There are few responses to a request more deflating than, “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid that’s classified.” It’s a particularly depressing response when the information is so old that there’s nobody likely to leak it to me. There would be something amusing about drawing on a leak of classified information to write a story about a leak of classified information. But unfortunately most, if not all, of the potential leakers are dead.
It took a number of exchanges with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to pin it down, but I’ve finally located what’s among the most important documents for my story. That’s the record of the court martial of Col. John Nickerson. The Army prosecuted Nickerson for leaking classified details of its Jupiter rocket program to noted journalist Drew Pearson, among others, in an effort to dissuade the Pentagon from shifting control of the rocket program to the Air Force. Finding the record was a Byzantine process. An archivist in Washington bounced me to archivists in Maryland. They redirected me to an archivist in St. Louis. She, in turn, completed the circle and returned me to a different archivist in Washington. No matter. Now I know where the record resides.
“However,” as the St. Louis archivist wrote to me, it turns out “the record of John C. Nickerson is a classified record.” I’m sorry, but I’m afraid that’s classified.
Or at least in part. The good news is that, from what I can tell, only the closed-door sessions of the court martial are classified. Based on the hundreds of newspaper accounts of the court martial I’ve reviewed, it looks like most of the closed-door sessions dealt with technical details of the Army and Air Force rocket programs. For example, the public was ordered out of the court martial when the testimony of Ernst Stuhlinger, a German rocket scientist working for the Army who testified on Nickerson’s behalf, turned to the superiority of the Army’s Jupiter rocket over the Air Force’s Thor rocket. While interesting, those details aren’t crucial to my story. I can live without them. Nevertheless, as long as it won’t slow down my access to the unclassified portions of the records, I may request declassification review under the Freedom of Information Act. It can’t hurt to have more data on the court martial, and I can’t imagine whatever was said in those closed-door sessions still ought to be classified. We’ll see whether NARA agrees.
In the meantime, I’m setting up a time—hopefully the end of this week—to go down to the Washington National Records Center. That’s the NARA facility authorized to hold classified records. The court martial only lasted a few days before Nickerson worked out the military equivalent of a plea deal. All the same, I’m sure the record will be substantial, so I may have to spend all day this coming Friday and Monday there.
If I have any extra time, I plan to visit the Library of Congress one of those two days to go through Wernher von Braun’s papers. They include a substantial volume of correspondence. I know for a fact they contain letters to and from Gen. John Medaris—von Braun and Nickerson’s superior—and I’m confident they also contain letters to and from Nickerson. Some of the papers of Drew Pearson—the journalist to whom Nickerson leaked classified information—are also at the Library of Congress.
My archive hunting otherwise has proven illuminating but less promising. The majority of Drew Pearson’s papers are housed in the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. Part of what’s interesting about Nickerson’s leak is what it says about the evolution of press-government relationship with respect to leaks. Pearson submitted the papers Nickerson leaked to him to the Pentagon, which led Defense Department investigators to quickly identify the source of the leak. Today, that’s an unthinkable—not to mention unethical—move on the part of journalist. To get at this issue, I feel I need to dig into Pearson’s correspondences and other papers from around the time of the leak.
The papers of another important figure in this story, the aforementioned Gen. Medaris, are housed at the Florida Institute of Technology, in Melbourne, Florida. Finally, I fear Stuhlinger’s papers are still in private hands, in Huntsville, Alabama. While it’s helpful to know where these documents are located, I’m unlikely to get the chance to dig into any of them until the summer, when I may be in for a research tour of the American South.