46.
Bennie Schriever arrived at the White House at 9:30 A.M. on July 28, 1955, half an hour before the scheduled briefing for the president. Trevor Gardner and Johnny von Neumann were with him in the back seat of one of the Pentagon’s long black Cadillac limousines as the car entered the rear gate to the White House grounds and made its way slowly up the circular drive. Schriever had been informed on July 11 that the briefing would take place on the 28th and they had been readying themselves ever since, most intensively after Bennie flew in from California on the 22nd. It had been decided that Schriever would anchor the briefing by wrapping up at the end. Gardner would go first with an introduction on the strategic significance of the ICBM. Von Neumann would follow with an explanation of how the invention of the hydrogen bomb and the ability to size it down, the “thermonuclear breakthrough,” had made an ICBM practicable. Bennie would conclude with a description of the unique organization the Air Force had formed with Ramo-Wooldridge to overcome the technological hurdles, and lay out the deadlines set for the building of the missile and its costs. Then they would run a short reel of 16mm film depicting fiery scenes of the rocket engines Ed Hall was experimenting with being tested on concrete stands across the continent in California. The film would constitute a bit of showmanship at the end if the president seemed inclined to let them take the additional time for it.
They had been told by the NSC staff that they were restricted to half an hour in all for the three presentations. Power, who participated in the planning and rehearsals, did not think this would be nearly enough time to get across a subject of such strategic and technical breadth to a lay audience, but Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever believed that if they compressed hard enough and kept things simple, they would be able to get their main points across.
The worst restriction had been laid on them two days earlier by Dillon Anderson, Eisenhower’s special assistant for national security affairs and as such head of the NSC staff, at a meeting in his offices in the Executive Office Building. Anderson had warned them that they were to confine their presentations to “straightforward and factual” descriptions of the project, that there was to be no attempt to “sell” the president on their needs or “pressure” him. “In particular, you will not comment on, or make any reference to, or use in any way,” he said, the letter Eisenhower had received on June 30 from Scoop Jackson and Clinton Anderson. (Dillon Anderson obviously had no idea he was addressing its ghost authors, or they might not be briefing the president two days hence.) Any recommendation to the president to order the radical changes advocated in the letter—a separate budget for the ICBM exclusive of all other Air Force needs, exemption from any Pentagon procurement regulation that might impede its progress, and a designation of the highest national priority—should come from Secretary Wilson on behalf of the Department of Defense, not just from the Air Force through them.
In an indication that he did not view with favor this wish list the plotters were hoping would emerge from their briefing for the president, Anderson remarked that “there are other important areas—in addition to the ICBM—which bear heavily on the national security and which warrant Presidential support.” He mentioned SAC, the Air Defense Command, and a new early warning radar system under construction on the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, on Alaska’s north coast, and thence through the Arctic regions of Canada to Greenland and Iceland. It was called the DEW Line, for Distant Early Warning. “If we set up one project for high Presidential priority, then we are, in effect, downgrading the others,” he said. His listeners surmised that Secretary Wilson’s delegates on the NSC Planning Board had preceded them to Anderson. “Termites in the woodwork,” Schriever wrote in his diary that night. The best hope the plotters had of getting around this restriction was to convince the president that the ICBM was not just another parochial Air Force project, but rather an issue of the most acute national and international significance. They had to arouse sufficient enthusiasm in him, win him so thoroughly to their cause, that he would see the need for these extraordinary measures himself when he took another look at the Jackson-Anderson letter after their briefing.
