A Fiery Peace In A Cold War Part 4

The team found itself immediately faced with a conundrum. Pure jet engines, the type with which the B-47 and the B-52 were equipped, achieve propulsion, i.e., propel an aircraft forward, by the backward thrust of high-speed jets of gas generated when their fuel, a type of kerosene, is burned. They are notoriously inefficient at low level because the backward thrust is not powerful enough to overcome the denser air and thus they gobble profligate amounts of fuel. The team needed a jet engine that would give them much greater fuel efficiency. The result of their search was a pioneering model called the turbofan or high bypa.s.s ratio engine. It has a large turbine-driven fan installed in the front. The fan is turned by diverting some of the gas from the burning fuel. The great whirling blades of the fan create vastly more forceful backward thrust than a pure jet engine does to drive the aircraft ahead. There were other advantages. The big increase in thrust of the turbofan meant that fewer engines would be required for aircraft of equivalent size. The pure jet B-47, for example, had six engines and the B-52 would have eight. Blasingame and his team thought they could get by with four turbofan engines on the strategic bomber they had on their drawing board. The additional lift the turbofans provided through their higher thrust would also allow the bomber to take off from a much shorter runway.

Innovation did not stop with the turbofan engine. Blasingame exploited his Draper education to give the plane the most advanced navigation and bombing system he could imagine. He twinned an inertial guidance navigation instrument with a radar that was not yet in production, but soon would be ready, in order to produce a night and all-weather bomber. The inertial navigation device would keep the aircraft on the essentially correct course while the radar enabled the pilot to adjust it with precision. The radar was a type called rapid forward scanning. Its signal did a constant quick sweep of the terrain ahead of the plane and bounced back the images it encountered at high speed. These images were also much sharper on its screen than on those of the older radars. The pilot or the navigator/bombardier would have to thoroughly familiarize himself beforehand with a map in order to translate what he was seeing on the screen to the actual terrain ahead of him and the features he wanted to follow to his target. But if he did so, he could attack at low level at night and in bad weather and the radar would serve as his eyes. This instrumentation package that Blasingame conjured up for the intermediate bomber was a forerunner of the sophisticated electronic systems, the avionics suites for navigation, bombing, and air-to-air combat, that were to form such a critical feature of warplanes of the future. An example was the next logical step in radar-the terrain-following radar that was to appear in the early 1960s. The pilot cranked the necessary data into a computer and the radar then took over and flew the plane automatically on a ground-skimming course.

The plane was never built. Schriever couldn't sell the proposal to LeMay He remained adamant against low-level attack. The team's effort got no further than publication as an internal Air Force doc.u.ment in 1954. (It has since been lost.) The aircraft that did emerge from all of this wrangling was America's first supersonic bomber, the B-58 Hustler, a high-alt.i.tude, medium bomber with a top speed of approximately 1,300 miles per hour, approaching twice the speed of sound. Schriever had proposed it in an earlier and separate Development Planning Objective in 1952 in an ill-considered attempt at compromise. The Hustler was a boldly handsome aircraft of full arrowhead, delta-wing design, but unfortunately its attributes-high alt.i.tude where Bennie soon came to see low as a necessity, shorter combat radius of approximately 1,600 miles, and a medium bomber when LeMay wanted long-range and heavy-satisfied no one.

LeMay was eventually to get his way when Schriever was no longer at the Pentagon to frustrate him. In 1957, the same year LeMay left SAC and moved up to become vice chief of staff, the Air Force gave North American Aviation a contract for the bomber he wanted as the successor to the B-52. It was the B-70 Valkyrie, ma.s.sive at 500,000 pounds (bigger and more than 50,000 pounds heavier than the B-52); high-flying at 75,000 feet; supersonic at more than three times the speed of sound (Mach 3.2); expensive at $9.2 billion to obtain and test two prototypes; and useless. When decision time came in 1961, LeMay fought as hard as he could to have the plane accepted and put into production. He argued that the B-70 could be used as a reconnaissance-strike bomber to find and destroy Soviet airfields and missile complexes that had escaped an initial American nuclear attack. The trouble was that if the B-70 survived the Soviet surface-to-air missiles, the crew would not be able to see anything on earth while flas.h.i.+ng across the stratosphere at more than 2,000 miles an hour and 14.2 miles high. No sensors existed at the time to replace their eyesight and detect the airfields and missile sites below for them. President Kennedy canceled the Valkyrie, except for the two experimental prototypes, as "unnecessary and economically unjustifiable."

(There never was to be a satisfactory successor to the B-52 as a heavy bomber. The Air Force resorted to keeping the last model, the B-52H, in service indefinitely, periodically sending the planes back to Boeing to have them rebuilt. For nine years, from 1965 to 1974, B-52s were to carpet-bomb Vietnam and then Laos and Cambodia, snuffing out many thousands of lives and causing incalculable environmental damage to the forest and agricultural landscape, with the conventional high-explosive bombs LeMay had wanted to abolish in favor of nuclear-only munitions. The SAC staff referred to these ordinary 500-pounders as "garbage bombs." During the Gulf War of 199091, the B-52s were to be back at carpet-bombing, this time in a just cause, liberating Kuwait by helping to destroy the army of the Baghdad dictator, Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi soldiery were to find no shelter in desert bunkers that the strings of bombs collapsed into tombs. The B-52's role in the second Iraq war of the second President Bush was to be limited, but the fuel capacity of the ma.s.sive bombers made them the perfect aircraft to loiter in the skies over Afghanistan and periodically launch one of the latest in precision-guided 2,000-pounders at a redoubt of the Taliban or the al Qaeda terrorists. As of the publication of this book, the B-52s are still flying.) By 1953, Schriever had begun to suffer an affliction that was new to him, severe headaches from the tension of being repeatedly at odds with the biggest man in the Air Force. Although he was actually accomplis.h.i.+ng a lot, he couldn't see the results of his endeavors because they lay in the future. If Boeing's shrewd conversion of the KC-135 jet tanker it produced for SAC into its renowned 707 jetliner was to bring a major surge in international air travel, the introduction of the turbo-fan engine was to set off a revolution in military and commercial aviation. Blasingame blamed LeMay's att.i.tude for r.e.t.a.r.ding its advent by years, but when the engine builders and aircraft manufacturers caught on to its potential at the beginning of the 1960s, it soon became the universal engine. The H model of the B-52, which emerged from the Boeing production lines in the final runs in 1961 and 1962, was equipped with an early version of the turbofan in place of the J-57 pure jet engines that had powered previous models. As a result, the turbo-fan's economy in fuel consumption was to enable a B-52H to establish a new long-distance flying record in January 1962-12,532 miles from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa to Torrejon in Spain with no midair refueling.

