but didn't marry her until 1997, after Dora granted him a divorce. He was 87 and she was 67. In 1998, Falcon Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, a command center for satellites, was renamed Schriever Air Force Base. He died on June 20, 2005, age 94, and was buried in Arlington near Hap Arnold. 

16. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 406-439

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 66. A Victory Despite the Bugs; 67. Minuteman: Ed Hall's Triumph; 68. "You Couldn't Keep Him in That Job". Book VII: A Spy in Orbit and a Game of Chance, 69. A Would-Be Spy in the Sky Goes Awry; 70. Mathison Snatches the Prize; 71. Discoverer Goes "Black" into Corona; 72. A Hare-Brained Scheme

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After the deployment of Atlas D at Vandenberg, there was a year's learning curve for the SAC launch crews. Maj. Benjamin Bellis was put in charge of straightening things out, which he did by insisting on full documentation of every modification that engineers made to the missiles, particularly if they were successful, "because you know you got it right but you can't repeat it," Bellis observed. "It drives you wild." Meanwhile, work was proceeding on the F series, the last of the Atlas models and the first to be put in underground silos. By December 1962, there were 132 Atlas missiles ready to be used against the Soviet Union. And the Titan, originally a fallback missile in case Atlas didn't work, had added another 54 missiles to the arsenal.

Now attention turned to "the ultimate in ICBMs," the Minuteman. Ed Hall had been angry at being shoved aside on Atlas and requested a transfer, but instead Schriever put him in charge of the Minuteman project, which was the creation of a solid-fueled ICBM that would have an advantage over the liquid-fueled Atlas and Jupiter. It could be much smaller, for one thing, as long as the bomb it would carry could be sized down. And it could be launched more quickly than the liquid-fueled rockets, which took fifteen minutes to fuel. Minuteman could be launched instantly. Hall managed to win over even Curtis LeMay by creating a vision of hundred of Minuteman that could be launched simultaneously:

Hall got the impression that what appealed most to LeMay was the massiveness of the scheme. The thought of hundreds and hundreds of rockets roaring out of silos was LeMay's vision of how to frighten the Russians and then to reduce the Soviet Union to cinders if it did come to nuclear war. 

Approval of "what would probably be the biggest rocket program the Air Force would ever undertake" was granted in February 1958. But Schriever disappointed Hall once again by taking the project out of his hands. Hall was so bitter that he left the Air Force and went to work as an engineer at United Aircraft Corp. A young colonel named Samuel Phillips, who had worked on the Thor installations in Britain, was put in charge of Minuteman. The first test of the missile, in February 1961, was a complete success that earned Philllips a promotion to brigadier general at the age of 40. He went on to run the Apollo moon landing program on loan to NASA.

The creation of Minuteman now put the United States so far ahead in the strategic missile competition that the Soviet Union was confronted not with a gap but with a chasm." It would be five years before the Soviets acquired a solid-fueled missile.... The advent of Minuteman put an end to the fear of a nuclear Pearl Harbor that had haunted Eisenhower.... And even if by some miracle the Soviets managed to hit first with everything they had, there wuld still be plenty of Minutemen intact in their steel and concrete shelters to doom Russia. No Soviet statesman with a vestige of sanity could risk a surprise attack.

But Schriever still had work to do, this time on spy satellites. He had been put in charge of the Air Force's satellite program in 1955, partly because he was also the one in charge of the rockets that would put the satellites into orbit. Nothing much got done on them, largely because of Eisenhower's budget concerns, until Sputnik was launched in 1957. Eisenhower authorized creation of a spy satellite in February 1958, with the Air Force in charge of development but the CIA in charge of the finished product, an arrangement parallel with the one that had been successfully used on the U-2 spy plane. Of course, Schriever would take the blame for any failures.

The project was announced as a scientific and medical one called Discoverer, to test the effect of space on the items "from human bone marrow to corn seedlings" that would be carried into orbit and then retrieved. But the CIA called it Corona, and the most important things to be sent up would be cameras and film. Schriever put "Moose" Mathison in charge of satellite control, which was first housed in a motel in Palo Alto and then in a room at Lockheed in Sunnyvale. The equipment used to control the satellites was primitive -- there were no minicomputers or solar panels, and the control system was a strip of plastic tape with holes punched in it that was hooked up to an electric timer.