Vince Ford and Beryl Boatman had preceded them to the White House much earlier with the paraphernalia for the briefing. Their blue Air Force staff car had pulled up to the guard cubicle just inside the northwest gate to the White House off Pennsylvania Avenue at precisely 7:30 A.M. They had been instructed by the NSC staff to arrive two and a half hours beforehand in order to have plenty of time to complete their preparations. In the trunk behind them were the briefing charts, easels to set the charts on, a blackboard and a box of white chalk for illustrations, a pointer, and the reel of 16mm film displaying Ed Hall’s rocket engine experiments. Vince told the White House policeman inside the cubicle who they were and why they were there. The policeman glanced at a sheet of paper and said, “Just a moment, please,” while he turned, picked up a telephone, and apparently called someone inside for clearance. “Okay,” he said into the phone, “I’ll send them in.” He turned back and, addressing them politely as “Gentlemen,” instructed them to proceed along the drive and bear to the right until they saw a ramp that would take them to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House. Someone would meet them at the doorway there.
Ford and Boatman set to work swiftly, setting up the easels, the blackboard with the chalk within easy reach, and the small, roll-down screen on which they were to show the film. It was placed on the podium at the front of the room, behind and to one side of the lectern that was already there, so that the president and others in the briefing audience could see it without obstruction. They left nothing to chance. They had not brought a 16mm film projector with them because they had been told that the White House had one. As their first move, Boatman ran a segment of the film to check out the machine and be certain it was in good order. They had calculated that if the machine malfunctioned, they would have plenty of time to send to the Pentagon for a substitute. The site of the briefing was a comparatively small room with a shallow arched ceiling on the lower level of the West Wing known as the Broadcast Room. It was often used for briefings and on this humid Washington morning in July it was filled with rows of straight-back wooden chairs. The one exception to this austere seating was a capacious, plumply stuffed red leather armchair in the center of the first row for the comfort of the president.
Ford was familiar with the place. He had been there in mid-February when James Killian, the president of MIT, and his committee had briefed Eisenhower and the NSC on reducing the vulnerability of SAC by dispersing its bombers and increasing the number on airborne alert. The silence of the room and the rows of chairs “had a strange kind of eloquence,” Ford thought, because of the importance of the men who would soon be sitting in them and the importance to the nation of what they would soon be hearing. This was the era when the freshness of the triumph over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and the enormous power and paramountcy of the United States among the non-Communist nations had endowed the president and the surroundings in which he lived and worked with a monarchical aura. Ford had been conscious of “mixed feelings of awe” from the moment the staff car had passed through the White House gate. As he and Boatman went about their work in the Broadcast Room “electricity filled the air all around us.”
They were done before they knew it. The time was still only 8:20 A.M. The big men of the land would not start gathering in the Broadcast Room for more than an hour at the earliest and so they went in search of a caffeine lift. A policeman in the corridor outside the room directed them to a small coffee bar in the West Wing basement that the White House police used. The cups of hot black liquid helped “calm the butterflies we knew we had but wouldn’t admit,” Ford recalled.
After the limousine from the Pentagon arrived at 9:30 A.M., Schriever, Gardner, and von Neumann walked down the corridor toward the briefing room. They were an unusual threesome, the portly von Neumann flanked by the long-stem figure of Schriever on one side and the big-shouldered Gardner on the other. They were talking in lively fashion, but von Neumann was apparently dominating the conversation, as both Schriever and Gardner had their heads turned in toward him. As soon as he spotted them, von Neumann said, in his pronounced Hungarian accent and with jovial mock ignorance of the occasion, “Hello Veence, hello Boat, vat iss cooking?” Then his irrepressible curiosity took him over to the door to the briefing room, where he peeked inside. Gardner greeted Ford with a roar, “Dr. von Ford!” in more mock joviality to ease the tension of the occasion, instantly elevating Ford to genius rank in rocketry with Wernher von Braun. “Got any hot coffee?” he asked. When Ford and Boatman returned ten minutes later cups in hand, they found Gardner and Schriever talking to Dillon Anderson and James Lay, the executive secretary of the NSC, apparently about the procedure for the briefing. Johnny von Neumann was sitting in a chair next to the far wall making notes on a small white pad. Von Neumann didn’t need notes. Everything he was going to say was already concisely arranged in his head. Perhaps the note making helped him to focus and calm himself.
Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever would be addressing, in addition to Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon, approximately twenty of the most important civilian and military leaders in the country. The lesser figures like Tommy Power, who was there because the program officially belonged to him, arrived early, not long after 9:30. At 9:50, with just ten minutes to go, the weighty men began strolling into the room in groups of two and three, chatting to one another as they took their seats—Vice President Nixon; Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; John Foster Dulles, secretary of state; his brother, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. They had been attending a prior meeting of the NSC in the Cabinet Room of the White House and it had just broken up. At 9:55, with only five minutes to go, Dillon Anderson walked to the podium to make sure that any laggards got themselves seated quickly. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if you will please find chairs so that everyone will be in place and seated when the President arrives.” Eisenhower, the military man, wanted his meetings to begin with precision.
But then 10:00 A.M. came and passed and 10:05 and 10:10 and the president still did not come. As unobtrusively as he could, Ford got up from his seat in the separate row of chairs arranged against the far wall where von Neumann, Gardner, and Schriever were also sitting. He and Boatman, who had been on station next to the projector at the back of the room, sidled over to the entrance and stepped just outside so that they could spy down the corridor toward a double set of French doors through which the president would emerge. They had not waited long when suddenly the doors swung open and Eisenhower appeared striding at a fast pace down the corridor. He seemed angry about something, his face flushed. Whatever it was apparently concerned Defense Secretary Wilson, who was walking beside him, hurrying to keep up as the two men swept past Ford and Boatman and into the briefing room.
Everyone in the room was standing. The president stopped, glancing around. He spotted his favorite cabinet member, George Humphrey, a Cleveland banker who was secretary of the Treasury, standing next to a chair in the second row. Eisenhower availed himself of the amenities offered by his rich friends and subordinates to take frequent vacations, too frequent in the opinion of his critics. He was obsessed with golf—he had a putting green constructed on the White House lawn—but also enjoyed hunting quail, fly-fishing for trout, and playing bridge. He often spent a week at Humphrey’s 13,000-acre Milestone Plantation near Thomasville in south Georgia, shooting quail with Humphrey and golfing at the neighboring Glen Arven Country Club. “Hello, Gawge,” he said in a drawl, the anger disappearing as his face metamorphosed into the famous slightly off-center Eisenhower grin. Then he seated himself in the well-padded red leather chair in the first row, rested his elbows on its arms, cupped his big bony hands together, and looked up at Anderson on the podium. The moment had come.
Gardner was out of his chair and halfway to the podium by the time Anderson had finished announcing the subject of the briefing and identifying the three briefers. He laid down on the lectern a couple of white three-by-five-inch cards on which he had jotted notes in red pencil, then stepped off to one side so that he was standing directly in front of the president, about eight to ten feet away. He was at his natty best in dark suit, fashionable tie, and starched white handkerchief crisply folded into the lapel pocket. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a much feared Confederate cavalry leader, boasted that one of the ways he won battles was to put the “sceere” into his opponents. Gardner wasted no time putting the “sceere” into his audience. He explained briefly how the invention of the hydrogen bomb and its projected downsizing had made possible the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile.
Then he hit them with the consequences. “This breakthrough,” he said, “caused an irreversible change in the world power equation, in the waging of war. It says loudly and clearly that not only is it now technically feasible to develop a nuclear-armed ICBM but, more importantly, it is now of overriding importance to the security and survival of the United States that we do it first—ahead of the USSR.” He waited a moment or two for his words to register and then he hit them again harder. “Because, gentlemen, this technology is also known to the Soviets—and our intelligence tells us that they are going full out to develop it. It means, gentlemen, that it is now possible to send a ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead from the continental United States to Soviet Russia—or vice versa—in roughly thirty minutes.” He paused again. The room was absolutely silent. There was no clearing of throats, no shuffling of feet or shifting of chairs. Everyone in the room, including the president, had their eyes fixed on Gardner. That was all he would have to say for the moment, Gardner said, as if half an hour to annihilation was not enough. He then took the time to describe what von Neumann and Schriever would cover in their presentations and turned the briefing over to Johnny.