While Blasingame and his colleagues were still engaged in their study for the intermediate strategic bomber, Bennie had given another team the task of planning a wide-body cargo aircraft that would utilize the turbofan engine. This study was to bear its first fruit in 1965 in the grand C-141 Starlifter transport. With just four turbofan engines, the C-141 could loft 154 fully equipped troops and their weapons or 7,000 cubic feet of cargo 4,000 miles. In 1968, the mammoth C-5 Galaxy appeared, again with only four hefty turbofan engines, which could lift virtually anything that might be loaded into its astonis.h.i.+ng 34,000 cubic feet of cargo s.p.a.ce. Standing inside its cargo bay, one had the sensation of being in a flying warehouse. In 1990 and 1991, both transports would perform an indispensable role in ferrying troops, tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, and the rest of the manifold equipment and supplies necessary to deploy an army in Saudi Arabia to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

The impact on commercial aircraft was even more dramatic when, in 1970, the first of the jumbo jets, Boeing's 747 jetliner, went into service with Pan American and Trans World Airlines. Its four turbo-fans could fly 400 pa.s.sengers from New York to Paris and beyond. With the ma.s.s market these giants fostered, air fares fell accordingly and millions who might otherwise never have traveled abroad flew off to see the world. It was no small irony that this miraculous engine had first emerged in a search for a low-level nuclear bomber to attack the Soviet Union that was never built. Bennie was even to be vindicated on low-level tactics to counter Soviet air defenses. SAC was to start switching to them in 1959 under LeMay's successor and the crews of the lumbering B-52s would learn how to hug the contour of the earth.

Nevertheless, the premonition that lay behind Bennie's tension headaches was not without substance. On June 23, 1953, he was promoted to brigadier general. The photograph in his study years later would show an excited and happy Bernard Adolph Schriever standing between two men, one of them Jimmy Doolittle, each pinning a silver star onto his shoulder tabs. In a note to Nathan Twining, Bennie thanked the chief of staff for his first stars with Schriever restraint. "My one hope is that I can do the job expected of me," he wrote. LeMay then almost got him. Colonel Schriever had given Curtis LeMay enough trouble. Brigadier General Schriever would give him more. The Cigar reached out to burn him. Bennie suddenly received orders a.s.signing him to South Korea as chief of logistics for the Fifth Air Force units stationed there. His boss at the time, again Laurence Craigie, now a lieutenant general and deputy chief of staff, development, called him at home to warn him that the orders were coming through from Personnel. Craigie told him not to give up, that he was going to intervene and rally others to try to get the orders overturned.

There was no doubt that LeMay was behind the maneuver. No one else had a motive to boot Schriever off into exile. At first, Bennie was stunned and then deeply angry, but he would have tamped down his anger and gone if he had to go, rather than leave the Air Force and make money in one of the military industries, as he might easily have done. Had LeMay succeeded, history would not have been the same. As Curtis LeMay had been the indispensable man in the success of the strategic bombing so important to victory in the Second World War, Bernard Schriever was to be the indispensable man in the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile during the Cold War and the enormous consequences that were to flow from it-America's penetration of s.p.a.ce and an unspoken but permanent truce of mutual deterrence with the Soviet Union. Lieutenant General Earle Partridge, an admirer of Schriever who had given him the funds for a turbofan engine prototype while head of the Air Research and Development Command, had recently been promoted to deputy chief of staff, operations, in effect the third man in Headquarters, USAF. He and Donald Putt, another of Bennie's former superiors, who had replaced Partridge at ARDC, joined forces with Craigie. They apparently went to General Tommy White, the vice chief who had known Bennie slightly out in the Pacific, and to Twining. The orders were rescinded. Schriever had survived and just in time, for he had begun to set in motion the great work of his life.

BOOK IV.

STARTING A RACE.

SEEKING SCIENTIFIC VALIDATION.

The thought that propelled the United States into the race for the ultimate weapon-nuclear-armed ballistic missiles hurtling across continents at 16,000 miles per hour through the vastness of s.p.a.ce-occurred to Bernard Schriever toward the end of March 1953 at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, nearly three months before his promotion to brigadier general. He was in Alabama to present the concept for the intermediate strategic bomber he was attempting to create for SAC to a meeting of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Many men would have found the thought fantastical, but not Schriever. His mind was receptive because he was so caught up in the opening years of the sinister arms compet.i.tion between the Soviet Union and the United States, a rivalry that would help to bankrupt and dissolve the immense Soviet empire and bequeath America a national debt of colossal proportions.

Two members of the Advisory Board at the meeting were exceptional men even among the generation of exceptional European minds who had transformed American science and learning in the decades since their arrival in the 1930s. One of the men was John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematical genius, possibly the finest intelligence of the twentieth century after Albert Einstein. The second was another Hungarian, Edward Teller, a physicist of great talent and monomaniacal ambition who claimed to be the sole parent of the hydrogen bomb. The flight of this wealth of intellectual talent across the Atlantic had been a born-in-sorrow gift to America from Europe's economic and social turmoil after the First World War and the rise of Adolf Hitler and his virulent anti-Semitism. Both men had partic.i.p.ated in the building of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during the Second World War. Both had then taken part in the creation of the awesome thermonuclear or hydrogen weapon that followed the initial unleas.h.i.+ng of the atom.

The first of these hydrogen bombs, as they were commonly called, code-named Mike, had been detonated at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific on November 1, 1952, only three years before the Soviet Union was to acquire its hydrogen weapon. Mike erupted with a force of 10.4 megatons, 832 times the power of Little Boy at Hiros.h.i.+ma. It vaporized the island on which it was tested and left a crater under the sea. Mike was not really a bomb in the sense that it could be dropped from an airplane, although the Air Force attempted for a time to obtain a lighter version that it could drop. Mike was an eighty-two-ton device, laboriously constructed, of giant metal containers called dewars, after James Dewar, the Scottish physicist who in 1892 had invented the thermos bottle, from which these highly sophisticated receptacles were descended. Mike's doomsday contents were in liquid form, flowing into the dewars through connected piping, and had to be cooled down to cryogenic levels. Von Neumann and Teller had, nonetheless, labored sufficiently long in the devil's workshop of nuclear weapons design to be able to calculate rapidly how to transform unwieldy monsters into practical devices of ma.s.s destruction. In their briefings to the Advisory Board meeting, they predicted that by 1960 the United States would be able to build a hydrogen bomb that would weigh less than a ton but would explode with the force of a megaton, i.e., eighty times the power of the simple atomic or fission bomb that had blown away Hiros.h.i.+ma.

