Volume 29, Number 5 · April 1, 1982
The Rise of Hyman Rickover
By James Fallows
Rickover
by Norman Polmar, by Thomas B. Allen
Simon and Schuster, 744 pp., $20.75
Hyman G. Rickover, immigrant from the Czar's Russian empire, entered the US Naval Academy while Woodrow Wilson sat in the White House and Allied forces threw back the Germans at the second battle of the Marne. When directed to bring his public career to a close late last year by President Reagan, Hyman Rickover, by then a four-star admiral in his early eighties, was the oldest full-time employee of the federal government and arguably the longest-serving military man in the nation's history. As a five-star general, Omar Bradley was theoretically on active duty for life, from his graduation from West Point in 1915 until his death in 1981. But Bradley had no real job after completing his term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1953, whereas Rickover was on hyperactive duty from the day he was commissioned an ensign out of Annapolis in 1922 until January 31 of this year, when the final presidential waiver of mandatory retirement age lapsed.
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