What it takes to do a job will not be learned from a management course. . . . Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.1
By the time he was forty, Rickover had made a critical management decision. It was a reluctantly personal one. He had grown to accept that his military peers did not believe he had enough of the intangible “command presence.”
He was faced with a dilemma. He would need to find and recruit thousands of people to staff his program. Each would need a deep understanding of nuclear engineering and management. However, they would also have to possess the élan to lead sailors into danger. Rickover was an education expert.2 He believed he well understood what could be taught and what could not. He therefore made a counterintuitive choice. Rather than picking engineers (like himself) and trying to teach charisma, he instead recruited natural leaders who could learn engineering.
He didn’t insist on his recruits’ becoming technical wizards (although some, like Dennis Wilkinson, clearly were). He looked for potential leaders who were also capable of learning the engineering Rickover believed necessary. He insisted they follow his conservative engineering principles day to day. He wanted to ensure that if, while at sea, they subsequently decided it necessary to take submarines into harm’s way, they had the best possible warfighting platform. Action decisions were their choices.
But once Rickover had recruited and trained a group of assertive risk takers, he had the problem of controlling them—for he had staffed his submarines with people who would vie mercilessly with each other to personally count coup against the Soviets. Time would prove that these submariners often went well beyond what Rickover thought prudent.
One of the most extensively documented examples of this challenge involves the second commanding officer of USS Nautilus, Cdr. Bill Anderson. The future congressman from Tennessee was a man determined to become even more famous than Dennis Wilkinson, and he had a plan.3
America and the White House were not having a good year in 1957. It had started well, with President Eisenhower being sworn in to his second term, but the feel-good atmosphere quickly dissipated as the national unemployment rate approached 20 percent. Then, on 5 September Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the National Guard to protect those trying to maintain segregation in Little Rock High School. Immediately, the nation was in turmoil. To prevent attacks on black children, Eisenhower was forced to nationalize the Arkansas Guard as well as order troops from the regular Army into Little Rock. Eisenhower, the five-star general, was using his army to protect black children. The public wondered if he and his army had been distracted from the threat of communism.
Exactly a month later, a New York Times headline screamed, “Soviet Fires Earth Satellite into Space; It Is Circling the Globe at 18,000 m.p.h.; Sphere Tracked in 4 Crossings over U.S.” Below the fold on the front page, a different headline read, “Faubus Compares His Stand to Lee’s.” Neither headline was good news for Eisenhower. The United States had been trying and had failed to get its rocket program even a few feet off the ground. While the United States was still embroiled in racial tension, the Soviets would launch their first intercontinental missile the following year.
To answer this Soviet technical challenge, President Eisenhower—still focused on recovering from two costly wars—looked for inexpensive answers. Controlling military spending was important to the president’s domestic and military priorities. His senior Navy aide was a naval aviator named Pete Aurand, who happened to be a personal friend of the nuclear submariner Cdr. Bill Anderson. Aurand urged the president to undertake a “never-before” crossing under the North Pole with the nuclear submarine Nautilus. Aurand and Anderson would not inform anyone in the Pentagon about the proposed North Pole passage until after the president had committed to the mission.4 Rickover would be even more of an afterthought.
President Eisenhower and his press secretary, James Hagerty, quickly perceived that this North Pole mission had the potential to swiftly regain technological and military superiority in the public eye. Even more important to Eisenhower, there was no extra cost. The U.S. Navy had already set aside money for a nuclear-submarine building program. Therefore, highlighting a nuclear-submarine success did not have the downside for the president of implicitly endorsing a budget-busting space effort (which the New York Times began calling for the day after the Sputnik launch) to catch up with the Soviets. For Eisenhower, Nautilus was the perfect asymmetric answer to Sputnik.5
The president knew the political stakes were high. He did not want to experience another “military” failure like the Navy Vanguard rocket program if the mission did not succeed. On the other hand, he desired full credit for any success. Eisenhower accordingly insisted on controlling the timing of any announcements and was clear that the concept and mission were to be treated as top secret.6
To drive home this lesson on American technical exceptionalism to the world audience that was avidly watching the communism-versus-capitalism tussles, the president decided to follow the pole trip with news about a submerged voyage around the globe. It would follow Ferdinand Magellan’s route and be performed by USS Triton, America’s first dual-reactor submarine, captained by Eisenhower’s previous naval aide, Captain Ned Beach. These two successful demonstrations would showcase Eisenhower’s personal investment in this new, and visibly American, technology.
The Magellan trip would finish just in time to be announced at the next summit with Khrushchev and would reinforce the North Pole success.7 The president directed the Pentagon to plan the Magellan trip as soon as possible. It therefore needed to happen during Triton’s shakedown cruise, which was an underway intended to “shake the kinks out” of the new ship, not to demonstrate its abilities on the world stage.
With Nautilus’ successful passage under the ice cap in the summer of 1958, the first gamble paid off in spades. Accolade headlines appeared around the world. The president held a ceremony in the White House to announce the successful completion of the mission (Admiral Rickover was not invited) and arranged a ticker-tape parade for the whole submarine crew up lower Broadway.8
Anderson would later write of the White House ceremony, “I pointedly avoided talking about the strategic military impact of our transit beneath the ice. But it was obvious that Nautilus’ feat had immediately changed things in that regard.” Time magazine made the same point, emphasizing how this transit exposed Mother Russia, whose southern borders were protected by satellite states and whose northern shores were protected during most months by miles of pack ice: “In one voyage of one U.S. nuclear submarine . . . the Navy had . . . increased the power of the U.S. deterrent by laying bare the Communist empire’s northern shores to the future Polaris-missile-toting nuclear submarines.”9
Nautilus’ crossing under the North Pole was a great achievement for the United States and a brilliant policy move by the president. Although Rickover’s expert opinions were ignored and the admiral was kept in the dark about the event,10 he had the maturity, once the milk had been spilled, to use the crossing to his advantage. He would tout the event to cement congressional support for nuclear submarines. The crossing certainly demonstrated that Rickover had recruited men who could merge boldness with engineering expertise—if only Rickover could stand the daily strain of dealing with such strong personalities.
Recruiting the best of the Navy hotshots to work in nuclear power had solved Rickover’s need for bold and charismatic leaders in submarines. However, wardrooms of alpha personalities introduced their own unique problems. How was Rickover to guide them? It would be much like herding cats.
Anderson made a new friend in Captain Aurand and subsequently used him to gain direct access to the White House (without telling either the Chief of Naval Operations or Rickover) to propose a mission his ship had not been designed to perform. Anderson well knew that Rickover believed the North Pole trip was technically dangerous and ignored him, as alphas have been known to do.
When the president decided to conduct the mission, Rickover had few options left. By secretly giving Commander Anderson envelopes containing expanded reactor operating limits and other instructions, the admiral attempted to ameliorate the dangerous situation he believed the president and Commander Anderson had established. The president made operational decisions; Rickover could only provide additional technical guidance and latitude.
The North Pole trip was a grand success—for the president, Aurand, Anderson, and nuclear power. Rickover would soon face another situation he could not control. That one did not turn out as well.