The first launch attempt, in January 1959 from Vandenberg, was a disaster that the crew labeled "Discoverer 0." But the Discoverer I launch went fine, sending the Agena rocket into orbit, though with an attempt to eject and recover a capsule. Discoverer II also launched well, but the control station in Hawaii lost track of the rocket. The capsule was supposed to be ejected and recovered in the Pacific northwest of Hawaii, but there was no way to control the satellite after radio connection was lost. It was calculated that, left on its own, the capsule would  land on a Norwegian island near the Arctic Circle. Mathison flew to the island, whose governor reported that people had seen the capsule, attached to a parachute, descend. But there was nothing at the site except tracks in the snow leading to a coal mine, a concession that belonged to the Soviet Union. Mathison was convinced that the Russians had the capsule, but Schriever messaged, "Tell Moose to stay out of Soviet territory." The capsule, which had no military value, was never found.

A year and a half followed with little success and increasing complaints from Eisenhower to Schriever and to Richard Bissell, the CIA man put in charge of Discoverer/Corona. Schriever was about to dismiss Mathison from the project until Discoverer XIII was launched in August 1960. When he learned that the orbit was perfect, Mathison flew to Hawaii and recovered the capsule, which contained only instruments and an American flag. He flew back with the capsule to Andrews Air Force Base, where Schriever was waiting. The capsule was taken to the White House where the flag was removed and presented to Eisenhower. Then the capsule was displayed to Sen. Richard Russell, the chairman of the Armed Services committee, and Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader before being sent on a tour of the United States and eventually winding up in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

In fact, Mathison had made an end run around the CIA, which was supposed to pick up the capsule from the Navy ship that retrieved it, and fly it to Rochester, New York. It was meant to be a dress rehearsal for the top-secret delivery to Eastman Kodak of the film capsules that would eventually be placed in the capsule. The CIA was furious, and accused Mathison of a "unique mix of creative anarchy and casual effrontery." (Mathison had even packed a service pistol to intimidate the captain of the ship if he put up any resistance to his taking the capsule.) Mathison was just doing what Schriever, who had learned the value of publicity, wanted him to do. 

The next launch was the real thing, and this time Mathison left retrieval up to the CIA. Discoverer/Corona XIV went into orbit eight days later, carrying a panoramic camera developed by Itek, a company founded by Richard Leghorn, a colonel in the Air Force reserve. Launch, orbit and recovery were perfect, and the resulting photographs of the Soviet Union were deemed "terrific, stupendous." Eisenhower was pleased, of course, but he also insisted that the pictures be kept secret, for fear that Khrushchev would find a way of retaliating. Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was briefed on the spying, and as a result stopped talking about the "missile gap," though as Sheehan notes, "he did not stop his supporters from talking about it, and Nixon suffered the consequences on election day." Discoverer was now Corona, a project that remained secret as its successors have done.

As for Minuteman, the first ten missiles were placed in silos in October 1962 -- the same month that Khrushchev "brought the United States and the Soviet Union the closest they were ever to come to nuclear war." When Leonid Brezhnev took power from Khrushchev two years later, he cited the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example of Khrushchev's "harebrained scheming." Khrushchev had been most irked by the presence of missiles in Turkey, the closest to the Soviet Union, and decided that sending IRBMs to Cuba would test the United States' resolve. The Soviet R-12 missiles in Cuba would threaten Eastern cities as far north as New York, and as far west as Dallas and Oklahoma City. Both Khrushchev's friend and adviser Anastas Mikoyan and his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, advised against it. Khrushchev failed to realize that "Americans regarded the Caribbean as the Romans had regarded the Mediterranean. It was Mare Nostrum, Our Sea." And that "No American president could withstand the political firestorm that would ensue if he acquiesced in the positioning of Russian nuclear missiles on" Cuba. 

14. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 350-371

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 55. The Reluctant Rescuer; 56. Thor vs. Jupiter; 57. Sputnik; 58. Thor Readies for Europe

_____

Schriever asked Richard Jacobson, the chief of test facilities and operations, to take over the troubled Thor program. But when Jacobson declined, Schriever persisted, pointing out that the three failed launches were the result of the way the missiles were tested, and that Jacobson had the expertise to see that the mistakes were eliminated. So Jacobson agreed to become "acting" program director while Schriever found a new role for Ed Hall, the current program director. He tightened up all the launch procedures, and in August 1957 Thor 104 made it off the launch pad and flew for ninety-six seconds before exploding. In September, Thor 105 succeeded in releasing its payload, which flew on for 1,495 miles before splashing down in the Caribbean. And in October, Thor 106's warhead went the required 1,725 miles.

