Jere Mitchum, Rev. Missileman: The Secret Life of Cold War Engineer Wallace Clauson, by John Clauson with Alice Sullivan. WND Books, Washington, D.C., 2017.

Most Americans will be surprised to learn that a teenage Iowa boy played a significant role in America’s Cold War during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. While still in high school in Kiron, Iowa, Wallace Clauson (1922–1991) began a fifty-year career as a top-secret nuclear missile engineer and mathematical genius. After he married, not even his wife and children knew about his double life. To them he was a successful IBM computer salesman, but secretly he was an engineer working with top military and scientific experts as they designed, constructed, and armed missiles and other weapons for the United States government during a crucial period in American history.
          Missileman is the account of Wallace Clauson’s double life related by his son John Clauson. The pages are thoroughly documented and researched with an extensive chapter-by-chapter bibliography.
          Wallace Clauson’s secret life came to light in 1987 when his son John was transferred from California to New Jersey, and he invited his father to help choose the new house and get settled. By that time, having retired and having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Wallace welcomed the change and the challenge. He volunteered to help John build a fence around the new backyard. During the three days they worked together on the project, Wallace related the real story of his life to his son; it was the first time in fifty years he had told anyone, even his wife, about being a secret agent. He retired in August 1984, after over 33 years of dedicated service to his country.
          “I’ve got some things to tell you, son,” Wallace said as he began his life’s secrets. During each day as they worked on the fence, Wallace continued to reveal more and more details of the intrigue, danger, and deceit he had been sworn never to tell. John was dumbfounded. Everything he had assumed about his father’s sales career with IBM was turning out to be a lie. Following his father’s death in May 1991, John accidentally discovered hundreds of business cards hidden in the back of his father’s desk bearing the names of companies and government agencies involved in the military-industrial complex prevalent during the 1960s. With these business cards as his guides and his father’s narrative as his motivation, John began the research that is the basis of this book. Almost ironically, John kept his father’s secrets to himself for fifteen years before finally putting them in permanent form.
          Wallace’s story begins when he was eleven years old and was severely injured in an automobile accident. He was not expected to live, and since their small town had no hospital, he lay at home in a coma for days, his mother praying constantly for his recovery. After he miraculously survived and regained his strength, he returned to school.
          But somehow, while in his coma, this previously average student had become a mathematics genius, the result of a massive head trauma called sudden savant syndrome that is referenced in the book. One day after class Wallace proved to his teacher that the answers to some of the problems in the back pages of his mathematics text were incorrect. His teacher wrote to the publisher pointing out the errors. The publisher acknowledged Wallace’s corrections and asked him to review other as-yet-unpublished math texts. Soon Wallace was earning an occasional check editing textbooks for that company and other publishers that had heard of his skillful editing and original presentations of problems. Almost by accident his teacher found to her amazement that Wallace had become a mathematical genius, most likely as the result of his injuries. Her letter opened a door that might never have opened for a special student.
          The year was 1939, Wallace was 17, the war in Europe was just beginning, and Roosevelt anticipated America’s likely involvement in a major world conflict. Preliminary preparations were underway even then for a nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project and Oak Ridge were already being planned.
          The National Academy of Sciences, recently charged by the president to discover and enlist outstanding scientific and mathematical talent, happened upon Wallace’s reputation as a genius mathematician and a promising editor of math textbooks. Academy representatives contacted him, still in high school, and arranged to meet him secretly in his hometown for an interview. Wallace interrupted his basketball practice after school and met them in the Kiron Café. They handed him a page of problems to solve within a limit of two hours. Still in his basketball uniform and seated alone in an empty café booth, he finished the problems in under half an hour, returned the paper to the astonished committee, and rushed back to the gym.
          So began Wallace’s secret career as a mathematical prodigy on call in the service of the United States government. Even in his teens, high school senior Wallace Clauson began solving top secret mathematical calculations for the government.
          Upon graduation from high school in 1940, Wallace received a full scholarship to Iowa State College where he enrolled as a regular student, and even a member of the trumpet and drum corps, but he did not attend classes, nor did he have any musical talent. By disguising him as a student, the federal government protected their prodigy from prying eyes while feeding him defense project assignments, specifically early versions of radar and the Polaris missile. John Atanasoff, creator of the first computer, regularly sent him mathematical problems even after he graduated—with a 1.11 GPA!
          Later, the government enlisted him in the Navy, with strict surveillance still intact and without regular seaman’s duties so he could continue his assignments as a slide rule-carrying agent of the Defense Department. His major assignment while hidden as a Navy seaman was to lead the installation of the radar sets at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida. The government agency was so careful to protect Wallace and his family, they secretly equipped his teenage brother’s car with a primitive GPS to monitor his activities and quietly quash investigation of an occasional accident.
          Of course, any account of a double life must have two story lines. Interwoven with the intrigue of secret missions are warm cameos of Wallace’s close-knit, religious family, moving around the country, even to Switzerland, as Wallace is reassigned to different projects, but always together and always in church when possible. The book is as much about his wife, Marilyn, and sons John and Bill as it is about Wallace’s important undercover work and his sham career with IBM. The authors have gracefully balanced the two sides of Clauson’s life within forty-eight short chapters and 275 pages, appealing to casual readers as well as those researching the details of America’s involvement in the Cold War.