Chapter 1. Why Rickover Is Important
1. See Nilsen, Kudrik, and Nitkin, “Russian Northern Fleet Nuclear Submarine Accidents.” Also see World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear-Powered Ships”; and Johnston, “Deadliest Radiation Accidents.”
2. There are three particularly excellent biographies of Rickover: Duncan, Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence; Polmar and Allen, Rickover; and Rockwell, Rickover Effect. Two of these biographies were written by men who worked directly for the admiral. The third was written by a more critical duo. The admiral had a full life, and no one book can do it justice. My contribution focuses on the admiral’s leadership and management style.
3. Ignoring the question of which nation originated which technology and focusing solely on the Americans involved passage through the air and under the water became contemporaneously feasible at the turn of the last century. The Wright brothers’ first flight of their heavier-than-air machine was in 1903, and the U.S. Army bought its first aircraft five years later. Meanwhile, in 1900 John Holland beat out Simon Lake (my great-granduncle) in the Navy’s competition to buy its first submarine.
4. Rickover, Pepper, Rice, and Elephants. This book was published three years after Ruth Rickover died. The author’s foreword is dated December 1954, the year USS Nautilus was launched.
5. Rickover, “Thoughts on Man’s Purpose.”
Chapter 2. Challenges Rickover Faced
1. The “chipmunk” phrase is included in one of the admiral’s statements to Diane Sawyer in his fifteen-minute 60 Minutes interview in 1984. The session was filmed after Rickover had been forced to retire and was noteworthy for both him and Sawyer. It was her first television interview in what would become an exceptional professional career, and Rickover broke his long-standing aversion to 60 Minutes, which he had previously maintained cut the tape to produce a result that supported the producers’ personal bias.
2. According to Ted Rockwell (Creating the New World, 337), “Science is unparalleled in its ability to analyze a wide range of physical phenomena. But it is not the only way of thinking. . . . Admiral Rickover’s approach to these things was intuitive and instinctive. In discussions over technical issues his arguments were seldom straightforward, rational or even valid. Often, after a bitter argument, events would take an unexpected turn, and Rickover’s position would prove to be correct. ‘Why do you guys fight me on stuff like this?’ he would ask. We would try to explain that none of the facts seemed, at the time, to support his conclusion. ‘But now you tell me I was right. Why am I always right for the wrong reasons?’”
3. There are many recent writings on this particular revolution in warfare, including Lecaque, “Guns That Almost Won.” Also see Bilby, Revolution in Arms.
4. “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will dig you in. We will bury you!” said Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in an address before Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on 18 November 1956. Cited in Time, “We Will Bury You.”
5.See Polmar and Allen, Rickover, 114, for the cost of the submarine. Nautilus' unusual mechanical ancestry became obvious during my tour as her engineer.
6. As related to me by Medal of Honor recipient (and the man who had sunk the most Japanese tonnage during World War II) Vice Adm. Gene Fluckey during a visit he and his spouse made in 1984 to Yokosuka, Japan. The Japanese had invited the admiral to Japan to help them locate some of the ships he had sunk during the war. While researching, the Fluckeys stayed in the Submarine Sanctuary living area, which belonged to Submarine Group Seven.
7. John Cromwell, Sam Dealey, Gene Fluckey, Howard Gilmore, Dick O’Kane, Red Ramage, and George Street—these seven men were all awarded the Medal of Honor in the Pacific.
8. According to Valor at Sea, “U.S. Submarine Losses in World War II,” “A total of 52 submarines were lost, with 374 officers and 3,131 enlisted men. . . .
• The United States submarine service sustained the highest mortality rate of all branches of the U.S. Military during WWII
• 1 out of every 5 U.S. Navy submariners was killed in WWII”
Chapter 3. Planning for Success
1. Rickover, speech delivered to Naval Postgraduate School.
2. It is extraordinary that Rickover was able to overcome his introversion as well as he did. To judge the extent of this characteristic, see Blair, Atomic Submarine, about Rickover’s experiences as a submarine executive officer: “As time passed, however, conditions on the S-48 went from bad to worse for Rick. He and the commanding officer did not see eye to eye. Moreover, some of the men did not believe Rick was the sort of happy-go-lucky submarine officer they wanted to follow. He stubbornly refused to go ashore and associate with the other officers when the S-48 was on a cruise. He preferred to take lone exploration trips to the interiors of the foreign countries they visited, or spend his spare time studying more Naval War College correspondence courses” (p. 53). In a personal conversation in early 2012, Ted Rockwell, Rickover’s first senior engineer, told me that Blair wrote his book from an office in Naval Reactors’ spaces with editorial assistance from Ruth Masters Rickover. Rockwell was spearheading an effort to get Rickover promoted from captain to admiral, and he planned to use Blair’s book and articles for that purpose. One would thus suspect the book presented the admiral in as favorable a view as possible.
3. John Wayne was the submarine commanding officer in the very popular World War II movie Operation Pacific (1951).
4. It is almost impossible to exaggerate what was acceptable at the time. I well recall a particular commanding officer who routinely drank excessively and also invited different women to share his spousal bed. He was an effective warrior, and for many years his excesses were largely ignored. Finally, he reached the professional breaking point when he managed to steer his submerged submarine into both Pacific shores—the coral of Japan and the rock of San Diego—during the same voyage. He was relieved.
5. Wilkinson, “Abandoning the Darter,” 185.
6. From my personal experience, I know that well into his nineties, Admiral Wilkinson was still making money in the cutthroat California poker parlors.
7. Wilkinson played championship tennis throughout his Navy career. See his Reminiscences.
8. Wilkinson, Reminiscences, 105–11. They were firing captured German V-1 rockets, or Loons, a predecessor to the Regulus program, which in turn would lead to the Polaris, Poseidon, and Trident programs.
9. The most recent demonstration of this was the difficulty in coordinating Defense, State, and Treasury during the 2003–13 Iraq War.
Chapter 4. Inadvertent Consequences
1. Rickover, “Getting the Job Done Right.” (This article was based on a speech the admiral gave at Columbia University.)
2. The satellite-based Global Positioning System, which has so much effect on our daily lives, was originally developed by Dr. Ivan Getting of Raytheon to provide exact positioning information for mobile transcontinental missiles.
3. At this time all ballistic-missile submarines on patrol used the same codes, or “keys,” so snoopy submariners could read the encrypted mail addressed to sister ships. In this case we did so without hesitation.
4. My younger brother, Tim, was Wegner’s deputy, and I had served as the engineer on board Nautilus. Both of these facts tended to build my credibility with the Naval Reactors office.
5. Anderson, Ice Diaries, 194. Commander Anderson tells this story somewhat differently (e.g., Anderson deliberately maneuvered around Rickover to arrange the trip, and the admiral believed the trip too demanding for Nautilus) but closely enough to confirm the existence of the envelopes: “Sunday, June 8, 1958 [departure date for the pole]. I knew Rickover as well as anybody did. . . . But I also knew how he felt about risking Nautilus to explore under the Arctic ice. I did not relish a surprise visit, especially today. . . .
“I had not discussed our proposed operation with him. I assumed, however, that the Pentagon, the White House, or both had made him aware of the details by then. The polar trip did not come up at all in our cordial conversation.
“Then just before he rose to leave he did a most unusual thing. Without comment, Rickover handed me a small scrap of paper he retrieved from his suit pocket. He had written on it the simple phrase: ‘If necessary to reduce primary system leakage, it is satisfactory to the Bureau of Ships to reduce the pressure from 1,600 p.s.i. [pounds per square inch] to 1,400 p.s.i.’ He signed it ‘H. G. Rickover.’”
6. Ibid., 162. “Aurand later said, when he first learned about the proposal, Admiral Hyman Rickover was against it, and understandably so. Many submarine people thought it would risk Nautilus, which was unquestionably true.” Presidential aide Capt. Evan Peter Aurand was an aviator who worked with Anderson (in successfully bypassing the Pentagon and Rickover) to convince Eisenhower to approve the under-the-pole mission. Aurand would subsequently retire as a vice admiral.
