Hyman G. Rickover

Rickover was born Chaim Gdala Rykower on January 27, 1900, in Makow Mazowiecki, then part of the Russian Empire, to an Orthodox Jewish family. In 1906, six years old, he fled with his mother and sister ahead of anti-Jewish pogroms and joined his father, a tailor who had gone ahead to New York, before the family settled in Chicago. He worked delivering telegrams and produce as a boy, graduated from a Chicago public high school with honors in 1918, and won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy that same year, graduating 107th out of a class of 540 in 1922. A master's degree in electrical engineering from Columbia followed in 1930, earned while he was still serving at sea.

Rickover spent the 1930s and the Second World War in unglamorous engineering postings, then in 1946 talked his way onto the small team sent to study nuclear reactors at Oak Ridge. He appealed directly to Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz for backing, took over the Navy's Naval Reactors Branch in 1949, and drove the design of the reactor that powered USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, commissioned in 1954. Two separate selection boards had already passed him over for rear admiral before Congress intervened to force his promotion in 1953. For the next three decades he ran naval reactors as something close to a personal fiefdom, personally interviewing tens of thousands of candidate officers and enforcing a discipline so exacting that the Navy went more than 3,000 reactor-years without a single accident. The Soviet navy, by comparison, recorded fourteen.

Rickover's authority over reactor safety was close to absolute, and he used it without regard for rank, which is part of why two boards tried to force him out before Congress intervened on his behalf, and why the Navy's leadership eventually succeeded in retiring him anyway. In 1981 an operational error during sea trials of USS La Jolla gave Navy Secretary John Lehman the pretext he needed; Rickover, 82 and the Navy's most decorated living officer, was ordered into retirement that January over his open objection. He had also accepted more than 67,000 dollars in defense-contractor gifts over sixteen years, a lapse the Navy treated as a footnote to his enormous contributions rather than a scandal. He testified to Congress near the end that, given the choice, he would sink every reactor he had built.

Rickover suffered a stroke in 1985 and died at home in Arlington, Virginia, on July 8, 1986, at 86. President Carter, who had served under him as a young submarine officer and credited an interview with Rickover for the title of his own memoir, Why Not the Best?, attended the memorial service and read from Milton. Two submarines have since carried his name, and Congress awarded him a second Congressional Gold Medal in 1983, one of only a handful of Americans given the honor twice. The zero-accident safety record he built into the nuclear fleet has held since his death; the education reform he spent his last years pushing for did not take hold the way the submarines did.

Hyman G. Rickover's life against the full span of the corpus.

• USS Nautilus reactor program invention
  World's first nuclear-powered submarine 1954
• Naval Reactors Branch other
  Directed it for more than three decades under both the Navy and the Atomic Energy Commission 1949
• Center for Excellence in Education other
  Founded to promote science and math education after his retirement 1983
• Education and Freedom book
  One of five books he wrote arguing U.S. schools lagged Europe's 1959

• January 27, 1900 aged 0 Born Chaim Gdala Rykower in Makow Mazowiecki, Poland
• 1906 aged ~6 Flees pogroms with his mother and sister to join his father in New York
• 1922 aged ~22 Graduates from the U.S. Naval Academy and is commissioned an ensign
• 1949 aged ~49 Takes over the Navy's Naval Reactors Branch
• 1953 aged ~53 Promoted to rear admiral after Congress intervenes on his behalf
• January 17, 1954 aged 53 USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear submarine, is commissioned
• 1973 aged ~73 Promoted to four-star admiral
• January 31, 1982 aged 82 Forced into retirement at 82 after 63 years of active duty
• July 8, 1986 aged 86 Dies at home in Arlington, Virginia

• Jimmy Carter 1924–2024
  39th president who emphasized human rights, brokered the Camp David Accords, and built a major post-presidential humanitarian legacy. interviewed and mentored
• Chester W. Nimitz 1885–1966
  Fleet admiral who directed U.S. naval strategy in the Pacific during World War II. backed his nuclear submarine program
• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. president when the Nautilus was commissioned
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. forced him into retirement