A Fiery Peace In A Cold War Part 6

At the end of November, McNarney and Lanphier convened a meeting in San Diego to present what they apparently regarded as a compromise. Gardner flew out from Was.h.i.+ngton to attend, joined by Lindbergh on behalf of the Von Neumann Committee. Schriever arrived with an att.i.tude growing ever more suspicious. He had had lunch the day before with Jimmy Doolittle. Friends like Teddy Walkowicz had been warning him that Convair had by no means slackened its lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill and wherever in the Pentagon McNarney and Lanphier thought they might get a sympathetic hearing. Doolittle described their att.i.tude and that of other major aircraft makers with grim succinctness: "AIA [Aircraft Industries a.s.sociation] wants to see us fail," Schriever recorded in his diary. At San Diego, Charlie Bossart handled the main briefing, McNarney or Lanphier occasionally interrupting with additional information they thought might help to sell their offer.

Bossart said Convair had abandoned the a.s.sumption of a 3,000-pound warhead that had been the basis for its earlier monster missile design. His team was now laying out a far lighter model based on a 1,500-pound hydrogen bomb. He also briefed on what Convair was doing to design the nose cone that would house the bomb and its ideas for the guidance and control system. The company wanted to hang on to both of these subsystems. Lanphier said the firm was prepared to hire 250 consultants and to put 1,600 engineers to work on Atlas in 1956. The meeting settled nothing. McNarney and Lanphier continued to refuse to accede to Schriever's demand that they confine themselves to manufacturing the airframe and a.s.sembling the missile.

By mid-December, Schriever was so exasperated that he drew a cartoon in his diary entry of December 14. It showed a bloated figure labeled "Industry," which exuded "Politics" and "Pressure," and had an arm reaching out toward a bulging sack of money to satisfy the "Ravenous appet.i.te accustomed to." Underneath were the words "Motive Big Profit." Bennie had then written "(Pat)," an apparent abbreviation for "Patriotism," followed by the words "Small Thought." 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. The behavior of McNarney and Lanphier epitomized the vice. The offer he was making to them might not be nearly what they wanted, but it would provide Convair with a reasonable profit. This was particularly true at a time when the overall military budget was diminis.h.i.+ng because of the end of the Korean War and the determination of President Eisenhower to hold down military spending. Schriever also alluded to this in his cartoon by sketching a shrunken sack of money for the fiscal year to come. A decent return, however, was not enough to satisfy McNarney and Lanphier. They wanted the whole kit and caboodle.

While American industrialists had reaped stupendous profits during the Second World War, patriotism had also been a motive for many. Andrew Higgins, the New Orleans boatbuilder, had, along with several pioneering Marine Corps officers, developed the ubiquitous amphibious a.s.sault craft of the Second World War, the LCVP (Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel). It, and a larger version to ferry tanks, carried men and equipment ash.o.r.e on innumerable contested beaches. Both boats were produced in the many thousands, yet Higgins declined to exercise his patent rights. He pa.s.sed his designs freely to any other company that would agree to build them. By 1954, men such as Higgins were extinct. 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 high profits as a virtual right. The firms were heavily subsidized. North American Aviation, for example, had by 1954 invested $33.8 million of its own funds in building its plants, while the Air Force and the Navy had furnished it with additional facilities worth roughly twice as much, $61.6 million, free of charge. In this atmosphere of government largesse, greed had become inst.i.tutionalized. McNarney and Lanphier might fear advances in Soviet strategic weaponry as Schriever, Gardner, and von Neumann did, but if so, their fear was overmastered by their desire for lucre.

Gardner had also become sufficiently exasperated to ask Schriever what he thought about cutting off negotiations with Convair and finding another firm to build the missile's airframe and perform the final a.s.sembly. Bennie was opposed. They would lose a year's time, he said. As it was, to hold to schedule they would have to release designs for the airframe and the other components in the spring of 1955. He told Gardner that they had no choice but to keep hammering at Convair. Fortunately for Schriever, McNarney and Lanphier apparently did not realize how tight Schriever's deadlines were. Perhaps fearing an outcome such as the one Gardner had proposed, they caved in to the "country boy" and on January 6, 1955, agreed to a contract on his terms. Bennie made one concession. In addition to manufacture of the airframe, a.s.sembly, and partic.i.p.ation in the testing, Convair would also provide the control mechanisms that steered the missile during liftoff and the first stage of flight. (The long-range guidance system to direct the warhead to its target remained a separate element to be awarded to a source with specialized expertise. Convair had come up with a radio-controlled system called Azusa, but like all radio schemes, it was vulnerable to interference. Von Neumann and the members of his committee favored an inertial guidance mechanism that would be integral to the missile and thus beyond the reach of the Soviet Union's defenses.) Given the innovation of swiveling rocket engines that Bossart had introduced in his work on Atlas's progenitor, the experimental MX-107B back in 194647, it was reasonable to a.s.sume the firm could perform this task adequately. Whatever the case, under the contract the specifications for everything would be those laid down by the Western Development Division and Ramo-Wooldridge. In turn, Schriever exacted a pledge from McNarney to create a distinct work force devoted only to Atlas at Convair's San Diego plant. There was to be no dual tasking with Convair's other enterprises, which could result in delays.

The signing of the contract did not put an end to Schriever's distrust of McNarney and Lanphier and their allies in the Aircraft Industries a.s.sociation. He feared that they had not truly given up. Near the end of February, he wrote Power a secret fourteen-page memorandum recounting the flawed performance of the old-line aircraft companies in missilery and defending the unique organization that he and Simon Ramo had formed. Nor did the signing of the contract put an end to Schriever's troubles with Convair's performance. Ramo reported to him that Convair was not hiring the right kind of engineers in such specialties as metallurgy. More unpleasant exchanges followed with McNarney and Lanphier. It was not until May 1955, with Roger Lewis, the a.s.sistant secretary of the Air Force for materiel mediating, that Schriever and Ramo sat down with McNarney and Lanphier and settled on procedures that satisfied Bennie.

In the meantime, Schriever's relations with Power had undergone a transformation since their unnerving conversation of the previous July. Despite his years of a.s.sociation with LeMay and the conventional att.i.tudes of the senior Air Force bomber general that his career had ingrained in him, Power had a mind of his own. Months of listening to scientists as prestigious and as persuasive as von Neumann discuss the ICBM had given him an appreciation of its strategic importance. He was by now a convert and saw it as a necessity in the nuclear arms compet.i.tion with the Soviet Union. Those same months of listening had also brought him around to an understanding of why the special management arrangement with Ramo-Wooldridge was needed. Tommy Power was a tough and decisive man and, as he valued those qualities in himself, so he also admired them in others. The persistent, unflinching manner in which Schriever had stood up to and eventually won out over McNarney and Lanphier made him realize how badly he had misjudged this younger officer in a.s.sessing him as a naive amateur.

