Science: The Man in Tempo 3

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But he did work—ferociously—when inany good officers were relaxing in the interwar illusion of peace. He specialized on electrical equipment, after five years of sea duty went back to the Naval Academy for postgraduate work in electrical engineering. When on the battleship Nevada as a lieutenant j.g., he and his men installed a 500-unit battle telephone system. When on the submarine S-48, he redesigned its defective motors. He fought against waste and slipshod ways. These activities earned him commendation, but they won few friends and no preferment.

Rickover's real progress was made by strenuous study, partly at Columbia University, where at Navy expense he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering. At Columbia he also met Ruth D. Masters, a student of international law, whom he married in 1931. Still, his advance in the Navy was slow, and when he got his first and only seagoing command, it was the minesweeper Finch, a decrepit rust bucket operating in China waters. Called back to Washington from Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines (where his hard-driving efficiency had made whole shiploads of enemies), he was assigned to the Electrical Section of the Bureau of Ships. By the time he got command of the section in 1940, the war was just ahead, and hardworking, nonsocial officers were in sudden demand.

Rickover worked day & night revamping outmoded equipment to win the battles to come. His section grew prodigiously as the Navy's ships grew fuller of electrical and electronic gear. Sharp-tongued Hyman Rickover spurred his men to exhaustion, ripped through red tape, drove contractors into rages. He went on making enemies, but by the end of the war he had won the rank of captain. He had also won a reputation as a man "who gets things done."

With war's end, Rickover's prospects seemed to have dimmed, and his personal life was none too happy. The Rickover family in Chicago had never been outwardly affectionate. Violent conflicts and bitter resentments were an integral part of its life, but it was close-knit and loyal. Captain Rickover had drifted out of this clannish environment. He did not follow Jewish customs; he did not go to a synagogue; he had married a gentile. At last he wrote a letter to his parents, telling them that he no longer considered himself exclusively Jewish in religion. A later generation might not have taken this too hard; he is still earnestly religious in a nonsectarian sense. But Rickover's parents did not forgive him for many years.

Oak Ridge. In 1946, Captain Rickover, still a sharp, square peg confronted by polished, rounded holes, learned that the Bureau of Ships had decided to send a captain and four junior officers to Oak Ridge to study nuclear energy. He got the job. (No other qualified captain applied.) Nuclear physics in those days was something to scare even brilliant officers.

Since his decision to go to Oak Ridge, Rickover's life has been a battle to get the Navy and the atom together. It was a battle of a type that has been fought before—between the necessary conservatism of a military organization and the equally urgent necessity to keep it up to date.

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