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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.