214 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Wernher von Braun thus fails to satisfy the need for a reliable popular biography. Although another is under way that promises to be less partisan, it is clear that we will have to wait a few more years before we will finally have a thoroughly researched work on this important and fascinating figure. Michael J. Neufeld Dr. Neufeld curates World War II exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum. His history of Peenemiinde and the German Army guided-missile program, The Rocket and the Reich, will be published shortly. The “Sputnik” Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite. By Robert A. Divine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. xviii+ 245; notes, index. $25.00. If Dwight Eisenhower was one of the more competent and more scientifically aware of modern American presidents, how did he make such an awkward and, in the opinion of many witnesses, inadequate job of leading the United States into the opening years of the Space Age? Indeed, was Eisenhower’s early space policy quite so feeble as has often been thought? Supplementing internal White House memoranda and diaries held at the Eisenhower Library with contemporary published sources, Robert Divine builds a largely convincing account of the responses of American policymakers to the launching of the world’s first space satellites (Sputniks 1 and 2) by the Soviet Union in the fall of 1957. Those responses included the transformation of the American gov ernment’s science advice apparatus, some measure of national edu cational reform, the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a partial reorganization of the Department of Defense, and an overhaul of the latter’s missile development pro grams. While previous historians have looked at these as separate topics, no other book so usefully disentangles and exhibits all the main strands of the story. Divine presents an uncomfortable and privately more or less exasperated president who was obliged to yield significant ground to his newfound and vociferous critics, especially on the size of the military budget and on elements of the near-term space program such as lunar probes. But Eisenhower and his advisers are also shown skillfully deploying the resources of the modern presidency to win on almost all the major issues such as limiting the federalization of education, protecting and prioritizing the WS-117L spy satellite program, and refusing to allow such massive procurements of firstgeneration missiles as might have delayed their already-planned successors. Eisenhower’s fiscal conservatism, often blamed both then TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 215 and since for the Soviet victory in the first space race, is shown as holding up well against the pressures of the crisis, alongside his confidence, based partly on secret information from U-2 overflights that he could not share with his critics, that the underlying balance of power was favorable to the United States and would remain so. Regrettably, Divine’s account breaks off sharply at the end of 1958, not even sparing a chapter to reflect on the two remaining years of Eisenhower’s space policy, during which the American public’s cha grin at the successful Soviet lunar probes (after the relatively unim pressive American shots of 1958) amounted to a partial reprise of the Sputniks crisis and contributed to a revival of “missile gap” accusations in the 1960 presidential campaign. There are also involuntary limitations. Divine’s unfamiliarity with the history of space technology, and with the unreliability of many space-history texts, results in an irritating rash of errors, some minor but others less so. The unproven allegation that Sputnik 1 was hard to see because it was painted black is revived; the 6-inch Vanguard “test spheres” are referred to as if they replaced the main Vanguard satellites instead of supplementing them; the widely documented cosmic ray and solar radiation instruments on Sputnik 2 are arbitrarily deleted from the record; and so on. Like many before him, Divine inflates the impact of the Sputniks by rescheduling events on the American side. The decision to put miniature satellites on the Vanguard test vehicles, taken in July 1957, is assigned to the aftermath of Sputnik 1 in October. Pre...