Hyman G. Rickover

American admiral and engineer

• Born: August 24, 1898 or January 27, 1900
• Birthplace: Makov, Russian Empire (now Mákow Mazowiecki, Poland)
• Died: July 8, 1986
• Place of death: Arlington, Virginia

A specialist in electrical engineering, Rickover became a pioneer in nuclear propulsion after World War II. He headed the project that developed the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, and remained a dominant figure in the U.S. Navy and public life for three decades.

Early Life

According to his public school records, Hyman G. Rickover (RIHK-oh-vur) was born in the village of Makov, about fifty miles north of Warsaw, Poland, in what was then the Russian Empire. His parents were Abraham, a tailor, and Ruchal Rickover. In 1899, Abraham Rickover, like many other Jews, left the poverty and discrimination of Russia behind to try to achieve a better life in America. For several years the senior Rickover worked in were chosen to save enough money to send for his wife and two children, Hyman and a daughter, Fanny. In 1904, or thereabouts (there are discrepancies surrounding many facets in Hyman Rickover’s childhood), the family was reunited in New York. A second daughter, Hitel, usually known as Augusta, was born there. In 1908, the family moved to Chicago, where they settled in North Lawndale, a neighborhood of two-family homes that was a typical first step above the ghetto for families such as the Rickovers. Hyman attended public school in the neighborhood and worked at various jobs as he grew older. His high school record was by no means outstanding, but Rickover liked to think that his time-consuming work as a Western Union messenger kept him from achieving the grades of which he was capable. He did do well his final two years at John Marshall High School and was graduated early in February, 1918.

Rickover entered the U.S. Naval Academy later that year and graduated in 1922. Rickover’s years at Annapolis were not happy ones, but as with so many other incidents in his life, inconsistencies exist between his version of events and the written record and the recollections of others. According to Rickover, anti-Semitism marred his years at the academy. Others recall that several Jews who were enrolled at the same time were very well liked and that Rickover was a loner because of his own desire to pass up social and athletic activities to study diligently. To use the slang of the time, it seems he was considered a “grind.”

Of slender build and about five feet six inches in height, Rickover never seemed to show an interest in sports or other recreational activities; he was, however, from his childhood years on, a determined worker. In Chicago, he had sometimes held two part-time jobs while attending school. At the academy, he became known for his zeal to get things done.

Life’s Work

Commissioned an ensign in 1922, Rickover served the next two years on the destroyer LaVallette, holding the position of engineering officer during the second half of his tour. Rickover’s next assignment was as electrical officer of the battleship Nevada. He then undertook advanced studies, first a year’s course in electrical engineering at the Naval Academy’s postgraduate school and then a year at Columbia University, where he received a master’s degree in engineering. He was promoted to lieutenant while at Columbia. There, Rickover met Ruth Masters, a student in international law and subsequently a recognized scholar in the field. The two carried on a courtship, largely by correspondence, and in 1931 were married by an Episcopal minister. They had one son. (Two years after Ruth Rickover’s death in 1972, Rickover married Eleonore Bednowicz, then a Navy nurse; she retired after their marriage.)

In 1929, Rickover was accepted into submarine school. The training program lasted six months, after which Rickover was assigned to the submarine S-48 as engineer and electrical officer. A year later, he was named executive officer and navigator, a position that he held until 1933. Although at this time in his career he was eligible to command an older submarine or an auxiliary such as a minesweeper, he was assigned to two years of shore duty in Philadelphia, where, with the Office of Naval Matériel, he was charged with inspecting supplies and equipment being produced for use by the Navy. Next, Rickover was rotated to duty at sea as assistant engineering officer of the battleship New Mexico. Given much latitude by his immediate superior, Rickover was able to demonstrate his zeal for efficiency by instituting methods to save on fuel consumption. Not all of his innovations were popular, and Rickover could be hard on lax subordinates. He had the reputation for thoroughness, if not tact, and the New Mexico won the Navy’s prized E awards for efficiency in engineering each year of Rickover’s tour of duty.

Ordered to the Asiatic Fleet in 1937, Rickover was promoted to lieutenant commander and given command of the old minesweeper Finch. This was his first and only command, and accounts differ regarding whether Rickover was merely striving to bring his customary efficiency to a ship where morale was already low or whether he bore down too hard on an otherwise decent crew. He was relieved of command after three months and assigned to the Cavite Navy Yard near Manila, in the Philippines, for duty as assistant planning officer. His responsibilities included planning the repair and overhaul of machinery for ships coming into the yard.

Rickover requested a transfer to the status of engineering duty officer, having recognized from the fact of his assignment to the Finch that his career as a line officer was headed toward a dead end. Since 1916 the Navy had officially differentiated between line officers and engineering duty officers, or EDO’s. Line officers were trained, in effect, to command ships and eventually task forces and even fleets, in the case of the most able. While outstanding line officers such as Chester Nimitz and Ernest King might in their younger days become expert in engineering matters, they would be rotated in the course of their careers to a variety of command and staff duties at sea and on shore so that they would be familiar with many aspects of the Navy. In contrast, an EDO could design, operate, and maintain ships but could not command one.

After duty at Cavite, Rickover returned to the United States for assignment to the Bureau of Engineering, which later consolidated with another shore establishment into the Bureau of Ships in 1940. In an effort to prepare for World War II, the Navy was undergoing rapid expansion. As head of the electrical section of the Bureau of Ships for much of the war, Rickover was responsible for organizing the design, construction, maintenance, and repair of the electrical apparatus in radios, radars, guns, lights, refrigerators, and propulsion. Promotion now came quickly; Rickover rose to commander in 1942 and some months later to the temporary wartime rank of captain.

Rickover’s style of command was unconventional in that he ignored rank among the personnel detailed to his section, and he thought nothing of working late into the evenings or on Sundays. What mattered in wartime was that he got the job done, and he impressed his superior, Rear Admiral Earle Mills. Appealing to Mills for duty in a combat zone, Rickover, in 1945, received orders to develop and command a ship repair base on Okinawa. The war ended before the base became operational, and in a postwar Navy due for retrenchment, Rickover, like many others, was an officer whose future career was uncertain.

Rickover, however, was destined to achieve fame as the founder of the nuclear Navy. Although the name of Rickover has become synonymous with the nuclear Navy in popular accounts, the idea of a nuclear-powered submarine, a true submersible, had been batted around within the Navy since 1939. Mills was certainly in favor of it, as were many experienced submariners, and so after the war, Rickover and a few other engineering officers were sent to Oak Ridge to learn about nuclear technology. Rickover assumed leadership of the group and so impressed Mills with his grasp of the subject that he became the admiral’s assistant for nuclear matters until 1948, by which time the Navy at last had made the decision to develop nuclear propulsion. Rickover received the two assignments that would place him at the center of what was to become the nuclear Navy: head of the Nuclear Power Branch of the Bureau of Ships and, in early 1949, chief of the recently established Naval Reactors Branch (NRB) of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

For Rickover, there was a great advantage to holding two positions, the former in the naval hierarchy, the latter in the civilian-run AEC: Depending on circumstances, he could initiate action either from his naval position or from the NRB. Having already learned the ins and outs of military bureaucracy and how to deal with major defense contractors when he headed the electrical section of the Bureau of Ships, Rickover, still an obscure captain, became increasingly autonomous.

What became known as the Rickover style was again evident, and he gathered around him a group of bright and intensely loyal officers who worked diligently to overcome the myriad problems in harnessing a nuclear reactor for shipboard power. By the early 1950’s Rickover began to receive the media attention that he worked hard to cultivate and had also made himself known to influential Congress members as an officer who got things done, perhaps the only one who could make the Navy’s nuclear propulsion program a success. Whether he was, he did have a demonstrated record of accomplishment and was both an engineer and an experienced submariner.

Rickover, nevertheless, had his problems, not only those involving the design of the submarine and the complex requirements for the prototype reactor to power the nuclear sub but also others involving naval politics. Twice he was passed over for promotion to rear admiral, meaning that he would have to retire; Navy regulations so stipulated. His congressional supporters, however, rallied to him, and Secretary of the Navy Robert Anderson directed that a special board meet to select an engineering duty captain with experience in the nuclear field for promotion to rear admiral. As Anderson had known when he specified the criteria, Rickover was chosen. Just as this threat to Rickover’s Navy career was nearing resolution, the crucial Mark I nuclear reactor underwent a full-power test. Convinced that no excessive risk was involved, Rickover ignored advice to halt the test at the planned forty-eight-hour mark or less and ordered the test continued for ninety-six hours, enough time for a submarine to have crossed the Atlantic at full throttle. The successful completion of the test in June, 1953, generated much favorable publicity, soon to be surpassed by the achievements of the nuclear submarine itself.

In January, 1954, the Nautilus , the world’s first nuclear submarine, was launched and a year later undertook its trial runs on nuclear power. The vessel was clearly a success, establishing all sorts of firsts and earning many laurels for the Navy, for Rickover, and for the Eisenhower administration, particularly with its August, 1958, submerged polar crossing. Rickover was now in a very real sense above the Navy, for in a service whose personnel were routinely rotated to different assignments, he built an empire based in the NRB of the AEC and in the Nuclear Power Branch of the Bureau of Ships and kept control for more than three decades. As the Navy added more nuclear subs as well as surface vessels such as the cruiser Long Beach and the carrier Enterprise, Rickover was promoted to vice admiral (1958) and admiral (1973) and was continued on active duty by special presidential directive issued every two years, even after he reached the normal retirement age in 1962.

On the organization charts he was well down the chain of command. In fact, however, he was able to exert influence far beyond his official slot by insisting that safety considerations required him to approve personally the commanding officers of all nuclear-powered ships. As these officers spread throughout the Navy in subsequent assignments, they carried the Rickover influence to many quarters.

By no means was Rickover’s influence confined to the Navy. Using reactor plans for a nuclear-powered carrier that had been canceled, his organization, with some funding from private industry, developed for use by the Duquesne Light Company the nation’s first nuclear-powered generating facility at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957. Although Rickover himself had little more to do with commercial nuclear power following the completion of the Shippingport facility, many who learned their trade with NRB went on to become leaders in the growing nuclear power field in the 1960’s.

For a time following the Soviet launching of their Sputnik 1 satellite, Rickover also became widely known as an authority on American education. The lamentation about the spectacular Soviet first led to an uproar about the quality of education in the United States. Rickover was ready with an answer, criticizing what he considered its shortcomings and calling for standards of excellence such as those he had always imposed on himself.

Not until 1982 was Rickover retired from duty, and even then he remained a well-known figure, ironically making the news several times in 1984 when it was revealed that he had received expensive gifts from one of the major contractors with which he had dealt. He was reprimanded by the secretary of the Navy. In July, 1986, he died at his Arlington, Virginia, home.

Significance

Rickover served on active duty longer than any previous naval officer in American history. His career was perhaps even more remarkable for its influence than for its longevity. In his tenacity and in his ability to use the media to advantage he displayed some of the characteristics of Douglas MacArthur and J. Edgar Hoover, two other public servants who far outserved most of their contemporaries.

Unlike MacArthur and Hoover, however, he labored in obscurity for a quarter of a century. Had he retired in 1945, his naval service would by no means have been without purpose, for Rickover was one of those scores of officers in such Navy specialties as engineering, ordnance, logistics, and construction who, with little chance for popular recognition, provided the indispensable support for the fleets.

He became a public figure only around 1950, showing the same dedication and drive he had always demonstrated but doing it in the glamorous new area of nuclear power. Already experienced in the ways of bureaucracy, he developed a constituency among the media and in Congress and, with the support at crucial times of those who believed in him, guided the Navy into the age of nuclear propulsion and made important contributions in the civilian power field as well.

Always he remained controversial. His detractors believe that by the 1960’s he had become a conservative force in the Navy, hindering innovation in submarine design and in the field of gas-turbine technology for surface ships. The charge has also been made that the overall strength of the Navy was not what it might have been had not such emphasis been placed on costly nuclear-powered ships at the expense of additional conventionally powered ships that could perform many missions just as well. Finally, it is charged that Rickover was vindictive to those who disagreed with him or to subordinates who failed to display the loyalty he demanded.

His admirers, however, are many. They applaud his part in the guiding of the Navy into the nuclear age and his emphasis on excellence at a time when standards throughout the armed forces and society as a whole appeared to be slipping. Whichever view more closely approximates the reality, much about the twentieth century Navy cannot be understood without comprehending Rickover’s role in it. A bureaucrat par excellence, he brought a uniquely personalized style of leadership what has been termed a “rude genius” to a service in the middle of technological revolution.

Bibliography

Allen, Thomas B., and Norman Polmar. Rickover: Father of the Nuclear Navy. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007. A concise overview of Rickover’s life and career.

Anderson, William R., and Clay Blair, Jr. “Nautilus” 90 North. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1959. Written by Anderson, second skipper of the Nautilus, and journalist Blair, this book relates the Nautilus’s crowning achievement the voyage to the North Pole which is perhaps Rickover’s greatest triumph.

Beach, Edward L. Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the “Triton.” New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962. A fascinating account by the commander of the Triton, one of the first nuclear subs and the largest when built. Triton achieved invaluable publicity for Rickover with an around-the-world voyage.

Blair, Clay, Jr. The Atomic Submarine and Admiral Rickover. New York: Henry Holt, 1954. An authorized biography, with much information made available by Rickover, written when the controversy over Rickover’s retention and promotion to rear admiral was under discussion. Lauds Rickover and downplays the contributions of others to the development of the Nautilus.

Duncan, Francis. Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2001. Duncan utilized Rickover’s private papers and interviews with Rickover’s friends and family members to compile this biography.

Hewlett, Richard G., and Francis Duncan. Nuclear Navy: 1946-1962. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Factually reliable, concise, and clearly written narrative history of the building of the nuclear Navy. Perhaps the best relatively brief study of the first fifteen years of Rickover’s career in the nuclear Navy.

Lewis, Eugene. Public Entrepreneurship: Toward a Theory of Bureaucratic Political Power. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. This valuable probe into the theory of bureaucracy uses Rickover (along with J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Moses) as one of three case studies in the gaining and wielding of bureaucratic power.

Oldham, Charles, editorial director. Underway on Nuclear Power: Fiftieth Anniversary of USS “Nautilus.” Tampa, Fla.: Faircount, 2004. An illustrated history of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nautilus. Chapters look at events leading up to the submarine’s development as well as the submarine’s officers and crew and the significance of nuclear submarines in the context of the Cold War and naval operations in general.

Polmar, Norman, and Thomas B. Allen. Rickover. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Lengthy but readable biographical study of Rickover. By no means friendly to the late admiral, it needs to be consulted by anyone interested in him or in the nuclear Navy.

Rickover, Hyman G. Education and Freedom. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959. A compilation of many of Rickover’s speeches on education. This volume presents Rickover’s views on a topic about which he felt strongly. Rickover authored several other volumes dealing with education.