This was not good news. Navy regulations are fairly specific in the responsibility of a commanding officer for taking proper precautions to secure boats and equipment in bad weather. In our case it was particularly serious, because these boats were essential to the Salisbury Sound’s primary mission of supporting seaplanes in a seadrome.
We arrived at our pier at White Beach at about 1400 the next day, and the staff departed the ship while the ship’s company turned to restoring the damage. The admiral had come up to me on the bridge while I was tying the ship up, and said that he understood our aircraft rearming and refueling boats had been lost or damaged. He added that he would take care of having replacements located and delivered to the ship. His staff would be responsible for getting that done as soon as possible and would keep me informed. I thanked him very much for his offer of help. Then he turned, saluted the quarterdeck to leave the ship, and said, “You did a very nice job of minimizing the damage from the typhoon during our little trip to sea.” With an impassive face, masking what was probably a wink and a smile, he crossed the gangway to his waiting staff car to return to his home and find out what damage had been done to his own quarters.
9
Nuclear Propulsion
In December 1963 the Salisbury Sound returned to San Francisco to undergo a major overhaul in the Bay Area, and I was ordered to report to Washington, D.C., to be interviewed by Admiral Rickover for the Enterprise job. It turned out to be a special experience for me, as it was for all officers who underwent Rickover’s oral examination.
The offices of the Naval Reactors branch of the Bureau of Naval Ships (BuShips) were located in the Navy Department’s ancient, “temporary” World War I wallboard-and-plywood office buildings on the Mall along Constitution Avenue. Arriving at 0730, I was first interviewed by three of Admiral Rickover’s top civilian technical assistants. These were a group of engineers who had been with Rickover since his earliest days at the naval nuclear site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They had stuck with Rickover because of their intellectual admiration of his style and technical respect for his accomplishments. These interviews were tough, designed to test the depth of a candidate’s technical knowledge and aptitude for nuclear engineering. The sessions lasted throughout the morning. The meeting with Rickover himself would take place that afternoon, after the admiral had reviewed the notes provided by his interviewers in the morning session.
I was summoned to Rickover’s office at about 1330 and seated on a hard wooden bench in the hall outside his door. At about 1430, Rickover’s secretary showed up from her office — Rickover had no anteroom — and she took in a file of papers. When she came out after several minutes, I was ushered in and offered a seat in an uncomfortable wooden armchair with one short leg. Rickover was sitting at his desk behind piles of papers in a cluttered office and in front of a dirty window that placed him in silhouette so that I had difficulty in seeing his facial expressions. He was courteous, his voice soft, and he started with the expected questions. What were my favorite duty assignments? Why did I want command of the Enterprise? Did I think I could handle the academics of the course? What books had I read recently? Which ones had I liked, and why? Rickover then read from a copy of my academic transcript of grades as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy. This report showed that I had received good grades — a B average — as a plebe, but for the next two years my grades steadily declined right up to graduation. Rickover asked why had my academic performance been so poor in the last two years. I replied, trying to be scrupulously honest, that with the prospect of going off to war, I had decided to enjoy life at the academy as much as possible and study as little as necessary to get by without failing. Rickover said firmly but positively that was not a good answer and sent me into an unoccupied office next door to think of a better reasoned reply.
I was called back in half an hour after mentally struggling to determine what Rickover was really after. So I explained that I had been on the wrestling team and that took up much of my time and quite a bit of my energy. Again, Rickover calmly but firmly said that was not a good answer and sent me back to the empty office. Rickover added that I would get one more chance to come up with an answer that made sense. In our conversation, I had observed that Rickover expressed himself with a minimum of words and extraneous explanations. Rickover was direct and bluntly to the point.
When I returned, Rickover, without any preliminaries, asked me point blank, “Why were your grades so poor your final two years?” I answered directly with an equally short, but firm statement: “Because I wasn’t very smart.” By this I meant that I was pretty dumb to let my grades decline when I could have done much better (it was a double entendre in away). Rickover understood exactly what I meant and it was the answer he wanted. “You are absolutely right,” he said. “I will arrange to have you report to me for duty next month to start your nuclear training.”
So in February of 1964, I was detached from the Salisbury Sound in Oakland, California, and returned to Washington for duty in the Naval Reactors Division of BuShips under Admiral Rickover. A half a dozen carrels had been installed in Rickover’s office spaces, and that is where four of us senior officers undergoing study with Rickover’s staff would make our headquarters for the next year. It was full immersion. Study, lectures, and meetings with Rickover from 0800 in the morning to 1800 in the evening, when Naval Reactors closed down shop. Then a minimum of three more hours of homework every night, with problems to be solved and papers to be turned in the next morning for grading. Our instructors were the senior staff members of Rickover’s organization, who had to take this on as an additional duty, consistent with Rickover’s idea of exercising the greatest possible economies, including manpower. The routine at “Rickover’s College of Nuclear Knowledge” was especially rough for us senior officers attending the course. There were formal classroom training courses set up for the junior officers in the program, which were conducted in an academic environment at the Naval Reactors School in Newport, Rhode Island, by trained and experienced instructors. Rickover considered that these formal training courses were fine for the junior officers coming in at the entry level of his program, just out of the Naval Academy and NROTC colleges, but he wanted to personally oversee the training of his future carrier commanding officers. In 1963 the senior group consisted of myself, a prospective CO of the Enterprise; Cdr. Forest Peterson, a test pilot, and astronaut and prospective Enterprise XO; Cdr. Walt Schwartz, the prospective XO of the nuclear cruiser Long Beach; and Cdr. Kent Lee, a fighter pilot and a prospective CO of the Enterprise who had received his master’s degree in nuclear physics from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey just three years earlier. It was a professionally distinguished group, and everyone but me had gained strong academic credentials at the graduate level in recent years.