The first fitness report on Bennie that Power rendered at the end of April 1955 demonstrated the dramatic reversal of att.i.tude. Schriever has "excellent staying qualities when the going gets rough," Power began. "Professionally, he is characterized by his thoroughness. He has a brilliant mind and can be depended upon for outstanding work. He is highly respected by his a.s.sociates, both senior and junior. His management ability has been demonstrated in the organization and operation of the highly cla.s.sified special project for which he was hand-picked." Power recommended Schriever for a second star, promotion to major general. In short, Power had perceived that Bernard Schriever was made of the stuff that bred success and his success would s.h.i.+ne on Power, which is above all what Power wanted. From this point on Schriever no longer had to worry about the wary three-stars in Baltimore. Power was now behind him.

AN a.s.sAULT FROM AN UNEXPECTED QUARTER.

Having bested McNarney and Lanphier, Bennie was astonished in mid-February to find himself suddenly involved in a totally unexpected fracas with Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott. He had been looking forward to Talbott's scheduled visit to the Schoolhouse on February 16 as a "Happy to Have You" occasion, as he had written at the top of the outline for his briefing on the progress they were making. Instead, he subsequently recorded in his diary, "It was indeed a painful meeting." Schriever and Ramo had, with the concurrence of Gardner and von Neumann and the other scientists on his committee, decided on a management strategy that was a dual approach. One side was called concurrency. On this side, work on every part of the missile-airframe, engines, long-range guidance, nose cone or reentry vehicle-was to go forward simultaneously. The objective was to gain time. They a.s.sumed that if each of these parts was adequately tested beforehand and Ramo and his colleagues did their job of systems engineering competently to make certain that everything would fit together, they would have a ready-to-fly ICBM much sooner than if they developed each part in sequence.

The other aspect of the strategy was fail-safe redundancy. They were going to build not one, but two different ICBMs. And they were going to create a complete second set of the subsystems that went into an ICBM. If the Atlas or any of its components proved a failure, they would always have a fallback. Schriever already had his staff sizing up which other aircraft companies were the best candidates to design and manufacture the airframe for the second ICBM. He intended to launch a compet.i.tion as soon as possible. And, on Hall's advice, he had also just negotiated a contract for the rocket engines that were to power this alternate ICBM. The firm was Aerojet General, a full-grown descendent of a seedling company started in 1942 by von Karman and a number of his students with Hap Arnold's a.s.sistance to build small rockets that would give heavily laden aircraft an extra boost to take off. Aerojet had agreed to develop the new engines in collaboration with a less well-known firm called Reaction Motors, Inc., another pioneer in the rocket business.

Bennie cheerfully recounted all of this good news to Talbott and got a reaction he least expected. As with his unnerving session with Power the previous July, he was so upset by it that he again wrote a long memorandum, this time eight pages, for his diary. Talbott paid no attention to what had been accomplished. Instead, he was solely concerned with stopping any additional work on the project in California. To render military industries less vulnerable to attack, President Eisenhower wanted to start dispersing them inland, rather than leaving them concentrated, as they were, on both coasts. He was also particularly concerned about the extent to which California's economy was based on military industry. The state's dependence on the military made California, he felt, highly vulnerable to future cutbacks. Talbott had obviously left Was.h.i.+ngton freshly briefed on the president's wishes. He should have explained to Eisenhower that the ICBM project was so dependent on scientific and industrial resources virtually exclusive to California at this point in American history that an exception would have to be made if the program was to move ahead at an acceptable pace. But he had not done so. Instead, he had flown out a somewhat frightened man, determined to enforce what he interpreted as the boss's orders.

He told an amazed Schriever, and Gardner and Ramo, who were also present at the meeting, that he wanted no additional work a.s.signed in California, or at least none that would enable a California firm to enlarge its organizational or industrial base. He ordered Schriever to cancel the contracts with Lockheed and Aerojet General. When Bennie replied that carrying out those orders would severely impair the project, Talbott lost his temper and threatened to fire him on the spot and reduce him in rank. "Before this meeting is over, General, there's going to be one more colonel in the Air Force," he shouted at Schriever with a menacing look on his face. He yelled that he expected his orders to be obeyed. Other people might lose their jobs for failure to carry out the president's wishes on this issue, but he was not going to be one of them, Talbott said. Bennie could also lose his temper on occasion, but never when he was under a.s.sault. He grew cold and deliberate then. He replied quietly, yet p.r.o.nouncing each word with unaccustomed precision, that he could not accept the order "because I have a prior and overriding order. On being handed this a.s.signment, I was directed to run this program so as to attain an operational ICBM capability in the shortest possible time." Talbott also regained control of himself and began speaking calmly, but he did not back down.

Ramo and Gardner came to Schriever's defense. So did Roger Lewis, Talbott's a.s.sistant secretary for materiel, who had also apparently flown to Los Angeles for the gathering. They pointed out to Talbott that if the president wanted industry dispersed, production facilities could be found inland once research and development of the prototypes was completed. The R&D, however, had to be done in California. Otherwise, they would lose a year. Lewis said he had read the agreement with Aerojet and that creation of new rocket engines for the alternate ICBM with this firm in California was the way to go. The solution of development in California and production elsewhere did not satisfy Talbott. He lost his temper again at a remark by Gardner and then said that the Aerojet General contract should have gone to General Electric. With its headquarters in upstate New York, GE was presumably far enough away from the coast to satisfy Talbott's understanding of the dispersal criterion. The company had never previously manufactured rocket engines. In a reflex search for new business, however, it had competed for the alternate engine contract and lost because of its lack of qualifications. To his listeners, Talbott's championing of GE now smacked more of politics and favoritism than obedience to the president's dispersal policy. Gardner snapped a Gardner retort at his chief and patron. Bennie recorded it in his diary. "This would have been a big mistake because GE was a s.h.i.+tty outfit." Ramo was glum and grim. Bennie also recorded his warning. "If no R&D is done in Calif., you might as well scrub the [whole] program." Talbott waffled somewhat, but he left still refusing to rescind his instructions and aimed a parting shot at Schriever. The secretary told him that whatever contractor he chose for the airframe of the second ICBM, it would have to be a company "east of the Rockies."

Horatio Viscount Nelson, the British naval genius who brought his country a century of command of the seas and thus the freedom to build its extraordinary empire by destroying the combined French and Spanish fleets in the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, was once ordered by a superior to break off an action in which he believed he would prevail. In an account of the incident that may be apocryphal but which is entirely within character, Nelson put his telescope to an eye blinded in an earlier fight. He pointed it at the signal flags waving from his superior's flags.h.i.+p and declared, "I really do not see the signal." Bennie Schriever had not come this far in the United States Air Force to fail to learn the lesson that when a foolish order is issued, a wise officer ignores it. "The only way in which a development can be accomplished in the shortest period of time is when all other considerations are subordinate to time," he observed in his diary. He canceled neither contract, instead forwarding both for approval. He ordered his deputy, Colonel Charles "Terry" Terhune, a redheaded Dutchman and one of the most accomplished engineers in the Air Force, who had been present at the meeting, not to tell anyone what had occurred. He also instructed Terhune to get the search for a second airframe contractor moving. He was careful with Power. The next morning, before leaving for Patrick Air Force Base in Florida to start planning for the launch pads and other missile test facilities they would have to construct on nearby Cape Canaveral, he telephoned Power in Baltimore, filled him in on the tumult of the previous day, and told Power what he intended to do. Power did not object.

