Out of the blue

It jolted America out of its complacency and showed us our enemies were smarter than we thought. The author of "Sputnik" compares the days of that shocking satellite to our own.

By King Kaufman

Dec. 13, 2001 | "The vast majority of people living today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, were born after Sputnik was launched and may be unaware of the degree to which it helped shape life as we know it," Paul Dickson writes in the introduction to "Sputnik: The Shock of the Century," his fascinating new history of the 1957 Soviet satellite, the first human-made object in orbit.

The Soviets' success in the new "space race" stunned Americans like nothing since Pearl Harbor, 16 years before, and the event was often compared to Japan's devastating sneak attack, at the time and in subsequent histories. Dire predictions abounded, such as the one from Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson that soon the Soviets would be "dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses."

Reading "Sputnik" in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, it's surprising and striking to note the parallels between the two events. Dickson, the author of more than 40 books, many of them growing out of a fascination with space sparked by Sputnik, which went beeping overhead during his freshman year of college, spoke to Salon from his home in Garrett Park, Md.

The thing that kept hitting me as I was reading "Sputnik" was the similarity between the reaction to Sputnik and the reaction to Sept. 11, at least by a lot of Americans. Am I imagining things or are there real parallels there?

You're not the first person to ask this question. Yeah, as soon as you can divorce yourself from the fact that they were totally different things. Sputnik was really a scientific achievement by the Soviet Union, with some propaganda overtones, whereas this other thing was a massive crime. But if you can get outside the box on those two things, a vastly different stimulus, then some things become sort of interesting, the parallels. Our reaction -- the way we thought and the way we think, certain assumptions up to that point -- it's really interesting. As long as you make that little caveat. Not little. A big caveat.

I think I was reasonably aware of Sputnik and the reaction to it when I started the book, but what struck me as I read were some of the contextual similarities that I didn't know about. There was a looming recession, the stock market was falling. It's almost as if we were, in a lot of ways, in the same place before Sept. 11.

And then things got worse. The wheels really came off the cart in '57. Seventy thousand people died of flu that year. And of course [the school integration battle] was going on in Little Rock, which Ike, Eisenhower, was calling an insurrection. That's going on, and Sputnik, in the Third World especially, is contrasted to our people with distorted faces screaming at children going to school, and spitting on them and cursing at them. That was the context of seeing the Russians put up a satellite.

And I think the other thing to me, the thing that really replays interestingly, is that if you follow the end of '57, it starts out with the Mad Bomber, then Ed Gein, really the first sort of massive, horrible "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" kind of serial killer, comes out of that year. The year ends with the Apalachin crime thing in New York state, which is almost like they're Kiwanis or something, meeting in a resort, these gangsters. [A meeting of about 60 top syndicate bosses at the rural home of Joseph Barbara in Apalachin, N.Y., was broken up by police in November 1957, with many arrests. The national publicity that followed forced the FBI to finally admit that the mafia did, in fact, exist.]

And then of course what happens in America, the Monday after Sputnik: There's the fire in the nuclear power plant and then there's the Russians exploding an H-bomb basically using a missile, and we're really fearful of that, and it gets worse, everything that happens.

Next page: Soviets offer tech aid to "backward" U.S.