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They're some of our favorites. Our next episode of our American Stories comes to us from John Claussen in the Seattle area. Here's John to introduce himself and then share his story.
Hello audience, this is John Claussen, the author of Missile Man, and it's the story about my father as a Cold War engineer who lived a secret life for over 40 years. And once he was diagnosed with cancer, and he was told he had 18 months to live, I got a phone call from him that he wanted to come out to New Jersey, where it helped me select a home and build a fence. I picked him up in Philadelphia Airport, and if you know 95, it's south of Philadelphia, and as usual, he was casually dressed, and my mom is an avid knitter, and I refer to it in the book as a Mr. Rogers knitted sweater, and with a piece of luggage, we drove up 95 to go back up to New Jersey.
And then I got a phone call from him that he wanted to come out to New Jersey. Just north of the airport, there's an exit called Broad Street, and my father said, John, 10 men sat down in the basement of a YMCA and decided how nuclear weaponry was going to be deployed and missiles, and he started naming off names, and one was Enrique Fermi, which I recognized immediately, but I didn't recognize the other was looking quite pensive, kind of looking down the street, and he gets to the ninth person, and he could not remember his name, and he goes, and he was a guy from Georgia, and I said to my dad, if you can't remember number nine, you're sure is not going to remember number 10, and to my amazement, he goes, it's your father. It took me by such surprise that I almost went off the road, hitting the white knobs on the highway, and I kept driving, and I said, dad, what would you be doing at a meeting like that? He goes, Johnny, I got something to tell you for the next three and a half days.
So the next morning, we got out to start the fence. He'd already told me what materials to buy, and he just started telling me what happened in his life and how he got recruited into the top secret NDRC. Very few people have heard of the NDRC, the National Defense Research Committee, which is the precursor, actually two committees before the Manhattan Project. Now let's just go back to the beginning of in the 40s, 3940, now having received a letter from the National Academy of Sciences, where my father is thinking that he's being recruited for college because he has been correcting math books. Now let's talk about him correcting textbooks. In eighth grade, my father is told that he's missed two questions in an eighth grade math test. Now a year and a half before, he was in a very violent car accident where he was thrown from the car after church when a drunk t-boned their car they were driving on a gravel road in Kiron, Iowa. My father went flying.
They had to look for him in the cornfield where he was. He was unconscious and with this gigantic scar on his face, they brought him back to the house and the only dressing on his face was the drunk driver's t-shirt and they just assumed my dad was going to die. They didn't even bother going to see a doctor. My grandfather just said, I'm not wasting any money. Well, there is no money and my dad's in a coma and his mom was a very devout Christian. She locks herself in a prayer closet and she prays non-stop. Now this accident happens Sunday, let's say noon.
He wakes up on Tuesday morning and he takes the t-shirt off his face and that gash is fully healed. My father kept that open the way it was because he always wanted to remind himself that God kept him alive and now he realizes that he's given him a mathematical and mechanical skill set that is not normal, that he's alive for a purpose. He shortly realized thereafter that not only was he a mathematical savant, that things just naturally came to his brain now, that he was also a mechanical savant. Now it's very, very, very rare to see a theoretical and a mechanical savant kind of combined in one package.
We've been emailing with the world's leading expert. He's a doctor out of the University of Wisconsin. He's the world's leading expert on savants and he's only met 16 called post-birth savants. But what's so rare with my father, it's mechanical and theoretical. Albert Einstein, while he might have been a theoretical genius, he wasn't mechanical at all. He had a hard time even tying the shoes and how to do that. He can do all the theoretical codes of nuclear reactions along with how to fly a missile.
Usually those are two completely separate skill sets. So my father is basically a one-man shop for a nuclear or ballistic missile, which is extremely rare. And you're listening to John Clawson and he's the author of Missile Man, the Secret Life of Cold War Engineer Wallace Clawson.
And his father's secret, super secret double life as a nuclear missile savant is what this story is about and so much more. When we come back, more of John Clawson's father's story and he listens in Seattle here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
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Firefighters are still working around the clock. As the world changes, we look for what endures. We are coming on the air with breaking news right now.
We look for a constant. And from one era to the next, trust is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yarmus. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yarmus.
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Shop now at Lenovo.com. A better future is waiting and it needs you. And we continue with our American stories and John Clawson's story of his father's super secret double life as a nuclear missile savant. Let's return to John and more of his father's story. So once my father is correcting textbooks, the teacher, the basketball coach as well, mails the textbook back to the publisher because my father took the textbook where they said he missed two questions and my father told the teacher the textbook is wrong.