Meanwhile, Eisenhower had called for a review of both the Thor and the Jupiter projects, with an intention to shut one of them down. Schriever argued that Thor had the advantage because its missiles were being produced at Douglas, which was ready to gear up for full production, whereas the Jupiter missiles were still being made one by one at Redstone. Jupiter also lacked ground support and storage, which could also cause delay in production. The Army countered that Jupiter's reentry vehicle -- the warhead -- was lighter than Thor's and could therefore fly farther. But Mettler managed to lighten the reentry vehicle, which was the same one designed for the ICBM, and Thor 107's traveled 3,043 miles to splashdown. In the end, the competition was called off and both programs remained active.

One reason for the continued competition may have been the launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. It was a massive public relations coup for the Soviet Union, putting Eisenhower into a political hot seat. As Sheehan comments,

Dwight Eisenhower was the last American president to believe that military spending which was not absolutely necessary was money wasted and that a well-founded economy was as important to the security of the country as armed might.

Eisenhower's achievements during World War II had made people confident in his military leadership, but Sputnik caused people to doubt if enough was being done to win the rocket race. The Soviets followed with Sputnik 2, a 1,120-pound satellite carrying a dog named Laika, on November 3, 1957, the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader, called for hearings by the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. "The leadoff witness at the Johnson hearings was that genius of scaremongering Dr. Edward Teller." It was not until January 31, 1958, after an embarrassing failure by the Navy to launch a satellite in December, that Wernher von Braun's team used Juno I to send Explorer I, which at eighteen pounds was lighter than either Sputnik, into orbit.

Schriever had been struggling with steady cuts in his budget until Sputnik and the Johnson hearings. Now he was getting ready to deploy Thor missiles in England according to an agreement signed with the British in January 1957. (Jupiters were being sent to Turkey and Italy.) And the ICBM program was still on track. Jacobson had been working on developing a series of tracking stations along the Atlantic range for testing the Atlas and Titan missiles, and the Los Alamos Laboratory had provided a simulated bomb to be placed in the reentry vehicle. Tests were being made of the inertial guidance system, which depended on vacuum tubes in the primitive computer. Thor 112 had to be blown up because it lost stability during its test in December 1957, but Thor 113 was a perfect flight whose payload landed directly on target. After more test launches in July and August 1958, Thor was deemed ready to be deployed in England, and the first missile was sent to its British launch site at the end of August.

13. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 315-349

Book VI: Building the Unstoppable, 49. A Competitor; 50. The Team of Mettler and Thiel; 51. John Bruce Medaris and Wernher von Braun; 52. The Cape of the Canebrake vs. "Moose" Mathison; 53. A Few Grains of Sand; 54. Medaris Goes for the ICBM

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The Soviets' intermediate-range missile made Washington decide that concentrating all missile efforts on the ICBM might not be such a great idea, so Schriever had pressure put on him to develop an IRBM as well. As so often, interservice rivalry had something to do with it, too: The Army had its Jupiter IRBM under way at Redstone, under the direction of Wernher von Braun. Now Schriever was forced to get people to work on the Air Force's version, which was named for another thunderer, Thor.

Ramo chose Ruben Mettler, an engineering and technical director recently hired by Ramo-Wooldridge, to head the Thor project. Mettler was an expert in radar and had been present at one of the postwar bomb tests at Bikini, an experience that "led Mettler to vow that he would do all he could in future years to prevent weapons like this from being used against the United States." He had worked for Ramo and Wooldridge at Hughes Aircraft, but had declined an offer to join them when they left. This time he agreed to work for them again. Assisting Mettler on Thor was Adolf Thiel, an aeronautical engineer who had worked on the V-2 and had come to the States with the group of German rocketeers recruited after the war in Operation Paperclip. He had worked with von Braun at Redstone, but had broken away to form his own research group. Thiel knew enough about the work being done at Redstone that it's no surprise "that Thor was essentially a copy of the missile that was to become the Army's Jupiter." Edward Hall was project manager for Thor, but he had his hands full working on the backup ICBM, Titan, as well.

