Sailing True North

by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret. )

  As anyone reading today’s headlines knows, leaders’ personalities matter immensely. Especially in today’s media environment, personality is an essential foundation piece of any leader’s message. And while it is tempting to let emotion drive personality, the true acme of character is sublimating anger, pettiness, and impulse in favor of a cool, calm temperament. This was the genius of Nimitz.

  Personality is naturally individual, and it is often fixed to some degree. Importantly, though, a leader can first learn what sort of personality he or she has, and then how best to express him- or herself within an organization. The world is still full of irascible Halseys, brooding Spruances, and volcanic Kings—and each type can contribute to success. However, as with those three admirals, success often depends on each person being in the right position, and especially on the presence of a Nimitz who can “link and buffer” between idiosyncrasies. While we all have challenges overcoming our emotions, the habit of a calm demeanor can be learned. In my own case, in my twenties I had more difficulty with this than later in life. I was lucky that my second captain aboard my very first ship, the destroyer Hewitt, had a calm and soothing personality, as did the operations officer, someone I deeply admired and tried to emulate. By the time I was a destroyer captain myself, I consciously talked with the entire 350-member crew about the need to never lose our tempers. This anger-free zone in the ship paid great dividends as we came under pressure on forward deployments.

  Qualities of personality, especially such subtle ones as Nimitz exhibited during World War II, take a lifetime to develop. The important thing is to dedicate some self-awareness and effort to nurturing them, as Nimitz did from his earliest days in the Navy. Although Nimitz might have been predisposed to become a leader of leaders, his personal evolution was neither accidental nor predestined. Moreover, he is not the sole paragon of success in this respect, nor was he entirely successful. All leaders have lacunae in their personalities, and no one style can fit every job or mission before it. For example, it is doubtful that King or Nimitz could have succeeded as they did if their roles had been reversed—in King’s position, a brutal, ruthless driver was needed; in Nimitz’s job, being a conciliator was the key. And we should also recognize the simple fact that virtually all the leaders of those days would have a great deal of difficulty working alongside women or members of minorities in a partnership of equals. Although Nimitz was a superb overall leader, he was of an era that did not recognize the contributions of women or nonwhite groups or their abilities. In order to succeed deep into the postwar era, he would have needed to adjust his approach considerably. The point is that effective leaders know that personality and style cannot be static and are prepared to adjust to changing circumstances.

  Nimitz was a compassionate leader who “made every effort to protect the feelings and reputations of his subordinates, even when they failed to measure up.” Nimitz established and maintained extremely high standards, but, as President Ford noted, “never forgot that he was dealing with human beings.” Nimitz’s standard could both accommodate occasional mistakes—even big ones—by basically competent people like Halsey and preserve the dignity and efficacy of those who simply “failed to measure up” by promptly but discreetly moving them to jobs in which they could succeed. Nimitz demoted people rarely and demeaned them never; in fact, he was unafraid to use promotion as a tool for reassigning people from unsuccessful positions into jobs they were better suited to do.

  Rather than compromising his standards, Nimitz’s discretion helped him build and maintain trust throughout his command. All leaders are in the business of dealing with human beings, but not all of them know it. Especially today, when people and organizations are increasingly geographically far-flung—organized around digitally delivered messages much more than by personal touch—leaders need to put a lot of energy into building and sustaining trust. In that respect, they might do well to reflect on Nimitz’s famous principle of “calculated risk,” by which he trusted his people to perform to the best of their judgment and ability, and they could trust him not to demote and never to demean them if they proved to be merely human.

  I’ve certainly made my share of mistakes in failing to be discreet. As one of the famous “Laws of the Navy” (a long poem penned by a retired British admiral which US Naval Academy midshipmen are required to memorize as plebes) puts it, “Take heed what you say of your seniors / Be your words spoken softly or plain / Lest the birds of the air tell the matter / And so ye shall hear it again.” I have made indiscreet comments from time to time, and they have never turned out well. Even as a senior officer, wearing my first star and certainly knowing better, I made some loose criticisms about my three-star boss that made their way back to him. This was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and I was sure that my ideas for radical changes were the right prescription for the Navy, and that the chain of command was just slowing things down with timidity. My boss rightly called me to his office (which still smelled of smoke from the attack), read me the riot act, but gave me another chance. He also listened to my ideas, and the lesson I learned was simple: either have the courage to go to your boss directly, or keep your mouth shut. Far better to keep your own counsel on personal opinions about others and be careful with secrets both professional and personal. That is an element of character that is so often lacking, even in the most senior of people. And in today’s world of instantaneous tweets heard round the world, it’s an even better policy to follow.