Schriever pondered the prediction for a moment and immediately understood its implication. The barrier to the construction of the weapon against which there was no defense had always been the excessive weight of the warhead required. Von Neumann and Teller had just told him that it was now possible to devise a warhead of acceptable weight and thus to build this weapon-a rocket that could catapult up into s.p.a.ce, hurl its thermonuclear projectile nearly 6,330 miles, and fling this bomb of eighty Hiros.h.i.+mas down on any city in the Soviet Union.

On May 8, 1953, the earliest he could obtain an appointment, Schriever went up to the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study at Princeton to see von Neumann. He wanted to be certain he had interpreted correctly what von Neumann and Teller had said. He needed to have von Neumann, the mathematician and mathematical physicist wizard who held the research chair in mathematics at the inst.i.tute, confirm that it really would be possible by 1960 to downsize a hydrogen bomb with a megaton's blast to less than a ton in weight. These two attributes were the sine qua non for the building of a practical intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. If the warhead was a great deal heavier, a rocket of mammoth porportions, difficult to transport and field at dispersed launching sites, would be required to lift the warhead into s.p.a.ce and hurl it the approximately 6,330 statute miles that was the desired range. (The Air Force and Navy normally measure distance in nautical miles. One nautical mile is equivalent to approximately 2,025 yards. Civilians, however, measure distance in statute miles, one of which is equivalent to 1,760 yards. Because this book has been written for lay readers.h.i.+p, statute miles, with some exceptions, have been used here and throughout.) Yet the yield had to be high, given the relatively primitive guidance technology of the day and thus the difficulty of hitting a target, even one as large as a city, thousands of miles away. A thermonuclear warhead exploding with a million tons of TNT would allow the average accuracy requirement (technically called CEP for circular error probable) to be eased to two to three miles from the center of the target, because the blast would be sufficient to destroy or severely damage anything within that radius and beyond.

No one had told Bennie Schriever to go to Princeton, nor had anyone instructed him to find out how to build an ICBM. His previous initiatives, such as his confrontations with LeMay, had all occurred in the course of carrying out the duties of his job. This time was different. This time, for the first time, he was initiating something entirely on his own. If anyone was responsible for sending him to Princeton to see von Neumann it was Hap Arnold, who, the better part of a decade before, had inspired him to set off down a visionary's road. Schriever had arranged the meeting through his friend Teddy Walkowicz, who knew von Neumann well from his years of working with von Karman, first on the Toward New Horizons Toward New Horizons task force, then as secretary of the Scientific Advisory Board, and subsequently as executive a.s.sistant to Jimmy Doolittle. (During the SAB meeting at Maxwell there had been no opportunity for Bennie to do more than introduce himself briefly to von Neumann.) Worried that he might not be able to understand the intricacies of nuclear physics, a subject with which Walkowicz would have no difficulty, Schriever had asked his friend to join him. Walkowicz was by this time a civilian living in New York. He had resigned from the Air Force in disgust and gone to the big city to work for Laurance Rockefeller in venture capital finance. Despite the Ph.D. he had gained at MIT at considerable sacrifice, Walkowicz had been unable to gain promotion beyond lieutenant colonel because he had never gone to Flying School and become a pilot. In the terminology of the profession, he was a "nonrated officer." As far as the airplane drivers, the bomber generals who then dominated the Air Force, were concerned, that barred him from the higher ranks, whatever his technical prowess. To these men an officer who could not fly lacked the essential qualification for admission to the brotherhood-he would never be able to exercise command in the air. task force, then as secretary of the Scientific Advisory Board, and subsequently as executive a.s.sistant to Jimmy Doolittle. (During the SAB meeting at Maxwell there had been no opportunity for Bennie to do more than introduce himself briefly to von Neumann.) Worried that he might not be able to understand the intricacies of nuclear physics, a subject with which Walkowicz would have no difficulty, Schriever had asked his friend to join him. Walkowicz was by this time a civilian living in New York. He had resigned from the Air Force in disgust and gone to the big city to work for Laurance Rockefeller in venture capital finance. Despite the Ph.D. he had gained at MIT at considerable sacrifice, Walkowicz had been unable to gain promotion beyond lieutenant colonel because he had never gone to Flying School and become a pilot. In the terminology of the profession, he was a "nonrated officer." As far as the airplane drivers, the bomber generals who then dominated the Air Force, were concerned, that barred him from the higher ranks, whatever his technical prowess. To these men an officer who could not fly lacked the essential qualification for admission to the brotherhood-he would never be able to exercise command in the air.

While they were waiting for their appointment with von Neumann in a combined lounge and small library at the inst.i.tute, Schriever was surprised by an elderly figure who walked in, apparently on the way to his office. The wildly unkempt mane of white hair and the untidy mustache could belong to only one man-Albert Einstein. Bennie got up and introduced himself and Einstein shook his hand and said a few polite words before moving on. There was a certain irony in the encounter, however fleeting. Einstein, then in his seventy-fourth year, had two years left to live and, as he reflected on his extraordinary life, the act he regretted most was signing the famous 1939 letter to Franklin Roosevelt that was the genesis of the American atomic bomb project. He had done so at the behest of fellow emigre physicists out of fear that the n.a.z.is would build the bomb first and win the Second World War with it. He had then been horrified when the United States had used the bomb to ma.s.sacre the civilian populations of two j.a.panese cities. He was now equally upset over the postwar arms race that had sprung up between the United States and the Soviet Union, because he regarded the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a threat to the existence of humankind. One wonders what he might have said had he known he was shaking the hand of a man who was making it his mission to put not a mere atomic bomb, but rather a hydrogen bomb of eighty Hiros.h.i.+mas, on the tip of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

At the agreed time, 10:30 A.M. A.M., von Neumann's secretary, a friendly, middle-aged woman named Elizabeth Gorman, appeared and led them into the eminent Hungarian's office. He was standing behind his desk, a portly figure of modest height, as ever dressed correctly in a business suit (he usually wore the full three-piece model with matching vest), white s.h.i.+rt, and tie, and white handkerchief ironed and folded precisely into two points and tucked into his lapel pocket. His hand was held out in greeting and he was smiling, the smile redoubling the double chin in his wide, friendly face. The deep brown eyes also seemed to smile a greeting, emphasized as they and the brows above them were by the high forehead, growing higher all the time because of the receding line of his equally dark brown curly hair. Schriever had come to the right man. "Johnny" von Neumann, as he referred to himself and as his friends called him, was always pleased to welcome members of the American military establishment and to put himself at their service.

