Beeping balls, bent periscopes and the care and feeding of fire breathing dragons.
Ike was pissed. Those sneaky Russians shot a ball into space and it was beeping. The world was watching to see how America would respond to its once ally beating them to the beeping-ball-in-space-race. Sputnik was not simply about beaming an obnoxious sound down onto its foes, it was about who would take the lead into the space race and most importantly, perfect the science of rockets and missiles so that, if needed, one could rain down a lot more than just a beeping radio signal.
Ike was right to be pissed. America’s own efforts at a beeping ball in space dominance were struggling. The program was failing to launch in nearly every respect. More than that, the President had lost control of the information space as much as he was losing control of actual space. His subordinates were communicating with their own messages and timing, making it hard for Ike to shape the narrative. He was mad.
Rickover wanted to be mad. He said as much. “You have 10 seconds to make me mad,” he said directly to the young officer sitting across the desk. “9……8……7…..”. The officer instinctively stood up and, with the full length of his arm, bulldozed the contents of Rickover’s desk onto the ground leaving the desktop clean.
“It worked.” Rickover said through gritted teeth, “you’ve got the job.”
Rickover didn’t just want to put a nuclear reactor in a submarine; he wanted to change the culture of the officers running those reactors. To do that, he’d have to change the culture of the officer corps in those subs. To do that he’d need to change the education culture of the Navy. To do that he would need to change the Navy itself from the inside out. And that’s exactly what he set out to do.
Rickover built schools. He collaborated with MIT in building whole programs based on nuclear engineering. He wrote the curriculum and collaborated with the experts in each subject to lend their expertise to Rickover’s students. But schools and classes are not enough to build the Nuclear Navy. To build the nuclear Navy you have to control over who gets in and who does not. For that reason, every officer wanting to serve in Rickover’s nuclear Navy had to get past the old admiral.
Telling a young officer to make him mad is tame by Rickover standards. There are tales of the admiral making candidates sit in a closet for hours after answering a question wrong. The admiral insisted one candidate postpone his wedding and call his finance that very moment to break the news to her. Sometimes, the Admiral would excuse himself to the bathroom adjacent to his office then exit through the bathroom’s second door and go home- leaving the candidate in the office for hours wondering what to do. As infamous as anything, was Rickover’s interview chair. The admiral himself sawed a few inches off the front legs of the chair so the interviewee could never get comfortable. That was the point. Rick wanted to know how you performed when you are uncomfortable.
Rickover’s interview tactics won him some friends and more than a few enemies. It was where the admiral first encountered a young officer named Elmo Zumwalt who would later become the Chief of Naval Operations and would go on to describe Rickover as “the biggest enemy to the Navy after the Russians and the Air Force.” It would seem Zumwalt couldn’t get comfortable while meeting with Rickover and stayed that way the rest of his career.
For all its ridiculousness, there was a method to the old man’s madness. He was intent on seeing how a person responded to pressure. He created unexpected scenarios because he wanted to know what a person would do when they had to go off the script. A young Jimmy Carter recalled the admiral asking him if he had done his best in college. Carter said the question sat with him for many years and was a major point of introspection. “No,” Carter told the admiral, “I did not”.
There was an effort to pull back Rickover’s antics. It just looked bad to have these young people- the good grease of the Navy- highly polished from their years in Annapolis now locked in a closet because they don’t know enough about Hafnium. But when the standards were relaxed, something disturbing happened. There was a noticeable and disturbing spike in suicides among the nuclear engineering officer corps. Finessing a controlled nuclear explosion hundreds of feet under the water in a metal tube with 100 other souls onboard exerts a certain kind of stress. The Admiral knew and respected that. He was looking for the kinds of people who could withstand that kind of pressure.
In the earliest years of the nuclear sub force, the Admiral needed not only the minds and temperament capable of harnessing nuclear energy; he needed commanding officers with the kind of poise and polish the Navy loves. He needed people who lead with that rare blend of bravery, compassion, ferocity and warmness that build a crew culture to follow the skipper anywhere and do anything. Someone who cuts the figure of a brave Navy officer- standing straight and tall in a perfectly pressed uniform. So, basically, someone completely opposite of Rickover.
Rick knew that he could not change an entrenched Navy culture by constantly fighting against it. He needed to infiltrate the culture by embracing what the Navy embraces and that meant finding commanding officers that have the brains and gall of sitting atop a reactor while having the smile and shine to attract the glowing admiration of the crew and command. He needed Andy Anderson.
He really could not have picked anyone better. William Anderson was a distinguished WWII submariner and a recipient of the bronze star. He was summoned to meet with Rickover in Washington and (of course) was left waiting for hours, as the Admiral’s office kept shifting the time of the interview. Some artful choreography through the admiral’s protocol and Anderson found himself in Rickover’s Naval Reactors Branch with no idea what his job was. He took it upon himself to study everything he could about nuclear propulsion but still found it odd that his job remained undefined. There were a few others in the same situation. Accomplished submarine officers somehow marooned with Rickover and having no clear definition of what their job was. It wasn’t until some time later that Anderson realized what these seemingly aimless officers were there for. They were commanding officers in waiting.
