The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

These three major legislative moves—the NDEA, NASA, and Defense Reorganization Act—marked an extraordinary period of activity for the president and Congress, and they all responded directly to the challenge of Sputnik. Combined with his beefed-up defense budget, these actions revealed a shift away from the small-government Republicanism that Eisenhower cherished. The missile race, and for that matter the cold war, required robust military-industrial-scientific collaboration on a nationwide scale, the sort of thing that only the federal government could direct. As the leading historian of the Space Age has said, Eisenhower had to discard “the old verities about limited government, local initiative, balanced budgets, and individualism. The United States had to respond in kind to Soviet technocracy.”