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 reactionary."