Admiral Hyman Rickover (Jewish Lives) by Marc Wortman

Author:Marc Wortman [Wortman, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-02-15T08:00:00+00:00

9

Education and Freedom

FOLLOWING THE Nautilus polar-transit festivities and the Navy’s public flogging, reverence for Rickover outside the Navy overflowed. Politicians solicited his views on nuclear technology and broader naval questions. His highly anticipated annual Atomic Energy and Armed Services committee briefings, which came to be known as “Rickover lectures,” ranged far and wide; he covered naval, governmental, industrial, and civilian affairs, whatever was on his and the committee members’ minds. Congress and the nation also solicited his thoughts on the state of health care, religion, the family, schools, and education, even the books he recommended. His constant reading and the scores of notebooks he filled over the decades with thoughts and quotes provided the basis for dazzling displays of historical, philosophical, and cultural knowledge. Rickover’s unique brand of insult humor, in particular his flagrant goring of his fellow admirals and Defense Department bureaucrats, his fiery contempt for inept, profiteering contractors, and his fierce defense of taxpayers against government waste enthralled Congress and won him fans everywhere outside the Pentagon and corporate offices. His frequent—equally abrasive—public talks to university and civic groups, engineering associations, and other professional organizations and his published articles kept him in the headlines. He rarely gave interviews yet was as much a public figure as any statesman of the day. It was no surprise when, in July 1959, Rickover’s lack of restraint again made national headlines, this time for his freewheeling intrusion into Cold War diplomacy.

As part of a post-Stalin thaw in Soviet-US relations, the two nations set up a highly anticipated goodwill exchange of trade fairs and top official visits. In early July, the first deputy premier of the Soviet Union, Frol Kozlov, at the time the Kremlin’s second-most-powerful official, considered a likely successor to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, visited various sites in the United States. Toward the end of his tour, Kozlov stopped at the Shippingport atomic power plant, where he met Rickover. With a scrum of reporters surrounding them, even Rickover feared he might have overstepped a line when he patted Kozlov’s portly stomach and remarked that he looked like the stereotype of a capitalist, while he, the wiry admiral, had the appearance, Rickover said, of a “hardworking man.” The vice premier laughed it off. In the spirit of the moment, Kozlov then suggested that an exchange of nuclear experts might improve their nations’ relations. Rickover immediately agreed.

He invited Kozlov and his entourage to tour the plant with the press in tow. When Kozlov asked where they should leave their cameras, Rickover told him to bring them along, that nothing inside was classified. Rickover then remarked, “Just like your atomic-powered icebreaker ship, the Lenin. Isn’t that right, Mr. Kozlov?” The Lenin, the Soviet’s first nuclear ship, was under construction at the Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) shipyard. Rickover had him pinned down. A sputtering Kozlov was forced to agree. As the two men moved through the power plant, Rickover explained the systems they were seeing. Never one to shy from a chance to insult anyone’s intelligence, even

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