Chapter 5. Talent Repercussions
1. Rockwell, Rickover Effect.
2. Rickover was the author of three books on education: Education and Freedom (1959), Swiss Schools and Ours: Why Theirs Are Better (1962), and American Education, a National Failure: The Problem of Our Schools and What We Can Learn from England (1963). Education and Freedom and American Education were collections of his speeches on the subject.
3. Anderson, Ice Diaries. Anderson planned on taking Nautilus under the pole well before he became the skipper: “I was already doing a lot of thinking about exactly how I would make my mark as captain of Nautilus. The more I thought, the more my mind steered me northward” (p. 42). He kept his thoughts secret, knowing he was only one of several seeking to distinguish themselves from the other extraordinary men in the nuclear-power program: “Commander Calvert and a couple of the other prospective nuclear submarine skippers were also dreaming of the Arctic. . . . There was one other consideration. I suspected that Admiral Rickover would reject the thought of taking a nuclear ship under ice so early in the nuclear submarine era. As it turned out, that suspicion later proved to be correct” (pp. 44, 45). Anderson fails to note that his submarine, as essentially the first nuclear prototype, was not nearly as capable as the submarines commanded by the other nuclear skippers.
4. Ibid., 154–62.
5. Eisenhower chose to answer the Soviet threat asymmetrically—with a disruptive technology instead of a direct competition—because he believed that directly meeting the Soviet challenge in space (the approach President Kennedy later selected) would involve a very expensive arms race.
6. Anderson, Ice Diaries, 166–68. All of those top-secret messages were still on board Nautilus ten years after the trip under the pole, in a file locked outside the engineer officer’s bunk. I used to read them during the hours between fires and other casualties.
7. Ibid., 158. Ned Beach’s Magellan voyage in USS Triton would prove to be successful, but Eisenhower’s campaign to use this achievement to shape world opinion was crushed when an American U-2 was shot down well inside the Soviet Union and pilot Gary Powers failed to use his curare poison pin. At the next meeting of the presidents, the four-power Paris summit, Khrushchev trumped Eisenhower’s latest submarine triumph with accusations of a secret and illegal American overflight. Some of this insight was highlighted by Ingrid Beach, Ned’s spouse, during a discussion she and I had on 8 November 2013.
8. Eight days after the announcement, USS Skate, a newer submarine under the command of Jim Calvert, crossed under the North Pole, an event that received little attention outside the submarine force. On a technical note, the Navy would not begin to build submarines actually designed to go under the ice until nine years after both Nautilus and Skate had passed beneath the pole.
9. Anderson, Ice Diaries, 305.
10. Ibid. “There was another stop I wanted to make while I was in Washington. I intended to pay my respects to Admiral Hyman Rickover and brief him on the ship’s condition and what he had planned for her while we were under the ice. I suppose it was in my mind somewhere that I might gain his blessing for the probe. . . . To my surprise and with no pleasantries whatsoever, Rickover jutted out his jaw and, his eyes blazing, said angrily, ‘You’re going to take that ship up there and get into trouble and you are going to wreck this program’” (p. 83).
Chapter 6. Escaping Responsibility
1. Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, as quoted by Duncan, Rickover and the Nuclear Navy, 294.
2. Ibid., 63. “Rickover . . . was responsible for the initial sea trials for the propulsion plant. His practice, broken only twice because of serious illness, was to direct the trials in person.”
3. USS Thresher was lost on 10 April 1963. Thresher was the first class of nuclear submarines built by the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard under the laissez-faire concept then in vogue at the Bureau of Ships. All five previous classes of nuclear submarines, as well as the one-of-a-kind Nautilus and Seawolf, had been designed at Electric Boat in Groton (New London), Connecticut, a private shipyard operated much more in consonance with Rickover’s technical guidance.
4. This rivalry had come to a boil in 1949 with the Revolt of the Admirals, and the underlying issues had not simmered away. The aides to the admirals who had been figuratively beheaded as a result of the incident were now admirals themselves. Not surprisingly, the former aides had neither forgotten nor forgiven.
For those unfamiliar with the 1949 revolt, immediately after splitting off from the Army, the newly formed Air Force had convinced President Truman’s new secretary of defense, Louis A. Johnson, that the Air Force could win all future wars with strategic (primarily nuclear) bombing; thus, the Navy and Marine Corps were no longer necessary. Perhaps tempted by the promise that this method of fighting would be less expensive and result in fewer American casualties, Secretary Johnson agreed with these views and publicly verbalized them—the fight was on. This warfighting and philosophical crevice was temporarily bridged with words by the House Armed Services Committee and then sidetracked by the Korean War (in which no nuclear weapons were used). The basic argument boiled beneath the surface of Washington defense discussions for decades whenever money became limited. It also tended to arise whenever Air Force or Navy supporters were in a snit. There are even experts who maintain this fissure still exists. See Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals.
5. In January 1968 Seawolf ran aground during a training exercise. She was doing a high speed at the time and literally tore her stern planes and rudder from the ship. She was extraordinarily lucky to survive, as the subsequent court-martial inquiry uncovered. (I was the inquiry recorder.)
6. I use the word theoretically advisedly, as there was a limit to the depth at which unaided human escape was practical (the escape trunks as constructed were a vestige from diesel-submarine days, when most diesel operations, as well as the overwhelming preponderance of the accidents, took place in relatively shallow water). However, nuclear submarines spent their time in water so deep escape was impractical, and in fact our training had been harming more people than we could expect to save. In the eighties we finally discontinued escape training.
7. A fid is a tool that has been used for centuries on board ships to splice manila, and now nylon, lines (the naval term for the thick ropes used to lash the ship in place in port or next to another ship). The pointed end of the stretched, cone-shaped, smooth wood tool is forced (usually using a leather palm to protect the hand) between the strands of the line to open up the rope so that individual strands may be braided around the core of the line. Because it did not cut, a wooden fid was a useful tool when working with the rubber gaskets found in some valves as well as all watertight doors and hatches.
8. This event was reported in an early book about Admiral Rickover and Naval Reactors, and I suspect Admiral Rickover was the source. “On another trial a leak appeared to develop in a double-hatch leading to the deck. Rickover was convinced that the hatch was not leaking and that the water found between the hatches had resulted from an improper alignment of valves. When the commanding officer appeared reluctant to proceed, Rickover climbed into the space between the hatches with a flashlight while the ship submerged. Had there been a leak, there would have been no way to remove Rickover from the space between the hatches until the ship surfaced. Now more concerned than ever, the commanding officer took the ship down while Rickover made his point.” Hewlett and Duncan, Nuclear Navy: 1946–1962, 338. Despite the book title I presume the event actually happened in 1966.
Chapter 7. The Danger of Culture
1. Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, speech delivered at Columbia University, 1982; govleaders.org/rickover.htm.
2. Romig, Fatal Submarine Accidents. The seven ships were E-2, O-5, K-4, S-49, SS-365 (Cochino), SS-464 (Bass), and SS-486 (Pomondon).
3. The 1MC is a submarine communications system used to broadcast critical communications throughout the ship.
4. Admiral Rickover was not responsible for this inaction and inattention. He was limited by law to directing issues involving only the nuclear portion of the ship. As a consequence, in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, frustration with the lack of action from the nonnuclear portion of the Bureau of Ships was palpable at all levels in the submarine force. As a junior officer I could pick up the telephone, call the appropriate office in Naval Reactors—or even the admiral himself, if I felt like living dangerously—and receive an answer to a technical question within a few hours. However, if I had an important problem in a portion of the ship that did not fall under the responsibility of the Kindly Old Gentleman, I would have to write a letter via the seven levels of command to the nonnuclear portion of the bureau and send it off into the ether—and months or years later, still nothing would have happened.
Finally, late one evening in the early seventies, while cursing and reading through the many volumes of the Bureau of Ships manual, I discovered an interesting paragraph. While I could not myself make any alteration to the ship without the Bureau of Ships approval, in an emergency I could make “an alteration in lieu of a repair” to the ship. All I had to do to make this legal was to promptly notify the bureau via the chain of command.