Schriever's counterpart on the Army's missile was Maj. Gen. Bruce Medaris of the Ordnance Corps. Medaris had an advantage in the rocketeering expertise of von Braun and his fellow Germans. Von Braun was more interested in space exploration than in warfare; he claimed that his membership in the Nazi party, his commission as an officer in the SS and his work on the V-2 were merely means to an end: developing spacecraft. (This would lead to the joke that von Braun's book, I Aim at the Stars, should have had a subtitle: But I Sometimes Hit London.) He had in fact been arrested by the SS, under Himmler's orders, and briefly jailed on suspicion of "defeatist talk and hindering V-2 production by wasting time discussing the future of rockets in space exploration."

The stage for the conflict between Thor and Jupiter was a reclaimed canebrake in Florida called Cape Canaveral (Spanish for "canebrake"). Schriever put Lt. Col. Charles "Moose" Mathison in charge of supervising the construction of the launch facilities at the cape. Thor No. 101 (its designating number inflated to fool the Soviets into thinking it had a hundred predecessors) arrived there in October 1956 and was readied to launch in January 1957.

It rose about eighteen inches and then suddenly fell back on the pad. With a deafening blast and a shock wave that was felt in the blockhouse, the missile blew up, not only tearing itself into pieces but also damaging the concrete launch pad seriously enough that Mathison's civilian construction crews needed two months to restore the pad to usable conditions.

Mettler expected to be fired, but Schriever just said, "I expect things like this to happen." It turned out that two technicians in charge of the liquid oxygen (LOX) tanks had dragged the hose used to fill the tanks on the ground, contaminating the LOX with sand.

Thor 102 also met with disaster when it was launched in April 1957. It left the launch pad and headed out to the ocean, but 32 seconds into the flight it exploded -- or rather it was blown up by the range safety officer. Thiel was so enraged that he almost punched the safety officer, an Air Force major, in the face before Mettler restrained him. The safety officer had three instruments that showed the course of the missile, and one of them had shown it not heading out to sea but inland toward Orlando. It turned out that a Ramo-Wooldridge had installed the Doppler radar apparatus backward. But the safety officer should have checked the other two instruments before detonating the rocket. "He was transferred not long afterward to Alaska."

Thor 103 was ready to launch in May. The launch team had agreed on a countdown of twenty-four hours, reasoning that if the countdown lasted longer, everyone would be so fatigued that human error might be introduced. When they reached the twenty-four limit on Thor 103, Mettler and Thiel were so eager to launch that they called Schriever to ask for an extension. He was reluctant at first but finally agreed. But the technician in charge of reading the gauge that recorded the pressurization of the LOX tank was so exhausted that he didn't see the needle slip over into red. The rocket exploded, doing so much damage that the pad had to be rebuilt again.

Meanwhile, the first Jupiter had launched in March 1957, five weeks after Thor 101 blew up. It flew for seventy-two seconds before breaking up. A second Jupiter lasted ninety-two seconds. After they discovered that the breakup happened because of the sloshing of fuel in the tanks and adjusted for that, on May 31, 1957, ten days after the fireball of Thor 103, a third Jupiter flew downrange for eight minutes and 1,610 miles. The Jupiter's Germans had almost succeeded in creating a missile that would meet the required 1,725-mile flight. But Medaris was unhappy because of two rulings by Secretary Wilson: any successful missile that the Army produced would be turned over to the Air Force for deployment, and in the future, Army missiles would be restricted to a 200-mile range. On the other hand, Medaris could argue that the Air Force was incapable of building an IRBM, and if it couldn't do this, how could it be trusted with the more crucial ICBM project? Surely the success of von Braun and his team meant that the Army should take over the development of the ICBM?

Schriever blamed Ed Hall for the failures, which were not so much the result of flaws in the missile itself as flaws in the testing process. Hall was also at odds with Mettler, and Thiel regarded him as "a horrible guy ... very arrogant." Schriever decided he needed to replace Hall. 

10. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 231-260

Book V: Winning a President, 37. A Schoolhouse and a Radical New Approach; 38. The Guru of Rockets; 39. A Problem With Tommy Power; 40. How Greed Corrupts

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Schriever's new ICBM project set up in a converted Catholic boys school in Inglewood, Calif., so the team that worked there became known as the Schoolhouse Gang. Convair, sensing a serious threat from this new project, proposed that they continue to work on the rocket it already had underway, but von Neumann and his committee opposed the suggestion. It became clear that the new approach to creating an ICBM "would amount to a revolution in the Air Force's relationship with the aviation industry." Ramo would be the chief engineer and the chief scientist, but his firm would be barred from actually manufacturing components for the missile. Convair's reluctance to be cut out of the deal set Schriever up for a power struggle.

