ABSTRACT
The publication of Walter A. McDougall's Pulitzer-prize-winning The Heavens and the Earth in 1985 launched a new historiographical phase. McDougall was able to show, based on declassified National Security Council (NSC) documents, that there was a hidden agenda behind the Eisenhower Administration's May 1955 decision to support the concept of an IGY satellite. Establishing the precedent of "freedom of space" with a peaceful scientific satellite would smooth the way to overflying the Soviet Union with military reconnaissance satellites. How important "overflight" was in the decision is still somewhat debatable-as evidenced by the contributions of Kenneth Osgood and Dwayne Day to this volume-but McDougall was able to show that it had considerable influence at least from the level of Donald A. Quarles, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development, upwards to the President himself. This has been confirmed by further research by Cargill Hall and by Day.^
As a corollary of this thesis, McDougall speculated that the decision of the Stewart Committee was heavily influenced and perhaps pre determined by this hidden agenda. The choice of the NRL's soundingrocket-based Vanguard assured "the strongest civilian flavor" in the first U.S. satellite, in contrast to the Army's Orbiter, which used the Redstone ballistic missile as the first stage and Army solid rockets for the upper stages. Going further out on a limb, McDougall also speculated that establishing "freedom of space" was so important to the Eisenhower Administration that it consciously decided to risk the USSR launching first, which would be another way to establish the principle of overflight. This possibility was "less desirable, but it was not worth taking every measure to prevent."^
While the latter hypothesis has found few backers because of a dearth of positive evidence, the idea that Vanguard was virtually certain to win the support of the Stewart Committee because it looked "more civilian" for overflight purposes has been influential.'' But newly declassified documents, combined with research into neglected sources from the Stewart Committee, reveal that overflight had little or no influence on the Vanguard decision; moreover, that decision was even closer than previous accounts suggest. Recently
declassified minutes of Quarles' Research and Development Policy Committee show that this key advocate of the hidden agenda of overflight almost overturned the decision on August 16, 1955, by arguing for an interservice program in which the Army launch vehicle would inject NRL's satellite into orbit-a fact revealed here for the first time.