The contracts went through and the ICBM project was eventually granted a complete exemption from the dispersal policy. Ironically, Harold Talbott, who had predicted that someone was going to lose his job but that it was not going to be he, was forced to resign that August because of a conflict of interest imbroglio. He had been using Air Force stationery and his phone and office to further the fortunes of a former business partner. Some of the companies he had contacted on behalf of his friend were Air Force contractors whom he had to have known would feel themselves under obligation to him. He had also retained his partners.h.i.+p in a New York investment group and had accepted more than $132,000 from them, he claimed for services not performed while he was secretary of the Air Force.

A SENSE OF ADVENTURE.

Despite these traumas, Schriever and Ramo and their a.s.sociates at the Schoolhouse in Inglewood were by no means discouraged. On the contrary, they were filled with the stir of adventure. They were giving birth to a "New Era," two words that appear repeatedly in Bennie's diary entries at this time. The ballistic missiles they were fas.h.i.+oning would lift the Air Force out of the atmosphere and carry it off into the world of outer s.p.a.ce. In these chilling years of the early Cold War, fear of the Soviet Union was a constant and powerful stimulant. The probability that they were in a race with unnamed and unknown but nonetheless all too real rivals hard at work to destroy the United States from within the dark, closed society behind the Iron Curtain was pervasive, and Schriever never let anyone forget this. "If we don't push into it [this New Era], we have failed our country and seriously endangered our security," he told the Schoolhouse gang in a pep talk.

Yet anxiety for the security of their nation and a race against opponents who would endanger it were only half of what drove them. These men were engineers. They built things. Theirs was a different ethos from that of operators like Power and LeMay, who got their adrenaline rush from the lure of aerial combat. The engineers' fulfillment came from creating the new, from bringing into being that which no one else had yet achieved. And in building their lethal rockets, they were simultaneously opening the realm of s.p.a.ce that had so far been beyond the reach of man. Their rockets would be more than weapons. They would also become launch vehicles to penetrate this unexplored vastness. If they could acquire the means to send a hydrogen bomb into s.p.a.ce and bring it back down again, they could do so with other things and, although they were military men to whom human exploration of s.p.a.ce was not a priority, they could do so too with man. The technology that applied to sending the bomb up and bringing it back down again intact applied to virtually everything else. The first American astronauts to venture into s.p.a.ce were, in fact, to ride up on military missiles and to return in capsules that were modified versions of the initial hydrogen bomb warhead.

Bennie imparted some of the exhilaration of this adventure in a secret briefing he gave to the staff of the Air Force's think tank, the RAND Corporation, in nearby Santa Monica on January 31, 1955. He spoke of a warhead flas.h.i.+ng through s.p.a.ce at the previously unimaginable speed of 20,000 feet per second, of the "invulnerability" of this nuclear spear point to Soviet defenses. And yet, he said, the real objective of the adventure was to contribute to the preservation of peace. The ICBM was not being built to be used as a weapon. Rather, as an instrument of war the ICBM would have the "highest probability of Not Not being used." The thought was an idea he had absorbed from Gardner and was to reiterate over and over in the years to come. Once the missile existed the Soviets were "unlikely to miscalculate our capability to retaliate" and would be afraid to attack. The ICBM would thus achieve its highest purpose. It would have being used." The thought was an idea he had absorbed from Gardner and was to reiterate over and over in the years to come. Once the missile existed the Soviets were "unlikely to miscalculate our capability to retaliate" and would be afraid to attack. The ICBM would thus achieve its highest purpose. It would have "deterred Total War. "deterred Total War." Schriever was articulating a concept that would subsequently become known as Mutual a.s.sured Destruction. And once they had attained the means to penetrate what he called the "New Environment-outer s.p.a.ce," they could move on to the next contribution to "preserve the peace." They would power their rockets to even higher speeds than 20,000 feet per second in order to fling into orbit around the earth the spy satellites Arnold and von Karman had envisioned. The "constant surveillance," the regular flow of information on "enemy intentions" provided by these spy satellites, would deny the Soviets the possibility of a surprise attack, of a nuclear Pearl Harbor, the dread of which haunted many, including Eisenhower.

NO TIME FOR FAMILY.

Schriever found a house for his family in a neighborhood in Santa Monica with the Roman Catholic schools that Dora wanted. There were three Schriever offspring now. Brett Arnold, their son and firstborn, was a fifteen-year-old high school student when his father took command of the Western Development Division on August 2, 1954. Their second child, Dodie Elizabeth, who had arrived in June 1941, in time to be bundled off to California on that earlier trip when Schriever had spent a year studying for his master's degree in aeronautical engineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, was a thirteen-year-old in junior high. Another daughter and the last of Dora and Bennie's children, Barbara Alice, who had been born in June 1949, was just five.

The family had grown accustomed to seeing a great deal of Schriever while he was stationed at the Pentagon and they lived in Alexandria. Although he might work late, as he often did, he came home at night. On weekends, there was the Belle Haven Country Club, where he played golf, but Dora and the children had the pleasure of the swimming pool and tennis courts. And periodically he would take leave. Dora and the children would climb into the car, the luggage would go into the trunk, and with Bennie at the wheel they would set off for a visit with General and Mrs. Brett, who had retired to Winter Park, a suburb of Orlando in central Florida. All of this ended with the move to California and Bennie's new responsibilities. When he was home he was preoccupied and he was away as much as he was at home, shuttling between Los Angeles and Was.h.i.+ngton and Baltimore or off on trips like the one to Patrick Air Force Base to start planning for the missile test range on Cape Canaveral.

As soon as the conference at Patrick was over, he left for a two-day tour of the Bahamas to try to get some idea of the tracking system they would need to establish in order to monitor the flight of the mock warheads over the Caribbean and into the South Atlantic after the missiles had been launched from the Cape. The islands were still a British colony then, but London had already given the Air Force permission to set up some tracking stations there for test firings of the Snark and earlier missiles. Although his relations.h.i.+p with Dora began to come under strain from his lack of attention to her and the family, Bennie was energized by this relentless quick-step regime of shuttlec.o.c.k travel, decisions under pressure, and a workload that seemed to be forever expanding. This was the mission for which, it seemed, he had spent his life preparing himself, and now he was living it. He was ruthless at keeping himself organized and he prevented himself from becoming exhausted by a trick he had of suddenly putting aside whatever he was doing in an office or on a plane and going off on a catnap.

