An excellent approach to technological history which flips the popular mythology. ( )

I read this in tandem with Charles Murray's Apollo, and it suffered mightily in the comparison. Judging from the glowing reviews of this book that are out there (and its Pulitzer Prize for History for 1986) I might the only person whose primary reaction to this very broad, extensive, and well-sourced "Political History of the Space Age" was that it could have used some perspective, but that's life. Before I start complaining, let me describe the work: McDougall's subject here are the changes that the United States and the Soviet Union underwent as a result of the Space Race, with particular emphasis on shifts in the civilian-military relationship and how the decision to be #1 increased the role of the government as a setter of national priorities as opposed to the people/the market/the prior way of doing things. It's an ambitious subject, and for the most part the book is filled with a wealth of fascinating detail about the struggle for space superiority. The sections that cover the Soviet side of the story in particular are a great exposition of the benefits and the dangers that a command economy can pose when it comes to scientific research, the latter of which can't be emphasized enough. Interestingly, McDougall discovers that in some ways the Soviet terrors and purges did not seem to materially hamper their space program as much as might be thought, due to the great emphasis they put on closely-related military projects like nuclear weapons. Even more interestingly, McDougall pokes some big holes in the common perception that the early space race was initially largely between "our Germans" and "their Germans" - the Soviets had plenty of talented engineers and scientists of their own, as demonstrated by their highly effective tanks and rockets. However, since the USSR did not have the equivalent of NASA, a civilian agency, their space program was even more influenced by their military than was the American program, and hence had even greater problems articulating peaceful goals and interacting with the world at large. I was also highly engaged by the way that the US used "space dividend" technological advances as diplomatic tools to head off the Soviets through trade deals with other countries, as well as the discussions about international cooperation and demilitarization of space, and also how the space race began to spread to other nations like France. However, I can't rate the book very highly overall, and my main issues can be summarized thusly: it's biased, it's sensationalist, and it doesn't settle any of the questions it raises because McDougall doesn't really understand them. Let's take those one at a time. First off, let me say that whatever your position on the timeless philosophical question of "can history ever truly be objective?", I think we would all agree that there's a difference between the kind of inevitable forced subjectivity that comes from having only limited space to write, in other words bias due to the limits of space and time, and the kind of subjectivity that comes from trying to force facts into a narrative. To a certain extent this second kind of bias is just as inevitable as the first (after all, if you just wrote a collection of facts unordered by any kind of higher logic, that's basically the opposite of a history), but in choosing the precise narrative - what to emphasize, what kind of higher principle animates the past events, what to make of changes and discontinuities - you've always got to make sure you're not artificially tying down some loose ends that are actually part of a bigger tapestry. McDougall has issues with this. It's always a bad idea to read history through the lens of your own political leanings, but when you encounter histories this soaked in ideology you almost can't help mentally recoiling. Plainly put, McDougall has a bad case of Eisenhower worship, and this ended up unraveling most of the appeal of the book for me. Now, if you are an Eisenhower fan, then you'll be silently cheering as you read the twentieth time he gets portrayed as a sage visionary and misunderstood guardian of America's most cherished and time-honored values. If, like me, you regard him as very prescient when it came to things like the dangers of the military-industrial complex but not exactly out in front when it came to solutions to problems of poverty, racism, or other the complex social issues that came to the forefront during these times, then you see McDougall's constant belittling of people who had different ideas than Eisenhower as what it is: bias. It's fine to be conservative, and it's fine to write a history from a conservative perspective, but it doesn't help anyone to mislead your readers by artificially stacking the deck in favor of your heroes. McDougall does this in a few different ways, most irritatingly by giving the impression that different positions held by different people at different times were really unified factions, thus allowing wise statesman Eisenhower to calmly steer the country past these chattering herds of loons. Even worse, this is frequently done in that dismayingly dense, convoluted academic style of quoting critics citing summaries of positions being disparaged by yet other people, layered over with links of strawmen. One example is the discussion of the changing role of the federal government in education in