a lantern in a machine shop. While in high school, Rickover worked the night shift, from 3:00 to 11:00, at the Western Union telegraph agency. A picture from the 1916 Republican convention in Chicago shows him standing stiffly at attention in his Western Union uniform as he would later stand in his naval uniform. Through a lucky fluke, he won a nomination to the Naval Academy at Annapolis.5
Anxious, fearful of failure, and certainly no athlete—and subject to extra hazing because he was Jewish—Rickover spent every moment he could at the academy studying. He was, as he later put it, “trying to get by, stay alive.” At night when the library closed, he even crammed himself into an unused shower stall to get in extra time with his books. Rickover may not have been the most popular midshipman in his class, but he graduated with distinction. However, as a result of a naval disarmament treaty, it looked as though there would be few career berths in the navy for the Annapolis graduates, including Rickover. Deeply disappointed, he secured an entry-level engineering job at Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison, the linchpin of Samuel Insull’s empire. But then, a naval posting became available. Rickover subsequently served on two submarines—one, the S-48, of such faulty, sooty, dangerous and repellent engineering as to sear into Rickover’s soul a fanaticism about the absolute importance of high engineering standards. This conviction would infuse everything he did thereafter.6
During World War II, Rickover headed the Electrical Section in the Bureau of Ships. There he honed his zealotry for excellence and an obsession with precision. “An organizer & leader of outstanding ability,” said his final fitness report, and “one of the country’s foremost engineers.” What this report did not include was his driving, domineering, irascible, abrasive, sometimes hypersensitive, extremely confident personality. This was the flip side of his single-minded focus on mission and extraordinarily demanding nature. This combination of qualities would make some forever loyal to him and others, bitter enemies—later including much of the senior Navy brass. But, he would say, “my job was not to work within the system. My job was to get things done and make this country strong.”
“I have the charisma of a chipmunk,” Rickover, late in life, told newscaster Diane Sawyer. He added, “I never have thought I was smart. I thought the people I dealt with . . . were dumb, including you.” Sawyer quickly replied, “To be called dumb by you is to be in very good company.”7
Rickover had a distinctive gift that made him, in the eyes of many, the best engineer in the Navy. “I believe I have a unique characteristic—I can visualize machines operating right in my mind,” he once explained. “I do not think there has been anyone in the U.S. Navy who has had as much engineering experience as I have had.”8
THE NUCLEAR NAVY
After World War II, despite the dislike that many had for him, Rickover’s name was added at the last minute to the roster of naval officers dispatched to the secret atomic research city at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Their mission was to learn about the mysteries of nuclear energy and what role it might have if harnessed in peaceful power generation.
Rickover quickly recognized the strategic potential of a nuclear navy and thereafter committed himself to realizing it. In particular, he understood that nuclear submarines could offer a range and capability that far exceeded that of the diesel-fueled submarines of World War II. By so doing, nuclear power offered an extraordinary solution to an intractable problem that bedeviled contemporary submarines—the constraints of conventional batteries, which limited the amount of time that submarines could spend at full speed underwater. By contrast, it was thought, nuclear subs should be able to cruise underwater at full speed for hours, days, or even months.
Rickover was given double duty; he was put in charge of the nuclear propulsion programs for both the navy and for the new Atomic Energy Commission. This double posting helped him to overcome the formidable engineering and bureaucratic obstacles to realizing the nuclear submarine. It was said that he would write letters to himself and then answer them, ensuring instant sign-off from both the navy and the AEC. The urgency of the program increased in 1949 with the first Soviet atomic bomb test.
It was one thing to build an atomic bomb. It was quite another to harness a controlled chain reaction of fission to generate power. So much had to be invented and developed from scratch—the technolog y, the