Summary

In this long-awaited history, Neil Sheehan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, describes the US-Soviet arms race through the story of the colorful and visionary American Air Force officer, Bernard Schriever.

This never-before-told story details Schriever’s quest to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, and describes American efforts to develop the unstoppable nuclear-weapon delivery system, the intercontinental ballistic missile, the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than to be fired in anger.

In this sweeping narrative, Sheehan brings to life a huge cast of some of the most intriguing characters of the cold war, including the brilliant physicist John Von Neumann, and the hawkish Air Force general, Curtis LeMay. Melding biography, history, world affairs, and science, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War transports the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage.

Author Biography

Neil Sheehan is the author of A Bright Shining Lie, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1989. He spent three years in Vietnam as a war correspondent for United Press International and The New York Times and won numerous awards for his reporting. In 1971, he obtained the Pentagon Papers, which brought the Times the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for meritorious public service. Sheehan lives in Washington, D.C. He is married to the writer Susan Sheehan.

From the Hardcover edition.

Foreword	p. IX
Prologue: A Rite of Succession	p. xv
Becoming an American	p. 1
Ellis Island and a Tragedy in Texas	p. 3
A Benefactor and the House on the Twelfth Green	p. 6
The Virtues of Golf	p. 9
White Silk Scarves and Open Cockpits	p. 13
Entering the Brotherhood	p. 16
A Fiasco and Reform	p. 19
Staying the Course	p. 24
A Fork in the Road	p. 28
"Let's Dive-Bomb the Bastards"	p. 31
The Test of War	p. 40
Inheriting a Different World	p. 49
Atomic Diplomacy	p. 51
Spies Inside the Barbed Wire	p. 54
"The Balance has Been Destroyed"	p. 66
The State that was Stalin	p. 69
A Confrontation and a Misreading	p. 77
Containing the Menace	p. 87
Neither Rain, Nor Snow, Nor Sleet, Nor Fog	p. 94
Stalin Gets His Bomb	p. 99
The Consequences of Delusion	p. 104
Good Intentions Gone Awry	p. 108
The Perils of an Apprenticeship	p. 115
Hap Arnold's Legacy	p. 117
Getting Organized	p. 124
Bomber Leader	p. 130
Into the Lion's Den	p. 142
Moscow Opts for Rockets	p. 152
A Nuclear Reactor in the Sky	p. 156
Low-Level Tactics and the Flying Boom	p. 160
The Last Tangle and an Ambush	p. 166
Starting a Race	p. 175
Seeking Scientific Validation	p. 177
When Hungary Was Mars	p. 181
A Fascination with Explosions	p. 188
Finding an Ally	p. 194
Marshaling the Expertise	p. 200
The Tea Pot Committee	p. 207
Getting Started	p. 220
"Okay, Bennie, It's a Deal"	p. 225
Winning a President	p. 229
A Schoolhouse and a Radical New Approach	p. 231
The Guru of Rockets	p. 235
A Problem with Tommy Power	p. 249
How Greed Corrupts	p. 253
An Assault from an Unexpected Quarter	p. 261
A Sense of Adventure	p. 265
No Time for Family	p. 267
Getting to Ike	p. 268
A Difficult Dialogue at Geneva	p. 279
Dazzling the Monarch	p. 287
No More Nitpicking	p. 300
A Rader in Turkey	p. 302
Building the Unstoppable	p. 313
A Competitor	p. 315
The Team of Mettler and Thiel	p. 318
John Bruce Medaris and Wernher von Braun	p. 324
The Cape of the Canebrake vs. "Mosse" Mathison	p. 331
A Few Grains of Sand	p. 338
Medaris Goes for the ICBM	p. 343
The Reluctant Rescuer	p. 350
Thor vs. Jupiter	p. 358
Sputnik	p. 361
Thor Readies for England	p. 367
Jamie Wallace's Thor Show	p. 371
The Biggest Airlift Since Berlin	p. 377
"Roy...I Want you to Get Me Camp Cooke"	p. 380
A Tie	p. 387
Black Saturday	p. 390
The Trials of Atlas and a Christmas Surprise	p. 396
Whose Missile Gap?	p. 403
A Victory Despite the Bugs	p. 406
Minuteman: Ed Hall's Triumph	p. 409
"You Couldn't Keep him in that Job"	p. 416
A Spy in Orbit and a Game of Nuclear Dice	p. 421
A Would-Be Spy in the Sky Goes Awry	p. 423
Mathison Snatches the Prize	p. 430
Discoverer Goes "Black" into Corona	p. 434
A Harebrained Scheme	p. 437
Palm Tree Disguises	p. 440
Keeping the Military on the Leash	p. 442
"Use 'Em or Lose 'Em"	p. 445
LeMay and Tommy Power as the Wild Cards	p. 447
Avoiding Götterdämmerung	p. 449
Buying Time for the Empire to Implode	p. 452
Epilogue The Schriever Luck	p. 459
Johnny von Neumann Finds Faith but not Peace	p. 461
"The Slowest Old Trev has Ever Gone in a Cadillac"	p. 464
Losing it all and Forgiving a Brother	p. 467
"Only in America"	p. 470
A Reunion with Hap	p. 475
Acknowledgments	p. 481
Interviews	p. 485
Source Notes	p. 489
Bibliography	p. 501
Index	p. 511
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

