Word: wilber
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Fume & Smoke. At 9 o'clock one night last week the Explorer was ready. Lox vapors (liquid oxygen) waved in the floodlights' glow. In Central Control, scientific and technical missilemen tended their network of instruments. In the Pentagon at that moment, Army Secretary Wilber Brucker and the Jupiter's top Scientist Wernher von Braun joined a score of other military and civilian officials in the Army's telecommunications room, seated themselves at a table before two huge screens, one enlarging teletype messages from the Cape, the other carrying Pentagon messages back to the site. Elaborately...
...three, four minutes passed. In the Pentagon, Wilber Brucker, sometime governor of Michigan, cracked lamely: "This is like waiting for precinct returns .to come in." Von Braun and Pickering sat down and scribbled some figures. At zero plus in minutes, three California stations reported the pickup. Pickering said: "I want four stations. These are all Army stations, and they may be over enthusiastic." The fourth followed: a Navy tracking station checked in with the confirming news. Announced Pickering: "It's in orbit." Brucker beamed; Von Braun smiled. The Explorer was late, he concluded, because it had shot farther...
Control of Time. Before his statement had burst into print Texan Johnson was on his way again. He seemed everywhere at once: describing a new electric vibrator to Vice President Richard Nixon, eating breakfast with Defense Secretary Neil McElroy and again with Army Secretary Wilber Brucker, holding seven-hour committee sessions, making television films for a Texas network, striding down a corridor tossing off orders to two pretty secretaries who took notes as they scurried after him, slipping into a dinner jacket for a banquet, speaking to the Women's National Press Club and to 1,200 steelworkers...
...Lyndon Johnson's swift pencil that complicated the Gavin mess, since Gavin's fundamental reason for quitting-his failure to arouse sympathy for the Army's cause-was stuffed in at the end of the press statement. To make the mess messier, Army Secretary Wilber Brucker next day called a press conference to explain how it all started. Before Christmas, when Gavin sent word around that he planned to retire, Brucker called him into his office. "I urged General Gavin to be patient," explained Brucker in the tones of a genial office manager referring to his ambitious...
Brilliance & Bluntness. The Army insisted that Gavin's decision to retire was wholly his own. Said Army Secretary Wilber Brucker, who spent 30 minutes trying to dissuade him: "We cannot afford to lose one of our most brilliant officers, one of the most brilliant we ever had." Gavin, who will be eligible for retirement in March, explained with his customary bluntness: "I am getting out, frankly, because I feel I can do more for our country's defense effort out of uniform than in. I have spent 6½ years out of the past nine in the Pentagon...