Word: nickersons
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Seldom had the talented minds of Hollywood or Broadway set a stage with more artful care. The title of the production was The Case of Colonel Nickerson, and for weeks the U.S. Army's drumbeaters were out proclaiming the coming attractions. West Pointer John C. Nickerson Jr., 41, World War II combat soldier (Silver Star, Bronze Star) and postwar missile .specialist, was risking 46 years' imprisonment as he faced Army court-martial charges ranging in effect from laxity through perjury to espionage. The plot line was that Nickerson, field coordinator of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Redstone...
Keeping the Receipt. These were tough charges indeed for West Pointer Nickerson, who earned a master's degree at the California Institute of Technology, won a chestful of medals for gallantry in action in World War II. Nickerson, moving upward through Army Ordnance to his big job at Redstone Arsenal, shared many Army officers' gnawing fear that the Army was being shouldered more and more to the sidelines of the U.S. defense setup. Specifically, Nickerson felt that the Army's Jupiter, a 1,500-mile intermediate-range ballistic missile, was more promising than the Air Force...
...last December, according to the court-martial charges, Colonel Nickerson wrote his memorandum against the Wilson order, sent it to William F. Hunt of Reynolds Metals Co. and John A. Baumann of Radio Corp. of America (both employed at Redstone), Editor Bergaust of Missiles and Rockets, and to Washington Columnist Drew Pearson. "We took one look at it," said Bergaust later, "and decided we didn't want the stuff around. So we mailed it back to Nickerson, registered. Fortunately, we kept the receipt...
Searching the Attic. Pearson's legman took Pearson's copy of the Nickerson memorandum to the Pentagon to see if he could stir up an Air Force rebuttal. But the Air Force refused to rise to the bait, and notified the Army; the Army ordered the Pearson copy confiscated. Then Secretary of the Army Wilber Brucker began padding around Capitol Hill in person picking up other copies from Alabama Congressmen. Back at Redstone, Army MPs burst into Nickerson's ante-bellum (1817) home, searched it from attic to basement, refused to let anybody...
...wake of the court-martial order this week, Colonel Nickerson was busily getting into step with heady speculations that the U.S. might have on its hands a new Billy Mitchell. At week's end he put out a statement "to clarify my intentions in taking the action I did," in which he reiterated the Army's claim that it ought to have its own intermediate-range ballistic missile. "Both technically and tactically this weapon is very similar to artillery," he said, "and very dissimilar to aircraft." Nickerson's attorney, Robert K. Bell, former law partner of Alabama...