The Heavens and the Earth

...There was something very seductive about "the best and the brightest" in those days...

...David Halberstam painted a devastating portrait of them all in The Best and the Brightest, men who embodied the liberal contradictions of the era between "good intentions and the desire to use and hold power...

...McGeorge Bundy from Harvard...

...Indeed, the policies of the current Administration have probably locked most of the pro-grams into place for all time...

...The author understands the Soviets and is under no illusions as to their motives...

...Most of these Presidents initiated In the early days of the Kennedy Ad-ministration, when Lyndon Johnson first met all the brilliant men of Camelot, he is said to have run to his friend Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, in awe...

...Garry Wills sarcastically wrote that "first generation millionaires give us libraries, second generation millionaires give us themselves...

...We have had activist Presidents in the past: Andrew Jackson, James Polk, Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, probably Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman...

...PREPARING FOR POWER: AMERICA'S ELITE BOARDING SCHOOLS Peter W. Cookson, Jr...

...Soviet government policy, however, has been one of continuing duplicity and secrecy...

...Perhaps the most important contribution McDougall makes in recounting American space policy is to develop the interplay between the forces that pushed for military and non-military space programs...

...only the strong intervention of Secretary of Defense Harold Brown kept the pro-gram alive...

...Two of the three components of our space program, scientific research and worldwide reconnaissance, were therefore in place by the time the Russians launched Sputnik I in October 1957...

...The third component, national prestige, was introduced later, by President Kennedy.program was in financial trouble, President Carter almost canceled it...

...The book has some Hans Mark is chancellor of the University of Texas system...

...were many people in the United States who realized the political value of launching the world's first man-made satellite...

...I suspect he would have found the space program entirely within American traditions...

...On the American side, things have been much more complicated...

...The Grand Coulee Dam, begun by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, cost $5 billion in to-day's dollars, about half of what the Manhattan project, initiated ten years later, would cost...

...they have behaved cynically and deceptively throughout the Space Age, which those of us who have had to deal with them know very well...

...And anyone who has ever lived in Boston knows that the eatery in Boston where the Kennedy brothers used to meet in the 1950s is called Locke-Ober's, not Lochober's...

...The Heavens and the Earth is organized around the notion that the space effort transformed the United States into a "technocracy" and led directly to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society...

...Wernher von Braun and his collaborators never doubted how the public would react to the first orbiting satellite...

...The administrations after 1968 were not generally friendly to the nation's civilian space program...

...Well Lyndon," said Rayburn, "you may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff...

...Starting with the Rand report of 1946, there 'However, there are a few minor errors that should be corrected before a second edition is printed...

...It was the beginning of a new American breed of perfect public servant...

...Retired General James McCormack never served as President of MIT, he was a vice president in the 1950s...

...Naval Research Laboratory...

...But these interpretations strike me as implausible...

...First of all, it is not clear that all the Great Society pro-grams were failures...

...Dean Rusk from Rockefeller...

...The Eisenhower Ad-ministration was quite capable of undertaking large public works programs...

...There was also, according to McDougall, the fear that large government-sponsored space programs would somehow fundamentally alter our democratic institutions...

...The Titan rocket is not fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene as implied, but rather by a storable hypergolic mixture...

...This was not a random collection of talent...

...A major virtue is its description of the ideas that led tospace flight, starting with the solitary Russian genius Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky and the work of the early German and American pioneers...

...THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE SPACE AGE Walter A. McDougall/Basic Books/$25.95 Hans Mark Walter McDougall of the University of California has written an extremely important and useful book...

...And if you didn't like this set, why, there was always more where they came from...

...it is refreshing to read a book that takes this into account...

...The Apollo program was indeed larger than the Panama Canal by about a factor of four, but it was not unprecedented in our nation's history, as McDougall seems to imply...

...When it came to Vietnam, the same people, the same middle Americans, who used to make funny little noises whenever Dean Acheson was mentioned, now were the best and brightest's biggest supporters (which is, in a way, Vietnam's final irony: how a war started by the preppies came to be defended by the nerds...

...Rayburn was, to his great credit, quite right...

...It is not quite a comprehensive history, nor is it a piece of political journalism...

...McDougall attributes Eisenhower's reluctance to a deep suspicion of "experts" and "technocrats," an approach consistent with the generally "minimal government" or "small government" views of the leading members of the Eisenhower Administration...

...However, these were driven not by some technological imperative or concern over national prestige, but by the President's strong desire to persuade the Senate that the provisions of SALT II could be adequately verified...

...One is tempted to argue that the leading figures in the Eisenhower Administration, particularly Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson and Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, were more familiar with industries related to automobiles (Wilson was president of General Motors and Humphrey was closely tied to the steel industry) than those related to national defense...

...It is George Rathjens, not Norman Rathjens, Roswell Gilpatric, not Ross Gilpatric, and Wolfgang Panofsky, not Panovsky...

...Perhaps the strongest technical initiatives taken during the Carter years were in the military space program...

...A highway construction pro-gram was considerably more congenial to them than something as exotic as earth-orbiting spacecraft...

...this was a phenomenon...

...If all that flash, that polish, could fool Lyndon Johnson, who couldn't it fool...

...David Riesman called them "brilliant Atlantic provincials...

...It wasn't just that they were so smart and so young, because the smart and the young have always been attracted to politics...

...Many individual Soviets have behaved honorably, and there have been useful scientific collaborations with them...

...McDougall does point out, correctly, that a worldwide reconnaissance system has been a high priority of every administration since 1945, what with the Soviet penchant for extreme secrecy...

...Even as the remarkable U-2 reconnaissance aircraft took shape in Kelly Johnson's "skunk works," other people were already thinking about how to do the job from space...