response to Sputnik. McDougall is trying to show that people were "cashing in on the Cold War alarm to sell the notion that government money was a panacea for all variety of deficiency" as a prelude to validate his later support of Eisenhower's attachment to the existing system of primarily state and local funding against those meddling do-gooder liberals who will arrive during the Great Society period a few years later. He starts by claiming that John Dewey's Progressive Education was the "reigning philosophy" of American schools but that it "came under attack". In lieu of actually describing it, he simply quotes the later attacks of James Killian that Dewey's system supposedly advocated "education as a sovereign remedy for all our social problems" as well as the contention of the unnamed author of And Madly Teach, whatever that was, that Dewey proposed "the same amount and kind of education for all individuals". He then tacks on still more completely unrelated criticisms of public education in general from more unnamed "social progressives" worried about racial discrimination and then "Cold War pragmatists" that want "excellence to be set apart and cultivated". McDougall solemnly concludes after this almost indecipherable mishmash that these people had "Opposite emphases, but the same solution: more federal direction and subsidy". Now, it should be obvious that those people had nothing to do with each other, so he can't legitimately conclude that any of those people would have advocated anywhere the same solutions to their various concerns as the others. In addition, I've never heard of anyone claiming that money from the feds would solve all problems ever in the history of the world. That this kind of analysis is pretty much the only game in town for nearly 500 pages means that the work reads largely like a debate between McDougall and his strawmen, and not really a debate between the views of any real people at all. This impression is enhanced by his near-inability to simply tell you what someone said without also telling you what you should think about it. An example is when he slams the New York Times as having "little interest in accurate reportage" for a 1959 headline of "US Space Program Far Behind Soviets", mere pages after reproducing a table from National Security Council memo NSC-5814/1 saying exactly the same thing! Maybe looking back you can confidently sneer at the Times, but back then it wasn't so obvious what was going on with the USSR at all, and like in countless other cases in the book, they get lots of snide commentary and 20/20 hindsight. I get that this is a political history, meaning that it has to concentrate on what people were saying at the time (which frequently means cataloging all sorts of errors and lies), but this determined effort to cheerlead for Eisenhower and his idea of America is the framework for the whole book, and is transparently not good history. This is why I thought it could have used more perspective: McDougall continually champions the old, pre-New Deal/Great Society of thinking, and makes much of our transition or saltation into "technocracy" (a vague term that isn't ever clearly defined, but seems to mean a sort of managed capitalism oriented towards goals managed by the central government), but while the space race might be one of the clearest modern examples of the fight between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian visions of America, he never really makes clear that this conflict is as old as, well, Jefferson and Hamilton. Indeed, pretty much every society in world history has had conflicts about how much power to allocate to their central government, or which projects they'd like it to undertake. Is it really so hubristic or unprecedented to ask "If we can put a man on the moon...?", especially when it had such dramatic success? McDougall's inability to come to really come to terms with this broader perspective on why people actually advocate for more or less government involvement in big social prospects lead him finally into the morass of the last two chapters, which I frankly confess I found to be almost meaningless swamps of jargon and religious philosophizing. How can a writer with his ability and poetic sensibility get so totally lost? Maybe it's just me, and I've completely missed the insights McDougall uncovered, but by the end of the book I'd come to the conclusion that he was just playing with words in order to comfort himself about his own sentimental attachment to the pre-Apollo era and inability to come to terms with progress. Maybe that's just the definition of a conservative. All I know is that while there's plenty of good stuff in the book, it comes with a lot of baggage. ( )

By no means light reading, this book is a superb, careful look at a complex time. The devil is in the details. ( )

2993 ...The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, by Walter A. McDougall (read 9 Jul 1997) (Pulitzer History prize in 1986) This is a heavy book, and I was only occasionally interested in it. It covers the period 1945 to 1985, but mainly concentrates on Sputnik in Oct 1957 and space events thereafter. Since the book is old and since the Cold War ended after it was written, it is not real topical. I'm glad I am done reading it. I confess I barely skimmed the voluminous footnotes--and feel guilty claiming I read this book when my reading of the footnotes was so cursory. ( )