Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige by Yanek Mieczkowski (review)

Recalling how the United States took the challenge after the Soviet launch of the world’s first satellite in 1957 and “beat them to the moon,” President Barack Obama announced in his 2011 State of the Union address that “this is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” He called on the country to invest in science, technology, and education now, as then, as a way to deal with both a serious economic recession and heightened international competitions for jobs, especially from China and India. Whether Obama’s Sputnik analogy has served its intended purpose of rallying public support for his various programs is subject to debate, but it demonstrates the continuing public fascination with this dramatic episode that took place before a majority of today’s Americans were born. For those looking to learn more about this pivotal event of the Cold War and the original presidential response, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige by the historian Yanek Mieczkowski provides both rich information and nuanced analyses.

Using archival materials from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and elsewhere, newspaper and magazine articles, and oral history interviews with surviving members of President Eisenhower’s White House staff, Mieczkowski, author of a fine book on Gerald Ford’s presidency, gives us a lively and contextualized history of Eisenhower’s space policy and program both before and especially after the Sputnik 1 launch. Along the way, he debunks, rather convincingly, several conventional claims related to this history. For example, was there a panic in the United States right after the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1? Examining the records carefully, Mieczkowski reaches the conclusion that, yes, there was a panic but it was more “a press and political panic” (p. 20), generated by the self-interests of these elite groups, rather than a general panic among the population.

Another question is related to the actual achievements of Eisenhower’s post-Sputnik space program. A common perception is that Eisenhower’s fiscal conservatism and well-known opposition to manned space projects held back the U.S. space program, and that John Kennedy was the one who rescued and revitalized it with his launch, in 1961, of the Apollo project to land an American on the moon. Mieczkowski argues spiritedly in this book that “the scope of scientific achievement [in space] during Eisenhower’s presidency was astonishing” (p. 4), especially in the areas of satellite technologies and national security, paving the way for what came in the 1960s. By the time Eisenhower left office, the United States had launched 31 satellites compared to just nine by the Soviet Union. Even in the area of manned space travel, Eisenhower deserves credit for starting the Saturn super-booster that became the launch vehicle for Apollo.

What, then, explains the widespread perception during much of Eisenhower’s post-Sputnik presidency that the Soviet Union led the United States in the space race and the race for world prestige? Here Mieczkowski, like Robert Divine (in his 1993 study The Sputnik Challenge) and other scholars before him, blames Eisenhower’s low-key political leadership style, especially his seeming obliviousness to the political importance of international prestige during the Cold War. Taking “balance” as one of his key political tenets, Eisenhower gave priority to national security, economic strength, and scientific achievements over what he called space “stunts” that were designed mainly to enhance national prestige. Yet, a large part of the Cold War, according to Mieczkowski, was “a prestige race” (p. 6). He believes that Eisenhower could have avoided much of his post-Sputnik political trouble, or at least “inoculated him against pernicious political pressures” (p. 292), had he recognized the prestige factor and approved, in 1955, the U.S. Army’s proposal to launch, before the Soviet Union, a satellite using a military rocket.

That may be true. Yet, as Mieczkowski himself acknowledges elsewhere in the book, Eisenhower chose to go with the new non-classified Vanguard...