Space Race—or Rocket Race?

The 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik started the space race. In Red Moon Rising (Reviews, June 18), Matthew Brzezinski (nephew of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski) launches readers back to that moment in time.

How is the space race related to the Cold War, and how was it sold to the American people?

People think the space race was about man’s need to explore. It was really a rocket race [about weapons delivery]. Politicians lied to the American people and made things out to be far greater threats than they were, so that in the name of securing the nation we threw away millions of dollars on bombers that would be outdated almost immediately.

Did your family history shape your thinking about this book?

My grandfather had been a Polish diplomat posted in Canada [in 1939], and then had no way to return home without being shipped off to Siberia. As you can imagine, there was rarely anything good said about the Russians [in the family]. So when I first approached the subject, it was with the idea that the Soviets were clearly the bad guys and we were the good guys fighting the good fight. But when I started doing the research, I saw that in a lot of ways, we were more the aggressors. I also found it fairly shocking how detached Eisenhower was, particularly after his heart attack and in the second term. Whenever something happened and I would ask, “Where’s Ike?” he was always playing golf. My editor actually made me take out some of the references to golf, because it seemed like I was bashing him too much.

What it’s like to write about Wernher von Braun, who led the Nazi rocket program and then headed America’s rocket research?

I expressly tried to curb my natural distaste for him. I found that he was amoral—he didn’t care who he was working for or who suffered because of it. He very much taints our entire record.

Is there any contemporary resonance in the story of the space race?

Times of crisis breed opportunity for certain politicians and interest groups. Then, it was the military-industrial complex and a very crafty and skilled politician named Lyndon Baines Johnson, who managed to scare the American public into spending on these weapons systems, many of which were redundant. Democrats saw Sputnik as a chance to run the Republicans out of office. Since 9/11, there have certainly been interest groups in Washington who have seen opportunities to get a lot of goodies that they would not otherwise get. Within the Bush administration, there have been more than a few LBJs who have exploited 9/11 to whip up fear.