WHEN HUNGARY WAS MARS.

This genius with the benevolent-seeming exterior, Johnny von Neumann, the epitome of bonhomie, was one of the most ardent of Cold War hawks. In his view of how to handle the Soviets, he surpa.s.sed even Curtis LeMay. LeMay advocated "preemptive war," striking first but only when it was clear that the Soviets were about to strike the United States. Von Neumann argued one chilling step further. He advocated what was known at the time as "preventive war." Convinced that hostilities with the Soviet Union were inevitable sooner or later, he believed the United States should strike as soon as possible at the best opportunity. "With the Russians it is not a question of whether but when," he once remarked. "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" In 1949, before Truman rendered the argument moot by ordering the building of the Super, as the hydrogen bomb was then called, the number and prominence of von Neumann's wartime a.s.sociates at Los Alamos who recoiled from the creation of a terror bomb more than 800 times as powerful as the Hiros.h.i.+ma weapon was truly impressive. Among them, in addition to Robert Oppenheimer, were two n.o.bel Laureates, the American physicist I. I. Rabi and Enrico Fermi, the emigre Italian physicist. The Super would be, Fermi and Rabi said, "a danger to humanity as a whole ... necessarily an evil thing considered in any light." Von Neumann shared neither their fears nor their moral qualms. "I don't think any weapon can be too large," he had remarked to Oppenheimer.

While von Neumann still kept his hand in at pure mathematics by doing an occasional proof, he had long since become bored with the abstract realm of mathematical research. He was instead dedicating his nonpareil mind to the practical application of mathematics and mathematical physics in the service of the American state, first during the Second World War and now in its contest with the Soviet enemy. With the exception of the Coast Guard, no American military or intelligence organization existed that John von Neumann did not advise.

He had pioneered the coming of digital electronic computers, played the major role in devising stored programming to run them, and designed and supervised the building of the second electronic computer to exist in the United States, the most advanced in the world at the time, under a project he had organized and the Navy had funded at the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study. It was variously called the IAS, Princeton, or von Neumann machine. The electronic computer had initially attracted his interest, however, not primarily for its potential civilian applications, but because of its extreme usefulness in devising nuclear weapons, particularly the hydrogen bomb.

Nuclear weapons could not be made through traditional engineering methods as, for example, new aircraft are built: a model is designed, manufactured, and flown by test pilots, with defects gradually eliminated and improvements added. If a new nuclear weapon was incorrectly designed, there would be a "fizzle," the term for such embarra.s.sing fiascoes in the world of nuclear engineering. The would-be weapon would simply fail to go off or detonate in such a flawed fas.h.i.+on that nothing would be learned or gained from the time and expense of preparation. Vastly complex simulated models therefore had to be constructed and tested mathematically with innumerable computations to determine whether the new weapon was going to perform as hoped. The Mike hydrogen device exploded in November 1952 had, in fact, waited upon-been paced by-the progress von Neumann had brought about in electronic computers on which the equations could be run.

The explanation for what motivated Johnny von Neumann lay, as with LeMay and so many other major figures of the Cold War, in his past. He was one of the "Martians," an extraterrestrial distinction awarded by a.s.sociates of his day to him and several other Hungarians of scientific renown. Teller, whose obsession with building the hydrogen bomb was eventually and unjustly to gain him the popular reputation he so coveted that he and he alone had fathered the Super, was another Martian, as was von Karman, of aeronautical fame. The appellation had stuck because their non-Hungarian colleagues had difficulty imagining how so many l.u.s.trous minds, of which von Neumann's was the most radiant, could have originated in a country like Hungary. Actually, von Neumann and his fellow Hungarians had come from a kind of Mars, a golden age of Jewish secular life in Central Europe that had flourished and then been snuffed out, vanis.h.i.+ng into history as remote as Mars was in the vastness of s.p.a.ce.

The von, meaning "of," the German designation of aristocratic status, was an indication of the wealth and prominence of the family in which von Neumann had grown up. His father, Max Neumann, was a banker. In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, which was to begin the destruction of their s.h.i.+ning but fragile universe, Max had been granted a Hungarian t.i.tle of n.o.bility by Franz Josef, the Austro-Hungarian emperor. He became Max Neumann of Margitta. When the eldest son of this newly enn.o.bled family began teaching mathematics at the University of Berlin in 1926 he had accordingly styled himself Johann Neumann von Margitta. The American consul to whom he applied for an immigrant identification card three years later trimmed it to Johann von Neumann, and von Neumann Anglicized the Johann to John after he settled in the United States.

The von Neumann family lived in a capacious apartment in Budapest in a building constructed by von Neumann's maternal grandfather, Jacob Kann, who had gained his fortune in the agricultural equipment business. Max had made a good match for himself by successfully courting Margaret, one of Jacob's younger daughters. Von Neumann was the first of the three sons born to them, three days after Christmas 1903, and was named Janos, Hungarian for John. Hungarians customarily do not address a person by his formal first name. He was thus always called Jancsi, the diminutive of Janos, which is why he quickly turned the John to Johnny after immigrating.

There was a cook and other household servants. Johnny and his two younger brothers, Michael and Nicholas, who eventually followed him to the United States, had nursemaids to care for them when they were toddlers. When they grew older a German governess was hired to teach them German, the second language of their parents and the language in which they were to be educated, and an Alsatian governess to teach them French. They learned English from two Englishmen interned during the First World War who preferred quarters in the family apartment to enforced residence in a camp. In addition, Johnny learned on his own to read Italian.

This tranquil world to which wealth and culture gave a seeming sense of permanence had arisen out of a compromise political settlement in 1867 whereby Hungary acquired self-government and became the equal of Austria in the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire. Casting about for allies to b.u.t.tress their position, the Magyar n.o.bility set aside the previously official anti-Semitism and encouraged Jewish immigration into the country as well as Jewish partic.i.p.ation in Hungary's business and professional life. The change coincided with an era of unparalleled growth, industrialization, and prosperity in Hungary's larger towns and cities, especially in the capital. Budapest burgeoned from a city of 280,000 in 1867 to 800,000, the sixth largest in Europe after London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, by the time von Neumann was born in 1903.

As agents for capitalist growth, Jews contributed enormously to this transformation and benefited enormously from it. Although a mere 5 percent of the population as a whole, by 1910 Jews comprised approximately half of Hungary's lawyers, journalists, and commercial businessmen, nearly 60 percent of its doctors, and 80 percent of its financiers. The Jews of this golden age who managed the climb into the middle and upper-middle cla.s.ses tended to leave the religious observance of their forebears behind them. By the second or third generation, as was the case with the von Neumann family, they became secularized and casually ec.u.menical in their customs. At Christmas the family put up a tree and exchanged gifts, and the boys sang Christmas carols with their German and Alsatian governesses.

