Rickover, Creator of U.S. Nuclear Navy, Dies at 86

Retired Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the acerbic, hard-driving Navy officer who was the moving force behind the creation of the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet, died Tuesday at age 86.

The cause of Rickover’s death was not disclosed, but he had been in declining health since suffering a major stroke July 4, 1985. He had been in retirement since January, 1982, when he was forced from active service after 64 years in uniform.

Rickover died at his home in Arlington, Va., the Navy said.

Rickover, who was graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1922, had served on active duty longer than any military officer of modern times. He was kept on duty by powerful congressional supporters for 30 years after the Navy first denied him promotion to rear admiral and ticketed him for retirement.

By the time he did retire, Rickover had battled with 14 defense secretaries, 16 secretaries of the Navy and a dozen chiefs of naval operations. Four presidents retained him on active duty after he had passed mandatory retirement age, among them Jimmy Carter, who, as a young Navy officer, had been hand-picked by Rickover for nuclear engineering school.

During the years Rickover dominated the design and production of the nuclear fleet, he saw his submarines travel 40 million miles and, according to the Navy, accumulate the equivalent of 30 centuries of operating time without a death or serious accident attributed to nuclear propulsion.

Shortly after he retired, three former presidents--Carter, Gerald R. Ford and Richard M. Nixon--turned out for a dinner paying tribute to him, and the next year he became the only person in history except for Gen. Zachary Taylor to receive a second congressional gold medal for exceptional public service.

President Reagan, in a statement issued at the White House, said that Rickover’s “commitment to excellence and uncompromising devotion to duty were integral parts of American life for a generation. The nuclear-powered submarines, cruisers and aircraft carriers deployed throughout the world today in defense of liberty are a major part of Adm. Rickover’s legacy . . . . We have lost a great American.”

However, in spite of his achievements, it was Rickover’s public temper tantrums, his vitriolic criticism of the military Establishment and his spellbinding appearances before dozens of congressional committees that made him perhaps the best-known military officer since World War II. And he grew increasingly controversial both within and without the Navy.

Bane of Big Spenders

His image as the bane of big spenders and critic of contractors was suddenly tarnished one year before his death.

Three years after he had been forced into retirement by the Reagan Administration after continuing clashes with Pentagon officials, Rickover was censured in 1985 by Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. for taking $67,000 worth of gifts from General Dynamics, the company that had been the leading contractor for the Navy’s nuclear submarines. In announcing the action, Lehman described many of the gifts as “trinkets,” saying the admiral had solicited gifts over a period of 17 years, among them items such as laminated $50 bills and teak trays.

Rickover, whose reputation was based on his hounding of shipbuilders as much as his virtuoso performances on Capitol Hill, replied to the Navy’s charges in an eight-page letter to Lehman, declaring that he had never considered the items personal gifts and was never influenced by them.

“I can state emphatically,” Rickover said, “that no gratuity or favor ever affected any decision I made.” He added: “In fact, I have been consistently tougher on defense contractors than any government official at any time.”

On Tuesday, Lehman said in a statement: “With the death of Adm. Rickover, the Navy and this nation have lost a dedicated officer of historic accomplishment. In his 63 years of service, Adm. Rickover took the concept of nuclear power from an idea to the present reality of more than 150 U.S. naval ships under nuclear power, with a record of 3,000 ship-years of accident-free operations.”

Born in Russia

Rickover, the son of a Jewish tailor, was born in Russia on Jan. 27, 1900. He grew up in Chicago and earned an appointment to the Naval Academy, where he excelled academically but was a distant, introspective midshipman who made few friends and disdained social and athletic activities.

While his contemporaries made their way up through the ranks with combat assignments in World War II, he worked in obscurity in shipbuilding and repair.

After the war, Rickover was sent to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to study nuclear energy, and he immediately became a crusader for atomic power, pressing for the Navy to develop a nuclear-powered submarine.

When he was facing retirement because he had twice been passed over for promotion to rear admiral, Rickover turned for help to friends in Congress, who were far more receptive to nuclear power than was the Navy. Rep. Sidney Yates (D-Ill.) took up his cause, with powerful members of the Senate, including the late Sen. Henry M. Jackson (D-Wash.), joining in.

By using his position as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jackson in 1953 effectively forced the Navy to promote Rickover to rear admiral and keep him on active duty.

Insulated From Critics

Thereafter, Rickover, using the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy as his congressional power base, was insulated from his critics in the Navy and the Pentagon. Several defense secretaries and secretaries of the Navy made tentative efforts to send the maverick officer into retirement, but Congress and the White House kept him at the helm of the nuclear propulsion program year after year.

Moreover, Jackson, who periodically reminded Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter to keep Rickover on active duty, wrote an amendment into the 1973 defense procurement bill making Rickover a full four-star admiral--20 years after he had first been ticketed for retirement.

Through it all, Rickover not only championed the growing fleet of attack and missile-launching submarines, hand-picking their officers, training their crews and overseeing their construction, he also waged battles large and small with his Pentagon superiors.

‘He Was Not Supervised’

After his own retirement, Adm. Arleigh Burke, who was chief of naval operations from 1955 until 1961, recalled his efforts to bring Rickover into line. “He was not supervised,” Burke said. “Congress prevented it.

“I told him once, ‘Rick, I know you’re an s.o.b. and you know I’m an s.o.b., so let’s both accept it and go on.’ ”

Twenty years later, Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., as the Navy chief, continued the long battle with Rickover over the appropriate mix of nuclear and conventionally powered vessels in the Navy fleet. Zumwalt contended that the two had made a pact but charged later that Rickover had refused to stick by the agreement.

Zumwalt contended that Rickover was an anarchist in uniform whose single-mindedness on the subject of nuclear power prevented urgently needed modernization of the Navy.

Influence Within Navy

But, through it all, Rickover’s foundation on Capitol Hill remained unshakable, and he even broadened his influence within the service. By the time he put on his fourth star, the Navy had 50 admirals--including then-Chief of Naval Operations James Holloway--who had gone through nuclear power school and had served aboard Rickover’s submarines.

In Jimmy Carter’s interview with Rickover on entering the nuclear submarine program, the admiral made such a profound impression on him that one Rickover question formed the title for the future President’s first political book, “Why Not the Best?”

“He raises the people around him like an old mother hen raises her chicks,” said William Clements, who was then deputy secretary of defense. “The system creates the problem by moving its senior people--military and civilian--in and out of the top jobs while he just sits there. When he gets all of the pieces put together, he has a structure like the rock of Gibraltar.”

As strongly as he supported the nuclear submarine fleet, Rickover denounced the attention given athletics in American schools in general and at the Naval Academy in particular. He delighted members of Congress by lambasting government bureaucrats while, at the same time, playing brazenly to politicians’ own egos.

Appropriately, Rickover bowed out of the Navy on Capitol Hill, attacking the shipbuilders, lauding the capitalist system and denouncing the Navy for having too many admirals. He declared that a modern aircraft carrier would survive “about two days” in war and predicted that the nuclear age would end when “we’ll probably destroy ourselves.”

Rickover is survived by his wife, Eleanore A. Bednowicz, and a son, Robert M. Rickover, by his first wife, Ruth, who died in 1972.

Private services will be conducted before burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.