Book For Sale Here.

Go to ePage selector for the notes and sources.

Notes and Sources, page 254.

by Donald Williams (see communications section) written on September 1, 1959.

Chapter 11: Move Over, Sputnik

Khrushchev's belligerent attitude toward the United States, which presumably set the tone for the excerpt from Soviet Fleet (page 119), is clear in an interview with James Reston for the New York Times that appeared on October 9, 1957. In the interview, Khrushchev said that the U.S. was causing all the trouble because it negotiated with the USSR as if it were weak. Khrushchev told Reston that the USSR had all kinds of rockets for modern war and spelled out the fact that since the USSR could launch a satellite, it had the technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles. In his interview, Khrushchev uses the terms "imperialist warmongers" and "reactionary bourgeoisie" when speaking of the U.S.

Eisenhower's attitude to this rhetoric is apparent in his State of the Union message on January 9, 1958. He said, "The threat to our safety, and to the hope of a peaceful world can be simply stated. It is communist imperialism. This threat is not something imagined by critics of the Soviets. Soviet spokesmen, from the beginning, have publicly and frequently declared their aim to expand their power, one way or another, throughout the world."

The failure of the launch of Vanguard on December 6, 1957, (page 120) is retold in Green's and Lomask's book in the NASA History Series, Vanguard, A History.

General Medaris's call to JPL et al. (page 121) is discussed by William Pickering in his oral history in the archives of the California Institute of Technology.

Pickering's attempts to contact James Van Allen are discussed both in Pickering's oral history at Caltech and in James Van Allen's oral history in the National Air and Space Museum (page 121-122).

In the oral history and in his interview with me, Pickering described the journalist who tracked him down in New York immediately prior to the launch.

254

Go to the top of the page