I remember rereading the paragraph several times. The wording did not define the level of emergency. I also remember leaning back in my chair and looking at the list of current engineering problems taped above my desk. A rational person would surely accept that on Nautilus I was dealing with an emergency each and every day. In fact, at that very moment I had nearly thirty unresolved requests to the bureau for nonnuclear alterations, and not one bureaucrat had yet seen fit to even say boo in reply. The one that irritated me the most was a four-hundred-cycle electrical generator located underneath a lithium bromide air-conditioning drain. With great care and a lot of work, we could get the electrical machine working for only a couple of days before something happened and the motor was once again drenched with seawater. The remainder of the time, the electrical unit was either on fire or bagged in plastic, waiting to be removed and repaired.
The next day I declared an emergency and moved the generator forty feet aft to a dry location above the main shaft. I filled out, signed, and mailed away all the necessary paper, positive the silent bureau would never respond. Soon we had accomplished most of the other changes for which we had previously requested approval.
I will not pretend that no displeasure was expressed during the next annual review of my records, performed by five members of the staff for the Atlantic commander in chief (the same fleet commander who I believed had been less than diligent in answering my mail). And I won’t pretend we passed that inspection. However, ultimately, none of my people died—and the chain of command started paying attention to what I wanted to change.
5. For example, see Offley, Scorpion Down.
6. Kennedy, “Another Theory on Loss.” “CNO SCORPION Technical Advisory Group . . . 28 Oct 2009. . . . The USS SCORPION was lost because hydrogen produced by the . . . main storage battery exploded in two-stages one-half second apart. . . . This assessment is not the generic attribution of the loss of a submarine to a battery-explosion advanced as a default explanation in the absence of any more likely construct. . . . July 2008 reanalysis of the SCORPION ‘precursor’ acoustic signals. . . . The general battery damage is violent. The high velocity intrusion of pieces of the flash arrestor into both inside and outside surfaces of the retrieved plastisol cover attest to violence in the battery well. . . . The battery probably exploded at some time before flooding of the battery well occurred.”
Also see Polmar, “Re: ‘Loss of USS Scorpion,’” 141, which is a comment on both the truth that a battery explosion caused the loss and the reluctance of some to accept facts.
7. For years the submarine force endured the problem of the standard operating practices diesel submariners brought with them to nuclear ships. The practices may have been well suited for diesel boats operating in shallow waters, yet frequently, they were completely inappropriate for the nuclear-submarine environment. Unfortunately, tradition so often trumps innovation that it took nearly two decades for us to weed out what was inappropriate. One of the corrective effects of Rickover’s policy of drastically limiting the acceptance of diesel submariners directly into the nuclear ranks (and his accompanying preference for recruiting from the college ranks) was that fewer inappropriate diesel-boat processes needed to be uprooted.
8. Bentley, Thresher Disaster, 323.
9. As Adm. Frank Kelso, nuclear submariner and Chief of Naval Operations from 1990 to 1994, said about Admiral Rickover, “He was the most impersonal man I ever met. There isn’t anyone even close to him. So that’s hard to live with, but it probably meant he made pretty good decisions about people because he saw them all the same way. He didn’t see them differently. You don’t have favorites or non-favorites much.” Kelso, Reminiscences, interview 4, 181.
Also read Schratz, “Admiral Rickover,” for a contemporary view of how key individuals viewed Rickover’s personality: “Rickover . . . was resented as a loner, a cutthroat with an abrasive personality. . . . Used the exploding technology of nuclear power to project his own career. . . . The cold, unrelenting, ruthless workaholic, undermining the bureaucracy . . . organized to the smallest detail, intolerant of error, devoting everything including his personal life to a cause.” Dr. Schratz, who achieved command (of USS Pickerel [SS-524]) shortly after World War II, reviewed many books for the Naval Institute after he had retired from serving as a diesel submariner. Some suspect that because of his key position, Schratz had a biased but nevertheless critical role in determining how Rickover was viewed by the general readership of this respected and Navy-focused organization. Dr. Schratz died in 1993, seven years after Admiral Rickover passed.
Chapter 8. Future Shadows
1. Rickover, speech delivered to Naval Postgraduate School.
2. For example, he had not sought even the most minor leadership role during his years at the Naval Academy. According to Duncan (Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence, 16), “Although he had no desire to hold rank in the regiment, in the academic year 1920–21 Rickover was second petty officer, 4th Battalion, largely because the superintendent had decided that all midshipmen insofar as possible would receive some training in the handling of men.” Also see Blair, Atomic Submarine, for several interesting comments about how, as a young officer, Rickover would rather do practically anything than participate in a social function.
3. S1W was the designation of the first submarine training prototype. The “S” was for submarine and the “W” for the contractor who built the trainer. The manufacturer for this prototype reactor and engineering plant (as well as for USS Nautilus) was Westinghouse. The next major trainer built in Idaho would be A1W, with the “A” in this case standing for aircraft carrier, as this unit would be the prototype for USS Enterprise. The Enterprise reactor was also built by Westinghouse.
4. Observing evolutions involved monitoring an individual doing a routine action to ensure it was being done completely correctly and the individual knew why each particular step in the process existed.
5. If Admiral Rickover had previously approved an officer for his particular duty (a group which on a submarine normally included the commanding officer, executive officer, and engineer officer), these officers were not subsequently “inspected” by this team. Rather, we “certified” officers observed the examination as our work in preparing the ship’s crew was judged. The inspection was intended to evaluate whether the senior officers were adequately performing their primary role of training. Not evaluating those whom Rickover had already certified emphasized to everyone, including those on his staff, that Rickover was firmly in charge. No one got the impression that any mere staff member was capable to judge what the admiral had already approved. Of course, as will come to light when I discuss Operating Instruction 62 in chapter 11, this emphasis had its downsides.
Chapter 9. Knowing You, Knowing Me
1. Nixon, “Remarks at a Promotion Ceremony.”
2. Song lyrics to “Martha,” performed by Tom Waits. Copyright Elektra/Asylum Records, 1985.
3. At that time nuclear submarines had a little red phone directly connected to the White House switchboard. By simply picking up the receiver, you could be in personal conversation with the president of the United States. How cool!
4. W. Edwards Deming was a statistician who is often credited as the Father of Quality Control. He built the Japanese automobile business after World War II (by producing automobiles much more reliable than those produced in the United States) and then was hired to return home and teach his techniques in Detroit. This in turn resulted in a resurgence of the American automobile industry. Deming was a contemporary of Rickover’s.
5. Wegner interviewed me for nine hours before Rickover would permit me to serve as engineer on board USS Nautilus. It actually was a one-on-two interview as Wegner was asking reactor-plant technical and operational questions of two young lieutenants. When we were all three exhausted, Wegner turned to me.
“Do you want East or West Coast duty?”
Demonstrating remarkably good judgment, I replied, “I need to call my wife.”
Mr. Wegner, who on some occasions showed the impatience Rickover was famous for, said, “There is no time for that. You are now the engineer on Nautilus. Report to New London [Connecticut].”
He completed our session by turning to Bill Owens (who some years later would become the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff): “You go west. You are the new engineer on Seadragon.” (USS Seadragon [SSN-584] was another of the early submarines experiencing engineering difficulties during this period.)
Before I left that day, Rickover had given me his home telephone number (by which I could, if I dared, bypass the nine levels of Navy command between the two of us). With the insight the Nautilus’ challenges would provide me and my subsequent contact with Rickover, I grew to believe I understood him as well as anyone but Ruth and Eleonore.
6. Subsequently, the Marine Corps and Special Warfare have adopted a similar system using a more junior officer to conduct the interview.
Chapter 10. Wooing and Winning
1. Rockwell, Rickover Effect, 133.
2. For a period in the seventies, when it looked as if the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution might pass, Rickover interviewed and trained women. Only thirty-five of the necessary thirty-eight states had ratified the amendment by 1982, and the amendment ultimately expired. Subsequently, since Congress had specifically decreed that women could not serve on submarines, most of the female applicants served in nonsubmarine jobs involving controlling radioactivity exposure. A decade later, in 1994, Naval Reactors began assessing women for service in nuclear-powered surface ships, and in 2010 twenty women were recruited for nuclear-submarine training.
