Some of the stories from these interviews are priceless, demonstrating the stereotypical Rickover: angry, foul-mouthed, irascible, and utterly unpredictable. Most are the stuff of legend and difficult to verify. One that has been verified is from Lieutenant (later Rear Admiral) Paul Tomb, who was interviewing with Rickover in hopes of entering the nuclear propulsion program. Tomb told the admiral his name was pronounced “Tom.” Despite this the admiral persisted in calling him “Toom” throughout the interview, even after the lieutenant tried several times to correct him. When Rickover asked him when he became interested in the program, he said, “Right after the first atomic ‘boom’ went off, Admiral.” He was accepted. But plenty of midshipmen were rejected from the program for reasons that seemed odd, from being unwilling to postpone their planned weddings to being related to senior naval officers. And in fairness, some of the candidates balked at entering the program after undergoing the interview. It was certainly a “fascinating experience,” as future chief of naval operations Elmo Zumwalt wryly described it.
From time to time, the admiral used a chair with the front two legs sawed off short, so the candidate was leaning forward and unbalanced throughout the conversation, which could last a couple of hours. Other times, the officers were dragged in and out of the admiral’s office, locked in small cupboards nearby, given math problems to solve, yelled at by teams of senior captains, and generally harassed. The one consistent thread was a desire to put the applicant under stress and measure the reaction—then decide his fate. What Rickover was after were officers who would stand and deliver without fear or favor in the crucible of pressure. He said once, “Free discussion requires an atmosphere unembarrassed by any suggestion of authority or even respect. If a subordinate agrees with his superior, he is a useless part of the organization.” Finding the right candidates was an obsession for Rickover, essentially because he fervently believed that it led to safer operations at sea.
During his decades-long stint as the head of Naval Reactors, the Navy’s powerful nuclear shop, Rickover focused above all on reactor safety. He correctly foresaw that even a single significant radiation leak could doom the public’s confidence in the nuclear program. Rickover understood the uneasy confusion the public had between nuclear weapons and nuclear propulsion, even though it is literally impossible to coax a full-blown nuclear detonation out of a shipboard reactor. Interestingly, he was the only engineering duty officer to hold the position as head of Naval Reactors; all the other officers who followed him in this powerful job—nearly all of whom he selected personally to enter the nuclear program—have come from a line officer background and commanded submarines at sea.
In the late 1970s, despite powerful friendships on Capitol Hill in the Senate and House armed services committees, Rickover’s clout was beginning to wane. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, he faced a new, young opponent—Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. In his blunt memoir, Command of the Seas, Lehman lays out what he calls “the Rickover problem.” In essence, he believed Rickover had already made the contributions he was going to make and was a sort of dead man walking who kept the nuclear Navy in perpetual fear of his explosive temper. Lehman correctly viewed the nuclear community as a kind of elite Navy within the Navy and felt its resource needs would detract from his overarching strategic objective of achieving a six-hundred-ship Navy.
By 1982, Lehman had assembled what he viewed as a compelling case to ease out the formidable Admiral Rickover. In addition to his advanced age and acid-tongued treatment of everyone in his path, Rickover was at the center of a badly handled submarine test event in which his actions personally caused a loss of ship control. With great reluctance, Rickover finally retired as a four-star admiral after sixty-three years of service under thirteen Presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Wilson Reagan. The story of how that came about is priceless and says a great deal about Rickover’s character.
In January 1982, Rickover was so angry his hands were shaking. He buried them in the pockets of his suit as he rode to the White House. He arrived just a few minutes before the new, young, and handsome secretary of the Navy, John Lehman. The two men detested each other and were long past the point of hiding it. Even as Rickover was settling into the waiting room to the Oval Office, the new secretary of the Navy was staring moodily and tensely out the windows of his limousine, going over in his own mind the script he had crafted for the small meeting with President Reagan. The objective of the meeting was to be simple: for the president to congenially thank Admiral Rickover for his long decades of service and accept his retirement. Lehman had convinced the president that this was the only course of action to deal with the difficulties of Rickover’s excessive domination of the Navy’s vast nuclear power program. Rickover, on the other hand, had absolutely no intention whatsoever of going gently into that good night, and came into the White House and the Oval Office with a plan to blow the meeting apart and put the relatively inexperienced secretary of the Navy in his place, establishing again that only one man could run the Navy’s nuclear program. It proved to be an explosive meeting.