And my father that night when he took the teacher's textbook home not only corrected the questions which were in the back of the textbook, he corrected the entire textbook and rewrote it how it should read. So when they were scouring the country looking for the top scientists in America, they noted MIT, Yale, Harvard, Caltech, UC Berkeley. That's when they said to them, you might want to check out this young kid in Iowa.
His name's Wallace Clawson, but there's one thing about him, he's 17 I think. And they kind of shrugged it off initially, but the publisher said, you probably should go see him because he's already correcting our astrophysics textbooks. So my dad went to this small rural country school that incorporated all the grades in basically a classroom, rural rural Kiron, Iowa. And my dad was on the basketball team. And that week of practice back in February of 1940, he received a letter from the National Academy of Sciences thinking, we'd like to talk to you about your math skills. Well, my dad thought he was being recruited to go to college. Well, he had no idea it was the NDRC coming after him. So he asked the coach if he could have a half hour because he's being recruited to maybe go to college. And he knew the tough environment my dad grew up with his dad being a drunk, a very abusive father.
He goes, Wally, you can have a half hour. He was in basketball outfit. He pulled on his pants over, but he left his basketball shirt on and a light coat. And it was very cold. He ran all the way to the cafe and there's the three G men.
And they must have looked at this young kid and say, you're Wallace Clawson? And my dad goes, yeah. And they sat down with and they sat down with my father and they said, if you take more than two hours to correct this question, we're not interested. And now my father's thinking, I've only got like 20 minutes left. Now I got to get out of here. Cause it's going to be 10 minutes to run back. And the two of the gentlemen went to the restroom and my father just sits down instantaneously, rewrites this very long protracted math question, and then rewrites it saying that this should be the way it should be written. It's not so cumbersome. It's not so complex. Always make math very logical.
He never liked to see people use math to intimidate anybody. So he had ran, started running back and that's when the two gentlemen came back out and sat down at the table and said, what did we do scare the punk kid off? And the gentleman who saw what my dad had done said, we don't know who should be more scared him or us. So the NDRC was in such a panic and in a hurry, they infiltrated 18 high profile scientific universities. And they acted all like graduate students or young professors, but they were all doing research work for the NDRC. But of one of those committees, there was a one called the uranium committee. They determined that the making of an ex they call it then a super explosive was not all that far fetched. It looks like it can be done.
And we're recommending that we go to the next phase. So what FDR did, he split the NDRC uranium committee off into its own group called the S1 committee. And my father went with the radar down to Jacksonville, Florida, where all these radar microwave radar sets were attached during World War II. That's where they perfected the microwave radar. They call it the biggest unsung hero of World War II, because if the U-boats were not captured correctly and eliminated, 40 to 50% of all shipping lanes across the Atlantic were being taken out sunk.
Well, within three years, three and a half years, if you wanted to be in a U-boat, you were putting your life at severe risk of being killed. So when the microwave was done, he was brought in to help design the first thermonuclear computer with a gentleman who was considered the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, John von Neumann, who was quite an interesting character in himself with his office directly across the hallway from Albert Einstein. And that was the connection of my father getting to know Albert across the hallway from his closest mentor, because John von Neumann had developed the first programmable computer program, which was unheard of back in the early 50s. And my father was exposed to the mechanical machine at Iowa State while doing radar projects from the name of John Altassenoff, who was considered to be the first person to manufacture a computer. So they combined the computer of Altassenoff with my father and the program from John von Neumann. And hence, you end up with the IBM 704 computer, which was brought out to Livermore, California from Poughkeepsie, New York. And as my father told me, it took three 18 wheelers to transport that machine.
And he says, John, you have no idea of the security around that convoy. But it's important for everyone to realize that during the 50s, that was the seven series computers tweaked. And then the IBM had a natural ability then to tweak it again so it could be commercialized and sell it.
And that's when the seven series IBM computers turned into the 360, which was one of IBM's most successful commercial machines ever built. Now let's explain this. When the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, that was what you call a fission bomb. It splits the atom.
That was Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Well, they found out mathematically, which are incredibly complex calculations, that if you take the heat energy of a fission bomb, which is what was dropped at Nagasaki fission. And if you take that million degree heat and you specifically direct it at hydrogen atoms, you vaporize off the one electron. And now what you do, you try to implode billions of hydrogen atoms, which is basically considered like the center of the sun.
