All men are by nature conservative but conservatism in the military profession is a source of danger to the country.1
Life is a series of choices made, opportunities recognized or ignored, and inequities experienced. Immediately following World War II, Admiral Rickover seized the opportunity to develop the nuclear submarine. He subsequently drove himself and a hand-selected team to achieve extraordinary professional success. His achievement was obviously a clear win for him and America. Because of the palpable American fear of the Soviet Union, Rickover remained thirty-three years in his very visible role as the head of the naval nuclear-power program. But fear did not curtail the growing resentment. Critics, like debris pushed before a persistent wind, accumulated around Admiral Rickover’s feet. It was like wispy tumbleweeds slowly being deposited against gray steps in an abandoned ghost town. When he became less nimble, Rickover finally stumbled.2
It was part of life’s unfairness that Admiral Rickover died before the Cold War ended and the achievements of his nuclear submarines could be popularized. Nevertheless, even without Rickover serving as a focal point, over the succeeding years it became known that
• our at-sea nuclear fleet ballistic-missile submarines (sometimes carrying multiple intercontinental nuclear-tipped missiles atop each missile) were the survivable threat the Soviets could never hope to counter3 and
• America’s other nuclear underwater component, our fast-attack submarines, lurked unseen along the Soviet coasts,4 targeting the Soviet ballistic-missile submarines, often holding the Soviet arsenal “at risk” as soon as they poked their steel noses out from the safety of their icy Soviet ports.5
American presidents responsible for the safety of the United States tended to appreciate being provided options other than abject capitulation or the duck-and-cover move taught in grade-school classrooms. Essentially, the men with the real need to know about the submarine fleet—the presidents of the United States—valued nuclear submarines.
Presidents also tended to notice when the safety of the United States began to deteriorate. I will provide an example that explains presidential concern. Soviet ballistic-missile subs operated from the two large Soviet submarine bases in the port cities of Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk. Periodically, Soviet submarines steamed five thousand miles east until they were in missile range of the most valuable U.S. targets.
To counter this, our attack submarines operated near Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk and endeavored to track all Soviet submarines that left these ports. This was impractical since the Soviets possessed two hundred more submarines than the United States. We therefore focused on the submarines undergoing the training for patrols off the western coast of the United States. Our secondary concerns were those submarines that might be intending operations against the Navy’s battle groups. We had historically been successful, but in the late seventies the submarine-versus-submarine situation in the Pacific had been disturbed by American secrets that a group of traitors had sold to the Soviets.6
I do not know how the half of our submarine force in the Atlantic was doing at the time, but in the Pacific even our best U.S. skippers were having zero luck in keeping track of Soviet ballistic subs. Not surprisingly, this lack of success was a bit disconcerting to the submarine admirals—and was irritating the hell out of President Reagan. Of course, not everyone was unhappy. At least three groups were silently cheering. The first was the group of traitors at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headed by Aldrich Ames and at the Navy in Norfolk (the Walker-Whitworth ring). These scoundrels had sold information to the Soviets that led to our difficulty. The second group contained a few officers wearing U.S. Air Force blue who were involved in strategic deterrence (and had felt a bit threatened by submarines since the Polaris program evolved). Those in the latter group were somewhat covert in expressing their true feelings since it was definitely not considered good form to root against fellow Americans.
The third crowd tended not to be terribly clandestine. This group comprised our fellow sailors who weren’t submariners. The surface and aviation portion of the U.S. Navy annually saw 20 percent of the service’s budget slide from the columns supporting aircraft and surface ships across the balance sheet to fund more and more submarines. Aviators and surface officers had grown to view submarines as useless for “real wars” like Vietnam. These officers were also professionally a bit irritated because physics dictated that airplanes and surface ships had little capability against submarines. Fanning these ill feelings was the policy that submarine missions were too sensitive for anyone other than a few submariners to know about.7 This policy had successfully established a secure environment for information and also a nearly perfect breeding ground for resentment. The submarine force was generally despised throughout the Navy. As a consequence, several groups hoped that a loss of presidential confidence in submarines would soon result in fewer submarines being authorized by Congress. As one might suspect, the tension in the Pacific was nearly tangible.