After clearing security—a quick process in those distant and innocent pre-9/11 days—the secretary and the admiral were ushered into the White House, then into the Oval Office. At this point in his presidency, Reagan was still like the sun shining on his visitors. The smile was broad, open, and sincere; the handshake was firm, confident, and friendly. They moved to sit around the coffee table in front of the president’s desk, and Secretary Lehman began his well-rehearsed pitch, thanking Admiral Rickover for his long decades of service and for his gracious decision to retire. Rickover sat silent, fidgeting a bit until there was a brief pause as Secretary Lehman threw the conversational ball to the president.
Before President Reagan could begin his amplifying thanks, the wizened admiral launched his own broadside. He told the president that he had most certainly not agreed with this idea of retirement, and only came to the Oval Office to plead his case to stay directly with the president. His voice raised in passionate intensity, Rickover told Reagan, “That piss-ant [pointing at Lehman] knows nothing about the Navy. He’s a goddamn liar, he knows he is just doing the work of the contractors.” Reagan was befuddled at this strange turn of events.
At this point Lehman was arriving at the unpleasant realization that he had personally persuaded the president, Reagan’s chief of staff James Baker, and Lehman’s boss, Secretary of Defense Caspar “Cap” Weinberger, to set up this meeting. He had assured each of them that the admiral had accepted his fate and was ready to finally retire. Everything had been arranged, including the offer of a new job for Admiral Rickover as a special assistant to the president on nuclear power, an office at the Navy Yard, administrative support, even a car and driver in perpetuity.
Yet Rickover felt only anger at being treated badly. He began literally shouting at the president, “Are you a man? Can’t you make decisions yourself? What do you know about this problem? These people are lying to you. Don’t you think people are already using this against you? They say you are too old, and that you’re not up to the job either.” The tirade continued unabated for long minutes, ending at some point with Rickover telling the president, “Aw, cut the crap,” and demanding a one-on-one with him. Lehman remembered thinking that if it turned out to be a brawl, Reagan looked strong and could probably handle himself.
Secretary Lehman said later that he was working hard to suppress a powerful urge to lunge across the coffee table and strangle the seemingly unhinged admiral. The meeting descended further into chaos, and finally Rickover got his way—he was granted twenty minutes alone with the president of the United States while Secretary Lehman, the chief of staff, and the secretary of defense cooled their heels outside the Oval Office. Lehman felt his stock slipping minute by minute. No one knows exactly what transpired in that one-on-one meeting, but the consensus is that Reagan merely did what Reagan did best—smoothed things over. Rickover probably
left the White House thinking he still had a chance to remain in his job. But the wheels of bureaucracy continued to turn, and in the end, despite some support from Capitol Hill and his own determination to stay, the writing was on the wall. Leaving the White House that day, Lehman realized that the battle to remove Rickover would be harder than he thought; and more important, that the nuclear Navy culture built by Rickover over the decades was here to stay. But in the end, Admiral Rickover did indeed retire, although his influence continues unabated to this day, decades after his death.
Despite the extraordinary achievement of bringing nuclear power to the Navy, his career was far from perfect, including various investigations into ethical missteps (accepting gifts of more than $60,000 from several contractors, for which he received a nonpunitive letter of caution). But he was ultimately afforded the unique honor of having a nuclear attack submarine named after him while he was still living. The warship, USS Hyman G. Rickover (SSN-709), was commissioned in 1984, two years before Rickover died. Fittingly, the massive Rickover Hall at the US Naval Academy today houses the technical disciplines of mechanical, ocean, electrical, aerospace, and aeronautical engineering. Rickover was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, while still on active duty, as well as two Congressional Gold Medals in 1958 and 1982.
His health declined through the early 1980s, although he still made occasional forays into public speaking, accompanied by his second wife, Navy nurse and retired commander Eleonore Bednowicz. He is buried at the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, next to his first wife, Ruth Masters, who died in 1972.
What drove him? No one ever worked harder than Hyman Rickover. Every book about him; every subordinate, peer, and senior official who met the man; every news story and obituary all begin with his work ethic. This manifested itself not only in the sheer number of hours he put into his job, but also in the lack of outside interests or hobbies and a single-minded focus he maintained throughout his career on his professional work and goals. Where does that wellspring of truly hard work come from? It is certainly a part of what we think of as character, and in the case of Rickover it most likely emerged from his immigrant background. Coming to the United States as a refugee at the very beginning of the last century, he was raised in a culture of hard work both from necessity, growing up in a poor neighborhood in Chicago, but also as an ethical choice. Like so many new Americans, he was born into a household that held hard work as both the path to success and a clear moral and ethical imperative.