So if you have them implode on each other, the energy release is the energy of the sun. So that's what my father specialized in. Then in 46, the government wanted my father to do advanced ballistic calculations under the guise of being an engineering student. The first thing I did, I pulled his grades from Iowa State. There my father is, he's flunking nine classes, nine. He flunked basic math 101. So they made him look like he was the flunky.
So he's now at University of Minnesota. All of a sudden, the government started a long four-year process to figure out if there were moles within our nuclear and scientific world. And we know that in Los Alamos, that they caught a group of the engineers selling secrets to the Russians. So they come to my father and they tell him, Wallace, we're thinking they're going to be coming after you now.
And we think there could be a mole within your group. And you're listening to John Clausen telling the story of his dad. And that would be Wallace Wallace.
And that would be Wallace Clausen. When we come back, we continue the story here on Our American Story. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.
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Download today. NBC Nightly News. Legacy isn't handed down. We're NBC News. I'm Tom Brokaw. We hope to see you back here. I'm Lester Holt. It's carried forward. Tom Llamas is there for us.
Firefighters are still working around the clock. As the world changes, we look for what endures. We are coming on the air with breaking news right now.
We look for a constant. And from one era to the next, trust is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Llamas. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas.
Evenings on NBC. Are you shopping for a new laptop while still trying to keep up with technology and AI? Talk about feeling burnt out.
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Shop now at Lenovo.com. A better future is waiting and it needs you. And we continue here on Our American Stories with the life of Wallace Clausen as told by his son, John Clausen, author of the book Missile Man, The Secret Life of Cold War Engineer Wallace Clausen, and soon to be a movie. There are producers attached to this as we speak and of course screenwriters. But now let's return to the story. We last heard that the Russians were coming after John's father, Wallace. Here's John with what happened next.
We want you now to go to Iowa and act like you're going to be a farmer and we're going to isolate you and living with your father-in-law at the farm in Kyron, Iowa and tell everybody you're now going to be a farmer. So he did that and but he wasn't done working. They did the drops at the windmill of scientific papers where he would go pick them up early in the morning, take them back to the farmhouse, he'd crawl up into the attic and do the mathematical calculations, put them back in the bag and then he'd put a light on up in the attic to notify his handlers that I've got a fresh drop of research papers I've developed. But what my father failed to recognize is that my grandfather was up at 4 a.m every day and my grandfather could see that his new son-in-law was leaving at 4 30 in the morning and come back in like 10 minutes.
So he watched this go on and on and he watched how the light would go on and off and in certain times when the light was on he'd leave that day. So when they were in the kitchen my grandfather approached my dad. He was of World War I and I have framed at my home here the letter he wrote to his father about how horrible the conditions were in France in World War I and that he learned to sleep with rats and rats crawling on his face.
And that backs up his statement, I know what a rat smells like and I think I've got one in my family. And my father very calmly responded saying, you know Alvin, you fought for this country in a certain way, I'm just doing it in a different way. And my grandfather backed off.
Never a word was ever said about anything. So after about a year of doing that is when IBM started knocking and that's when my father was brought into the commercial world of IBM still doing a lot of government projects but under the guise of IBM's back then it was called the Military Products Group. So when we were doing the interviewing of my mom and we went to my mom with my writer and researcher where we asked my mom, didn't you think Wallace had kind of a strange path? He's getting an engineering degree now says he wants to be a farmer and now gets hired by the IBM Military Products Group.
What kind of career path is that? And we got the biggest chuckle out of that because my mom said this, oh Wallace would have been such a good farmer. She still thought about my dad being a farmer.
It was very touching. Well then the life all of a sudden changed when Russia shot off Sputnik up into the sky and they went to get my dad out of bed. We had four kids sleeping in a two-bedroom house. My mom and dad had one and we had four kids in the other and my brother is seven years older than me.
He remembers that I was holding on to my dad's leg because I was sleeping usually on the floor with my blanket and when my dad went to leave I grabbed onto his leg and my brother woke up who would have been 10 at the time and my brother vividly sees four large statured men with rifles getting my father and shuttling him off. And what they were doing, they were going to be analyzing the track data of the satellite as it went and my dad said to everybody, oh calm down. So my dad put those calculations in but we a month later shot our first satellite off.