3. When I had my initial interview, it was relatively late one February afternoon, and the windows in Admiral Rickover’s office were already dark. The brightest light in the room was an old desk lamp. The accordion metal gooseneck bent in nearly a U held a shielded single bulb so the older man (he was already sixty-three) could clearly see the top page of the pile of papers he was reading. His red pen was circling items he had questions about. When he came to a stopping point, I realized the meager brown file on his desk was probably my personal record. I surmised it included my academic transcript, probably also my trio of Class As (Naval Academy slang for court-martials), each documenting a slightly different form of insubordination (I would have valiantly tried to explain if he had only cared to ask), as well as the three interviews I had completed with different individuals on his staff earlier in the day.
The admiral spoke, “You are about to graduate as the first literature major in the history of the Naval Academy—so write down the titles of the last ten books you have read.”
I quickly wrote down nine and handed him the list. They were a mixture of novels, plays, and contemporary international relations commentaries. I am certain the list contained only nine because I had been reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover the previous evening and could not excise Constance from my mind. I do and did have some minimal judgment, and thus that particular book did not make the paper I handed the admiral.
My single sheet of paper rested under the gooseneck lamp between his two small hands. He read without picking it up and then leaned back slightly from the only light in the rapidly darkening room. His high-pitched voice began, and for the next half hour, this admiral, this man who was the Father of Nuclear Power, responsible for managing a brand new engineering science, leisurely summarized the concepts each of my authors had avowed. In two cases Rickover chose to emphasize a point he believed the authors should have more clearly identified, and in one book that had captured his fancy, he paraphrased the author’s opening paragraph as well as a key passage.
By the time he reached the ninth line, the heat from the single lightbulb had begun to curl up the top and bottom of my list, and Rickover had snared another set of hands to help build a future only the admiral envisioned. So far, my interview had not yet required me to say a single word, much less recall an engineering principle. In fact, the admiral was still speaking: “I read a great deal. My wife summarizes those books when I do not have time. You will find that anyone can study literature and history by themselves, but,” and he looked down as his right hand closed on and crumpled my list, “you need a professor to help you when you are studying mathematics and engineering, or you will make mistakes.”
He looked up at me. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Get out of here.”
I followed my host (an officer about to go to a nuclear-submarine command who was forbidden to help you decide to grow up) to an outside office. Once there, I asked him what he recommended I do. He replied with a refrain I would later learn was one of the admiral’s favorites: “Do what you think is right.”
A couple of hours later, at a break in initial interviews, I returned to see the admiral and told him that for the last semester at the Naval Academy, I was going to substitute nuclear physics and the sixth year of college mathematics for the six credit hours I had previously set aside for literature and history. The admiral nodded but said nothing more. After the bus had returned to Annapolis that evening, I found I was on the list of students the admiral had accepted for nuclear power.
4. “He wanted straight, honest, and brief answers. . . . He did not want any ‘yes men’ around. He was tough on accepting personnel for training. . . . He was interested only in those men he believed would seriously concentrate on learning and could be relied upon to produce desired results.” Summitt, Tales of a Cold War Submariner, 198.
5. Rockwell, Rickover Effect, 237.
6. “I was spending the majority of each day at BuPers [the Bureau of Personnel] screening service records to identify candidates for Rickover to consider for nuclear-power training. I sought officers with excellent fitness reports who had performed well in college. Rickover did not seem to care what a person had studied in college as long as he had been a good, dedicated and serious student.
“. . . Selecting candidates based solely on the strength of their records was not enough. He wanted to interview each and every one to see what they were made of and if he thought they had what it took to successfully qualify. He saw no sense in wasting time and money on anyone he did not judge capable of being successful.” Summitt, Tales of a Cold War Submariner, 197, 198.
7. From Duncan, Reminiscences, 839: “The officer involved had been nuclear-qualified, he’d been a nuclear submarine engineer, he’d been executive officer in a nuclear submarine, and he had glowing fitness reports. I think on his record I’d have said ‘go,’ Admiral Rickover called him in for an interview and turned him down. So the submarine desk [it comprised diesel submariners] thought they had a case. Some officers said rather extravagant things like, ‘we’ll take this one to Congress,’ which frankly was a silly thing to think of thinking. But in any event I just use this because I was there. Admiral Smedberg [chief of naval personnel from 1960 to 1964 who did not hide his dislike of Rickover] and I decided maybe we’d better talk to this officer and so we sent for him. He hadn’t been in the room five minutes before Admiral Smedberg and I realized the fellow was practically in the middle of a nervous breakdown and couldn’t possibly be given command of a submarine. But the Bureau officers had not had access to him.
“Q: They had paper access?
“Admiral Duncan: They had paper access.”
Chapter 11. Innovation and Process
1. Rockwell, Rickover Effect, 85.
2. Dave Minton’s historical 1972 patrol on board USS Guardfish (SSN-612) was one of the notable exceptions.
3. The pressure to participate in Vietnam was strong. In 1966, in response to a Navy-wide appeal, I volunteered for command of a riverboat in the Mekong Delta, only to soon receive a letter from Admiral Rickover saying my services were required in the submarine force. At the time I had no need to know what our attack submarines were doing against the Soviet Union (at the time I was attached to a ballistic-missile submarine), so I naturally railed at the decision.
4. Just as continual improvement is the hallmark of any successful business. What Rickover was teaching would eventually be recognized as essentially the same Kaizen process Deming concurrently was introducing in Japan.
5. Make no mistake: the conflict between diesel and nuclear submariners was somewhat akin to a religious war, for nonnuclear submariners viewed nuclear submariners the way missionaries do the poor souls who fail to “see the light” and nuclear submariners of course felt the same about their nonnuclear counterparts. Just as in a religious war, there was not much room for compromise—or even unimpassioned discussion.
6. I had a pleasant back-and-forth tête-à-tête with Deming after one of his lectures in Chicago. He told me that organizations will always include a certain number of people who are out of control—that is, their performance is so unique as not to be explainable by any statistical analysis—and that these few individuals are essential to innovation—but necessarily need to be few.
7. The Maginot line was the famous series of fortifications France erected at the direction of the French minister of war. The line was considered impenetrable (when approached from Germany) to the tanks and artillery of the time. In response, the Germans outfitted their tanks with radios, enabling a coordination not heretofore seen in battle and permitting the Germans to use their new maneuverability to leave their center exposed. This released forces to outflank the Maginot line through the neutral countries Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The Germans then returned to the Maginot line from the French side after occupying Paris. The fortifications became another historical monument to the limitations of a static defense, the dangers of preparing for the last war, and the importance of militaries’ attending to technology innovations.
8. I suspected I knew how this change came to be. About five years earlier, a turn-to-turn failure of a large electrical component had occurred on board Nautilus. The accompanying severe electrical surge had shut down, or scrammed in Navy parlance, the reactor. In the blink of an eye, the only light on board was from the electrical fire. Technically, the shutdown should not have happened. The electrical system breakers, which Rickover had designed during his World War II stint at the Bureau of Ships, were supposed to selectively trip (meaning the breaker closest to the problem should open first and leave the rest of the electrical system unaffected).
Since I was supervising the engineering plant at the time and could picture in my mind all the meter readings in maneuvering as the lights went out, I knew the scram was not an operator error but instead an engineering flaw. After some effort, including a particularly dramatic test to replicate the problem, we found that during the previous overhaul Portsmouth Naval Shipyard had reversed the installation of key components in the breakers (our poor repairs had occurred five years after the shipyard had done a similar slipshod job on Thresher, so the new quality standards had not yet been fully assimilated there). As rebuilt, the breakers would not open properly when a problem occurred. In fact, the breakers wouldn’t open until they literally melted. The new O/I 62 would ensure a similar problem never remained undetected.
9. The Goat Locker is the living space for the senior enlisted personnel (E-7 to E-9) on board a submarine.
10. I always appreciated this symbolic action, particularly since it turned out we had inadvertently included two typos in the couple of dozen procedural pages, and he issued it with those two typos intact. He didn’t say, “This is from Dave, who cares about our sailors more than many of the rest of you,” but by issuing the change with the typos, the chief and I felt we were receiving his personal approbation.
11. Fitness report is the term for the (usually annual) assessment of naval-officer performance. There are always consequences—for both actions and inactions. Much of life is deciding which consequences you wish to share your bed with at night when you lie down to sleep.