Among the group, the very revered Captain Dennis Wilkinson would be the first CO of a nuclear submarine, The USS Nautilus. Wilkinson spent three years on Nautilus developing the protocols and procedures of operating a nuclear submarine. In 1957, he would relinquish command of Nautilus to Anderson. These early commanders were the very picture of great Naval Officers. They were brilliant in their thinking, thoughtful in their decisions and decisive in their actions. All of them were the model of command and congeniality that Rickover was not- precisely why the admiral selected them. They could and would be extensions of his philosophies into the Navy because they could go where he could not. Anderson was about to prove as much and then some.
Here is about as good a place as any to talk about who Wilkinson and Anderson were beyond the polished medals and service dress. Both of these men were seasoned WWII submarine commanders. Their service in the Great War was perilous. Sub commanders of that era are renowned for their courage, boldness and self-assurance. Rickover was hesitant to tap these lions of war for his project more suited for an engineer. But in the end, the submarines are warships and Rickover needed a warship commander who could both finesse and deploy the destructive power of the atom.
Upon taking command of Nautilus, Anderson was determined to make his mark. The whole world wanted an up close view of Nautilus and the sub had a near endless dance card of demonstrations, VIP tours and exercises. Naval commanders all wanted to take a shot at challenging the sub that, unlike their wartime experiences, would not have to surface. Nautilus was like nothing they had ever encountered. It could invisibly and silently hunt with awesome and terrifying ability.
Still- Nautilus was capable of more. Much more. And that was Anderson’s idea. Russian naval strategy (and military strategy, for that matter) had a level of expectation on inaccessibility and advanced warning of seaborne attack. A ship or sub would have to navigate all around the place to get into position to pop off a missile and by that time the aggressing ship would likely be spotted. That is, unless that sub can creep out from under the polar ice cap, completely submerged, and pop up off the Russian coast to deliver it’s payload with nobody the wiser until it was too late to do anything about it.
Rickover did not want Anderson taking Nautilus under the ice. He thought there were simply too many risks for too little gain. A malfunction under the ice would risk the crew and possibly turn public sentiment against the nuclear Navy. Rickover and Anderson also had different views of the Nautilus. In his books, Anderson speaks lovingly and generously about Nautilus- praising it’s technical and design superiority. While pleased with his design, Rickover was not nearly as fawning of what was in the sub. There are at least a few rumors that Rickover has bought some tanks for Nautilus from a scrap yard in New Jersey. Another rumor is that a motor on Nautilus was salvaged from a ship that had been underwater for a year. While there’s few doubts whether Rickover would let a non-seaworthy ship sail, Rickover himself had doubts about allowing this very new and very untested design go where assistance would be hard to come by.
With some irony, and in complete Rickover fashion, Anderson let word of his ambitions leak upwards through not only naval command but also into the political realm. Ike took the bait. The Russians could circle the globe and beep all they want. We were going to show the world our new technology could take American might anywhere and right up to the advisories front doorstep.
Rick was pissed. One of his pet fire-breathing dragons had decided to fly off on it’s own way. Yet, Anderson executed exactly as he was taught. It was a performance that would harken back to Rickover’s own rank jumping as he took his dream of Nuclear propulsion directly to Nimitz. Admiral Rickover sought to cultivate officers for the Nuclear Navy that were bold, unrelenting and would not back down. In Anderson, he got what he wanted whether he wanted the rest of it or not.
Anderson’s journey beneath the ice was not all smooth sailing. He was turned back by narrow passages on his first attempt. He bent and flooded the periscope at one point. He struggled with and eventually overcame navigational issues (when your at the North pole, every direction is South). Navigating the internal bureaucracy of the Navy may have been even more difficult. Like Rickover, Anderson’s dream attracted no shortage of detractors- seething with envy and indignation. Just before Anderson sailed, he called on Rickover. The Admiral was not pleased. But at the conclusion of the meeting, the Admiral handed Anderson a slip of paper. On it was written the full tolerances of the reactor plant- operation beyond what was in the ship’s manual. Anderson may have chose to go out on his own to win the coveted mission but Rickover was determined that the sub captain would not be on his own under the ice.
When the USS Nautilus surfaced on the other side of the North Pole, Ike could be heard cheering from across the pacific. The President had stayed in complete contact and control of the mission and had the full might of the media machine ready to showcase this American marvel. It would be unsurprising if Ike had ordered the news to be translated into Russian in advance of the announcement.
Anderson was whisked away from the sub and hastily flown to Washington for a news conference and other assorted melee. The celebration in Washington was tremendous, but missing from the fanfare was the little man who dreamed of the power to carry Nautilus under the ice. Anderson noticed Rickover was missing and he halted his drumbeat of meetings and briefings to pay his respect to his old boss. Rickover was touched by the gesture. The young officer he believed in to steward the embodiment of the admiral’s long held dream showed the kind of character and reverence that Rickover had counted on when the selecting Anderson years before.
Ike caught wind of Rickover being snubbed during the Nautilus announcement. As amends, the President asked Rickover to represent him in the parade that would be held in New York to celebrate the feat. Images of the day show Admiral Rickover smiling and looking awkward in his dress uniform. The crowd was elated with the strange but exciting technology that signaled an edge in the era of sea warfare to come. The air was full of confetti and ticker tape.
And sputnik circled overhead- it’s beeping silenced months before as the satellite had degraded in orbit. But it was still up there somewhere.
Hardly anyone noticed.
No Heroes In Peacetime is a new book that looks at the management practices of Admiral Hyman Rickover, his efforts that gave rise to the nuclear Navy and how many of his principles and practices can and should be applied to modern organizational management. Portions of the book will be periodically released over social media and the full book should be ready sometime in 2021.