On the left you can see Rickover in his full Admiral's uniform. On the right you can see him out of uniform (His normal condition) sitting at one of the diving controls on NAUTILUS

Although Rickover always considered Chicago his home town, he was born in Poland in 1900, and immigrated to the United States as a small child.

The Admiral died July 8, 1986 and is buried in Arlington Cemetery at Washington, D.C. If you had a chance to think about it for a while you would have to come to the conclusion that he should never have been in charge of such an important program as the creation of the first nulear submarine.

After the Second World War all of the heroes in the various branches of the service became the Generals, Admirals and decision-makers we knew about in the1950s and beyond. The submarine navy had seven of their skippers win the Congressional Medal Of Honor as captains of submarines that sank Japanese shipping. At the end of the Second World War, four of these Captains were still alive. Ten years later the Admiral in charge of the next generation of submarines turned out to be Rickover, who never saw action as a submarine crewmember during World War II. Wartime admirals have lots of medals to go along with their gold stripes. Rickover had very few. The largest vessel he ever commanded was a minesweeper back before the war in 1937

In 1946 he was sent to Oakridge, Tennessee to be part of the "Manhattan Project." You might recall that this was the group that put together the first atomic bomb a couple of years earlier. The story of how he managed to eliminate the submarine heroes and put himself in charge of the next generation of atomic submarines will be a good tale for somebody's book someday. We know he got himself appointed to the civilian branch of the Atomic Energy Commission while at the same time being in charge of the Naval Reactor Branch. He was in fact able to allocate money to himself. All that counts is that he pulled it off and the nuclear program prospered, so I guess we all won in the end. Congress loved Rickover; most of the Navy hated him right up until his retirement in 1982 when he finally left the military with 63 years of service.

My exposure to Rickover was one step less than minimal. Whenever he visited the nuclear site in Idaho or came on the submarine base to go aboard Nautilus, everyone stationed on the base and aboard the submarine became nervous. Our individual careers often times rested in his hands. In the old days your promotion to the next rating or rank was primarily based on some commander's whim and the needs of a particular ship. That system was supposed to have been eliminated in 1948 when the military adopted a method of competitive testing along with "time in rate" as the basis for determining who was to be advanced to the next promotion. Rickover kept interfering with that new system. A good example of this interference involved one of our best instructors at the Idaho prototype site. The sailor affected was a very experienced Chief Petty Officer. He had that special gift of making complicated subjects extremely simple. There are lots of instructors that understand their subject very well, but do a lousy job of explaining it to someone else. This chief was not only a nuclear enthusiast, but he also enjoyed teaching the subject. A tough combination to put together when you are committed to training a bunch of inexperienced sailors a lot of very complicated subjects. The fact that this Chief was selected for the nuclear program meant that he had the IQ and experience that would qualify him for just about any program the Navy offered. He chose nuclear.

In the 1950s The US Navy initiated a program that allowed qualified enlisted people to be promoted to the commissioned rank of Ensign and be awarded a commission as a limited duty officer. Most of the limited duty officers that came through the nuclear program ended up as engineering officers with a potential of getting to Lieutenant Commander, but seldom higher. If you were a first class or Chief petty officer and had ten years of service completed, you could apply for the examination and be interviewed for consideration.

This Chief met all the necessary qualifications, passed his interview with flying colors and was offered the opportunity to go to officer candidate school for promotion to Ensign. The problem in Rickover's navy was that the Admiral personally interviewed all present and potential commissioned officers for his atomic submarine program. Rickover did not like the chief because, in his words, he thought the Chief was too crude. In other words he could be a top-notch nuclear power plant instructor and ride the boats as a Chief Machinist, but not, according to Rickover's rule, as a commissioned engineering officer. The chief was forced to make a decision. He loved the Navy and the nuclear program in particular, but to stay in nuclear he would have had to give up further promotions and a higher retirement pay, along with future pay increases and responsibilities just to satisfy Rickover's personal prejudices. It was too high a price to pay to remain in nuclear submarines so he left the program to ride surface vessels for the balance of his career and the nuclear submarine navy lost a good man that was going to be almost impossible to replace. That fact that Rickover could get away with this type of manipulation was just one of the reasons that a lot of the sailors did not like him.

Rickover's technique for interviewing prospective commanding officers was brutal. Along with the expected detailed examination of your qualifications he had you sit in a chair that had the front legs sawed off just enough to make you slide forward and remain very uncomfortable during the interview. On one occasion he had one of his young secretaries take off her shoes, stand in front of a line of prospective commanding officers and sing "My hero" to them while she stood there in her bare feet. He felt this exercise would humble them a little. I'm sure it did, but did they really need humbling? President Jimmy Carter once wrote about his interview with Rickover when he was still a young junior officer. Rickover asked him about his class standing when he graduated from the Naval Academy. Carter told the Admiral that he had graduated fifty ninth out of one hundred and twenty graduates in 1946. Rickover then asked him why he had not graduated number one. Carter thought about it for a little while and replied that he supposed he had just not tried hard enough.

Rickover asked. "Why not?"

Carter was speechless. He could not come up with a sensible answer to this logical question. A young kid from Plains, Georgia was given the opportunity to go to the Naval Academy, no doubt the biggest opportunity of his life up until that time and once there he did not give it his best effort! Carter didn't know what to say next, but he made a decision that would change his life forever. Never again would he shirk a great opportunity. Many years later President Carter wrote a book titled, "Why not the best?" I bet you can guess how he came up with that title.

Come to think of it, I wonder what Rickover's standing was in his graduating class at the Academy. I bet he wasn't number one either.

Many of us in the nuclear program resented that Rickover did not like to wear his uniform. If you are an Admiral you should look like one. Admirals have great looking blue uniforms with lots of gold on the hat and sleeves. The also wear rows of ribbons and medals. Rickover spent most of his naval career dressed in civilian clothes. If he wanted to be a civilian he should have resigned from the Navy and became one. We were proud of our uniform, he should have felt the same. Perhaps I am being too critical and not understanding of his feelings. Try to picture this diminutive, academic type, Jewish cadet graduating from the Naval Academy in nineteen twenty-two. The upper classmen probably gave him a rough time that he never forgot!

The German magazine STERN came up with as good an explanation as anyone about the problem the Navy had with Rickover. Following our trip under the North Pole in1958, the magazine interviewed many of us crewmembers in Portland, England to write their article. They put it this way in STERN magazine.

If you are the Captain of a ship and you see a box of apples at the end of the pier, and you grab those apples and give them to your crew this makes you a good Captain.You are a good Captain because the Captain's job is to take care of his crew. Now pretend you are the Admiral of the base and you give that same box of apples to one of the ships. This makes you a bad Admiral because you have a responsibility to take care of all the ships in your command, not just your favorite one. As an admiral, Rickover had a larger responsibility. His only focus at that time was Nautilus. Everything else took second place. Other people and ships that depended upon him came up short. We were once told that he grabbed this country's stock of the expensive and rare metal hafnium and gave it to us for the control rods in our nuclear reactor. The word was that this gift set the rocket program back a few years.

In another incident Rickover had stockpiled over 600 tons of high temperature stainless steel for the Nautilus primary system and was under great pressure to release some of it for jet fighter construction that was needed for the Korean War. Naturally he refused

Good Captain, lousy Admiral!

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