Chapter 12. Elephant Instincts
1. Rickover, “Doing a Job.”
2. In addition to the ongoing Vietnam and Cold Wars (as well as the not-so-quiet conflict between the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force for air and nuclear supremacy within the U.S. military), the submarine portion of the Navy was also frothing with excitement. In March 1971 Admiral Zumwalt had appointed Vice Adm. Phil Beshany as the initial deputy chief of naval operations for submarines (for the first time placing submarines on a bureaucratic par with airplanes and surface ships in the Navy).
3. Soon afterward, because nuclear submarines were so often at sea for long periods and thus nuclear submarine officers did not have the opportunity to practice underways and landings nearly as much as their conventional counterparts, underways and landings began being routinely done with the assistance of tugs.
4. Mouza Coutelais-du-Roche Zumwalt, with whom my wife, Linda, became good friends.
5. McKee was executive officer of Nautilus in 1961, and it was definitely his handwriting in the Machinery History, but his signature on the page did not make sense. The work should have been overseen by the engineer or machinery division officer, not the executive officer. When I worked for him, our discussion of this subject was always interrupted by real-world events, so the details remain a mystery to me to this day. I only know the valves worked nicely when they were put back on the proper sides of the boat.
6. And the gentleman who did get this wonderful job as the first fellow subsequently was not selected for admiral. C’est la vie.
7. Like Rickover, Zumwalt had his own cover of Time, on December 21, 1970.
8. Many of the churches in Northern Virginia were segregated in the early seventies, and Mouza Zumwalt and my spouse would attend services together on Wednesday afternoons. They would sit with the black congregations in the back or in the lofts. Linda would come home each week crying about the injustice—this was my clue that Mouza had also gone home in tears and that the next day would see the Chief of Naval Operations redouble his efforts to eliminate segregation in the Navy.
9. See Zumwalt, On Watch, 85–95, for his recounting of his interview with Admiral Rickover for the nuclear-power program. For a completely different view of this same interview (and of Admiral Zumwalt), see Peet, Reminiscences, 163–68 (Zumwalt and Peet were interviewed together). Adm. Hal Shear (who was the Naval Reactors monitor for this particular interview) has comments on the event in his Reminiscences (159–60). I wasn’t there for the interview but was present for two years while Zumwalt was Chief of Naval Operations. Zumwalt detested and was determined to best Rickover.
10. I always felt that wearing civilian clothes was a wise policy for Rickover during his captain and early admiral days, for this prevented people from focusing on how junior Rickover was in the Navy hierarchy (and everyone in Washington reads and understands the relative rank of officers). In addition, not wearing a uniform meant Rickover did not have to compete with other officers with respect to how many rows of combat ribbons he was wearing (another archaic realm of knowledge well understood within the Washington beltway).
Of course, this leaves open to question the issue of how well Rickover adapted to changing circumstances. Once he had been promoted in early 1973 to four stars and had received his first Congressional Gold Medal and Distinguished Service Medal, he was officially one of the eight or nine senior naval officers in the world, and no other active officer had a Gold Medal. I have always thought that wearing a uniform after his promotion most likely would have subconsciously helped bolster his arguments. Yet Rickover did not change his pattern—he remained in mufti as he had since he was a captain in the Navy—and thus gave away a position of power in the constant conflict with his detractors.
11. Friedman, U.S. Submarines.
12. The Trident was a product of a 1968 study about the next U.S. missile system (essentially a competition between the Air Force’s recommendation for a Minuteman replacement and the Navy’s proposal for a Polaris follow-on).
13. The DD-963 class destroyer would be a great success, and the FFG-7 frigate less so. Both were needed to fill the surface-ship gap resulting from the large numbers of World War II ships retiring after extended service in Vietnam. The surface-ship gap produced fiscal tension in the Navy between the money devoted toward submarine- and surface-force construction, tension that was exacerbated by an underlying inequity in the ascent of different warfare specialties to the chief of naval operations billet. Zumwalt was the first Chief of Naval Operations in some time who was a surface officer (the aviators made up more than 50 percent of the officers and thus most often served as chiefs of naval operations during this period). So while Rickover had convinced the president and Congress to fund submarines and the previous chiefs of naval operations had funded aircraft, surface ships had generally been neglected.
14. I learned a great deal about ship design (the Naval Ships Sea Command personnel understood this subject much better than I) but ended up simply removing one of the two (exceptionally expensive) graving docks and some other facilitation from the Bangor, Washington, construction plan.
15. Zumwalt is the last Chief of Naval Operations to have lived in the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, NW, in Washington, D.C. When Admiral Zumwalt moved out, the house became the vice president’s residence.
16. Subsequently, all the nuclear shipyards experienced expensive problems learning how to weld the new HY-130 steel without cracking—the precise process the construction of the NR-2 was intended to debug. Whether the welding processes would have matured sufficiently while building the $300 million NR-2 to avoid these later costs was the issue under discussion at the time.
17. A great number of Admiral Zumwalt’s changes were successfully resisted, and many of those he established were countermanded within a few months of his retirement. This is not to say his cultural-change methods were inferior, for he had only four years in his leadership role and had a much larger group to influence, whereas Rickover had a small group and almost thirty years. Zumwalt, to his great credit, did irrevocably start the Navy down the path to face a new cultural future. From my personal observations of Admiral Zumwalt and Admiral Rickover, as well as an effort I participated in in the large public company Airbus (named EADS at the time), my conclusion is that achieving real cultural change takes something more than two years and less than ten. I feel confident in the bounds but not in any number more precisely refined.
18. In the early eighties two privately owned shipyards, Electric Boat and Newport News, had recently been bought by conglomerates (General Dynamics and Tenneco, respectively) and submitted claims to the Navy for large sums of money for cost overruns. Rickover did not feel these costs were justified and was active, publicly and emotionally, in recommending the requested sums not be paid. The story is complex, but it included fortunes for lobbyists, corporate secret meetings, congressional hearings, bribery, misconduct charges, and the fleeing of the Electric Boat CEO to Greece to avoid extradition. For the most comprehensive report, see Tyler, Running Critical. Also see Duncan, Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence, 240–56. For a less extensive discussion, see Polmar and Allen, Rickover, 488–513.
Because Rickover was fighting tooth and nail not to pay the companies money they needed to maintain their stock prices, both companies desperately wanted Rickover out of office. The Reagan administration, represented by Secretary John Lehman, was committed to building the Navy up to six hundred ships. Secretary Lehman believed he needed the support of these two shipyards. However, ushering Rickover out was neither easy nor fun.
After Rickover had been forced into retirement, Electric Boat made up a list of the favors they had provided Rickover over the past twenty years (rides to and from the airport, etc.; a list valued at more than $67,000). The list included innocuous items such as box lunches, as well as other items the admiral had probably used as gifts to legislators. The list might not have been too damaging, but unfortunately, it also contained diamond earrings for his second wife (see Flynn, “Navy Penalizes GD”). Rickover was censured by the Secretary of the Navy (the same day the chairman of General Dynamics, owner of Electric Boat, resigned). The admiral’s protests that “he had always acted in the best interest of the Navy and my country,” while undoubtedly true, seemed to ignore the level of propriety that he had demanded of others. Some wondered if the comments by the eighty-five-year-old man were a part of the failure of his short-term memory noted by Duncan (Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence, 293). Also see Riddell, Through My Periscope, 281–84.
Chapter 13. Genetics
1. Rickover, “Thoughts on Man’s Purpose.”
2. Because nuclear submarines were so important in the Cold War and the Soviet fleet was more numerous than the American, there was a constant need for submarines to be at sea. An attack submarine has only one crew, so whenever the ship is at sea, so is its crew. During the Cold War most nuclear-attack submarines were away from their home port (and their families) for nearly 80 percent of each year. As you may suspect, these extended absences were not a positive retention tool, which meant even more sea duty for those of us who remained in submarines.