Perhaps the finest accomplishment of the period was the educational system and perhaps the finest inst.i.tutions within the system were the secondary schools. They were not public schools. They were elite schools, designed to educate the sons of the middle and upper-middle cla.s.ses who could afford the high tuition fees. The secular Jewish bourgeoisie contributed to the excellence of these schools as well, out of their inherited love of learning that derives from the rabbinical system and its reliance on study of the Torah. Again, they were ec.u.menical in their choices. Max sent his boys to the Lutheran Gymnasium (the word is a German one for an academic high school that prepares its students for university). The school was nondenominational in its admissions policy. Its course was rigorous and included eight years of Latin, four of cla.s.sical Greek, history, physics, and the full range of mathematics through calculus and a.n.a.lytical geometry.

Of all the students who ever attended Lutheran, John von Neumann was by far the most brilliant in the estimation of his peers. When he was six, his parents would amuse visitors and show off their Johnny by having him read a page in the telephone book, then take it back while he reeled off the names and numbers from his photographic memory for the astonished guests. Near the end of his life, as he lay dying of cancer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Was.h.i.+ngton, his brother Michael came to see him and, to distract him from the pain, sat beside the bed and read Goethe's Faust Faust in the original German of their school days. As Michael reached the bottom of a page, von Neumann would start reciting the first lines of the next one. in the original German of their school days. As Michael reached the bottom of a page, von Neumann would start reciting the first lines of the next one.

He was a genuine mathematical prodigy. His mathematics teacher at Lutheran had to devise special advanced courses for him because he quickly worked his way through the school's regular math curriculum. The proofs he wrote in subsequent years for publication in journals of higher mathematical studies resemble Mozart's musical scores. The original drafts, written with a fountain pen in von Neumann's firm, clear hand, go on for twenty to thirty pages with hardly anything ever crossed out. As Mozart could hear the music in his head while he composed his scores, so von Neumann could see in his mind the steps leading to the solution of the mathematical challenge. "He wrote last drafts first," his daughter and only child, Marina von Neumann Whitman, who became a prominent economist, remarked. At Los Alamos during the making of the atomic bomb he was renowned for solving in a few minutes in his head defiant equations that took other physicists and mathematicians nights of toil with slide rule and mechanical calculator.

The first cataclysm struck in 1918 with the defeat of Austria-Hungary and Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany by the Allies. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy fell and the empire disintegrated. The second cataclysm occurred in March 1919 when Johnny was fifteen and still attending the Lutheran Gymnasium. Bela Kun, a Hungarian socialist who had absorbed Bolshevik ideas while a prisoner of war in Russia, staged a Communist revolt with the support of Hungarian soldiers home from Russian prison camps, who had been similarly radicalized by the success of Vladimir Lenin's revolution there. Kun's regime was marked by a utopian ineptness at governing and a Red Terror in which about 500 opponents were executed. The chaos ended after 133 days when Admiral Miklos Horthy, who was to become the right-wing dictator of Hungary, enlisted Romanian troops to oust Kun and launched a White Terror in which as many as 5,000 may have died. And the Jews got the blame.

The von Neumann family fled to Austria about a month into the revolt, when Max saw that it was too dangerous to stay. The Hungary to which they returned was a different land. Eight of Kun's eleven senior commissars had been Jews and so had a goodly number of lesser figures in his regime. The backlash was a powerful resurgence of traditional anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitic laws that had been in abeyance since the grant of self-government and the creation of the Dual Monarchy in 1867 were reenacted. One struck at education for Jews at the University of Budapest and other higher schools. Henceforth, they were to be restricted in admission to the 5 percent Jews represented of the population as a whole. But the worst consequence of the backlash was the loss of the secure place Jews had known in Hungarian society. Even families like that of Max von Neumann, who had plotted with the right-wing Magyars to rid the country of Kun's regime, were now outsiders with an uncertain future.

John von Neumann had imbibed Russophobia in his Hungarian culture. It was as much a part of his heritage as paprika goulash, inculcated by generations of confronting the Bear along the eastern frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The upheaval of Bela Kun's revolution and its aftermath immensely reinforced that att.i.tude within him. He saw Russia as the font of this menacing new radicalism and became, in his words, "violently anti-Communist."

Von Neumann wanted to take his university degree in mathematics in Budapest (he would obviously have no trouble qualifying no matter how high the bar was set) and to teach the subject, but Max was convinced he could not earn a decent living that way. There was virtually no chance of gaining a post in mathematics at the university level in Hungary. They settled on chemical engineering as a compromise. Von Neumann obeyed his father, but had his own way too by designing a unique higher education career for himself. He went off to Germany in 1921 to study chemistry at the University of Berlin, moving on two years later to the prestigious Federal Inst.i.tute of Technology in Zurich, where he took a chemical engineering degree in 1925. All the while, at both inst.i.tutions, he continued his studies in mathematics and physics. Then he came home and enrolled in the University of Budapest. In a single academic year he whizzed through the remaining courses required, wrote his doctoral thesis in mathematics, and in 1926, at the unprecedented age of twenty-two, was awarded his Ph.D. with highest honors.

He never worked a day as a chemical engineer. Rather, he returned to the University of Berlin as an a.s.sistant professor of mathematics soon after gaining his Ph.D. Germany's economic troubles and the shortage of funds at all inst.i.tutions prevented him from turning the Berlin post into something permanent. In 1929, the year his father died, Princeton offered him a visiting lectures.h.i.+p for the following year. He accepted it, to begin with less out of apprehension over the growth of n.a.z.ism in Germany and the drift from old-fas.h.i.+oned authoritarianism toward n.a.z.i-style Fascism in Hungary, than out of simple lack of opportunity there. He was still bound to Europe, but the ever more looming menace of n.a.z.ism gave him pause. When Princeton held out a visiting professors.h.i.+p in mathematics and mathematical physics at the end of his initial lectures.h.i.+p, he responded and kept renewing it until Hitler made up von Neumann's mind for him by rising to chancellor of Germany in January 1933, quickly establis.h.i.+ng an absolute and stridently racist dictators.h.i.+p. There was no alternative now but America.