1. ELLIS ISLAND AND A TRAGEDY IN TEXAS

The men in the Schriever family were venturesome types who immigrated to America to better themselves or took to the sea. Schriever's paternal grandfather, Bernhard, after whom he was named, had jumped ship as a young German sailor in the port of Norfolk, Virginia, in 1860 and volunteered for the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Afterward, he had made his way down to New Orleans and gone to work on the railroads, building watering towers for the steam locomotives of the time, before returning to Germany in 1870 to pursue the trade of a rigger for sailing ships.

Schriever's mother, Elizabeth Milch, a pleasing dark brunette with bright blue eyes and a strong will, had left Germany as a teenager to work in the household of a German family who owned a pharmacy in lower Manhattan. She had initially dated Schriever's paternal uncle, George Schriever, who had immigrated to Union City, New Jersey, and become a prosperous baker and delicatessen owner there. But George was a bon vivant determined to remain a bachelor ("He played the field," his nephew recalled) and so he introduced Elizabeth to his brother, Adolph, a tall stalk of a man with blond hair and a neat mustache who was an engineering officer on the passenger liners of the North German Lloyd Company. They were married at a Lutheran church in Hoboken in 1908, when she was twenty-two. Adolph took her back to Germany. Her first son, Bernhard Adolph, was born in the north German city of Bremen on September 14, 1910, and her second boy, Gerhard, followed two years later just before Christmas. The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, while Adolph's ship, the George Washington, was in New York Harbor, suddenly separated the family, now living in his home port of nearby Bremerhaven. (The German line had apparently built the ship in 1909 for service to the United States and originally named it in honor of America's first president.) Adolph was stranded in New York, Britain's Royal Navy standing by to seize the vessel the moment the liner ventured out.

By the end of 1916, Elizabeth had had enough of waiting for the war to end and her husband to come home. Holland was neutral during the First World War. She booked passage to New York for herself and her two boys out of Rotterdam. They left in January 1917 on the Dutch liner Noordam. The English Channel was closed to neutral shipping because of the war and they had to sail north around Scotland. It took them more than two weeks. The North Atlantic was rough sailing in this winter season. Looking at the heaving waves, Schriever remembered thinking that the ocean must be a series of mountains. His mother had a scare when a British gunboat hailed the ship and an inspection party came aboard. She was afraid they would be seized as German nationals and taken off, but fortunately Gerhard had the mumps, a dangerous disease for an adult. When the Dutch crew warned the British sailors, the boarding party avoided the Schrievers' cabin. The next fright came in the intimidating immensity of the Great Hall at Ellis Island. It was a cavernous structure, 189 feet long and 102 feet wide with a 60-foot-high vaulted ceiling. Thousands of immigrants off the ships lined up within it each day to be processed, either accepted as physically fit and freed to go ashore or rejected and sent back to wherever they had come from with now vanished hope. Elizabeth spoke English well, with merely a slight accent, but her boys had only German. Anti-German feeling was reaching war pitch in much of the United States. She feared that if the immigration officials overheard a word of German, she and the boys might be turned away. "Be quiet," Schriever remembered her whispering, taking them by the hand. "Don't say anything." They were cleared and released as landed immigrants on February 1, 1917. Elizabeth Schriever had given her sons an

Excerpted from A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan
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