  Nimitz was a perpetual optimist, but a grounded, almost a guarded one. He was never a cheerleader spreading sweetness and light on his sailors, but in his quiet way he did all he could to see the positives in any situation—no matter how bleak. All leaders know that surprises and defeats are a fact of life; luckily, few leaders will face the equivalent of Pearl Harbor, but all will have to respond to significant setbacks. This has been central to my approach and was something I inherited from my father. He was a career officer in the Marines and saw combat around the globe from the end of World War II through Vietnam, yet never lost his optimistic view of the world. As I have said earlier, optimism is a habit of personality that stems from our character.

  How the leader responds will go a long way toward determining how the group responds, as Nimitz understood. Though he confided the depth of his fears to his wife and one or two trusted confidants, on arrival in Pearl Harbor, Nimitz’s words and actions signaled his confidence in a team that had just suffered the surprise of the century. This stopped the free fall in morale, set people back on their feet, and quickly translated newfound determination into action. Had Nimitz summarily dismissed his predecessor’s staff, he would have spent his first six months or more as CINCPAC fighting the learning curve rather than the enemy.

  Essential as optimism was and is in the face of crisis, it is critical that it be well founded. A leader needs to lead—but leadership needs to be believable to be effective. Pearl Harbor was as serious a crisis as they come, and feigned optimism would have been at least as damaging as defeatism. By pointing to what few others could see—namely, all that was not destroyed, such as the underground fuel reserves and the all-important aircraft carriers out at sea—Nimitz was able to give his people real reasons for hope at a very fragile time. I continue to reflect on the quiet confidence, calm demeanor, endless civility, and incisive judgment of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. He set a high bar for character and remains a true North Star for the Navy, and the nation.

  All quotations in this chapter are sourced from E. B. Potter, Nimitz (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1976).

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Master of Anger

  Admiral Hyman Rickover

  BORN JANUARY 27, 1900, MAKOW, POLAND

  DIED JULY 8, 1986, ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  In March 1974, something historic happened at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland: four-star admiral Hyman G. Rickover arrived on campus wearing his US Navy service dress blue
uniform with a single broad gold stripe and three narrower ones adorning each of his sleeves. He was present for the dedication of Rickover Hall, which was being named in his honor, and evidently had been convinced to actually don a four-star admiral’s uniform, probably under direct orders from Secretary of the Navy John Warner. This was the only generally known occasion on which he did so, despite serving in that rank for years.

  Rickover famously avoided wearing a Navy dress uniform for several reasons. First, he enjoyed effectively pointing out to the other high-ranking members of the “Naval Aristocracy” that he could not be defined by their conventions. Second, he jealously guarded his concurrent civilian appointment at the Department of Energy focused on nuclear power and used it to maneuver between the uniformed Navy, the rest of the executive branch, and Capitol Hill. And finally, he preferred his baggy, nondescript suits and overlarge collared shirts for the simplicity and comfort they provided over the starched white dress shirts, beribboned blouses, and admiral’s cap with copious gold braid.

  I remember that March day as quite strange, even to my eyes as a “youngster” or second-year midshipman at the Academy. For starters, the venerable admiral, who as a four-star outranked the well-liked superintendent, three-star vice admiral Bill Mack, just didn’t seem very happy. He had a scowl on his face throughout much of the ceremony, smiling thinly and briefly a couple of times but generally looking upset. As one of the selected midshipman “escorts,” I was charged with trailing in the wake of the admiral and his new bride, a Navy commander in the Nurse Corps who was a fair bit younger than Rickover. I tried to stay out of his line of sight.

  The event was a perfect reflection of the ambiguous relationship Admiral Rickover had with Annapolis. He had arrived at the Academy in 1918, part of the class of 1922. He was the son of a tailor, poor, short, slender, Jewish, and an immigrant who had passed through Ellis Island. From the moment he arrived in Annapolis, he was made to feel like an outsider, and that sense of isolation and detachment from the larger naval profession continued throughout his life. Fifty-six years after he first arrived at Annapolis, on that cold March morning when I first laid eyes on this legend, I could not help but notice that on a day when he should have been feeling honored and valued there at the very heart of the Navy, the anger and the resentment he had carried with him for decades seemed to dominate his feelings—or at least that is how it appeared to a very young midshipman.

  In the end, Rickover served in the Navy from 1918 until 1982—the longest tenure in the service’s history. He was a flag officer for nearly thirty years, again unprecedented. Rickover led the Navy into the era of nuclear propulsion, as important a transition surely as the previous shifts from sail to coal and from coal to oil. Yet on that blustery day, despite all his honors and successes, the feeling I had watching his awkward acceptance of the honors laid before him was not awe, but rather pity. I felt sorry for all the anger he seemed to carry with him, and all the pain it must have caused him across so many years.

  He was born in Russian Poland in 1900 (or possibly 1898, as there is confusion between Navy records and birth records found by some researchers), named Chaim (derived from the Hebrew for “life”) Godalia Rickover. His family came to New York City in 1906, refugees from anti-Jewish pogroms, and moved on to Chicago, where his father found work as a tailor and where young Hyman, as he was now renamed, worked for low wages outside the house from an early age. He went to the Naval Academy on a congressional appointment in 1918, and graduated with the class of 1922, close to the top 100 in his class of 540—high but not signal honors.

