The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower's Response to the Soviet Satellite

"The Sputnik Challenge" is one of several very fine works published since 1990 that have reinterpreted the history of the first years of the space age. The figure of Dwight D. Eisenhower has dominated this recent work, and does so in this important book by Robert A. Divine, and Ike has accordingly emerged as a much more effective leader than thought at the time. Rather than a smiling, do-nothing, golf-playing president, Eisenhower's leadership in handling the Soviet Union in space now increasingly appears far-sighted and rational. To ensure against Soviet aggression, Eisenhower supported the development of ICBM deterrent capabilities and reconnaissance satellites as a means of learning about potentially aggressive actions.Most important, Eisenhower established the right of international overflight with satellites, making possible the free use of reconnaissance spacecraft in future years. From the perspective of the Eisenhower administration, which was committed to development of an orbital reconnaissance capability as a national defense initiative, an international agreement to ban satellites from overflying national borders without the individual nation's permission was unacceptable. Eisenhower was concerned that if the United States was the first nation to orbit a satellite, the Soviet Union could invoke territorial rights in space. Soviet Sputniks 1 and 2, however, overflew international boundaries without provoking a single diplomatic protest. As Divine shows in this book, on October 8, 1957, Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles told the president: "the Russians have...done us a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the concept of freedom of international space." Eisenhower immediately grasped this as a means of pressing ahead with the launching of a reconnaissance satellite. The precedent held for Explorer 1 and Vanguard 1, and by the end of 1958 the tenuous principle of "freedom of space" had been established. By allowing the Soviet Union to lead in this area, the Russian space program had established the U.S.-backed precedent for free access.Of course, as Divine demonstrates, Eisenhower displayed a tin ear when asked to listen to the American public in the aftermath of the Sputnik launches in October and November 1957. Eisenhower triefd to reassure U.S. citizens that efforts in space were on track but he was insufficiently successful. He was berated in the media and on the stump for this failure at the time, and there are some appropriate reasons to question his administration's ability to react to public unrest.At the same time, Ike's leadership in the crisis winter of 1957-1958 yielded some of the most sweeping governmental reorganizations and new programs to be undertaken at the federal level since the New Deal. Divine suggests that overall, Ike made several important changes to react to the Sputnik crisis, taking these decisive actions:1. Established a Science Advisor, and the President's Science Advisory Committee, to coo