Is it something we can develop, this appreciation for hard work as a mainstay in our character? Somewhat. Certainly, circumstances play a role—being born into a household with both a significant need for work as well as one in which there is a culture of doing so matters. But this is not in any sense purely socioeconomic. I have seen both the hardest-working people and the laziest and most self-contented people come from very wealthy families. The generations of sailors I have worked with at sea, most from lower-middle-class backgrounds, have included both hard workers and slackers. One aspect of developing a character that relishes hard work is simple: choosing to do something you love. Rickover certainly did that, trying first the surface Navy, then submarines, but finally settling on pure engineering. For any of us who would improve our own desire for hard work, the first step is choosing work that is personally rewarding and fulfilling—regardless of how the world weights it in the résumé of life. A second step is to look at examples of people who have truly worked hard to achieve something worthwhile. Reading the life story of someone like Hyman Rickover and understanding the depth of his efforts to simply grind it out can be inspirational. Indeed, in the Navy’s nuclear force the expression “nuke it out” means doing everything it takes to succeed—a legacy of the irascible admiral who built the program. Finally, serving on the team of someone who is a truly determined hard worker literally builds character. The boss you want in this regard is one who works harder than you do every day. As a three-star vice admiral, I worked for over two years as the senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. His work ethic mirrored that of Rickover. Before that assignment, I had thought of myself as a hard worker. Watching Secretary Rumsfeld, I came away from those two years realizing I needed to amp up my game if I was going to have real impact on my nation and the Navy. Studying the life and times of Hyman Rickover will reinforce that important lesson of character for anyone.
Each of the admirals we have discussed in this book was a visionary in some regard. Each of them showed the ability to look some distance into the future, appreciate its complexities, see beyond the horizon of their contemporaries, and chart a course to either achieve a goal or avoid a catastrophe. Some of them evinced this in more tactical ways (such as Lord Nelson’s approach to battle); others were quite strategic in a geopolitical sense (Themistocles in his diplomacy and use of the sea against the Persians). Several were innovators in a technical sense, including Rear Admiral Grace Hopper and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, whom I will describe shortly. In each of them we find an ability not only to look into the future, but also to do something about it. Still I’ll argue that no admiral in this book was more visionary than Hyman Rickover.
The very idea of using nuclear power on ships at sea is inherently crazy. The difficulties of packing such technology into relatively small spaces; the need to protect sailors operating the systems who are essentially living, eating, breathing, and sleeping on top of reactors; the enormous potential environmental dangers not only to the oceans but also to coastal life in the case of a breach—all of these would have been deal breakers to any sensible person. But Rickover correctly saw that nuclear power would change everything in the ability of a massive seagoing fleet (especially submarines) to operate globally. As he surveyed the post–World War II world, his vision allowed him to see the need to face the emerging Soviet fleet on a global basis. The interesting question in terms of character is how a leader uses vision to motivate and inspire subordinates, peers, and seniors. In this sense Rickover—despite his uncharismatic personality and awkward presentational and interpersonal skills—was able to use vision to drive events. This was at heart one of the two pillars of his character, the other being an incomparably strong work ethic and sense of personal drive. No one ever outworked Hyman Rickover.
So often leaders have vision but fail at implementing it successfully. In my own case, as a newly selected four-star admiral I was put in charge of US Southern Command—essentially all military operations on sea, air, and land south of the United States. My vision, which I believe remains accurate, was that we would never go to war in Latin America or the Caribbean. As a result, I desperately wanted to reform the command from its Cold War incarnation of being prepared to invade Cuba to an international, interagency, private-public entity designed to focus on humanitarian operations, medical diplomacy, counternarcotics, rule of law, and other “soft power” applications. I had power and I had a vision. I pitched it to my boss, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, and he supported me, although he was skeptical. Unfortunately, I was lacking two things that Admiral Rickover had—a long time horizon and a sense of how to ensure that a hidebound bureaucracy didn’t dismantle my work. While at the Southern Command, I completely revamped the organization, created a new culture, overcame both internal and external objections to the idea . . . and then was posted to Europe as the NATO commander. From five thousand miles away in Brussels, I watched my successor take it all apart and revert to the previous version of US Southern Command. The lesson I learned was that vision without staying power and bureaucratic skill is insufficient to drive the tent poles into the ground far enough. You also need the deepest reserves of character—strategic patience especially—to implement vision. Rickover was a curious combination of someone who was supremely tactically impatient, to the point of real anger, but had deep reserves of strategic patience to implement a long-term vision—a very rare combination in terms of character, and it served him well.
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