This was the case for the entire Cold War. Consequently, some officers had been assigned to submarines for twenty years, with only two or three years not in an at-sea assignment (their surface and aviator peers had much less time away from their families). The amount of time submariners spent away from home was a matter of geography—the distance of each U.S. coast from the Soviet Union. In the Pacific, submarines deployed for over a year at a time (in the Atlantic, since the transit time was shorter, deployments were only six months). In general, attack-submarine life was not optimal for those men who had or wanted a family.
3. Frequently, in addition to the three months, one or more of the commanding officer candidates would require a week or two of special instruction before Rickover was satisfied.
4. After the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pate, who in addition to being a truly exceptional naval officer also had a PhD in nuclear physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, went to work at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations as part of the team working to restore public confidence in commercial nuclear power in the United States. He eventually succeeded Adm. Dennis Wilkinson as the organization’s president and CEO.
Chapter 14. Never Beat a Compass So True
1. Rickover, speech delivered to Naval Postgraduate School.
2. The lyrics are from the 1955 hit musical Damn Yankees (music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross), which took Broadway by storm the same year Nautilus was having an identical effect upon the world’s navies.
3. See Beshany, Reminiscences, interview 7, for written confirmation of my recollection.
4. Although this was a subject of loud discussion at the time, it should have been evident that the precautions necessary in work involving possibly radioactive reactor systems were introducing new costs. In addition, Rickover had taught his acolytes to insist on performing a job properly or doing it again. This had not previously been the standard in nonnuclear ship repairs.
5. In the process the Navy then used for budgeting money, the people responsible for carrier maintenance had only to earmark money for the costs they estimated. If they therefore “honestly” estimated that the Enterprise overhaul would cost no more than a conventional carrier overhaul, then they had to put aside only that lower estimate in planning dollars (rather than a more reasonable expected sum of double or triple that number). Following this approach would magically provide planning money sufficient to overhaul another one or two carriers or, since money is fungible, to plan to buy more airplanes. The lowest possible ship overhaul estimate made these estimators popular people, and everyone enjoys being liked.
6. Since at that time submarine crews remained with their ships during overhauls, whereas the majority of the surface-ship crews did not, Bremerton was largely a submarine town. The housing situation was so dire that two young married couples lived with Linda and me and our two sons for over a year before the couples could find and close on their own homes.
7. Among those not interested in informing Rickover of possible trouble were his own people whom the admiral had inserted in each shipyard. Rickover’s shipyard representatives were supposed to be alert to precisely this sort of problem and responsible for reporting it to him. This should amply demonstrate that all management systems depending on people will occasionally (or more often) either run amuck or, more likely, fail to recognize the precise situation they were installed to detect. Rickover taught that if one does not have at least three independent check systems for what is considered important, one does not have a system. However, often no number of independent checks will suffice to discover a problem people have previously never seen.
8. Overhaul tasks are controlled by a system subsequently known as the PERT (program evaluation and review technique) chart.
9. Reporting labor was also the method for charging work. Thus, if workers were erroneously reported to be working on ship A when they were actually working on ship B, then funds allocated by Congress (which provides a specific amount of money for each ship) were being subverted. In this case, funds were essentially being taken away from the submarine force and given under the table to the surface force or to aviation (an even more terrible offense in some Navy circles).
Chapter 15. Renaissance Man
1. Rickover, speech delivered to Naval Postgraduate School.
2. At the age of eighty-two, after having recovered from two heart attacks, Admiral Rickover found himself fighting the administration, industry, and the Navy regarding how to resolve his accusations of improper financial conduct by the Electric Boat shipyard (owned by General Dynamics) and the Newport News shipyard (then owned by Tenneco). The record indicates Rickover was correct, but nevertheless, he lost the argument (Tyler, Running Critical). Rickover was retired and died four years later. The companies were subsequently paid hundreds of millions of dollars most believe they did not deserve.
3. America’s land-based missile fields and bomber forces were both susceptible to surprise attack, as the still blue waters of Pearl Harbor and simply the date of 7 December 1941 remind us.
4. In the forty years of the Cold War, except by accident, which the principle of “small ship, big sea” minimized, the Soviets never located an American fleet ballistic-missile submarine.
5. At risk was the euphemism used to describe the ability to destroy the Soviet ballistic-missile submarine at least before it had launched its second missile, and possibly before the first one left its tube.
6. We would later discover that the Soviets had established a set of American traitors within the Navy (the Walker-Whitworth ring). The information the traitors disclosed led the Soviets to alter their concept of submarine operations. These changes made our detection and tracking much more difficult.
7. The healthy submarine-building rate was not the result of Pentagon requests but rather of an unusual alliance between the White House and key members of Congress who were carefully briefed on submarine exploits.
8. During this at-sea period several difficult decisions had to be made. Several times my engineer officer recommended that we turn back or head for the nearest port. If I had not been nuclear trained, I might not have had the self-confidence in this demanding situation to say, “No, I fully understand the risks involved and have balanced them against the operational gains that may be made, and I take full responsibility. This is what we will do to compensate for this additional risk.” I make the point because some other countries with nuclear submarines don’t require their commanding officers to be nuclear trained. As a result, critics of the U.S. system use these other countries as examples to recommend the United States change its practices. The critics propose permitting people with less technical training and knowledge to serve as nuclear-submarine commanding officers. I am positive my ship would have turned back empty-handed and failed in its mission if a nonnuc had been in command of Plunger.
9. Capt. Hank Chiles and his wife, Katy, were close friends. He was commanding officer of USS Gurnard in the other San Diego squadron. He had also made an exceptional Western Pacific deployment and been invited back to brief various commands in Washington. Chiles would later advance through the admiral ranks to the highest level and the role of commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Command.
10. In 1972 Minton led one of the most extraordinary missions ever conducted (commonly referred to as the “Saga of the 1972 Guardfish Patrol”). He alerted the president to an impending nuclear attack and then simultaneously trailed three Soviet submarines from Vladivostok through thousands of miles of dangerous waters to Vietnam. Minton single-handedly prevented these Soviet submarines from targeting our carriers with their nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. He was every submariner’s operational hero.
11. If you want another famous reference that participation or nonparticipation in sports was just something to talk about, read Wilkinson, Reminiscences. Wilkinson played tournament tennis throughout his Navy career; won many championships, including those of other services; and was a visible and proud athlete.
Chapter 16. Innovation and Change
1. Rickover, speech delivered to Naval Postgraduate School.
2. I believe this is both because the commentaries have been written by his critics (who saw no or negative value in Rickover’s methods) and because the remaining histories have been written by men who worked closely with the admiral. The latter viewed nearly everything Rickover did as one does the actions of family members, whom one loves even when they are at their worst. I know of no histories of Rickover written by the men actually responsible for the operation of his submarines at sea, where Rickover’s innovations changed the course of history. The men who were his critics, knowingly or not, were essentially siding with the opponents of the cultural changes Rickover viewed as critical to the technology shift from diesel to nuclear. The men on Rickover’s staff were engineers. They accurately reported his tactical moves but were not emotionally or physically involved in the cultural changeover. As a consequence, this book deliberately ignores many of the aspects of Rickover’s fascinating life in order to focus on what he contributed to the disciplines of management and leadership.
3. The surface nuclear fleet was decommissioned shortly after Rickover’s death, for while nuclear power provides advantages to aircraft carriers that the Navy has decided are worth the added investment, nuclear power does not transform any surface ship’s usefulness.
4. See Blair, Atomic Submarine, 46, for the following quote about Lieutenant (junior grade) Rickover’s time on board the battleship Nevada in 1925: “Captain Kempff called him on the ship’s telephone and urged that he attend a party staged by an admiral on a nearby flagship. . . . There was a great deal of crowding of the boats at the flagship’s gangway as Navy brass from the many ships in the harbor gathered to go up the glistening ladder, through the receiving line on the sparking quarterdeck and thence into the party below decks. At length Rickover’s boat worked its way alongside the ship, and as he climbed on the boat, he whispered into the coxswain’s ear. Seconds later, he scurried up the starboard ladder, zipped through the receiving line, firmly shook the Admiral’s hand, kept walking straight to the other side of the ship, clambered down the port ladder and stepped into the waiting motor launch . . . within half an hour, he was back aboard the Nevada at work in the electrical office.”