GETTING TO IKE.

Even prior to the confrontation with Talbott and the additional complication it had raised with the policy to disperse military industries, Gardner and Schriever had decided they had to make an end run around the Air Force and Department of Defense bureaucracies. They were going to have to do what Gardner had said all along would be necessary. They had to reach President Eisenhower and convince him to underwrite the project with his personal support. Despite the advances Schriever and Ramo and their teams had made, they were not moving nearly fast enough to meet Gardner's June 1958 deadline for a "Ph.D. type" capability of two launching sites and four operational missiles, let alone his major deterrent of twenty launching sites and a stockpile of one hundred missiles by June 1960. Dealing with the Department of Defense and Air Force bureaucracies meant navigating an obstacle course. Bennie had his staff count up the number of agencies or offices from which, depending on the nature of the request, they had to seek prior approval. The total came to forty-two. Merely to obtain an air-conditioning unit to protect a computer the Ramo-Wooldridge team was purchasing from the Southern California heat became a ha.s.sle.

AN IMMIGRANT BOY.

Elizabeth Milch, Schriever's mother, as a young woman in New York not long before she met his father, Adolph Schriever. She had left Germany as a teenager to work for a German family who owned a pharmacy in lower Manhattan and moved back to Germany after marrying Adolph. COURTESY OF B BARBARA S SCHRIEVER ALLAN The street-corner building in Bremen, Germany, where, in one of the apartments above the shop, Bernard Adolph Schriever was born on September 14, 1910. COURTESY OF B BARBARA S SCHRIEVER A ALLAN Adolph Schriever, in his engineer officer's uniform on board the North German Lloyd Company's pa.s.senger liner George Was.h.i.+ngton. George Was.h.i.+ngton. During a cruise in 1914, the s.h.i.+p was trapped in New York Harbor by the outbreak of the First World War that August. The United States was then neutral, but Britain's Royal Navy waited outside the harbor to seize German s.h.i.+ps. C During a cruise in 1914, the s.h.i.+p was trapped in New York Harbor by the outbreak of the First World War that August. The United States was then neutral, but Britain's Royal Navy waited outside the harbor to seize German s.h.i.+ps. COURTESY OF B BARBARA S SCHRIEVER A ALLAN A strong woman who would not wait for the war to end to be reunited with her husband: Elizabeth Milch Schriever with her two sons, six-year-old Bernard (left) and four-year-old Gerhard (middle). Holland remained neutral throughout the war, so they boarded the Dutch liner Noordam Noordam at Rotterdam in January 1917, just a little more than two months before a U.S. declaration of war against Germany would have blocked their coming. C at Rotterdam in January 1917, just a little more than two months before a U.S. declaration of war against Germany would have blocked their coming. CCOURTESY OF B BARBARA S SCHRIEVER A ALLAN TEXAS AND THE ARMY AIR CORPS.

Pluck and enterprise: "The Oaks," the soft drink and homemade ham sandwich stand, erected under the shading branches of a grove of venerable live oak trees next to the twelfth green of the Brackenridge Park Golf Course in San Antonio, which Elizabeth Schriever established to support herself and her two boys. A sandwich cost fifteen cents and a gla.s.s of lemonade a nickel. COURTESY OF J JONI J JAMES S SCHRIEVER "Champ Gets Hot," boasted a headline in one San Antonio newspaper: Bennie Schriever in 1931 as a senior at Texas A&M, playing a long shot while stylishly attired in the plus fours and two-tone golf shoes of the era. That year he won the Texas state junior amateur champions.h.i.+p and the San Antonio city champions.h.i.+p for the first of two times. Schriever's prowess at golf not only would give him great pleasure but would also be a valuable a.s.set in his military career. COURTESY OF J JONI J JAMES S SCHRIEVER s.h.i.+ny boots and riding breeches: Schriever, in his senior year at Texas A&M, in the spit-and-polish uniform of an officer cadet in the horse-drawn field artillery. He would later joke that he chose airplanes because his legs were too long for the stirrups. COURTESY OF G GENERAL B BERNARD S SCHRIEVER Reaching for the sky: Bennie in the open c.o.c.kpit of a trainer aircraft at Flying School at Randolph and Kelly Fields near San Antonio in 1932 or 1933. The washout rate was more than 50 percent, but he survived and received his wings and a second lieutenant's commission in the Air Corps Reserve on June 29, 1933. COURTESY OF G GENERAL B BERNARD S SCHRIEVER A white scarf, goggles, and a leather helmet, the romantic regalia of the early 1930s, the open-c.o.c.kpit era, when Schriever was a young pilot. "The gals sure liked it," he said. "It was better than owning a convertible." COURTESY OF J JONI J JAMES S SCHRIEVER The future General of the Air Force: Schriever's idol, Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold, then a lieutenant colonel, about to take off in a Boeing P-12 biplane fighter with a load of mail during the air mail catastrophe of 1934. Arnold was commander of the operation's Western Region, with Salt Lake City as his headquarters. Schriever was one of his pilots. ARMY A AIR C CORPS PHOTO COURTESY OF G GENERAL B BERNARD S SCHRIEVER ENGAGED.

Bennie with his prize: Dora Brett and Bernard Schriever aboard a s.h.i.+p traveling from the Panama Ca.n.a.l Zone to San Francisco in August 1937, he to head for Seattle to begin flying for Northwest Airlines, she to proceed on to Was.h.i.+ngton, where they were to be wed at Hap Arnold's home on January 3, 1938. "Wonderful trip," Dora wrote in her sc.r.a.pbook. COURTESY OF B BARBARA S SCHRIEVER A ALLAN AT WAR IN THE PACIFIC.

The daring of the young: Major Bernard Schriever and Major John "Jack" Dougherty, back at their home base in northeastern Australia after their wild "dive-bombing" attack in a B-17 on j.a.panese s.h.i.+pping in Rabaul Harbor on New Britain Island on the night of September 23, 1942. COURTESY OF G GENERAL B BERNARD S SCHRIEVER Keeping 'em flying, New Guinea, 1943: Schriever, as chief of maintenance and engineering for General George Kenney's Fifth Air Force, supervising the repair of an engine. Schriever's honesty and efficiency won over Kenney's irascible deputy for combat operations, Brigadier General Ennis "Ennis the Menace" Whitehead. ARMY A AIR C CORPS PHOTO COURTESY OF G GENERAL B BERNARD S SCHRIEVER A wartime reunion: Bennie and Gerhard (right), who had acquired the nickname "Gerry" in his boyhood, visiting their mother in San Antonio during Bennie's brief trip home in the fall of 1943. Both were lieutenant colonels by then, Gerry commanding an engineering unit at Tinker Field in Oklahoma. Behind is the little white house on Terry Court in which they grew up. COURTESY OF J JONI J JAMES S SCHRIEVER BUILDING THE UNSTOPPABLE.

