Presidential Papers, Doc#548 Memorandum To James Campbell Hagerty, 24 January 1958. In The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower
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Document #548; January 24, 1958
To James Campbell Hagerty
Series: EM, AWF, Name Series ; Category: Memorandum
The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XVIII - The Presidency: Keeping the Peace
Part III: The Space Age Begins; October 1957 to January 1958
Chapter 7: NATO and the Cold War

 

We hope that there will be numerous occasions for making announcements in the field of scientific achievement. Many of these, of course, will be directed toward improvement of weaponry for our forces.1

I have two suggestions:

a. I assume that each of the Services that has an important part in this kind of achievement will want to make its own statement. But I do hope that wherever possible these will be made by the Secretary of Defense in person.

b. At the same time, I think that very quickly after one of these experiments has been successful, we should have a White House statement prepared. Its particular purpose would be to relate the discovery to peace. It seems to me that within 24 to 36 hours after a significant event of this kind, we should be able to get out something that would be slanted strongly toward:

1. the need and opportunity for peaceful negotiations in the international field, and

2. the peaceful uses of the natural laws that have now been harnessed for defense purposes.2

1 Eisenhower may have been anticipating two planned satellite launches, both using military missiles. The Navy's Vanguard program, which having failed to launch its satellite in December, had scheduled another attempt for January 18; the launch would subsequently be postponed until January 28. The Army, using the Jupiter-C rocket with the Explorer satellite, had postponed its scheduled launch from January 29 until January 31. Although the troubled Vanguard program would again fail to orbit its satellite, the Army would succeed in launching the Explorer, the first American satellite, into orbit on January 31 (see New York Times, Jan. 28, Feb. 1, 1958; see also Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, pp. 71 - 72, 93 - 96, and Levine, The Missile and Space Race, pp. 68 - 69). For background on the intense controversy over the U.S. failure to match the success of the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite, and the competition among the services to be the first to launch a satellite, see Robert J. Watson, Into the Missile Age, 1956 - 1960, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, ed. Alfred Goldberg, 3 vols. to date (Washington, D.C., 1982 - 97), vol. IV (1997), pp. 171 - 97 (hereafter cited as Watson, Into the Missile Age); and McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth, pp. 141 - 76.

2 On February 1 Eisenhower would issue a very brief statement regarding the successful satellite launch. Noting that he had been informed that the United States had just successfully placed "a scientific earth satellite in orbit around the earth," Eisenhower said only that the launching was "part of our country's participation in the International Geophysical Year." He promised to share all information received from the satellite with "the scientific community of the world" (Public Papers of the Presidents: Eisenhower, 1958, pp. 140 - 41; see also Ann Whitman memorandum, Jan. 22, 1958, AWF/AWD).

Bibliographic reference to this document:
Eisenhower, Dwight D. Memorandum To James Campbell Hagerty, 24 January 1958. In The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. L. Galambos and D. van Ee, doc. 548. World Wide Web facsimile by The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission of the print edition; Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/second-term/documents/548.cfm

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