Ships
- USS Parrott (DD-218) Captain, 3 December 1939 to 12 January 1942
Edward Nelson Parker was born in Avalon, Pennsylvania, in 1904. He attended school in New Orleans and Louisville, entered the United States Naval Academy in 1921, and graduated with the class of 1925. Commissioned an ensign that year, he was known in the service as Butch. He remained on active duty until 1963 and retired as a vice admiral.
On 3 December 1939 he became captain of the destroyer Parrott, a flush-deck veteran of the Asiatic Fleet. He was a lieutenant commander, and he still had her when the Pacific war began in December 1941. On 12 January 1942 he turned the ship over to John Nelson Hughes. Parrott stayed in the Southwest Pacific. In 1944 Edward Falka Rye commanded her. That May a merchant ship rammed Parrott, and the destroyer was decommissioned in June.
Parker was not captain of Parrott at Balikpapan on 24 January 1942. Some accounts still place him in the night attack on Japanese shipping off Borneo, and one account places him in John D. Ford. The succession of command does not. Hughes had Parrott. Davis Wing Olney's tour in John D. Ford had already started. A Navy Cross was awarded to Parker in a citation that named him as commanding officer of Parrott for that attack.
Further decorations followed after he had left the ship. A second Navy Cross marked his part in the fight in Badung Strait, off Bali, in February 1942. As commander of Destroyer Division 59, and in command of the second section of Destroyer Division 58, he took part in the Battle of the Java Sea on 27 February 1942 and received the Silver Star.
That autumn he was at sea again. From 6 October 1942 he commanded the destroyer Cushing and Destroyer Division 15. On the night of 12–13 November 1942, off Savo Island, the division met a Japanese force at close range during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Cushing was sunk. His tour in her ended on 13 November 1942. He received a third Navy Cross for the action.
After the war he commanded a destroyer squadron during the occupation of Korea and North China, from November 1945 to April 1946. He was at Bikini Atoll for the atomic-bomb tests of 1946 and later worked in naval weapons research in Washington. He commanded the cruiser Newport News and Cruiser Division 6, held command duty in the Marianas and with the Sixth Fleet, and served in senior posts concerned with nuclear weapons. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1952.
In 1960 Parker became a vice admiral and the first deputy director of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. In January 1962 he became the first assistant director for weapons evaluation and control at the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where he was the senior military officer. He retired in 1963. The Legion of Merit and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal recognized that duty. He died on 15 October 1989 at his home in Lighthouse Point, Florida, and was buried in the United States Naval Academy Cemetery at Annapolis.