Von Neumann walked in an unusual sort of toed-in fashion, but there was no lack of dignity in the slightly stout man in the three-piece suit who made his way forward to the podium. He did not mount it. Instead, he took his stance a few feet directly in front of the president and, looking out over his audience, began to speak. He held no notes in his hands. Everything he had to say had been set out with precision in his mind. He had no intimation that on this, one of the most eventful days of his life, he had less than nineteen months in which to live, that a cancer was coursing through his body. He would not learn of it until the following month. But at the moment there was nothing else he could be doing that could give him more contentment. He had arrived finally and fully in his adopted land. He was addressing the most august body in the nation and speaking as the nation’s preeminent scientist in matters of nuclear weaponry. His political patron, the financier Lewis Strauss, Eisenhower’s appointee as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was sitting in that audience, pleased that he had made Johnny the first foreign-born member of the commission. And everything he had to say would be credible, precisely because he spoke with the gravitas of a scientist whose judgment on these esoteric but utterly important matters had been proven correct again and again over the years.
Johnny now took his audience on a journey into the relationship between weight and yield in hydrogen bombs and the nuclear engineering processes through which these were achieved, on the speed of reentry vehicles—the missile warheads—plunging from space through the atmosphere to carry the bomb to its target on earth, on the latitude to dispense with pinpoint accuracy in the missile because the radius of destruction to be expected from a one-megaton thermonuclear explosion, equal to eighty Hiroshima bombs, was so great. Von Neumann had a knack for making nuclear intricacies comprehensible to laymen and it did not desert him on this morning before the NSC. Bennie’s staff out in California had helped by providing him with a chart showing the Atlas as it had been reconfigured into a lighter, more easily transportable ICBM with the one-megaton warhead. Another chart illustrated the flight of the rocket from the flame of its launch to the release of the warhead and the warhead’s trajectory through space and then down onto its target. Von Neumann interspersed his technical exegesis with some of the grim phrases that were never far from his mind: “nuclear blackmail” if the Russians got the ICBM first, “no known defense against it,” and a fact Gardner might have used to telling effect but had somehow overlooked, only “fifteen minutes’ warning” of incoming missiles. (Given the limitations of the American radar system in 1955, Soviet missiles would not be detected until they had reached their apogee halfway through their flight.) Ford, who was again watching the faces, was convinced that von Neumann had lost no one. Indeed, Ford thought, he had “knocked the ball out of the park.”
Gardner was on his feet once more striding for the podium the moment von Neumann finished speaking.
“Thanks, Johnny,” he said, and then turned to Eisenhower. “Mr. President, General Schriever will now give you a quick rundown on how we are set up to run this thing. Bennie,” he said, glancing toward Schriever, who was up and moving. It was already five minutes after 11:00 A.M. Von Neumann had talked far longer than he was supposed to do, long enough to already put them twenty minutes over the half hour they had been allotted in all and Schriever was just beginning. Yet there seemed to be no restlessness, no desire on the part of anyone to leave, certainly not the president, who was all attention.
It did not hurt, in this carefully crafted effort to impress Eisenhower, that Bernard Schriever was without a doubt the handsomest general in the United States Air Force. A New York Times reporter would later compare his appearance to that of James “Jimmy” Stewart, the “Slim Jim” Hollywood actor of the period who inevitably played the hero in Westerns and other screen dramas in which he starred. At forty-four, there was still not a wisp of gray in the dark curly hair combed up in a wave above his forehead. The blue eyes looked ahead confidently, the mouth and chin were firm. The litheness of his six-foot, three-inch frame was accentuated by the long, tailored uniform jacket and immaculately pressed trousers in the light tan that officers then wore in summer. The silver wings with the star in the middle encircled by the wreath of a command pilot and the rows of ribbons representing his Purple Heart and Distinguished Service Medal and his other medals and awards for the victorious campaigns in the Pacific were pinned above the left breast pocket. He wore two stars on his shoulder lapels now. On Power’s recommendation, he had been promoted to major general seven months earlier. The ever careful Schriever did have notes from which to speak. He placed them on the lectern, his fingers curled around its edge, as he turned to the president, acknowledged the rest of his audience with a sweeping glance, and began.