To work on development of the rocket engine, Schriever selected Lt. Col. Edward Hall, a rocket propulsion expert at the Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson. (Neither Schriever nor Hall knew that Hall's younger brother, Ted, was a spy for the Soviets.) Hall had distinguished himself during World War II by his skill at repairing aircraft damaged in their sorties from England over Europe. While stationed in England, he became interested in the German missiles, the V-1 and V-2, and collected pieces of them from the sites where they had exploded. He claimed in an unpublished memoir that he had actually been to the site where the missiles were built, at the Nordhausen slave labor camp, on a secret mission, but the claim is unverified. After the war he was sent to the Air Development Center and then to Caltech to study for a master's in aeronautical engineering. He returned to the Air Development Center's Power Plant Laboratory to work on ramjets and rockets. Under his supervision, North American Aviation's Rocketdyne division produced a test engine that Wernher von Braun selected for the Redstone missile, essentially an upgraded V-2.

Hall also claimed in his memoir that he had faked an intelligence report about a giant Soviet rocket engine in order to keep his work from being eliminated in budget cuts. He received the funding he needed for work on the ramjet engines for the Navaho intercontinental cruise missile, which was actually a cover for work on rocket engines for an ICBM. Hall persuaded Maj. Sidney Greene, head of the New Developments Office at the Air Development Center, to let him have $2 million to work on modifying the Navaho design to include a rocket engine. The money was originally designated for Convair, which protested but was overruled. Together with the engineers at Rocketdyne, Hall developed a successful prototype engine, a step toward the more powerful one that Schriever was looking for.

Schriever's next obstacle was Gen. Thomas Power, head of the Air Research and Development Command, who had succeeded LeMay as head of SAC and therefore was disinclined to approve of the ICBM project over which he had authority but no control. The consequences of the failure of Schriever's project would be a mark against Power. A meeting with Power left Schriever shaken: "If he did not succeed in allaying Power's worries, no amount of intervention from Gardner would suffice to protect him. Power would find a way to sack him in order to save his own hide." Power demanded written documentation on everything the project did: "He was preparing a defense for the investigation that would be certain to follow if the project failed -- men eminent in their fields had urged these actions on him and he had no logical recourse but to accept their advice." Schriever therefore took it on himself to woo Power by giving him everything he wanted and more -- and when he learned Power was "a keen golfer," he used that tool in his arsenal as well.

Golfing with Convair, however, was not an option. Its president was a retired general, Joseph McNarney, and the Atlas project was being overseen by Thomas Lanphier Jr., who was close to W. Stuart Symington, the former secretary of the Air Force who was now a senator from Missouri and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. McNarney and Lanphier "started a campaign against Ramo and Wooldridge in the trade press, accusing them of stealing technicians for their new rim from Hughes Aircraft in order to corner the ICBM business." Schriever saw that Convair was motivated by greed because of their disregard for the opinion of the scientific community represented by von Neumann's committee. When Convair tried to get Symington on their side, Schriever countered with presentations from the Schoolhouse Gang that convinced the senator that he should stay out of the crossfire.

What Schriever had run up against was the moral corruption that had become endemic to the U.S. military industry as a result of the Cold War and its demand, year, upon year, upon year for new weaponry.... U.S. military industry, particularly the aircraft industry, had been coddled for so long that its leaders were like spoiled children. They had come to expect profits as a virtual right.

(Anyone reminded of the oil industry?)

Finally, however, Convair yielded to pressure and agreed to Schriever's terms, with one concession: They would manufacture the airframe and assembly and participate in the testing, and would provide the control mechanisms for the missile. Schriever got Convair to create a work force dedicated only to the Atlas at its San Diego plant. But Ramo reported that Convair was not hiring properly qualified engineers for specialized parts of the project, and it took another sit-down with the brass to bring them in line.

As for Power, he had been converted to Schriever's cause by the information he had been receiving and the persuasion of von Neumann. He recommended Schriever for promotion to major general. "From this point on Schriever no longer had to worry about the wary three-stars in Baltimore. Power was now behind him."