In a letter to a friend around this time, von Neumann predicted that if the n.a.z.is managed to hold on to power they would destroy creative science in Germany. German science and technology remained formidable until the ruination of defeat in 1945, but von Neumann was essentially right about the creative aspect. The 1928 volume of the German edition of the Annals of Mathematics Annals of Mathematics, found among his papers at the Library of Congress, provides a sampling of the scientific talent that the n.a.z.is hounded out of Germany to inadvertently enrich science in the United States. Theodore von Karman is listed as one of the editors. Albert Einstein is among the contributors. Another is John von Neumann, with a paper on a mathematical model of economics he had just devised. He elaborated the theory in his new home and, in collaboration with a colleague at Princeton, Oscar Morgenstern, published it as a book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The theory became widely influential on everything from nuclear strategy and arms control negotiations to economic a.n.a.lysis and race relations. In 1933, von Neumann was also made an offer he could hardly refuse. The Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study, independent of the university, had been founded at Princeton. He was appointed its first research professor of mathematics at the then generous salary of $10,000 a year. The post was ideal for a man of von Neumann's temperament. While he could and did accept proteges in mathematics as temporary fellows at the inst.i.tute, he had no cla.s.ses to teach, indeed no fixed duties at all. He was expected simply to follow his bent and break new ground in his field. The theory became widely influential on everything from nuclear strategy and arms control negotiations to economic a.n.a.lysis and race relations. In 1933, von Neumann was also made an offer he could hardly refuse. The Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study, independent of the university, had been founded at Princeton. He was appointed its first research professor of mathematics at the then generous salary of $10,000 a year. The post was ideal for a man of von Neumann's temperament. While he could and did accept proteges in mathematics as temporary fellows at the inst.i.tute, he had no cla.s.ses to teach, indeed no fixed duties at all. He was expected simply to follow his bent and break new ground in his field.

A FASCINATION WITH EXPLOSIONS.

It was hardly surprising that a man of von Neumann's background and experience would be afflicted with a profound sense of insecurity, which sometimes manifested itself in comic ways. One was his obsession with proper attire. A unique photograph exists of him walking down a sidewalk in Santa Fe in 1949 with his daughter, Marina, then fourteen, in business suit but with his s.h.i.+rt collar open and no tie. It seems to have been a singular occasion, for no friend's camera appears to have caught him ever again in such disarray. More typical of the lengths to which he would go to maintain sartorial decorum is a photograph taken in the late 1940s of a group on a break from work at Los Alamos for an excursion into the Grand Canyon. They are about to start the descent, astride the mules that will carry them down. All, including von Neumann's second wife, Klara Dan, who was called Klari, are wearing casual clothes and some have broad-brimmed hats to protect them from the sun. Von Neumann brings up the rear. His balding head is exposed to the sun and he sits astride his mule in business suit and tie with white handkerchief tucked into his lapel pocket. For some reason, his mule is also headed in the wrong direction.

The insecurity manifested itself as well in his concern for money. There was no need for it. His salary at the inst.i.tute was ample. He also held a couple of civilian consultants.h.i.+ps, one with IBM, which paid him thousands more. He lived in the manner of the wealthy European he had been born, sailing the Atlantic in first-cla.s.s cabins each summer for international mathematical conferences in Europe, and seeking out the best hotels. He drove the best of American cars, a snappy Cadillac coupe. Yet this willingness to treat himself to luxury never stopped him from chasing down the last penny to which he felt he might be ent.i.tled. In 1955, while a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, he dictated a letter to his secretary for the management of the Na.s.sau Tavern in Princeton. It was typed on official stationery and dispatched by government postage. Enclosed were unused vouchers for the restaurant's parking lot. Von Neumann requested reimburs.e.m.e.nt, by check or credit. The total amounted to seventy-five cents.

He also had an ident.i.ty problem. He couldn't seem to decide whether he was a Christian or a Jew. His first wife, the daughter of a Budapest physician, was a Gentile and a Roman Catholic. The child of that marriage, Marina, was by prior agreement raised in the Roman Catholic faith. Three days before she was baptized in 1935 at Saint Mary's Cathedral in Trenton, New Jersey, von Neumann had himself baptized at the same place. He never practiced Roman Catholicism in subsequent years, however, and his Jewish friends a.s.sumed he considered himself a secular Jew because he acted like one when he was with them. One of his closest Jewish friends, the highly talented Polish-born mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, recalled in his memoirs how von Neumann liked to tell a joke mocking the "goyim," a derogatory Yiddish term for Gentiles. (Ulam, who also immigrated to the United States during the 1930s, was in 1951 to make the hydrogen bomb feasible by coming up with a new idea for detonating the thermonuclear core. Teller would never subsequently acknowledge the contribution because it detracted from his claim to sole parentage.) Not until death confronted him would von Neumann make up his mind.

Von Neumann displayed the same sort of intensely emotional patriotism Schriever did, the patriotism of the immigrant who is deeply grateful to a land that has been good to him. He had a fierce desire to defend this society that had given him shelter and that embodied values he cherished in the rule of law and the freedom of scholarly inquiry. The traits also made him eager to cooperate with the U.S. military. He found the relations.h.i.+p fulfilling, a measure of his acceptance by American society. Systematic mobilization of scientific talent then got under way at the outset of 1941. Roosevelt recruited Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer and mathematician who was president of the Carnegie Inst.i.tution and one of the country's most eminent scientific figures, to oversee the effort as his science czar. Bush established the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), with himself as chairman. That February 26, he wrote von Neumann notifying him that he was being made a consultant to a section of the committee under Bush's friend James Conant, a chemist who was president of Harvard.

By now von Neumann was eager to give the slip to his scholar's tower at the inst.i.tute. His was not the contemplative genius of Einstein. His mind was quick and restless and this was an opportunity to dedicate his extraordinary talent for mathematics and mathematical physics to a cause that had such intense and personal meaning for him. He quickly developed a fascination with explosions. The subject is called hydrodynamics because of the similarity between the expanding waves of an explosion and fluids in motion. The section of the National Defense Research Committee to which he had been a.s.signed was focused on the subject, using a laboratory at Princeton. Soon his correspondence was filled with such terms as "gas dynamics," "shock collisions," "shock waves in several dimensions," and "oblique shock reflection." He studied explosions through every technique available, including flash photography with high-speed film, and composed mathematical models for the various types, phases, and effects. By the spring of 1942 he had begun to make himself an authority on the subject, evolving a theory on explosions that he laid out in a secret report ent.i.tled "Detonation Waves." Unaware as he sometimes was that lesser mortals had difficulty keeping pace with his mind, his initial report was composed almost entirely of mathematical models and equations. At the request of some of his colleagues, he wrote a second report, "a more 'popular' version," as he called it, which contained enough of the English language so a technically qualified person could comprehend his mathematics.