5. Especially telling to me is the fact that neither H. G. nor Ruth Masters Rickover realized that this passage from Blair (Atomic Submarine, 53) could be read as particularly damning for a man who wanted to be portrayed as a leader of men: “As time passed, however, conditions on the S-48 went from bad to worse for Rick. . . . Some of the men did not believe Rick was the sort of happy-go-lucky submarine officer they wanted to follow. He stubbornly refused to go ashore and associate with the other officers when the S-48 was on a cruise. He preferred to take lone exploration trips to the interiors of the foreign countries they visited, or spend his spare time studying more Naval War College correspondence courses.”
6. Of course, Rickover was an extraordinary leader by John Kotter’s definition (from his “What Leaders Really Do”): “Both [leaders and managers] are necessary for success in today’s business environment. Management is about coping with complexity. Its practices and procedures are, for the most part, responses to the emergence of large, complex organizations in the 20th century. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change.” But Kotter’s view was not the accepted view of leadership by Rickover’s admiral peers. It was not that there was or is a common accepted definition. The Navy saw no real need to establish one. The organization shared Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s pragmatism. They knew leadership when they saw it.
7. “[Rickover] reported aboard [Finch] early on the morning of July 17 [1937]. . . . Later that day Rickover relieved Lieutenant Joseph P. Rockwell, who, having served as commanding officer for less than a month, was hastily departing to become aide to the U.S. High Commissioner of the Philippines. . . . Rockwell had been put in command of the Finch at the specific direction of Admiral Yarnell, who . . . wanted to observe Rockwell close at hand before sending him on to the Philippines with his highest recommendations. . . . Rockwell considered her [Finch] the best of the five ships he commanded during his naval career.
“Evans relieved Rickover on October 5 [1937]. At the time the Finch was moored alongside the gunboat Isabel, at Shanghai. Evans, in turn, would command the Finch for only four months before he was relieved, carrying on the Finch’s tradition of changing commanding officers virtually with the seasons.
“Memories have been dimmed by more than four decades of time . . . but some officers on the Asiatic scene at the time vividly recall the Finch. Once, according to one officer, she was seen ‘steaming into port with a red flag flying from her mast and the crew had painted “madhouse” on her side, in red.’ . . . The words on her side were probably in ‘red lead: as the crew repainted the ship and made sport of their conditions under Rickover.’” Polmar and Allen, Rickover, 84–90.
8. He was in the Pacific for a few months, assigned as the commander of the ship repair facility on Okinawa in July 1945, but one month later the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the great war was over. Polmar and Allen, Rickover, 110.
9. The story of how he subsequently proceeded from a one-man show to the command of an empire is a fascinating tale (begin with Rockwell, Rickover Effect, and the two Duncan books, Rickover and the Nuclear Navy and Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence). In fact, the power struggle within the Navy bureaucracies and other government agencies is so remarkable it tends to distract from the much more fundamental question of what new and innovative management and leadership techniques Rickover introduced. I have deliberately chosen to ignore the rich tapestry of the distracting power struggle going on behind the Washington insiders’ curtain.
10. From Rickover’s 1954 speech to the Naval Postgraduate School:
“Some of the ideas I try to get across to the people who work for me are the following:
1. More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.
2. Sit down before fact with an open mind. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you learn nothing. Don’t push out figures when facts are going in the opposite direction.
3. Free discussion requires an atmosphere unembarrassed by any suggestion of authority or even respect. If a subordinate always agrees with his superior he is a useless part of the organization. In this connection there is a story of Admiral Sims when he was on duty in London in World War I. He called a conscientious hard-working officer in to him to explain why he was dissatisfied with the officer’s work. The officer blushed and stammered when Sims pointed out that in all the time they had been working together the officer had never once disagreed with Sims.
4. All men are by nature conservative but conservatism in the military profession is a source of danger to the country. One must be ready to change his line sharply and suddenly, with no concern for the prejudices and memories of what was yesterday. To rest upon formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.
5. Success teaches us nothing; only failure teaches.
6. Do not regard loyalty as a personal matter. A greater loyalty is one to the Navy or to the Country. When you know you are absolutely right, and when you are unable to do anything about it, complete military subordination to rules becomes a form of cowardice.
7. To doubt one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. Don’t defend past actions; what is right today may be wrong tomorrow. Don’t be consistent; consistency is the refuge of fools.
8. Thoughts arising from practical experience may be a bridle or a spur.
9. Optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous.
10. Avoid over-coordination. We have all observed months-long delays caused by an effort to bring all activities into complete agreement with a proposed policy or procedure. While the coordinating machinery is slowly grinding away, the original purpose is often lost. The essence of the proposals is being worn down as the persons most concerned impatiently await the decision. The process has been aptly called coordinating to death.
11. A system under which it takes three men to check what one is doing is not control; it is systematic strangulation.
12. A man, by working 24 hours a day, could multiply himself 3 times. To multiply him more than 3 times the only recourse is to train others to take over some of his work.”
11. His system had other subtle values. Those who brought up fraudulent challenges (i.e., their challenges were technically incorrect) to the system identified themselves as fools who needed more careful watching. At the same time, multiple challenges to the same processes, even if the challenges were flawed, indicated one of two issues. Either there was a misunderstanding of what the process was attempting to achieve, or there was a process flaw as yet uncovered. In any case, it indicated that a more flexible mind should reexamine the problem.
12. See, for example, Blair, Atomic Submarine, 23; and Hewlett and Duncan, Nuclear Navy, 24–48.
13. No edifice is ever built without a cultural change. I began my Navy life in diesel submarines (USS Trumpetfish), and I commanded the last squadron of diesel submarines in the American fleet. Just like the fabled skippers of World War II, I have drunk in the Clean Sweep Bar in Pearl Harbor and danced outside on the tiled floor under the palms and stars with my true love the evening before deploying for dangerous waters. In addition, that same woman and I built a room reserved for Medal of Honor winners and four-star admirals at the Submarine Sanctuary in Yokosuka, Japan, and there hosted Adm. Gene Fluckey, the World War II commanding officer who had been recognized with a Medal of Honor for his legendary patrols on board the diesel submarine USS Barb (SS-220), and his wife. I loved this culture that had to die.
14. This decision was contentious as critics maintain that one needs officers who are bold in battle. Rickover believed that since a submarine was a stealth weapon and often did its best work as a deterrent, having the ability to reliably start up the reactor plant and move a submarine under way and submerged (an act purely the product of a working engineering plant) not only provided deterrence but also was 80 percent of any other mission the submarine might assume. In addition, many senior submariners observed that, given the talent Rickover recruited, learning and demonstrating a command of tactics and warfighting were skills most nuclear-trained officers easily developed. I do not believe the argument was ever settled to the satisfaction of the critics. The secrecy of the most important submarine operations was a factor in keeping the discussion alive.
15. The stem is the thin round piece of steel projecting from the valve body that connects the operating handle to the mechanism interrupting the flow of water or steam.
16. The lubrication was designed to keep the graphite packing around the stem moist so that the valve could be operated (rotated) without excessive torque—but a nuclear submarine closes its hatches and stays submerged for months at a time, so the small leakage past the valve stems thoughtlessly added to the air-conditioning burden and slowly built up radioactivity (the tortuous trip by the rings of packing contained most of the radioactive particulate).
17. The argument over stopping of the release of radioactivity into the environment is only one of many conflicts Rickover had with the engineers in the Bureau of Ships (especially the admirals therein). In general, the admirals were not supportive of Rickover’s approaches to nuclear design issues, nor were they much interested in submarines.
Probably the nexus of Rickover’s almost visceral negative reaction to the word manager was the perceived tendency of the Bureau of Ships at this time to be more interested in “managing” than in doing. In fact, the relationship between the nuclear and nonnuclear segments of the bureau was typically bitter for many years—and that emotional reaction was reflected throughout the fleet.
18. The leaking-valve issue (the bureau’s reactor-support valves were designed to leak reactor coolant) was only one of many arguments. Rickover won this particular argument by defining the problem as one involving issues over which he had responsibility (reactor safety) and blandly declaring that no one could discharge radioactivity overboard. As a result, each commanding officer clamored for the valves originally placed in their submarine by the Bureau of Ships to be removed and replaced. Otherwise, to comply with Admiral Rickover’s dictum, each ship had to construct elaborate plastic catch basins around each valve, filled with the equivalent of very absorbent paper towels.
