President Dwight Eisenhower was the most fiscally conservative president of the past ninety years, yet he also expanded the scope and power of the state to fight and win the Cold War. Among the most successful of Eisenhower’s new institutions was what is now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
No Republican president since has come close to Eisenhower’s record of balancing the budget three times in eight years, cutting the federal workforce by more than 10 percent, slimming federal expenditures from 21 percent of GNP to 15 percent in his last budget, and reducing the ratio of national debt to GNP. At the same time, his global strategy of containing communism entailed major investments in education and research, huge infrastructural projects such as the national highway program, and the creation of new government agencies, departments, and other bodies.
Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (or ARPA, as it was then known) in 1958 as part of the national response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, the previous year. The Soviets’ surprise breakthrough suggested both that America’s Cold War nemesis was more technologically advanced than the United States, at least in the Space Race, and that the Soviets soon would be “dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway passes,” as Democratic Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson put it.
The new agency was created so that the United States would not be caught off guard again in its technological-military competition with the Soviets, and as a means of overcoming the bureaucratic rivalries between the military services that had delayed the development of the American space program. But the central mission of the agency was articulated by Eisenhower’s science advisor James Killian, writing in 1956 that “If there are to be yet unimagined weapons affecting the balance of military power tomorrow, we want to have the men and the means to imagine them first.”
The purview of the new agency changed significantly in its early years, particularly after it transferred most of its responsibilities for the civilian space program to the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which Eisenhower and Congress created later in 1958. But it retained Killian’s charge to imagine the future first, and in so doing became what the Economist magazine called “the agency that shaped the modern world.”