We thought we were going to be first, we weren't. But that's when President Eisenhower initiated the program of NASA. So the exact month NASA was formed we moved down to Long Beach, California where my father is involved in IBM's what they call Space Systems West Division on a very unique address called Wilshire Boulevard. From there in in 1962 we moved up to San Jose, California. One thing that's important to note that whenever you have a person who even has a group that knows the actual ballistic codes that can activate a variety of different either ballistic missiles or missiles in wherever you always have to be able to find where that person is. So in the early 60s the military had developed GPS guidance systems with satellites.
We had it installed, my dad did, in the back of the Austin Healy sprite. So twice there was a time in which the government was following that sprite in San Francisco being driven by my brother and my brother runs out of gas. They realized that the sprite wasn't moving along the side of a highway in San Francisco. A military truck pulls up next to my brother and says we think you need some gas and they fill him up and off he went.
My brother was thinking man that's strange and then another time the sprite was actually stolen and my brother was directed not to call the police call dad if that if you don't know where that car is and they just went and got the car and brought it back. So and then there was a war called the Six-Day War when Egypt basically led an attack of a coalition of countries in the Middle East against Israel. And Russia was so frustrated with America that we helped Israel out so much in the Six-Day War. And what does Russia do? They move in 15,000 advisors into Egypt and 600 SAM sites.
Those are surface-to-air missiles. So lo and behold guess who moves to Switzerland in 1970. My father moves to Switzerland and this is how he told this to the family and I'll never forget it as long as I live. He said it in a very plain calm voice and I'm going where in the heck is Switzerland? He goes the Shah of Iran wants me to assist on building a water dam project. And I'm thinking whoa what does my dad know about water dams? And the week before we moved to Switzerland the PLO had hijacked an airplane at a Zurich and they blew it up. My father absolutely freaked. He was thinking the PLO has infiltrated the network of his program and he thought they were maybe coming after not only him but his family. At San Francisco we flew first class it was a 747 and my father later told me that the whole front row of coach were armed guards for security. We landed we got off we're going through a pack of customs we're in customs lines we're in customs lines and all of a sudden I see my dad in a window and he's saying come over here a door opened up and we just walked out. And you're listening to John Clawson telling the story of his father flash engineer Wallace Clawson but not just any engineer folks a super secret double life as a nuclear missile savant.
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Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. So you want to start a business you might think you need a team of people and fancy tech skills but you don't you just need GoDaddy Aero. I'm Walton Goggins and as an actor I'm an expert in looking like I know what I'm doing even when I don't and I like the sound of starting my own business Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses but I'm an actor. I don't know what I'm doing.
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Download today. The NBC Nightly News. Legacy isn't handed down. We're NBC News. I'm Tom Brokaw. We hope to see you back here. I'm Lester Holt. It's carried forward. Tom Yarmus is there for us.
Firefighters are still working around the clock. As the world changes we look for what endures. We are coming on the air with breaking news right now.
We look for a constant and from one era to the next. Trust is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News I'm Tom Yarmus. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yarmus.
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Plus college students and teachers get five percent off with an education account on Lenovo.com. A better future is waiting and it needs you. And we return to John Clawson's story about his father Wallace here on Our American Stories. We left off with John and his family having just landed at Zurich airport in Switzerland. We were out of that airport in under 30 seconds because my father didn't know if they were going to attack now at the Zurich airport where they hijacked the plane the previous week. And we got in the car and we drove to Tallville which is where we lived in our house. That had to be a good 15-20 miles. We had to go through at least 40 stop lights.
We didn't hit one red light. And my father said we were in a convoy of three cars and the first car controlled the lights of the street. And my father when he was telling me his story as to what we did when we lived overseas he says Johnny look at your passport you never ever entered the country of Switzerland.
