Why are Russians so good at vexing American minds? Vladimir Putin's bewitchment of President Trump continues to frustrate intelligence officials and at times hard-liners in his own administration, while pro- and anti-Russia journalists trade insults as enthusiastically as they did during the 1950s Rosenberg spy trial.
Beneath this lurks the uneasy feeling that our longtime superpower adversary remains our secret twin, matching us in audacity and ambition, just as it did all those years ago. “Listen now,” an NBC radio announcer declared in October 1957, “for the sound which forever more separates the old from the new.” The sound was the beep-beep of the radio signal emitted by Sputnik, the first satellite sent into space, as it streaked on its elliptical path at a surreal velocity of 18,000 miles per hour. The Russians' early conquest of space came as a shock — “perhaps the darkest hour of the Cold War,” one historian has written — but it was also an exciting communal moment: Americans stumbled out of bed to watch “the sunlit speck sweep across the predawn sky,” Time reported, “as steady in its orbit as the made-by-nature moon.”
Read Full Article »