Sailing True North by James Stavridis

Author:James Stavridis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

All quotations in this chapter are sourced from E. B. Potter, Nimitz (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1976).

CHAPTER VIII

The Master of Anger

Admiral Hyman Rickover

BORN JANUARY 27, 1900, MAKOW, POLAND

DIED JULY 8, 1986, ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

In March 1974, something historic happened at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland: four-star admiral Hyman G. Rickover arrived on campus wearing his US Navy service dress blue uniform with a single broad gold stripe and three narrower ones adorning each of his sleeves. He was present for the dedication of Rickover Hall, which was being named in his honor, and evidently had been convinced to actually don a four-star admiral’s uniform, probably under direct orders from Secretary of the Navy John Warner. This was the only generally known occasion on which he did so, despite serving in that rank for years.

Rickover famously avoided wearing a Navy dress uniform for several reasons. First, he enjoyed effectively pointing out to the other high-ranking members of the “Naval Aristocracy” that he could not be defined by their conventions. Second, he jealously guarded his concurrent civilian appointment at the Department of Energy focused on nuclear power and used it to maneuver between the uniformed Navy, the rest of the executive branch, and Capitol Hill. And finally, he preferred his baggy, nondescript suits and overlarge collared shirts for the simplicity and comfort they provided over the starched white dress shirts, beribboned blouses, and admiral’s cap with copious gold braid.

I remember that March day as quite strange, even to my eyes as a “youngster” or second-year midshipman at the Academy. For starters, the venerable admiral, who as a four-star outranked the well-liked superintendent, three-star vice admiral Bill Mack, just didn’t seem very happy. He had a scowl on his face throughout much of the ceremony, smiling thinly and briefly a couple of times but generally looking upset. As one of the selected midshipman “escorts,” I was charged with trailing in the wake of the admiral and his new bride, a Navy commander in the Nurse Corps who was a fair bit younger than Rickover. I tried to stay out of his line of sight.

The event was a perfect reflection of the ambiguous relationship Admiral Rickover had with Annapolis. He had arrived at the Academy in 1918, part of the class of 1922. He was the son of a tailor, poor, short, slender, Jewish, and an immigrant who had passed through Ellis Island. From the moment he arrived in Annapolis, he was made to feel like an outsider, and that sense of isolation and detachment from the larger naval profession continued throughout his life. Fifty-six years after he first arrived at Annapolis, on that cold March morning when I first laid eyes on this legend, I could not help but notice that on a day when he should have been feeling honored and valued there at the very heart of the Navy, the anger and the resentment he had carried with him for decades seemed to dominate his feelings—or at least that is how it appeared to a very young midshipman.

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