Where it all began: the Schoolhouse, the vacant Roman Catholic boys' school in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, as it was when Schriever and his band of rocket pioneers began secretly a.s.sembling there in July 1954 to launch the project to build the intercontinental ballistic missile. The former chapel, the small structure in the middle with stained-gla.s.s windows depicting the saints, was the site of their briefing room. U.S. AIR F FORCE P PHOTO C COURTESY OF THE S s.p.a.cE AND M MISSILE S SYSTEMS C CENTER "The wild Welshman": Trevor Gardner, the brash, brave visionary to whom Schriever first turned to get the enterprise started. COURTESY OF T TREVOR G GARDNER, JR.

Gardner, left, being briefed on another of his secret high-technology projects. Looking over Gardner's shoulder is his then a.s.sistant, Lieutenant Colonel Vincent "Vince" Ford, dubbed "the Gray Ghost" by Schriever's staff because of his capacity for behind-the-curtain maneuvering. His talent for it was crucial in arranging the White House briefing that won Eisenhower's backing for the missile program. The briefer is unidentified. COURTESY OF G GENERAL B BERNARD S SCHRIEVER A future cardinal of the military-industrial complex: Simon Ramo, center, who would rise to become the R in TRW, Inc., conferring with Schriever. On the right is Dr. Louis Dunn, Ramo's deputy for the missile effort. Both Schriever and Gardner knew Ramo was indispensable for a.s.sembling the array of engineering and scientific talent needed to overcome the technological obstacles. COURTESY OF G GENERAL B BERNARD S SCHRIEVER Cold War forgiveness: John von Neumann (right), a Jewish exile from Hitler's Europe, conferring with Wernher von Braun, a former SS officer, n.a.z.i Party member, and the fuhrer's V-2 missile man, during a visit to the Army's Redstone a.r.s.enal in Alabama. A mathematician and mathematical physicist with a mind second only to Albert Einstein's, von Neumann headed the scientific advisory committee for the ICBM and lent the project his prestige. JOHN VON N NEUMANN P PAPERS, Ma.n.u.sCRIPT D DIVISION, LIBRARY OF C CONGRESS The heartlessness of an early end: Seven months after immensely impressing Eisenhower at the July 28, 1955, White House briefing on the missile project, "Johnny" von Neumann had been driven to a wheelchair by the ravages of his cancer. Ike awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1956. "I wish I could be around long enough to deserve this honor," Johnny said to the president. He died approximately a year later, on February 8, 1957, at the age of fifty-three. WHITE H HOUSE PHOTO, JOHN VON N NEUMANN P PAPERS, Ma.n.u.sCRIPT D DIVISION, LIBRARY OF C CONGRESS A powerful opponent: Curtis LeMay, the formidable bomber leader who created the Strategic Air Command and directed it for nearly nine years, was a relentless foe of the ICBM program. Nicknamed "the Cigar" for the stogie he had perpetually in hand or clenched between his teeth, LeMay mocked the first of Schriever's ICBMs, the Atlas, as "a f.u.c.king firecracker." COURTESY OF THE N NATIONAL M MUSEUM OF THE U.S. A U.S. AIR F FORCE An essential ally: General Thomas "Tommy" Power (right) gives a souvenir handshake to Technical Sergeant Anderson in December 1957 at the "Thor Show" Major Jamie Wallace staged in Los Angeles, under the guise of a Development Engineering Inspection, to promote the Air Force's intermediate-range ballistic missile. Initially alarmed by Schriever while heading the Air Force Research and Development Command, Power, who succeeded LeMay as commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, was won over and became a staunch supporter. U.S. AIR F FORCE P PHOTO C COURTESY OF J JAMIE W WALLACE Going public in style: Schriever makes the cover of Time Time, then the nation's leading newsmagazine, in April 1957. T TIME M MAGAZINE Bennie in his element: testing missiles at Cape Canaveral in 1958. U.S. AIR F FORCE PHOTO COURTESY OF J JONI J JAMES S SCHRIEVER The younger brother who betrayed: the Los Alamos identification badge of Theodore Hall, the Harvard physics prodigy who, along with Klaus Fuchs, was one of the Soviet Union's two important spies at the atomic bomb laboratory. Hall apparently did not bother to have the mistake in the spelling of his first name corrected. COURTESY OF L LOS A ALAMOS N NATIONAL L LABORATORY The guru of rockets: Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hall, the rocketry genius who devised Minuteman, the missile that crowned the mission to deter the Soviets from any attempt at a surprise attack. U.S. AIR F FORCE PHOTO COURTESY OF S SHEILA H HALL All systems go: the first successful training launch of an Atlas D-model ICBM by a Strategic Air Command crew at Vandenberg Air Force Base, on April 22, 1960. The missile is raised from its protective concrete shelter, fueled, and fired into s.p.a.ce. U.S. AIR F FORCE P PHOTO Try and try again to put a spy in the sky: After the thirteenth attempt, Lieutenant Colonel Charles "Moose" Mathison presents the first capsule retrieved from a would-be photoreconnaissance satellite, Discoverer XIII, which had been flung into orbit around the earth, to a jubilant Schriever and General Thomas White, chief of staff of the Air Force, at Andrews Air Force Base, August 13, 1960. LOCKHEED M MISSILES AND S s.p.a.cE D DIVISION PHOTO COURTESY OF G GENERAL B BERNARD S SCHRIEVER Fulfillment: Bennie Schriever with four stars amid his missiles, circa 1962. HISTORY O OFFICE, U.S. AIR F FORCE S s.p.a.cE C COMMAND BEFORE RETIREMENT.

The Schriever family at Barbara's "sweet sixteen" birthday party at Andrews Air Force Base on June 11, 1965. Left to right: Brett, an Air Force navigator, with his captain's bars; Barbara; General Schriever; Dora; Dodie; and Dodie's pilot husband, Theodore Moeller, then also a captain. U.S. AIR F FORCE PHOTO COURTESY OF B BARBARA S SCHRIEVER A ALLAN A LAST SALUTE.

The Generals of the Air Force salute Schriever's coffin on July 12, 2005, as it is carried up the slope of a knoll at Arlington National Cemetery to rest, as he wished, near Hap Arnold. He was buried with the honors due a chief of staff. U.S. AIR F FORCE PHOTO COURTESY OF J JONI J JAMES S SCHRIEVER HAPPINESS IN THE EVENING.

The Schriever luck holds: Joni James and Bernard Schriever on honeymoon in southern France after their wedding, which took place on October 5, 1997. COURTESY OF J JONI J JAMES S SCHRIEVER Having been awarded the Air Force's highest development priority was fine, but it turned out that this did not absolve them from competing against other high-priority projects for funds. Their overall budget for each fiscal year also had to be approved by, in turn, the budget committees of the ARDC and the Air Materiel Command, and then by the Air Staff, the Air Force Budget Advisory Committee, the Air Force Council, the secretary of the Air Force, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of the Budget. What they needed was a streamlined decision-making process, their own separate budget, and a designation of the highest national-not just Air Force or Department of Defense-priority, which would enable them to override everything else. Only Eisenhower could give them these privileges. The question was, how were they to get to him?

