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By Root 469 0

Eisenhower out of touch, he was savvy enough to keep his grievances private while he still wore the uniform of a major general. One of his top aides, however, felt no such compunction to suffer in silence. Colonel John C. Nickerson had worked on the Jupiter program since its inception. More than anyone else, he had shepherded it through the labyrinth of the military bureaucracy, had nurtured its various stages of technical evolution, and had rallied behind its creators whenever morale flagged. The Jupiter was his project, and he could not bear to see it aborted. “The aircraft industry, and particularly the Douglas Aircraft Co. [which built B-47 long-range bombers under license from Boeing], openly opposes the development of any missile by a government agency,” Nickerson wrote in a lengthy report, which he sent to the aerospace writer Erik Bergaust and the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson. “It is suspected that the Wilson memorandum has been heavily influenced by lobbying by this company, and by the Bell Telephone Co.” Bell Laboratories, which had been headed by Donald Quarles for nearly twenty-four years before he became assistant secretary of defense, provided the radio guidance system for the Thor. “Discontinuance of Jupiter,” Nickerson went on, “favors commercially the AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors,” which was also one of Thor’s prime contractors.

This was a direct attack on Secretary Wilson, who had started his GM career at AC Spark Plug and had been the division’s president. The accusation implied impropriety at the highest levels of government, and reaction in Washington was swift. Nickerson was arrested, charged with revealing state secrets, court-martialed, and sent to the Panama Canal Zone.

Medaris scrambled desperately to distance himself from the Nickerson debacle, going so far as to testify against him at his trial. But it was too late. The damage had already been done. ABMA had made powerful enemies in Washington, and its future, and that of its star expatriate scientists, looked bleak.

• • •

Not for the first time, Wernher von Braun must have wondered if coming to America had been a mistake. After all, he had chosen the United States, among all the countries who had vied for his services, because he had thought that only America had the resources and foresight to pursue rocket technology. Even before the war had ended, von Braun had gathered his key engineers to discuss which Allied nation offered the best hope for continuing their careers. “It was not a big decision,” recalled the physicist Ernst Stuhlinger, one of those present during the defection discussions. “It was very straightforward and immediate. We knew we would not have an enviable fate if the Russians would have captured us.” The French had been discounted as strutting losers. The British had fought bravely, but the United Kingdom was small and no longer the power it had once been. West Germany would have strict limits placed on its military programs. That left only the United States.

But the America that greeted von Braun when he first stepped off a military cargo plane in Wilmington, Delaware, in September 1945 was not the place he had expected. At the time, his mere presence on U.S. soil was deemed sufficiently sensitive that it was kept secret for over a year. He cleared no customs and passed through no formal passport controls. The paper trail documenting his entry was sealed in an army vault, along with his incriminating war files; his Nazi Party ties, his depositions denying his involvement in slave labor, and his three SS promotions remained classified until 1984, seven years after his death. For Colonel Ludy Toftoy and von Braun’s army minders, his past, as well as the even more frightening war record of some of the other scientists, wasn’t an issue. “Screen them for being Nazis?” a senior intelligence officer told the historian Dennis Piszkiewicz, laughing. “What the hell for? Look, [even] if they were Hitler’s brothers, it’s beside the point. Their knowledge is valuable for military and possibly national reasons.” The