His reputation for expertise on explosives became sufficiently widespread within the military and scientific communities that the Navy sent him to England for six months to advise on the effects of detonations underwater, apparently for use in antisubmarine warfare. After his return from England in the summer of 1943, Robert Oppenheimer summoned him out to Los Alamos. He wanted von Neumann's advice on the implosion method the laboratory was attempting to develop to set off the Fat Man plutonium bomb that was to be dropped on Nagasaki. The two men had been acquainted since the late 1920s, when they had met while Oppenheimer was studying in Germany. Von Neumann endorsed the implosion concept and provided some ideas for it, but Oppenheimer then made the mistake of a.s.signing to an American physicist from Caltech the task of perfecting it. The job was light-years beyond the man. Even Hans Bethe, the gifted German Jewish physicist who was to win a n.o.bel for his research on the energy production of stars, at the time chief of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, tried and failed to design a workable method.

Early in 1944, "Oppie" summoned von Neumann back to Los Alamos. Other developments on the plutonium bomb had rendered imperative the creation of an implosion method that would succeed. Wrapping the plutonium core of the bomb with conventional explosives and detonating them to crush the plutonium with enough force and simultaneity to drive it to the supercritical stage of a nuclear explosion was a simple idea. The details, however, were extraordinarily complex. Enlisting his friend Stanislaw Ulam to help him with the mathematics, von Neumann set out to solve the riddle. To prevail, von Neumann needed all the knowledge of explosions he had acquired from past experiments.

His first task was to determine precisely how and at what speed the detonation waves from the wrapper of conventional explosives should converge in order to force the plutonium to supercriticality. To find the answers to this part of the problem, von Neumann and Ulam had to perform an exhaustive number of mathematical calculations. Once they had the results and had put together a mathematical model of the correct convergence, von Neumann moved on to his second task-diagramming the detonation wrapper by delineating the arrangement of fast-burning and slow-burning explosives required. He had to diagram to nearly perfect exactness. The calculations showed that an error of more than 5 percent would make the difference between a conventional explosion followed by a nuclear detonation and a conventional bang followed by a nuclear fizzle. The diagram was then turned over to George Kistiakowsky, the ingenious Ukrainian-born chemist, to transform it into reality, which he so brilliantly did.

And as the bombs were dropped on Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki, the fruit of John von Neumann's mind was at work again to enhance their destructiveness. It was he who had discovered in the course of his experiments that large bombs had a greater blast effect if detonated at an optimal height above their targets rather than at ground level. At both Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki, therefore, the bombs had been set for air bursts to maximize the obliterative effect on the cities and their inhabitants.

When Bennie Schriever went to Princeton to seek his help, von Neumann was near the height of his influence and prestige. His role in the making of the atomic bomb and then the Super were widely known within the upper reaches of government and the scientific community. His initiative in advancing the electronic computer had also brought him public recognition and the l.u.s.ter of his reputation for mathematical genius was undimmed. Von Neumann was liked as well as admired by his colleagues. With his wide erudition and a trove of ribald jokes, he was always an interesting and amusing companion. The militancy of his att.i.tude toward the Soviet Union was not regarded as wild and totally irrational at the time, even by those who did not share its intensity. Fear of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe had been brought to a peak by the Korean War, and no matter how mistaken in retrospect that fear may have been, it was all too real at the time. (In 1952, von Neumann had proposed persuading the best mathematicians in West Germany to immigrate to the United States in order to deprive the Soviets of their talents when the place was overrun.) The death of Stalin in March 1953 and the negotiations that were to bring a truce in Korea that July did not lessen the fear because the Soviet Union, rather than the person of Stalin, was now perceived as the menace. At bottom, von Neumann's contemporaries liked and trusted him as much as they did because they sensed the fundamental decency of the man. He was to display it conspicuously in 1954 by testifying in defense of Robert Oppenheimer, who was wrongly accused of disloyalty and deprived of his security clearance because of his opposition to creating the hydrogen bomb when the issue was still open to debate before Truman had made his decision. Von Neumann's defense of Oppenheimer was all the more striking for its moral courage because his political patron happened to be the financier Lewis Strauss, the man who, as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was stage-managing the conspiracy against Oppenheimer. Despite this conflict of opinion, Strauss apparently appreciated von Neumann's sincerity because he subsequently arranged his appointment to the commission.

Schriever recalled years later that, as he had antic.i.p.ated, the technical details of the conversation between von Neumann and Teddy Walkowicz were beyond his ken. Von Neumann was generous with his time-the meeting lasted several hours. Von Neumann explained, with occasional resort to chalk and blackboard, the process by which one progressed from the eighty-two-ton, liquid-fueled Mike device exploded the previous November to the warhead Schriever needed by the end of the decade for a practical ICBM-a dry hydrogen bomb of less than a ton in weight and one megaton in yield. Von Neumann based his findings on radiation flow and other data from the Mike test, which gave him confidence that much lighter dry bombs of lesser yield could be built in the future. He said he expected more data from the Castle test series scheduled for the spring of 1954 at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands of the central Pacific, when the United States was to set off its first dry thermonuclear devices fueled by lithium deuteride.

Bennie left the meeting well satisfied. He now had more than the simple confirmation for which he had originally gone to Princeton. He had scientific validation and, coming from von Neumann, perhaps the nation's foremost authority on nuclear weaponry, that validation was unchallengeable. He also recalled returning to Was.h.i.+ngton with something else that gave him additional satisfaction. Earlier that year, von Neumann had agreed to head the recently created Nuclear Weapons Panel of the Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board. Ironically, it was Schriever who had lobbied Jimmy Doolittle to set up the panel during the March gathering at Maxwell, so that they could obtain better information on what to expect in the size and yield of nuclear weapons to come. (Among his other roles, Doolittle served as a vice chairman of the SAB.) In the course of this meeting at Princeton, von Neumann now told Bennie he would see that the panel included in its reports a hydrogen warhead light enough for a missile to carry. When attempting to drive a project as big as the ICBM through the Air Force bureaucracy, having as much scientific judgment as possible in your favor was a key component in succeeding. Von Neumann's ultra-hawkish views, the widespread esteem in which he was held, and his ability to marshal the talents and support of his fellow scientists were to provide a.s.sistance of the utmost importance in bringing Schriever's vision to fruition.

FINDING AN ALLY.

Schriever understood that as a mere colonel-even though on the list for promotion to his first star in approximately a month and a half-he could not possibly carry a project of this magnitude forward by himself. He needed a leader much higher in the Pentagon aviary, someone with the imagination to see the strategic necessity to build an ICBM force and with the energy, verve, and daring-and the bureaucratic and political clout-to prevail against the entrenched opposition. As it happened, for the past several months he had known just such a man, Trevor Gardner, the new special a.s.sistant to the secretary of the air force for research and development. In the story of how the ICBM came into being, Gardner was to soar briefly across the firmament like a Roman candle. While he burned, he burned brightly.

