Out of the Pentagon last week rolled a thunderous indictment of an obscure but important Army officer, Colonel John C. Nickerson Jr., 41, field coordinator for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at top-secret Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Ala. Colonel Nickerson was ordered to face a Third Army court-martial on 18 tough specifications charging that he 1) included secret information on the U.S. missile program in documents sent to unauthorized civilian businessmen and newsmen (as well as—although the charges did not say it—to several Alabama Congressmen), 2) had violated national-security laws by sending three secret documents to Managing Editor Erik Bergaust of Missiles and Rockets magazine, and 3) had lied under oath in denying that he had distributed secret material.
The key Nickerson document was a brief called "Considerations on the Wilson Memorandum," in which he took issue with Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson's ruling last fall (TIME, Dec. 10) that the Air Force and not the Army was to use land-based missiles with ranges beyond 200 miles.
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's I.R.B.M. Thor, and ought to be adopted. In other words, he was bent on getting the Army slap-bang into the Air Force's business of long-range strategic attack.
One day 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 in or out for 24 hours, and the Nickerson case was on.