19. We quickly learned that radioactive fluids could be gathered, contained, combined with other compounds to stabilize the mixture, and then shipped to controlled sites for burial.
20. For simply one example, see a conversation in 1947 between Captain Rickover and Ray Dick, a metallurgical engineer from Ohio State who was with Rickover in Oak Ridge and afterward, about approving the building of a nuclear submarine (Rockwell, Rickover Effect, 56):
“Do we have any leads through his [the Secretary of the Navy] or any other staff types that could get us an audience?” asked Dick.
“Naw, that’s not going to do it. It’s got to be somebody who can speak authoritatively on ships, on what kind of ships a fighting Navy needs.” (Rickover)
“That’s what the Bureau of Ships is supposed to tell him.” (Dick)
“Oh, hell. No line officer thinks the bureau knows what it needs. When was the last time you heard a seagoing line officer listening with rapt attention to some character from BuShips?” (Rickover)
“The only real authority on the needs of the fleet is the chief of naval operations, Captain. The rest of the guys are just an amen chorus.” (Rickover)
21. Rickover kept extraordinary people in the nuclear-submarine force with leadership. While nuclear-trained people received bonuses as well as extra pay for being in submarines, the civilian commercial market was offering submariners salaries double or triple the total Navy stipend. One of Rickover’s key management methods was to publicly recognize his subordinates’ talents. As an observer said at the time, “In his treatment of his men Rickover draws no lines of rank. The lowest of his subordinates can and does argue heatedly with him. Rickover delegates large amounts of responsibility and authority to his subordinates, thus giving them the satisfaction of conceiving and implementing ideas. This is rare in the Navy or in private industry, where brainworkers’ children are customarily ripped untimely from them by the administrators. It is, indeed, the only coin sufficient to pay Rickover’s men.” (Wallace, “Deluge of Honors,” 116.)
22. For example, the self-scuttling of the Yankee-class (K-219) submarine off Bermuda on 6 October 1986 after a fire in a missile tube.
23. As substantiation, let me provide you two examples of well-known failures caused by “heroes” drawn from the same American melting pot that provides submarine officer candidates. Culture failures overrode talent in the two National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) flight disasters (1986 and 2003) and in the U.S. Air Force in 2008, when the service lost control of its nuclear weapons and the secretary of defense consequently fired its top political appointee and senior general.
Chapter 17. A Culture of Adaptation
1. Rickover, speech delivered to Naval Postgraduate School.
2. The last of the fleet boats, the B-girls (Barbel, Blueback, and Bonefish), were retired in 1990, 1990, and 1988, respectively, but the experimental submarine USS Dolphin (AGSS-555) was not decommissioned until 2007. This is not to say that the idea of diesel submarines has ever died for the United States, as whenever shipyards lobby for work or politicians look for increased hometown employment, diesel-like proposals inevitably rise.
3. And the surface ship–submarine capability gap was increasing. Under Rickover’s system of process control, nuclear-submarine material standards had continuously ratcheted upward every year, significantly outpacing the standards accepted elsewhere.
4. Women pilots were landing on carriers in the Navy’s high-performance airplanes. Many curmudgeons believed that women had no place in the Navy. This was especially evident within the retired ranks but also existed among active-duty personnel (surreptitiously aided and abetted by several key elected representatives in Congress). Change in the rest of the Navy had become inevitable after women had been accessed to seagoing positions while Admiral Zumwalt was Chief of Naval Operations. But by law there continued to be no females serving on board submarines.
5. I am avoiding discussing the nuclear-trained officers assigned to surface ships, as after we had been trained together, I did not subsequently serve nor mature with this group. As a consequence, I did not know this community nearly as well as I did the submarine officers.
6. After two decades of annual selection boards called to correct this “error,” one begins to assume there is a powerful cultural reason this oversight has not been addressed by these closed-to-outsiders promotion boards.
7. No, his former staff at Naval Reactors was not thrilled. This is not a fairy tale in which everyone is always happy. In fact, my briefing to the Naval Reactors staff that day in that small hot room was an unpleasant occasion. However, I believe I have as much insight as anyone into how Rickover would have viewed this change. The decision was consistent with the culture he had taught us—I chose to believe he would have been pleased.
8. Or so reported by Sontag and Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff.
9. A submarine is complicated to build, and the required skills are perishable. Several studies showed that it was important to keep the shipyard technical skills refreshed for the future when America again needed a large submarine force to control a “peer competitor.”
10. The Navy’s submarine component was labeled OP-02 in those days. The senior billet at this key juncture was held by the imaginative Vice Adm. Dan Cooper.
11. Dan Cooper had commissioned me to conduct this study, and I had done so, in secret, with five of the submarine force’s brightest commanding officers, all of whom would later be promoted to admiral, as well as a brilliant senior analyst civilian from the Center for Naval Analysis.
12. Demonstrating his unusual acumen and breadth, a decade later the Honorable Dan Cooper served President G. W. Bush as the undersecretary for benefits in the Department of Veterans Affairs.
13. “In 1953 Rickover told BuPers [the Bureau of Personnel] that he wanted another woman officer, and they sent over Rebecca A. Lloyd, a recreation major from North Carolina with a master’s degree in education (personnel administration) from New York University. Rickover hired her and, to her amazement, told her that she was going to be one of the eggheads. He asked if she had taken chemistry, and she said no, but she had taken a physics course once. He assigned her a self-study program in chemistry and told her he was putting her in charge of secondary system chemistry and heat exchangers. He told her new boss, Jim Cochran, that he’d better not see her at a typewriter.
“Most of us figured he had probably done this to humiliate Cochran because he was presumably unhappy with how chemistry was being handled. But Becky Lloyd said that she took Rickover at this word; he just wanted to get a woman into the technical work, and thought she could do it. ‘He seemed to be impressed with the fact that I had worked my way through college, including the master’s degree, without any help from anyone,’ she said recently. ‘He valued hard work and motivation a lot more than credentials. That experience really changed my life. I learned that I could do things I would never even have considered trying before.’ Nearly twenty years passed before women began graduating in significant numbers from engineering schools.” (Rockwell, Rickover Effect, 84.)
Ms. Lloyd went on to success in the business world, as noted in Gilliam, “UNCG to Award,” which announced that she was receiving an honorary degree for helping fund the honors college: “Rebecca A. Lloyd, a Greensboro native who now lives in San Diego. A 1950 graduate of Woman’s College (now UNCG); Lloyd spent 22 years in the U.S. Navy. Her service included four years working at the Naval Reactors Branch, the project that was headed by Adm. Hyman Rickover and ultimately produced the nuclear navy. . . . From 1972 to 1999, she was president of her own real estate firm, Rebecca Lloyd Inc. . . . Her $4 million gift to UNCG in 2006 is providing an endowment to fund the Lloyd International Honors College, named in honor of her parents, Aubrey P. and Georgia Garrison Lloyd.”
14. Jennie became one of the first two women to qualify in submarines, receiving her gold dolphins on 5 December 2012 in Kitsap-Bangor, Washington, as a member of the USS Maine (SSBN-741) Blue Crew. (Friedrich, “Navy Pins 1st.”)
Afterword: Memorial Day
1. Rickover, “Thoughts on Man’s Purpose.”
2. As mentioned previously, the Soviets were able to read our submarine correspondence as a result of the Walker-Whitworth spy ring, which had sold submarine communication code lists to the Soviet Union. This quotation was provided to me by Vice Adm. J. D. Williams, who also gave me a copy of the chart and who was present that day in his role as commander, Sixth Fleet.
3. Kennan, “Sources of Soviet Conduct.” This theory famously argued that “the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. . . . Russia will remain economically a vulnerable, and in a certain sense an impotent, nation, capable of exporting its enthusiasms and of radiating the strange charm of its primitive political vitality but unable to back up those articles of export by the real evidences of material power and prosperity. . . . But the possibility remains (and in the opinion of this writer it is a strong one) that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced.”