Gardner was, like Schriever and von Neumann, another immigrant to America. He was a Welshman, born in Cardiff in 1915. His father was a boilermaker who worked for a firm in Wales that built boilers for steam electrical generating plants. While Gardner was still a child, his father obtained a position as manager of one such small plant in South America and took the family off with him. The precise country and town has been lost to family memory. All that is remembered is that the place was somewhere up in the Andes. Whatever the location, the job did not last and by 1928, when Gardner was thirteen, the family had s.h.i.+fted to Southern California. Despite the empty-pocket years of the Great Depression, Gardner managed to cobble together enough odd jobs to take full advantage of California's magnificent educational opportunities. He took his bachelor's degree in engineering with honors from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1937 and then taught freshman mathematics at USC while he gained a master's in business administration two years later.

By 1942, soon after j.a.pan's Sunday morning surprise at Pearl Harbor, he was running the developmental engineering section of the California Inst.i.tute of Technology at nearby Pasadena as a protege of Charles Lauritsen, Caltech's senior and highly respected physicist. Under Lauritsen, he helped to fabricate explosives for George Kistiakowsky to use up at Los Alamos. The work earned him a Presidential Certificate of Merit at the end of the conflict. When Bennie Schriever met him in 1953, Gardner had five years of prosperity behind him running a company he had started in Pasadena, Hycon Manufacturing, which produced electronic components for aircraft and for short-range, air-to-ground rockets for Navy fighter-bombers. Hycon brought him to the attention of Harold Talbott, a wealthy New York businessman, investment banker, Republican Party fund-raiser, and acquaintance of the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike believed that prosperous businessmen and bankers would make sound government executives and so appointed a goodly number to his cabinet and the higher levels of the administration. Talbott happened to have had extensive experience in aircraft manufacture during earlier years. Eisenhower therefore named him secretary of the air force and Talbott in turn summoned Gardner to Was.h.i.+ngton to be his special a.s.sistant for research and development.

Colonel Vincent "Vince" Ford, who was to serve as Gardner's executive a.s.sistant and became his closest friend and confidant, remembered the day in March 1953 when he glanced up from his desk in the outer room of the office suite on the fourth floor of the Pentagon and saw a figure standing in the open doorway. The man was looking at Ford intently through thick rimless gla.s.ses held in place by narrow gold frames. He was large, about six feet tall and a couple hundred pounds, with big shoulders and dark, reddish-brown hair trimmed close. He was attired fastidiously in a navy blue suit with the points of a crisply pressed and folded white handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket, a silk tie of steel gray, and a white s.h.i.+rt. In his left hand he held a gray felt fedora, which was, like the suit and the silk tie and the white s.h.i.+rt, part of the dress code of a successful business or professional man of the era. When he put his right hand forward to shake Ford's, Vince noticed the flicker of one of the gold cuff links that held the French cuffs of the s.h.i.+rt in place. "Hi," the man said in a resonant voice. "My name's Gardner. I've been told this is where I come to work." As Ford shook the proferred hand, he felt it grip his firmly. "My name is Ford," he replied. Gardner gestured toward the open doorway of the large inner office that was to be his. "Let's go in here and talk," Gardner said.

Ford a.s.sumed the conversation was meant as an employment interview so that Gardner could decide whether to hire him. Then a lieutenant colonel, Ford had been executive a.s.sistant to the previous special a.s.sistant for research and development during the Truman administration, William "Bill" Burden, the first to hold the position and like Talbott a New York investment banker. After Burden had left, Ford waited on in the office to see whether Burden's successor would want him to continue. He wasn't certain he would be kept. Technically, Ford was physically unfit for active duty. A flying accident in his youth had left him with a grotesquely twisted left foot and ankle. In order to be able to walk, Ford had to encase the foot in a specially fas.h.i.+oned boot with steel braces on both sides of the ankle. He was able to move reasonably nimbly, without crutches or cane, but that did not change the fact that he was still a cripple. In 1948, Schriever, not a man to let a technicality deprive him of the services of a capable officer, had hired Ford and got him restored to active duty. Ford had then worked for Schriever for two years before moving up to become Burden's executive a.s.sistant. He was an ambitious, highly intelligent, and complicated man, capable of being extremely devious.

As it turned out, Gardner paid no more attention to Ford's disability than Schriever had. He never did tell Ford he was hired. They simply picked up where they were that day. "My name is Trev," Gardner said, after Ford had addressed him as Mr. Gardner, "and that's the way I like it. No formalities. Okay?" Gardner then did something during that first conversation which told Ford that informality was not the only thing that was different about this man. As Ford was speaking, Gardner suddenly reached across to a yellow legal pad that was lying between them on the conference table. He tore off a corner of the top sheet, rolled it into a wad with his thumb and forefinger, and, tossing it into his mouth, began chewing it, all the while continuing to listen and to fix Ford with those intense hazel eyes behind the gla.s.ses. It was a clue that, as Ford was later to concede, Trevor Gardner was "not the sort of man with whom one ordinarily made friends."

Whatever contradictory traits could exist in one man, Gardner had them. He was a good listener, but he was also extremely impatient. The ponderousness of the Air Force bureaucracy provoked particular ire. When he inquired about some matter he considered urgent and was told that the subject would have to be "staffed" and that he could expect a memo in three days, he would bark back over the phone, "I don't want a memo. I want a decision-in an hour!" He could be offhanded and informal and polite, as he was in Vince Ford's first encounter with him, and he could be abrasive and profane. Gardner did not hesitate to tell some important man that what he was doing "isn't worth a good G.o.dd.a.m.n." And he once snapped, "Shut up, Tommy!" at Lieutenant General Thomas Power during a meeting in a room filled with other bestarred men. Power had annoyed Gardner by talking while Gardner wanted to think. Since leading LeMay's first firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, Power had become one of the Air Force's most prominent generals. He did not appreciate the humiliation, especially in the presence of his contemporaries. Like encounters led much of the senior Air Force leaders.h.i.+p to detest Gardner. And Gardner had a serious drinking problem. He kept it under control during the day, although a couple of double-shot Old Forester bourbons with ginger ale, his standard potion at lunch, made him more aggressive back at the office in the afternoon. The night was another matter. Ford grew accustomed to calls from him at all hours, the voice sometimes so slurred that he could barely understand him. The nocturnal bouts affected his personal life by worsening a troubled marriage, but seemed not to interfere with his work be