It was a task made for Vincent Thaddeus Ford, a man to whom duplicity was second nature, an adept backdoor operative whom Schriever's staff was to nickname "the Gray Ghost." He was an odd, neurotic man. He had been born in Winstead, Connecticut, in 1907 and grown up there until, in his mid-high-school years, his father had developed chronic chest problems of colds and pneumonia and been warned by a doctor that if he wanted to live, he had better move to a warmer and dryer climate. The family had s.h.i.+fted to the community of Alhambra in Southern California southeast of Los Angeles, where Vince had completed high school and studied engineering for two years at UCLA. To support himself, he also worked part-time as a meteorologist for one of the original airlines, Western, which had a contract to fly the mail. He got to know a number of the pilots and discovered that they were all college graduates, some from prestigious schools like Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley, who had taken up flying for the sheer love of it. One pilot, he recalled, always tossed in his bag of golf clubs along with the mail sack so that he could play at stopovers.

This, Vince decided, was a pretty good way to earn a living, and he became fascinated with flying himself. With the two years at UCLA to qualify him, he was accepted by the Army Air Corps and reported to Randolph Field, Texas, in the fall of 1931, just as Schriever was to do in July of the following year. He survived the 50 percent washout rate, received his wings and the gold bars of a second lieutenant in the Air Corps Reserve, and in 1932 reported for a year of active duty, again as Bennie was subsequently to do, at March Field, California. Hap Arnold was already there as base and overall wing commander. Unlike Schriever, however, Ford managed to avoid bombers and to gain a coveted a.s.signment to one of the pursuit, or fighter, squadrons. His was the 34th, commanded by then Captain Ira Eaker and equipped with Boeing P-12 biplane fighters.

On April 14, 1933, while the 34th was practicing formation flying for its part in an air show the March Field units were to stage at the forthcoming annual air races at Santa Monica, turbulence either flung Ford's plane down on the aircraft below or tossed the plane below up into his. They had been flying at about 10,000 feet, so Ford had plenty of time to unbuckle his seat belt, push away from the tumbling plane, and pull the rip cord on his parachute. Then he pa.s.sed out. His left leg was shattered by the propeller of the plane below, which had ripped right through the skin of the P-12's fuselage. He was flown to the Letterman Army Hospital at the Presidio of San Francisco and spent the next two years and two weeks there. The leg also became infected. The infection was ultimately cured, a lengthy process in these years before antibiotics, but bone grafts were then required to get the fragmented leg to calcify and knit back together again. By the time this had occurred, the left ankle, so long in a cast and with the foot turned off at a crazy angle to the outside, had also frozen and calcified, and so in order to walk on it he had to wear a custom-made boot with steel braces at the ankle.

Over the next few years, however, the leg itself, which had healed fairly straight, strengthened and the knee was fine. Friends would later urge him to have the ankle and foot amputated, so that a false foot could be fitted to the stump of the leg and he could lead a normal life. Edward Teller, for example, had lost a foot when he slid under a Budapest tram as a youth, but no stranger would ever know it watching him walk. Ford always refused, preferring to hop about on the dreadful souvenir of his accident. Acquaintances decided that he clung to the deformed foot because he thought it elicited sympathy.

The Second World War saved him from an empty life back in Alhambra. Contemporaries from his Air Corps days were suddenly lieutenant colonels and colonels. He hitched a ride to Was.h.i.+ngton aboard a plane being flown there from the Douglas Aircraft plant and went to see a Flying School mate who was now a full colonel in charge of all filmmaking for the Army Air Forces. He had Ford a.s.signed as a lieutenant to the 1st Motion Picture Unit at the old Mack Sennett studios in Culver City, California. Ronald Reagan, who had obtained a lieutenant's commission in the Cavalry Reserve after he discovered that he liked riding horses while a young radio sportscaster in Iowa, had also been a.s.signed to the unit and promoted to captain. Ford offered to take him out to a nearby airfield on weekends to hitch rides on planes for fun, but Reagan declined. He said that the sixteen hands measurement of an average horse's height was as high as he wanted to go.

For a man who had known the company of serious airmen, making movies in Culver City was not a satisfactory way to spend the war. Ford returned to his catalogue of cla.s.smates and one of them arranged an a.s.signment to the Air Transport Command in England and a post as a.s.sistant operations officer for a C-47 transport squadron at Bovingdon, just northwest of London. The work was hardly exciting, but it was worthy. The surrender of j.a.pan in August 1945 soon brought banishment to civilian life once more. By 1948, an unhappy Ford was again banging on the gate. A persistent effort led from connection to connection until a Colonel Bernard Schriever hired him. Bennie had heard of Ford's accident after his own arrival at March Field in 1933, but the two had never met until a mutual acquaintance introduced them fifteen years later. It was the beginning of a relations.h.i.+p that was to last the rest of their long lives.

Although Schriever and Ford became friends and Ford felt indebted to Schriever for a renewed professional life, he had no intention of becoming Schriever's Sancho Panza. Ford had his own agenda. He was a shrewd man who enjoyed wielding power and influencing events. He was zealous to promote causes in which he believed. But because of the limitations life had imposed on him, he had to do this through other men with rank and status. Lacking both himself, had he sought center stage, his ambition would have been regarded as ludicrous and he would have found himself back in Alhambra. His personality and character fitted him for his behind-the-scenes role. He had a smile that disarmed and great capacity for charm. He rarely showed irritation or anger and was never confrontational. The rub was that the affability might mean he was in sympathy with someone or it might mean that he was just putting them off, for Ford wore it as a mask in all seasons.

His initial move upward from being just another member of Schriever's staff came in September 1950, when William Burden was appointed the first special a.s.sistant to the secretary of the Air Force for research and development. Through Teddy Walkowicz, who was then working for Doolittle, Vince gained an introduction to Burden and the job as his executive a.s.sistant. This had put him in position for the meeting with Gardner and the adventures that followed after Gardner appeared in the office doorway on that fateful day in March 1953.

Beginning in December 1954, Gardner and Schriever set Ford to work secretly briefing Henry Jackson, the Democratic senator from Was.h.i.+ngton State, on the impediments the ICBM program was encountering. Ford met Jackson in restaurants that were not frequented by other politicians or military officers, who might get curious. The objective was to gain Jackson's a.s.sistance in reaching Eisenhower. They would have been hard put to find a senator more willing to help them. Scoop Jackson was not merely anti-Communist, he was ferociously anti-Soviet and, like von Neumann, a believer in "maximum armament." He was also well placed to a.s.sist because he held the chairmans.h.i.+p of the Military Applications Subcommittee of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the joint Senate and House committee that oversaw the Atomic Energy Commission and all nuclear activities, including the manufacture of nuclear weapons. In addition, he was a member of the Subcommittee on the Air Force of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Schriever and Gardner had invited him out to WDD the previous fall and he had been impressed. It was common in the 1950s for the military to surrept.i.tiously appeal to friendly legislators with an end-run play like this when the need arose. There was risk, but Bennie was hardly risk-averse when the goal was worthy of the danger, and he would also have been a moral coward to have let Gardner a.s.sume sole responsibility for the plot.