At the time I commanded USS Plunger, one of the oldest attack submarines in the fleet. We were as fast as newer submarines, but our living spaces were more Spartan and our equipment less reliable. However, our sensor and analysis equipment had been continually updated over the years and was nearly as good as that on the newest ship. On the positive side, we had just returned from a successful thirteen-month overseas deployment, meaning our crew was well trained and experienced.
This recent deployed experience (and our availability when other ships were not) more than balanced any concern about equipment deficiencies, so when intelligence was received that the Soviets had a ballistic-missile submarine out and about, the job of turning the five-year detection drought around fell to Plunger. Our task was to locate the Soviet sub and determine what tactics she was using to make her way undetected back and forth across the Pacific. Reducing a several-month story to its essence, we were successful.8
After we had returned, it was in the best interests of the submarine force to make a grand example of Plunger’s accomplishment (this would serve to assail doubters, both foreign and domestic). I was thus instructed to put together a briefing for President Reagan. A fellow skipper, Hank Chiles,9 had also just completed an excellent patrol, and although he would not be briefing the president, Chiles and I together gave our briefs to a great of number of interested Washington, D.C., offices.
As we were so doing, we learned that Admiral Rickover had heard that Chiles and I were going to be in Washington, D.C., and wanted to hear our briefs. We both had time in our schedule. We had just been over to see Rich Haver, who had been the Navy’s expert on the Soviets for nearly as long as there had been submarines (to be completely fair, he is younger than I), and our briefs had ended early. Both Chiles and I suspected our briefings were also a form of personal interview, as the word on the street was that Rickover was looking for a new special assistant, a job both of us desired. The role had proved to be a sure path for promotion to the rank of admiral (Chiles was probably never that shallow, but I was).
We briefed the admiral and his staff in a little room packed with men sitting on armless chairs. Watching his eyes as I spoke, I remember thinking that the admiral was eighty and still absorbing everything I said. I also remember the intake of breath when I mentioned that (at one time in the thirteen-month deployment) I was playing a pickup game of basketball in Guam when a messenger brought me word that Plunger was needed off Thailand. Less than three hours later, our submarine was submerged and headed south-southwest at flank speed. (I had thrown this little bon mot into the brief to emphasize the readiness of our engineering plant, even when we were a year overdue for a planned overhaul.)
“You were doing what?” Instead of smiling his approval, the admiral was glaring at me. Off to my right I heard Chiles softly chortling.
“Flank.” (This is the Navy term for the fastest ship speed.)
“No, before that.”
I unsuccessfully racked my brain.
Finally, ratcheting his face up into its most menacing glare, Rickover took pity on my inability to recall: “Why were you playing some sport instead of studying or reading? That might improve your mind!”
Oops! I had forgotten that it was “nuclear lore” that the admiral derided anyone who participated in sports. I had always assumed his derision was not actually serious but for his own amusement. As it so happened, I had my own sports fiction ongoing with my two sons, so I straightened myself up to my full five-foot-ten-inch height: “I need to stay in shape, Admiral. When I retire from your program, I promised my two sons that I am going to earn money by playing in the National Basketball Association.”
Quickly, before he could decide to engage in a contest of wits and destroy me, I shifted to a backup slide that the director of naval intelligence had told me to remove from the presentation intended for the White House the following day. “Admiral, if I had stayed in my room in Guam, I would only have been more worried about this particular piece of information we gathered. A lot of people believe it is extraneous. I am not so sure. I haven’t been able to figure out what it means. It’s something new. No one in any of the eleven groups that Hank and I have briefed over the last few weeks has been able to offer any supposition as to what the Soviets are doing.”