...He calls the latter a failure because it applied the "technocratic" method to the solution of the nation's social problems...

...These examples hardly support the author's proposition that our government has become a prisoner of the technocrats...

...The problem, I believe, is that McDougall confuses the trend toward what he calls "technocracy" with the activist, pro-government political approach of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson...

...Robert McNamara from Ford...

...On the subject of Vietnam, then, the American right decided that it would rather back the Kennedy intellectuals and be right than go with its instincIn spite of the generally high level of scholarship McDougall displays, I have some trouble with the central theme of his book...

...His unique juxtaposition of American and Soviet motives, achievements, personalities, and public positions gives the book a special value...

...It was 'perfectly all right in conservative America to denounce the kids who were chanting and demonstrating and burning their draft cards as the children of privilege, but not the men who were running the battles from Washington...

...In 1979, when the Space Shuttle tributor to The American Spectator...

...The Soviets, of course, have never made a distinction between their civil and military space operations—something many people in this country either do not realize or do not want to believe—while loudly pro-claiming their peaceful intentions and accusing the United States of pursuing technical programs that would lead to warfare in space...

...flaws, and I will discuss these shortly, but they do not destroy its value.' The Heavens and the Earth deals primarily with the period from 1945 to the execution of the Apollo program in 1970...

...The administration opted to tie American satellite efforts to the International Geophysical Year and to turn the management over to a scientific group aided by the U.S...

...The Harvard men, with their new ideas and slide rules, proved they did not understand life outside Washington, New York, and Cambridge...

...In that tight circle there seemed to be great promise...

...Nor was it simply that suddenly there seemed to be so many of them, because talent, in various forms, had been flocking to Washington since the New Deal...

...As the author points out, this is not a new Soviet accusation, made only since President Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative in March 1983...

...President Nix-on had clear misgivings about the Space Shuttle and ordered the program cut substantially from the original NASA proposal before approving it in Malcolm Gladwell is a frequent con-1972...

...The Vietnam war, at least for a time, put an end to all this talk...

...and Caroline Hodges Persell Basic Books/$19.95 Malcolm Gladwell THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 41...

...McDougall tells the Soviet side of the story in an equally detailed manner...

...It is a fragment of the twentieth century, recorded by a distinguished young historian who has a clear view of the events he describes...

...2) The achievement of a satellite craft by the United States would inflame the imagination of mankind, and would probably produce repercussions in the world comparable to the explosion of the atomic bomb...

...The result was a leisurely program ultimately judged a failure...

...I wish McDougall had looked more carefully at some of these earlier large-scale programs...

...Leagued: Kennedy of Choate approached Robert Lovett of the Hill School to recruit Groton's McGeorge Bundy...

...they were using variations on the old striped-pantseastern-intellectuals theme to attack the Vietnam war, and the real anti-elitists in America would never go for that...

...These are dubious propositions at best...

...The difference was that these were men all of the same class, cut from the same Eastern cloth, pedigreed, prep schooled, and Ivymajor changes in policy (or "saltations" as the author likes to call them...

...McDougall also faithfully describes the seminal report, "Preliminary Design of an Experimental World Circling Space Ship," published by the Rand Corporation in May 1946 and put together primarily by Francis Clauser, Louis Ridenour, and David Griggs, which provided the basic framework for the American space programs that have become familiar to all of us...

...This was not, however, as effective a critique as it might have been because, by the usual standards, Halberstam and Riesman and Wills were anti-elitist for all the wrong reasons...

...The project cost $16 billion, in today's dollars, and took ten years to complete...

...I suspect the real reason the Eisenhower Administration did not push to build the world's first orbiting SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB, CHANNEL 3. CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE KTVN, CHANNEL 2, RENO, NEVADA WITS, 92 3 FM BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WGTC, 1370 AM, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WAJI, 95.1 FM, FORT WAYNE, INDIANA CORPORATE OFFICE, BOX 62, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA 47402 TELEPHONE 812 332 7251 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 satellite is that it simply had other, higher defense priorities...

...But the Eisenhower Ad-ministration did not share these views and therefore did not push for a pro-gram to launch an American satellite as rapidly as possible...

...Further-more, the alleged love affair with technology did not last long...

...Thus the destruction of Gary Powers's U-2 in 1960 did not create a large "intelligence gap," thanks to the foresight exercised by some dedicated people during the Eisenhower years...

...They have been saying it for thirty years...

...The Rand authors could not have been more explicit: Though the crystal ball is cloudy, two things seem clear: (1) A satellite vehicle with appropriate instrumentation can be expected to be one of the most potent scientific tools of the'Iiventieth Century...

...Most of the senior people in the Carter Administration, for instance, were skeptical of any technical solutions to the nation's problems (views generally shared by a President who was a trained engineer...

...There is some mention of subsequent events, the Shuttle, the Space Station, and developments in the military space programs, but these are compressed into a few brief pages to-ward the work's end...

...Moreover, the rationale used to justify the Interstate Highway System was national defense...

...For example, the Federal Highway Program, initiated in 1956, is by now the largest public works pro-gram ever executed in this country (we have spent about $250 billion in cur-rent dollars on the Interstate Highway System...

...The Panama Canal, begun in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt,- was clearly a major technical initiative...

...And it took more than three years of persuasion to get the Reagan Administration to adopt the Space Station program...

...The United States may have flirted with "technocracy" in the Kennedy Johnson years, but after that we beat a hasty retreat...

...It was not easy to say, in 1960 or 1961 when the glitz was on, that you had doubts about Bundy and Rusk and McNamara...