I go I got a high school diploma from Switzerland and he looked at me with his hands in concrete looked straight up at me and said Johnny we can make anything disappear. What my dad was had done he had put ballistic missiles in Iran in case Russia came in to attack Israel. I think it's important to do in telling you this story with my father is some of his idiosyncrasies and things he liked to do because obviously he could not have traditional friends because he couldn't trust anybody for obvious reasons if you know the nuclear codes you're not going to be hanging out with somebody. But what my dad liked to do though he loved to hit fly balls to my friends because he always thought the kids could be trusted. So we often did that and my father would always carry a plastic satchel. This is in the early mid 70s and he says Johnny open up I want to show you something that we're developing and in it was a 12 inch by two by two it looked like a white piece of chalk a white piece of chalk but it virtually weighed nothing and I go what like styrofoam but it was denser than styrofoam and I go to dad he goes what do you want me to see he goes Johnny I just want to show you what the world's greatest hot plate looks like. Now that was the sample piece of the space shuttle tiles as you re-enter earth's atmosphere there's incredible amounts of mass heat developed as you enter atmosphere again and that two inch thick they ended up painting it with a different color that even absorbed more heat as it came in but that was one of the original space shuttle tiles that was being developed and my father often would say Johnny inquire about whose tv's working and not working and you know I have kind of a propensity of fixing television sets that kind of get a kick out of it and the only thing he ever asked once in a while would be like a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and he'd completely tear apart the back of the tv set and fix their color tv with ever bringing out a manual or anything he just went in there and he'd go Johnny go into my tube wall go two row two down bucket three over and I need two of those or go down four four over I need one of those and I'd run back and I would he would take him and he had carried a soldering iron with him and he'd fixed tubes and those tubes which he was using were what you call g-force rated in other words they were used in missiles and you can just imagine if you have a tube machine and the g-forces in a missile if those tubes aren't reinforced with special strong connection tips and glass they'll break apart and those were all g-force rated for missiles so when my father died I gosh I can't believe I actually did this we took all of his tubes and took them to the dump and I've later found out that on an average those tubes were probably worth 200 grand today my father always said this Sunday is the day the Lord hath made we will rejoice and be glad in it I woke up every Sunday and he was always playing church music and he was always asking me who can we pick up to fill our car to go to Sunday school with he goes Johnny get up and get your friends here we'll wait for him at the train station or whatever but the Sunday he felt comfortable he even was kept a smile on his face he never really lingered around but he always that was his time to unwind and appreciate that he'd been kept alive and that he now knows what his mission in life is is to try to keep the world safe and then in 1982 my father is sent to England where under Carter's administration they were quietly secretly going to be bringing in missiles into England and then NATO says to Russia in an exercise only we are going to attack you and it's generally going to increase over the 10 days and the last three days is going to climax with a nuclear exchange of weapons so their hair is up and they're watching all the computer codes and my father is in the exercise making sure that none of the codes are in launch mode but have all been deactivated and there's thousands thousands of missiles can you imagine thinking oh did I forget about that missile in Turkey so for three days Russia goes to Defcom 2 Defcom 2 we have never been at before with an enemy they are expecting nuclear war 8 9 and 10 1983 and we have no idea that Russia's even this mad soon after that exercise ended my dad was diagnosed with cancer and basically he retired from IBM and came back to California but when he found out that he had 18 months to live he wanted to at least leave some sort of mark that to his family that he did exist in a different way than being a quote unquote IBM sales affiliated guy so when we were coming back to return the post hole digger my father said Johnny pull in here I want you to see this house and it was John von Neumann's house where the top scientists were deciding what we were going to do what we were going to do with nuclear activity now the bomb had been dropped now top scientists Fermi Oppenheimer they wanted to put the genie back in the bottle they figured you know what this is a horrible thing we've done you can go on youtube and see Oppenheimer openly crying of the technology that they've released to the world but my father was in the camp that said you know what the genie's out of the bottle we can't put it back in but you know what we can do a scientist can stay so far ahead of the military and uniqueness that will control it there's no doubt that my father was a walking savant met mechanical and theoretical but he did not give off any of that aura he just did it and quietly walked away and his skill sets was so far advanced he was probably 25 to 28 years before Bill Gates even talking about programs but he I look at it this way once you're in the inner sanctum of top secret computer projects you're not going to be openly now working on commercial projects it's just not going to happen it's just not going to happen so so he came back to Seattle after in 1989 and he really got sick in a very quick way and he passed away in may of 1991 and I'll never forget he was at a hospice center and I basically said goodbye and and he said he learned so much from me and I was thinking what could you possibly learn from me and he said he learned about life and I left and he died that night after my mom and two sisters saying ebbs and you've been listening to john clausen choking up talking about his father a great family story here on our american stories traveling is one of life's greatest joys honestly can anything be more exhilarating well actually yeah with chase sapphire reserve it's your gateway to the world's most captivating destinations first you'll earn three times points for travel and dining and the card gets you into the sapphire lounge by the club at select airports nationwide and access to one-of-a-kind experiences whether you're booking a once-in-a-lifetime trip or your next weekend escape discover more with chase sapphire reserve at chase.com slash sapphire reserve cards issued by jp morgan chase bank na member fdic subject to credit approval terms apply you have a long list of things to deal with check dry eye symptoms off with refresh reliever pf extra lubricant eye drops offering an advanced formula 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