“My job out in Inglewood,” he said, after recapitulating in a couple of sentences Gardner’s and von Neumann’s remarks, “is to make sure … that the United States will have an operational ICBM in the quickest time technology will allow.” Then he paused, smiled at Eisenhower, and adroitly plumbed the president’s patience. He said he realized they had exceeded their allotment, that he would keep what he had to say as brief as possible, but they also had the eight-minute film of Hall’s engine firings to show at the end. Did the president still wish to see it? Everyone in the room understood the gesture. Schriever was deliberately giving Eisenhower an opportunity to cut off or shorten the briefing then and there.
The president did not accept it. He nodded at Schriever to continue and the nod signaled that time was no longer a problem, that Schriever could take whatever time he needed to make his own points.
In describing the organization of the project and what was occurring out in California, Bennie cleverly attributed everything that was being done to the Tea Pot Committee and its recommendations. Furthermore, to capitalize on the credibility of von Neumann and the other distinguished scientists, like Kistiakowsky, who had served on it, he always referred to the group as the Von Neumann Committee. The ploy also enabled him to get around at least partially Dillon Anderson’s stricture on not attempting to “sell” or “pressure” Eisenhower. When he described the “radical reorganization” that entailed integrating the Ramo-Wooldridge group into his WDD command and the requirement, once the program got moving, as it now was, for “increased financial support and high project priority,” he invariably cited the Von Neumann Committee and its report. He spoke of an imperative need for “the operation of the new group [to] be relieved of excessive, detailed regulation by existing government agencies,” meaning streamlined management, as another conclusion drawn from the Von Neumann Committee’s findings. Schriever occasionally broke the seriousness of his talk with light detail. “Our first field office, Mr. President,” he said, smiling and turning toward Eisenhower, and Vice President Nixon and Secretary of State Dulles, who were sitting on each side of the president, “was an abandoned parochial grammar school in Inglewood, California.” Eisenhower nodded once more and gave Bennie a light smile in return.
But the breaks for humor were few as Bennie drove home repeatedly the utter seriousness of the challenge. “Today we are not at war,” he said, “at least not in the conventional sense, and yet the importance and urgency of this project requires the same dedication and competence and all-out effort one would expect to find in wartime.” He forged on, explaining the abstruse, to laymen, management technique of concurrency he and Ramo had adopted “in the interest of compressing time—our most critical commodity.” It was “simply … the development, testing, and perfecting of all major components simultaneously … at the right time all [of] this will come together, flow inward, converging finally at a central point in San Diego where it will be assembled to produce the final product—the ICBM.”
He told the president of the plan to develop a second ICBM (it was to be called Titan) as a hedge in case the Atlas did not fulfill expectations. A fresh chart placed on the easel laid out for Eisenhower the proposed test launch schedule at the Air Force’s Eastern Test Range at Cape Canaveral. He replaced it with yet another chart estimating how much this investment in rocketry was going to cost the United States, from $150 million in the current fiscal year to $538 million in Fiscal Year 1958. (As might have been expected, given the pressure Schriever and Gardner must have felt not to frighten the economy-minded Eisenhower, all of the future estimates turned out to be far below actual costs.) As Schriever concluded his presentation, Eisenhower was no longer sitting back relaxed in his commodious armchair. He had shifted forward and was sitting up straight, intent on what Bennie was saying. Boatman rolled the film and the briefing climaxed in the roar and flame of the engine firings.