He sent his executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Beryl Boatman, to join Ford at the clandestine rendezvous with Jackson and to regularly pa.s.s the senator copies of his latest cla.s.sified reports. Had the gambit gone awry, Gardner's authority would not have saved Schriever, particularly given the antipathy toward Gardner within much of the senior ranks of the Air Force. Years later, LeMay accused Bennie of sneaking around behind the chief of staff's back. Schriever called the accusation "a G.o.dd.a.m.n lie" and claimed that he had kept Twining informed of everything. This is doubtful. Both Twining and White, the vice chief, were supporters of the missile program. What probably happened is that they learned something of what was occurring through the grapevine-such covert maneuvering is always difficult to keep entirely hidden within the armed services-and tacitly approved by not interfering. Twining later showed his hand by invariably protecting Bennie whenever he did get into trouble. Power also apparently learned what was going on and said nothing. The un.o.btrusive briefings of Jackson continued for six months. The senator used the ammunition Ford and Boatman provided to hold fifteen closed hearings by his subcommittee. Gardner naturally appeared as a witness and von Neumann, ever prepared to pitch in, volunteered to testify as well. From March 1955 onward, Johnny carried the additional prestige of being one of the five commissioners on the Atomic Energy Commission, the first foreign-born scientist to be nominated to the post.

All the while, Ford had been boring another tunnel into the White House. Near the end of March 1954, Eisenhower met with a group of eminent scientists who const.i.tuted the Presidential Science Advisory Committee, PSAC for short. Its chairman was Lee DuBridge, by then president of Caltech. Eisenhower asked them to undertake a study of the nuclear Pearl Harbor nightmare that was always foremost in his mind. He was convinced, the president said, that modern weapons had increased the danger of such a surprise attack on the nation and wanted them to suggest measures through which science and technology might reduce the peril. A subcommittee subsequently ent.i.tled the Technological Capabilities Panel, and commonly known as the Killian Committee, was formed under James Killian, the president of MIT. Gardner gave the panel its first briefing, focusing on the ICBM. And Ford got himself appointed a member of the Killian Committee staff.

He managed this maneuver through a friends.h.i.+p he had struck up with another unsung, toiling-in-the-wings figure like himself, David Beckler, the executive director of PSAC. When the subcommittee officially began its inquiry in August 1954 after Eisenhower had reviewed and approved its agenda-which Gardner and Ford also helped to draft-Beckler needed an experienced staff man to a.s.sist the panel and to act as its liaison with the Air Force. With Ford prompting, Gardner offered the services of his executive a.s.sistant. The offer was not accepted without second thoughts. While the panel members admired Gardner, they were also wary of his zealotry and thus of Ford as his agent. Beckler's private investigation through his own sources at the Pentagon elicited the response that, although Ford might work for Gardner, he was by nature loyal, honest in reporting, and invariably discreet. Ford did not disappoint Beckler, and Killian and the other panel members praised his "exceptional" contribution to their report. He received a letter of commendation on behalf of the president as well. But in retrospect there is also no doubt that, character reference notwithstanding, Ford never wavered from what had become his central mission in life. He did his best to put his finger on the Killian Committee's scale.

The panel's report, delivered in mid-February 1955 to the president and the National Security Council, did address Eisenhower's concern with a surprise attack. It urged reducing SAC's vulnerability by dispersal of its bombers and the creation of a substantial airborne alert. In a separate and ultrasecret recommendation, it also urged the building of the U-2, which, through the lenses of its spy cameras when it began overflights on the Fourth of July 1956, was to ease Eisenhower's worry by providing the first good look into the closed interior of the Soviet Union. The most striking element in the panel's mid-February report, however, was its warning of the strategic consequences if the Soviets achieved an ICBM capability before the United States. "The intercontinental ballistic missile can profoundly affect the military posture of either country," the report said. The panel recommended something without precedent. The NSC had never previously lent its endors.e.m.e.nt to a specific weapon system. The panel urged that this now be done, that the council single out the ICBM project "as a nationally supported effort of highest priority." Gardner, Ford, von Neumann, and Schriever were elated, but then nothing happened. n.o.body at the top did anything to rescue them from their plight. They learned to their chagrin that it was not enough to lay a report before the president and the National Security Council. One had to follow up by persuading the council and the president that the matter was sufficiently urgent to warrant an NSC Action Memorandum, signed by the president, and spelling out a specific measure or measures, in order to shake the bureaucracy out of its complacency. Otherwise, the system continued on in its blithely obstructionist fas.h.i.+on. Killian and his a.s.sociates had failed to do this and Eisenhower, apparently still unaware that the Soviets would beat the United States to the launch if corrective steps were not taken, was content to leave ICBMs to the Air Force and the Department of Defense.

The crafty Ford was undaunted. He set in motion his third clandestine campaign. His new friend David Beckler helped him. With Gardner's a.s.sent, he remained on Beckler's PSAC staff in the Executive Office Building next to the White House. He had more freedom of action that way. The goal now was to get the subject of the ICBM itself placed on the agenda of the National Security Council so that the president could be fully informed on what needed to be done. The question was how to accomplish this. Arranging for a subject to be placed on the NSC agenda might sound like a trifling formality, but in the world of government bureaucracy, such formalities counted. It was a sine qua non if Schriever, Gardner, and von Neumann were ever to reach Eisenhower.

The NSC was the apex of the elaborate military-style staff system that Eisenhower had constructed to undergird his presidency. The council had originated with the National Security Act of 1947, which had also established the Department of Defense and reorganized the armed forces to provide for an independent U.S. Air Force. Truman had used it, as Paul Nitze's famous NSC-68 policy paper of 1950 on the Soviet threat attests, but in limited fas.h.i.+on. Eisenhower transformed the council, making it his paramount body to formulate, evaluate, and guide military and foreign policy. The president was its chairman and its princ.i.p.al members were the heads of relevant cabinet departments, such as the secretaries of state, defense, and the Treasury, and those at the top of other concerned government organizations, like the chief of the CIA, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the chairman and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The staff director was the president's special a.s.sistant for national security affairs. Under him was a beehive of sections dealing with the mult.i.tude of subjects and issues of interest to the council. The most important element was the NSC Planning Board, because it set the council's agenda. A representative of each of the NSC's princ.i.p.al members sat on it. The Planning Board was, in effect, the back door to the council's deliberations.