If the room was quiet after our sports repartee, it was now completely silent. The slight hum of the projector fan sounded like the rush of water over Niagara Falls—just before someone drops to his death in a barrel. The admiral’s eyes narrowed as he skimmed over the slide, taking in the information USS Plunger had acquired at some risk. After a few seconds his shoulders relaxed, and he slightly sighed, almost under his breath.
I have often since wondered whether or not it was the exhale of a man who had sometimes in the dark of night wished he had been better able to push himself beyond his introverted personality. I was watching every movement of his pupils as they darted about the slide and then focused on one particular sketch I had made of what I had seen. After a few seconds he rose from his seat, took my pointer, and walked over to the screen.
He turned and spoke across the audience to me, even though it was evident he was performing for his staff: “This should be obvious. The Soviets are . . .” He then related the conclusion he had drawn from the information I had presented, explaining to us all what was then immediately clear to his small audience (and which remains to this day classified information). His conclusions made several other previously uncorrelated observations quickly mate and lock in my mind. A few seconds later he handed back my pointer and exited the room without a word.
I inserted the former backup slide into the primary brief for the White House and the next day used the admiral’s explanation in my presentation to the president’s staff without shame, as if it were my own. I also mentally added the admiral’s superior knowledge of Soviet navy tactics to the list of talents I already had recognized. Still, Rickover selected Hank Chiles to be his next special assistant.
Chiles’ selection is worth a special comment, for never for a second did I think Admiral Rickover selected him because of my inadvertent sports remark (although when Chiles and I ate dinner that night, we both agreed I must have been brain-dead to tempt the admiral with my Guam basketball remark). The admiral often made disparaging comments to determine if a person could think on his feet and had the personal gumption to respond to Rickover’s challenges.
In this particular situation I have a good case to disprove all of those who believe they were not accepted into the nuclear program because they were exceptional athletes (you can find their stories littering the Internet). Chiles had actually been an All-American athlete at the Naval Academy, but I have a far stronger proof.
When I returned from the briefings in D.C., USS Plunger and I sailed immediately to Bremerton, Washington, where we entered the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. The professional pressure in Bremerton was much less than on board an operating ship, and during the overhaul I had time to coach my sons in soccer and basketball. Now, while I have played quite a bit of basketball (I was born in Indianapolis, where the desire to dribble is injected into the placenta while the mother is giving birth in Methodist Hospital), I had never participated in soccer. Therefore, to learn how to play in order to teach my young sons, I had joined a local semipro soccer team. How hard could this sport be? I said to myself. It was certainly not tackle football.
At the time I was thirty-nine years old. I had spent twenty-six of the previous twenty-eight months at sea and thirty of the last forty months away from home—and I was perhaps not in the best of shape. Perhaps I was feeling a little guilty about my absence during such critical years for my sons. I may have underestimated the contact involved in soccer. I acknowledge never being great about knowing my limits. In our first game my nose was crushed, my right eye orbit was broken, and sufficient blood vessels were ruptured in my brain to result in a subdural hematoma. I was flown by helicopter to a hospital to remove half my skull to relieve pressure on my brain.
As soon as I was out of surgery, my operational commander called me in the hospital and told my wife, “Tell Dave not to worry about anything, we just won’t tell Admiral Rickover.”
The “anything” to which he was referring was that everyone assumed Rickover would press to have me immediately removed from command. This wasn’t simply a broken leg. I wasn’t even going to be able to visit the ship for months. We were in dry dock, but Rickover insisted that someone always be responsible. It was nice of my boss to think he was protecting me, but “We won’t tell Admiral Rickover”? Hello!
I was in a hospital bed and covered with wires. I couldn’t move and had a breathing tube down my throat. However, nothing was blocking my thinking process. So I lay there and considered the likelihood of my operational commander’s statement proving to be accurate. A shipyard is a bit similar to a town of 15,000 to 20,000 people—except that people live a lot closer together and gossip more in a shipyard. Admiral Rickover had three teams in the Puget shipyard that independently reported to him what was happening on those acres. Was it likely that the three teams could be sworn to silence? I mentally reviewed them.