“Thank you, General Schriever,” Eisenhower said warmly when the film had ended. He turned in his chair to von Neumann and Gardner, who were seated along the far wall. “And my thanks also to you, Dr. von Neumann, and Mr. Gardner. This has been most impressive, most impressive!” he said. “There is no question this weapon will have a profound impact on all aspects of human life, not only in the United States but in every corner of the globe—military, sociological, political.” He turned all the way back, searching down the rows of chairs behind him. “Where’s Radford—is he here today?” Eisenhower asked, seeking his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president spotted the admiral almost as soon as he inquired. “Radford, let’s war game this—these long-range missiles—what they will do to the force structure. Do it right away. Let me know what answers you come up with.” He leaned over to say something to Vice President Nixon, then rose from his chair, smiled, and said, “Thank you once again, General Schriever, Dr. von Neumann, Mr. Gardner.” He gave another of his quick nods to recognize everyone else in the rows of seats who rose simultaneously in respect, then walked out of the Broadcast Room alone.
The half-hour ration of the president’s time had stretched on into an hour and thirty-five minutes. Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever “had done the job,” Ford thought. “We had introduced the President and the National Security Council to the nuclear missile age.” Virtually everyone stopped on the way out to thank Schriever, von Neumann, and Gardner, who had gathered in front of the podium. Twining was among them. He told Bennie how well he had done. Ford had spotted the older general sitting amongst other members of the Joint Chiefs with a satisfied “That’s my boy” smile on his face as Eisenhower had complimented Schriever. Nixon and CIA chief Allen Dulles lingered. “Why haven’t we started this sooner? What’s been the holdup?” the vice president said, tapping the palm of his left hand with the stiffened fingers of his right in a gesture of emphasis that was peculiar to Nixon. Schriever took on the answer and explained once more why, until the thermonuclear breakthrough and the imminence of a relatively light hydrogen bomb warhead, nothing practical had been possible. In Nixon and his concern they clearly had won an advocate at the top of the administration. Allen Dulles then asked what Ford called “cops and robbers” questions. Despite Gardner’s opening statement to the gathering that the Russians were “going full out,” Ford noted that none of the three men could provide detailed factual answers to Dulles’s questions “mostly because of what our intelligence people didn’t know about Soviet missile progress” (emphasis in the original text of Ford’s memoir).
Eisenhower may have been personally won over, but the bureaucratic struggle wasn’t at an end. At 3:00 that afternoon Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever repeated their briefing to the NSC Planning Board. It would be up to the Planning Board to submit an NSC action directive for the president to sign, and in the wording of the directive would lie the key to what action ensued. Schriever recorded the reaction of the board members in his diary. He noted that William Yandell Elliott, the Harvard professor who represented the Office of Defense Mobilization on the board and who had been so helpful in getting the ICBM on the NSC agenda in the first place, was still “a friend in court.” And because of Wilson’s opposition, the Pentagon representative, Brigadier General Charles Bonesteel, the defense secretary’s military aide, was still “reasonably negative.” Again by custom the Pentagon, as the department concerned, had the privilege of drafting the directive. Its draft was an exercise in sophistry. The proposed directive for the president to sign proclaimed the ICBM “a program of the highest priority,” and then fizzled into language that would entail nothing more than what was already being done. But as the maneuvering walked its slow pace on through August, others with clout in the administration saw the gambit and moved to negate it. The most important was Richard Nixon, who, with Eisenhower away on a trout-fishing vacation in Colorado, chaired a September 8 meeting of the full NSC that would decide the issue. He invited von Neumann to the meeting to lend a hand and Johnny waded in with more unnerving talk of nuclear blackmail and only fifteen minutes’ warning of incoming Soviet missiles.
NSC Action No. 1433, the presidential directive that emerged and that Eisenhower signed on September 13, 1955, in offices he and his staff had taken over as a Summer White House at Lowry Air Force Base, near Denver, stated that “there would be the gravest repercussions on the national security and on the cohesion of the free world” if the Soviet Union acquired an ICBM before the United States did. The president was therefore designating the ICBM project “a research and development program of the highest priority above all others.” He ordered the secretary of defense to build it with “maximum urgency.” The plotters had won none too soon. Ten days later Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack. It would be two months before he was able to preside over a gathering on the scale of the July 28 missile briefing, and that was a cabinet meeting under controlled circumstances at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland.