TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/86/86capmil.5

Text File | 1990-10-19 | 5KB | 85 lines

"They Broke the Mold"

July 21, 1986

Hyman George Rickover:  1900-1986

Flouting the rules is no way to get ahead in an institution steeped
in tradition.  But Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who died last week at
his home near Washington at the age of 86, often treated the U.S.
Navy--and its rules--with contempt.  He ignored orders he did not
like, wore his uniform sparingly and preferred bluntness to civility.
Still, he survived in the service for more than 63 years, longer than
any other officer in U.S. naval history.  Adjectives--brilliant,
egotistic, rude, unorthodox--clung to Rickover like barnacles to
boats.  Yet it was the diminutive (5 ft. 5 in.) Rickover who first
grasped the potential of nuclear power at sea and who tugged and
cajoled a reluctant Navy to develop and install reactors in
submarines.  Today "the silent service" fostered by Rickover is the
foundation of U.S. sea power, and missile-launching subs make up the
least vulnerable leg of the U.S. strategic triad.

Born to Jewish parents north of Warsaw, Rickover moved from Poland to
the U.S. at age four.  While working as a Western Union messenger boy
in Chicago, he won an appointment to Annapolis in 1918.  At the Naval
Academy, he stuck to his studies, shunned sports and dating, and
graduated in the top fifth of his class.  After more than 20 years as
an electrical engineer, the restless Rickover in 1946 was posted to
Oak Ridge, Tenn., where research was under way on atomic reactors.
Rickover believed the Navy could extend its reach and free itself of
the need to refuel ships if nuclear power plants could be squeezed
into submarines' tiny hulls.  Rickover's work eventually spawned not
only the first nuclear-powered sub, the Nautilus, launched in January
1955, but the first civilian nuclear power reactor, at Shippingport,
Pa.  Today more than 150 of 554 U.S. naval vessels steam under
nuclear power; American submarines can stay submerged for months and
traverse the waters beneath the polar ice caps.

The lure of the new nuclear technology and its strategic importance
appealed to many young naval officers.  But winning a spot in
Rickover's Navy was not easy:  prospective submariners often had to
sit before the old curmudgeon on an unbalanced chair whose front legs
had been sawed off by several inches.  The admiral's mean streak was
legendary.  He had no tolerance for defects in men or their work, and
he sacked many an officer for being "stupid."  Others, like a young
ensign named Jimmy Carter, went on to better things.

But the man who was clairvoyant on the role of nuclear power proved
less than visionary in other areas.  Behaving like an ordinary
bureaucrat, Rickover routinely demanded that a disproportionate share
of Navy dollars go to his nuclear ship programs.  Some naval analysts
also say that Rickover's single-minded belief in large pressurized-
water reactors drove the Navy to build bigger, if not necessarily
better, submarines while overlooking possible alternatives in
propulsion design.  Soviet submarines can now dive deeper and go
faster, and are narrowing U.S. advantages like quietness.  Notes
Norman Polmar, a Rickover biographer:  "In the '50s, Rickover was a
technical visionary.  By the '60s, he was a reactionary."

Nonetheless, Rickover's work earned him great influence in Congress,
which the admiral used to his maximum advantage.  After the Navy
denied Captain Rickover a rear admiral's stripes in 1952, a Senate
committee in 1953 balked at promoting 39 other captains until he was
included.  Facing mandatory retirement in 1964, he kept putting it
off by successfully appealing to Presidents every two years until
1982.  Even then, he resigned only against his will.  Though he
earned a reputation for bullying fat-cat defense contractors,
Rickover was censured by Navy Secretary John Lehman in 1985 for
accepting $68,703 in gifts and trinkets from General Dynamics Corp.

In the twilight of his career, Rickover was ambivalent about the
machines he had helped create.  In his final appearance before
Congress, in 1982, Rickover described his nuclear-powered ships as "a
necessary evil" to maintain peace but said he would "sink them all"
if he could.  "I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and
it's important that we get control of this horrible force and try to
eliminate it," he said.

Secretary Lehman last week paid mixed homage to the prickly old salt
by noting, "Admiral Rickover was Admiral Rickover...They broke the
mold."  Hyman Rickover was a man marred by an excess of arrogance,
but his rude genius nevertheless proved to be one of the Navy's
greatest assets at the dawn of the Atomic Age.

--By Michael Duffy.
  Reported by Bruce van Voorst/Washington