"They Broke the Mold"

By MICHAEL DUFFY

Flouting the rules is no way to get ahead in an institution steeped in tradition. But Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who died last week at his home near Washington at the age of 86, often treated the U.S. Navy -- and its rules -- with contempt. He ignored orders he did not like, wore his uniform sparingly and preferred bluntness to civility. Still, he survived in the service for more than 63 years, longer than any other officer in U.S. naval history. Adjectives -- brilliant, egotistic, rude, unorthodox -- clung to Rickover like barnacles to boats. Yet it was the diminutive (5 ft. 5 in.) Rickover who first grasped the potential of nuclear power at sea and who tugged and cajoled a reluctant Navy to develop and install reactors in submarines. Today "the silent service" fostered by Rickover is the foundation of U.S. sea power, and missile-launching subs make up the least vulnerable leg of the U.S. strategic triad.

Born to Jewish parents north of Warsaw, Rickover moved from Poland to the U.S. at age four. While working as a Western Union messenger boy in Chicago, he won an appointment to Annapolis in 1918. At the Naval Academy, he stuck to his studies, shunned sports and dating, and graduated in the top fifth of his class. After more than 20 years as an electrical engineer, the restless Rickover in 1946 was posted to Oak Ridge, Tenn., where research was under way % on atomic reactors. Rickover believed the Navy could extend its reach and free itself of the need to refuel ships if nuclear power plants could be squeezed into submarines' tiny hulls. Rickover's work eventually spawned not only the first nuclear-powered sub, the Nautilus, launched in January 1955, but the first civilian nuclear power reactor, at Shippingport, Pa. Today more than 150 of 554 U.S. naval vessels steam under nuclear power; American submarines can stay submerged for months and traverse the waters beneath the polar ice caps.

The lure of the new nuclear technology and its strategic importance appealed to many young naval officers. But winning a spot in Rickover's Navy was not easy: prospective submariners often had to sit before the old curmudgeon on an unbalanced chair whose front legs had been sawed off by several inches. The admiral's mean streak was legendary. He had no tolerance for defects in men or their work, and he sacked many an officer for being "stupid." Others, like a young ensign named Jimmy Carter, went on to better things.

But the man who was clairvoyant on the role of nuclear power proved less than visionary in other areas. Behaving like an ordinary bureaucrat, Rickover routinely demanded that a disproportionate share of Navy dollars go to his nuclear ship programs. Some naval analysts also say that Rickover's single- minded belief in large pressurized-water reactors drove the Navy to build bigger, if not necessarily better, submarines while overlooking possible alternatives in propulsion design. Soviet submarines can now dive deeper and go faster, and are narrowing U.S. advantages like quietness. Notes Norman Polmar, a Rickover biographer: "In the '50s, Rickover was a technical visionary. By the '60s, he was reactionary."

Nonetheless, Rickover's work earned him great influence in Congress, which the admiral used to his maximum advantage. After the Navy denied Captain Rickover a rear admiral's stripes in 1952, a Senate committee in 1953 balked at promoting 39 other captains until he was included. Facing mandatory retirement in 1964, he kept putting it off by successfully appealing to Presidents every two years until 1982. Even then, he resigned only against his will. Though he earned a reputation for bullying fat-cat defense contractors, Rickover was censured by Navy Secretary John Lehman in 1985 for accepting $68,703 in gifts and trinkets from General Dynamics Corp.

In the twilight of his career, Rickover was ambivalent about the machines he had helped create. In his final appearance before Congress, in 1982, Rickover described his nuclear-powered ships as "a necessary evil" to maintain peace but said he would "sink them all" if he could. "I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it's important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it,"he said.

Secretary Lehman last week paid mixed homage to the prickly old salt by noting, "Admiral Rickover was Admiral Rickover . . . They broke the mold." Hyman Rickover was a man marred by an excess of arrogance, but his rude genius nevertheless proved to be one of the Navy's greatest assets at the dawn of the Atomic Age.

With reporting by Bruce van Voorst/Washington