The first was my boss in the shipyard (in the military one often has more than one senior to whom he or she is responsible). He was a former nuclear-submarine commanding officer and, along with a small staff, had been assigned to the shipyard to provide advice and counsel to the commanding officers there. The particular officer in Puget was the legendary Dave Minton of USS Guardfish fame, and he, along with his wonderful wife, Marilyn, and their daughter, Davie, were great friends of ours.10 However, Dave was a true professional, and professionalism trumps friendship in the nuclear business seven days of every week. I was sure Dave would put his own evaluation of the state of my physical and mental recovery in each and every one of his biweekly letters to Rickover.
The second person in the Puget Sound area who wrote a biweekly letter to Admiral Rickover was a senior civilian who had worked for the admiral for twenty years, periodically moving among the various nuclear shipyards. This individual filled the role of the Naval Reactors shipyard representative and managed a small group of technicians tasked to ensure everyone in the shipyard was following all the details involved in the myriad processes entailed by nuclear power. The nuclear-power world is small, and the wife of this senior civilian actually had attended high school one desert town over from the farm my wife grew up on.
As a result, I knew that the Naval Reactors shipyard representative’s spouse had met her husband while she was performing in one of the strip clubs that filled a notorious block in the one-Idaho-town-over. This unimportant but titillating fact had become clear a decade earlier, during an admiral’s garden party, when, in casual conversation, after finding they were from the same low-density areas, my wife had asked the Naval Reactors representative’s spouse, “What clubs did you belong to?” For a minute the woman must have thought she had found a true kindred spirit from back home. My wife had meant high school clubs, like 4-H and Tri-Hi-Y, but that was not what was heard. During the moment of silence that always seems to mysteriously descend for these truly inappropriate cocktail party lines, the other woman’s clear voice rang out, “The Silver Spur, The Naked Chaps . . .”
Her husband and I never bonded. Somehow, I felt he might see it as his responsibility to mention that I was even less attentive than usual to my ship duties.
The third biweekly Rickover letter writer was the admiral who ran Puget shipyard. This was the same man who had recently reluctantly fired his best friend for falsifying time cards. Five weeks had passed. I wondered if he still remembered. His grand house lay immediately behind ours on the naval base, separated by only a grassy swale the neighborhood children used for sports. The previous week, while playing baseball, one of my sons had broken the glass in the admiral’s back door.
Admiral Rickover wouldn’t know about my state—fat chance!
It took a few months for my hair to grow back in where my skin had been grafted. It was another few months before my gait was completely steady. Yet Rickover never did call me to tell me how dumb it was to play a sport (at the semipro level when I didn’t even know all the rules).11 I later learned he did telephone my boss’s boss. He instructed him to call my executive officer every day—to see if my number two needed anything in the way of assistance until I was fully healed and back at work—and not to inform me. I didn’t hear from, see, or speak to Adm. Hyman G. Rickover again.
One hot July morning a few years later, I reflectively donned the white uniform bearing my own admiral’s gold shoulder boards and joined the thousand other quiet mourners for the admiral’s service within the heavy cool gray stones of the Washington National Cathedral.
Admiral Rickover only periodically received intelligence briefings on Soviet navy operations, yet he was able to quickly discern a new concept the Soviets were in the process of adopting (time later validated Rickover’s hypothesis). The remainder of the submarine and intelligence communities (and me, of course, who actually witnessed the events on site) had failed to identify the patterns Rickover instantly recognized. Does this incident indicate anything about the flexibility of Admiral Rickover’s mind? Can you capture this imagination in an organization? How?
Do you think Admiral Rickover was particularly loyal to those people he considered his top performers? Are you? Is this good for the organization? What are the possible problems with a nuanced, as opposed to consistent, approach to all your managers?