  After well-regarded service on the destroyer La Vallette and the battleship Nevada, he was sent for graduate school in electrical engineering at both the Naval Postgraduate School and Columbia University, where he met his wife, Ruth, herself a graduate student in international relations. They were married in 1931, and the event seemed to catalyze Rickover to convert from Judaism to the Episcopal faith, the unofficial high church of the Navy’s Admiralty. He remained a strong supporter of what today is called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) for the rest of his life, and throughout his career, he emphasized the need for naval officers to be formally trained to be technically proficient. (He also maintained that the social sciences, literature, history, and politics were unworthy of serious formal study: they could be “picked up” by personal study and reading.)

  The next step in Rickover’s career was pivotal: the decision to serve aboard submarines. This probably stemmed from his desire to be in a smaller, more controlled environment where he could exert greater influence. Despite being somewhat senior (at twenty-nine years of age) to transition from surface destroyers to diesel submarines, he received support from his former commanding officer aboard Nevada and, in the early 1930s, made the jump, training as a submariner and eventually qualifying for command of a diesel boat, although he never actually took command of one. His work translating the book Das Unterseeboot (The Submarine) by the German admiral Hermann Bauer had significant tactical impact on the US Navy.

  In the late 1930s, he “surfaced” briefly to take command (his only command at sea) of a minesweeper on the China Station. After only three months in command, his request to become a specialized engineering duty officer was approved, and in late 1937 he headed back to Washington for an assignment in the Navy’s Bureau of Engineering. He became fascinated with the idea of serving as an engineering duty officer so that he could drive new ideas, saying later in life, “Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience.” As an engineering duty officer, Rickover was shifting over to the “restricted line”—meaning that he would never be in line for another command at sea but would be guaranteed a string of jobs focusing on the design, acquisition, construction, and repair of ships and their systems.

  After the entrance of the United States into the Second World War, Rickover was dispatched to Pearl Harbor in the spring of 1942 to help with repairs to the badly damaged battleships. With the acceleration of promotions in wartime, he pinned on captain’s rank in June 1942 and continued to work at a variety of key engineering and support positions throughout the rest of the war, eventually being awarded the first of his several Legion of Merit medals. As he moved along in the Navy, it was clear that the rules-based system of order was increasingly chafing him. He said, “More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.”

  After the war, Rickover was named inspector general of the Navy’s West Coast fleet and began to work in earnest on nuclear propulsion. He mastered every element of the developing technology, saying later in a speech delivered at Columbia University that “the man in charge must concern himself with details.” This became his personal mantra, and eventually the philosophical heart of Naval Reactors, the organization he would build to direct seagoing nuclear power. His initial work in the immediate postwar years was with General Electric, and he was sent to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which became the epicenter of the Navy’s efforts to create nuclear propulsion. Of note, he helped the Navy see the powerful potential of using nuclear power on submarines, fundamentally changing the need for submarines to surface and recharge their oxygen-hungry batteries. Previously submarines were all diesel-powered and therefore extremely limited (and endangered) by the need to regularly surface. Despite frequent pushback from seniors, Rickover persisted with his single-minded vision of nuclear propulsion at sea and found a champion in fellow submariner and five-star fleet admiral Chester Nimitz.

  With both Nimitz and Secretary of the Navy John Sullivan championing the effort, the first nuclear-powered vessel, USS Nautilus, a submarine, was built, named for the submarine in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Rickover occasionally said that the true father of the nuclear Navy (a sobriquet that Rickover relished) was in fact N
avy secretary Sullivan. Regardless of how initial credit is divided, it is simply a fact that the ultimate development of nuclear power at sea was germinated, nurtured, led, and matured by Hyman Rickover. His work in the late 1940s and early 1950s at the Atomic Energy Commission was seminal, and his selection to lead the development of nuclear submarines in the 1950s cemented the powerful role he would play for three more decades. This was the key point in his upward trajectory. The Atomic Energy Commission was civilian led and completely separate from the Navy. Rickover was able to use his position there when he wanted to go outside the Navy chain of command. It was a critical element in his success, and it illustrated one of his key principles. He said, “What it takes to do a job will not be learned from a management course. Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.” The adoption of nuclear power at sea reflected the personality and drive of Hyman Rickover.

  By 1958, Rickover was wearing three stars, and despite the ongoing difficulties of pretty much everyone in getting along with him, he managed to completely consolidate his power over the Navy’s now-prestigious nuclear program, becoming its single point of entry and personally interviewing nearly fifteen thousand applicants over the years. He accepted this responsibility as he did everything else in life—with grinding determination to succeed. As he said about responsibility, you can “share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance, or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else.” Because he felt that responsibility so keenly, and because he always focused on the talent of the nuclear corps of officers, he spent endless hours deciding who would enter his program and who would not.