Notes on Marc Wortman's "Admiral Hyman Rickover"

Hyman G. Rickover, the “father of the nuclear Navy”, does not seem to have been what I’d call a good person. Nor does he appear to have been a happy person. But boy did he ever get it done. So while I don’t include him in my list of people I respect and aim to emulate, I can’t help but admire his achievements.

I recently read Marc Wortman’s solid new biography Admiral Hyman Rickover, Engineer of Power and was struck by its many resonances with Caro’s bio of LBJ. Both men were possessed by a single-minded obsession with achievement regardless of cost to themselves or anybody else (and suffered multiple heart attacks, possibly as a result). However, LBJ makes Rickover seem angelic by comparison, both in his general personality and in his motivation. Rickover wrote love letters to his wife and was apparently faithful to her; he loved his son and spent time with him, though his mad devotion to his work made that time rather limited. LBJ seems clearly unencumbered by that sense of morality or interest in his family.

Rickover was uncompromising in his principles, which were: first, safe operation of nuclear power reactors, both at sea and on shore, for both their operators and the public; second, the careful use of public funds; and third, the highest standard of hard work from himself and his staff. LBJ appears to have simply lacked principles from birth and was a paragon of cheating, corruption, and dirty tricks, though he also worked extremely hard. Of course, the deep mystery at the heart of Caro’s work is why such an unprincipled person would fight to get the Civil Rights Act passed, and whether there actually was, in the end, a principle of fairness and social justice operating way down deep in LBJ.

Both men grew up in poverty but it had a different effect in each case. Rickover always lived simply and humbly, the Platonic ideal of a civil servant, and transferred his sense of the value of a dollar to the taxpayer, fighting tooth and nail with defense contractors. LBJ, by contrast, was avaricious to a stunning degree, using his position of power to accumulate vast wealth for himself and his backers.

But what stands out to me most from both stories is the unusual relationships both men had to their “host” institutions. Normally an individual wields power within an institution by obtaining a position of power within the institution’s hierarchy. But in the case of LBJ and the Senate, he subsumed the senate; he brought it under his control in a way never seen before or since (see Master of the Senate). By contrast, Rickover didn’t subsume the Navy—it being much too vast—but somehow obtained and maintained his power despite the wishes of his host organization by building his own, effectively independent institution within the Navy, like a growth, which the Navy tried to excise for decades—without success due to Rickover cultivating powerful patrons in Congress. Rickover was basically an entrepreneur in his approach, ignoring all the rules and outrunning and outmaneuvering those who were trying to shut him down. But he was an entrepreneur within a colossal organization and operating with his own agenda that almost always ran counter to the Navy’s. I can’t think of another example like this, though I’m sure they exist.

Both men appear to have abusive relationships with underlings, possibly enjoying humiliating and degrading people for its own sake, though this is to be somewhat expected within the military. But in their relationships upward in the chain of command, LBJ was obsequious and Rickover was pugilistic.

I think the deepest commonality was that both men had superhuman motivation to achieve their ends. But Rickover’s ends were generally the public good, and LBJ’s were generally his own good. And despite being generally despised, and usually opposed, both men managed to bring about enormously impactful and lasting achievements.