One of the board's unwritten but long established rules was that a subject had to be referred to it by the department concerned, in this instance the Department of Defense. That was impossible in the case of the ICBM because Defense Secretary Wilson was opposed to singling out the missile project for special attention to the possible detriment of other high-priority projects. Beckler suggested that Ford resort to a flanking movement to get around this obstacle-going though the State Department's Policy Planning Council, the new, more elegant name for the old Policy Planning Staff. a.s.sistant Secretary of State Robert Bowie was chairman of the Planning Council and also sat on the NSC Planning Board as the representative of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's secretary of state. Beckler introduced Ford to a civil servant who proved immensely helpful-Carlton Savage, executive secretary of State's Planning Council. Tall, slim, and courtly, Savage was an old-timer at the State Department, a friend of Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of state during the Second World War. He differed from many in the civil servant tribe, however, in that he had imagination and courage. As soon as he understood the importance of what Ford was about, he gave him his full support. At Ford's request, he arranged a briefing by Gardner and von Neumann for his own superior, Robert Bowie, and a number of other senior State officials, including Robert Murphy, the deputy undersecretary of state for political affairs; Loy Henderson, the deputy undersecretary for administration; and Chip Bohlen, the Soviet specialist and current amba.s.sador to Moscow, who happened to have been called home to a.s.sist with preparations for Eisenhower's first summit meeting in Geneva in July with Stalin's successors to the leaders.h.i.+p of the Soviet Union. The objective was to make the diplomats realize the psychological and political repercussions on America's European allies if the Soviets were able to threaten with a weapon like the ICBM and the United States had no equivalent to deter them. The briefing went extremely well and the State Department was won to the cause.

Ford was enjoying himself immensely at all of this maneuvering. Years later, he was to write of "the fun and excitement and challenge of roaming the Was.h.i.+ngton jungle when you're hot on the trail of a major blow for freedom." Throughout the period, unbeknownst to Beckler or Savage, Ford kept working the Senate angle, arranging more furtive meetings with Scoop Jackson. He saw to it that the senator always had a supply of fuel for his subcommittee hearings from Schriever's cla.s.sified reports delivered by Boatman. To cover his movements, Ford adopted various tricks, including the use of public telephone booths for calls he did not want anyone to be able to trace back to Beckler's or Gardner's offices. He jokingly referred to these afterward as "my many carefully staked out field offices around Was.h.i.+ngton-a telephone booth in the Pentagon, or over at State, or in the nearest bar, or perhaps my favorite field office on the lower deck of the Army-Navy Club-the phone booth right at the bottom of the stairs, not the other one." (The anonymity of public phones in the 1950s appealed to others besides Ford. They were a favorite communications system of the Mafia.) In addition to Savage, Beckler also introduced Ford to another figure who was to be of considerable aid in placing the ICBM on the agenda of the NSC. He was William Yandell Elliott, a professor of government at Harvard, who was in Was.h.i.+ngton on a temporary stint with a relatively unknown but influential organization called the Office of Defense Mobilization. It too was housed in the Executive Office Building. The Presidential Science Advisory Committee was, in fact, subordinate to it. The ODM was a successor to the Second World War's Office of War Mobilization. During the Truman era it had become another of those skeletal formations to which Eisenhower was to give flesh and vitality. Its stated mission was to centralize management of mobilization activities in the event of conflict, but Eisenhower used it to provide him with general advice on a range of policies. Its head, Arthur Flemming, was a presidential confidant. He saw Eisenhower once a week for lunch, served on the president's four-man Committee on Government Reorganization (an attempt at reform at which Eisenhower and his committee were not successful), and held a seat as a full member of the NSC.

Professor Elliott was Flemming's representative on the NSC Planning Board. To impress Elliott, and a civil servant named Vincent Rock, who was Elliott's alternate on the board, Ford brought to bear his full battery-briefings by Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever. He had s.h.i.+ed away from including Schriever in the State Department briefing, thinking the danger of exposure there too great for a military man. The EOB was less conspicuous. Elliott and Rock became committed partisans and in turn recruited James Lay, the executive secretary of the NSC. The result was that when the critical meeting of the NSC Planning Board took place that June of 1955, the Pentagon representatives found themselves outweighed by Bowie from the State Department, Elliott and Rock from the Office of Defense Mobilization, and Lay in the Secretariat. They backed down, the ICBM was placed on the NSC agenda, and the way was now open to speak directly to the president.

Had the road to the NSC on which Beckler had set Ford been blocked, he and Schriever, and Gardner and von Neumann, had another and so far hidden path prepared. On June 30, 1955, Eisenhower received a five-page letter signed by two senators. One was Jackson. The other was Clinton Anderson, a Democrat from New Mexico. If Jackson had clout, Anderson had a lot more. He was chairman of the Joint (House and Senate) Committee on Atomic Energy, to which Jackson's Subcommittee on Military Applications belonged. He had also visited Schriever's California organization in the fall of 1954 and reacted sympathetically to what he had seen and heard. He had then followed Jackson's hearings and volunteered to co-sign the letter with him. There was no way the president could ignore the letter, even if he had wanted to do so. It described the obstacles the missile enterprise was encountering and recommended a series of radical changes to remove them. Among these were a separate budget for the ICBM independent of all other Air Force needs and an exemption from any Pentagon procurement regulation that hindered advancement. It also recommended that Eisenhower designate the program as carrying the highest national priority and that he arrange to be briefed on the project at the first opportunity. In short, the letter to the president contained all that Ford, Schriever, Gardner, and von Neumann could have wished, and with good reason. In a final act of legerdemain, Ford, Schriever, and Gardner had drafted it for Jackson and Anderson to sign. Eisenhower instructed Arthur Flemming to organize a briefing at the next meeting of the NSC. The briefing would have to wait until the end of July because Eisenhower was readying himself for his first summit confrontation in Geneva on July 18 with Stalin's heirs.

A DIFFICULT DIALOGUE AT GENEVA.

By 1955, the Cold War had persisted for the better part of a decade. The att.i.tudes initially formed among the policy-making elite in Harry Truman's time had congealed into an American theology that purported to explain the dynamics of Communism worldwide. The consensus among the few at the top had become the consensus of the nation. The beliefs were taken for granted and were shared by virtually all Americans, from President Eisenhower down to a worker on an automotive a.s.sembly line in Flint, Michigan. One can hear these beliefs repeated mantralike in Eisenhower's memoir of his first four years in the White House, Mandate for Change. Mandate for Change. Such phrases as "the dangers of international Communism," "the international Communist conspiracy," "Communist subversion," "the Marxist theory of world revolution and Communist domination," and "the never-ending struggle to stem the tide of Communist expansionism" are replete throughout the text. No one yet understood the extent to which this theology got in the way of perceiving reality and would thus lead to the disastrous consequence of the war in Vietnam. Such phrases as "the dangers of international Communism," "the international Communist conspiracy," "Communist subversion," "the Marxist theory of world revolution and Communist domination," and "the