| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

Sputnik Mania. Dir. by David Hoffman. Prod. by Eric Reid, David Hoffman, and John Vincent Barrett. History Films and Balcony Releasing, 2008. 87 mins. (http://www.sputnikmania.com)
One of the most rewarding aspects of the fine documentary Sputnik Mania is that it helps answer why, in the Academy Award–winning documentary Hearts and Minds (1974), President Lyndon B. Johnson's militant anti-communist advisor Walt Rostow believed that the United States committed itself to the Vietnam War in response to the Sputnik space satellite. Initially, I dismissed Rostow's comment as bizarre in the extreme. Yet after viewing Sputnik Mania I now see how Rostow may have been correct. David Hoffman and his staff have gathered remarkable material from Soviet and American archives, contemporary newscasts and interviews with insiders such as Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the Soviet premier, to explore the impact that the Soviet launching of Sputnik had on the United States and the rest of world in 1957.	1
The film opens with a big bang: the launching into space of a communications satellite on October 4, 1957. In a voice-over we hear, through the words of a Russian scientist's memoir, that like Christopher Columbus we have entered a new world. Once word of the Russian achievement spread, nbc newscasters told their viewers that this is the "most important story of the century," while observers stood in "awe" of a Russian rocket moving around the globe at 18,000 mph.	. . .

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