Getting Prepared to Go Face-to-Face With the Toughest Admiral in Navy History

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They're some of our favorites. When we talk about the United States nuclear Navy, or even the widespread use of nuclear reactors to generate power, we need to talk about one man, Admiral Hyman Rickover, a man whose active duty service spanned 63 years, making him the longest serving naval officer, as well as the longest serving member of the US armed forces in history. Despite Rickover's impressive length of service, he is more known for his unorthodox interview tactics.

Here is retired Navy Captain Bill Todie to tell us about his experience with the kindly old gentleman. The time was about 7 p.m. after a series of very long days. Like the others, this day was filled with tests and interviews, hours of mental intensity interrupted by hours of mind-numbing boredom. I was a first-class midshipman at the US Naval Academy, and this was the singular event that would determine the course of my professional life.

For the previous few hours, a combination of fatigue and nervous energy had been building, and I had become riveted, torn between the awe of the moment and fear of screwing this up. We had heard many tales about what I would soon encounter. Most of these stories were presumed to be tall tales. For example, several different renditions of the Make Me Mad story had been circulating, where Admiral Hyman Rickover dared a midshipman to do something that would anger him, purportedly to see how willing the midshipman would be to follow an order. Some midshipmen were said to have complied by clearing the admiral's desk with a single arm sweep. Then there were the various confinement tales of being locked up in a small space or tiny closet for hours. This apparently was one of the admiral's famous tests for claustrophobia, to see if the midshipman had what it would take to become a submarine officer.

The only anecdote I heard from our current round of interludes had supposedly involved a classmate of mine just a few hours earlier. As the breathless rumor went, the admiral had been berating him for a particularly poor performance in a certain course of study. What would your mother think if she knew you were goofing off like this, the admiral had supposedly asked my classmate, who reportedly replied, my mother's dead. The admiral's alleged response?

Well, it's a good thing she is, or she would die of embarrassment. This is how the legends usually spread. Most of them were unbelievably over the top.

Each was uncorroborated. I had been running through my potential reactions to these various scenarios when it happened. I was ushered in to see the kindly old gentleman, the KOG, of nuclear power lore. The year was 1979.

Since the admiral was born in 1900, it was never difficult to calculate his age. The man was 79 and about to die. I walked into his office and something seemed vaguely familiar. I couldn't quite place it, but I had witnessed this scene before. I looked around, searching for a clue of why I had this sudden bout of dreamlike familiarity. And as my backside hit the seat of a sadistically teetering wooden chair, the man looked back at me and said, I'm not sure what you're thinking. It hit the seat of a sadistically teetering wooden chair, designed, it was said, to keep the midshipman off balance, the first of the rumors I could now actually validate.

It hit me. The room was right out of the holiday movie, It's a Wonderful Life. He was Mr. Potter and I was George Bailey. He was about to offer me a job and hand me a cigar. And then the admiral, without ever looking up, muttered the only words I would hear during round one of toady versus the admiral.

I can't use a philosophy major with a 3-0 average. Get out. My assigned shepherd, a prospective commanding officer or PCO student, grabbed my elbow and yanked hard enough to overcome my inertia. Suddenly, we were standing outside the admiral's office to visit, having lasted less than 30 seconds. As the door closed behind me, I broke through the mental fog enough to proclaim, but I'm a physics major. Clearly weary of playing advocate to a bunch of wide-eyed midshipmen, he led me off to parts unknown. He pointed to a door and said, I'll see what I can do. Wait in here.

My holding pen was a very small office with bare walls and dust and filled nearly to capacity by a large metal desk. After a couple of the most excruciatingly tedious hours of my life, the door opened and the same commander said, come. We retraced our steps down the now familiar corridor into the admiral's office.

And I threw myself back onto that demon of a chair. Admiral Rickover was gazing hard at a file, occasionally muttering to himself. I was surprised how old and frail the great man looked.

His desk was stacked high with files of various sizes. I could barely see him behind this morass. After what seemed an eternity, again, without looking up, he said, you got to see in philosophy. Why?

That philosophy again. And you've been listening to Navy captain Bill Tody tell the pretty traumatic story of his first interview with a living legend and a curmudgeon. And back in the day, there were a lot more interviews like this.

Now you'd get arrested for this stuff or thrown in the stockade. When we come back, more of captain Tody's story about coming face to face with the nuclear Abe Lincoln, Admiral Hyman Rickover, here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country.

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Listen to Heart of the Game, every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back with Our American Stories, retired Navy Captain Bill Tody's experience with the father of the nuclear Navy, Admiral Hyman Rickover. After accusing Tody of being an underperforming philosophy major, he was actually a physics major, Rickover brought Tody back into his office to grill him once again. After what seemed an eternity, again, without looking up, he said, you got to see in philosophy.

Why? Philosophy again. Thus began my rant, which went something like this. My professor was a product of Yale University and didn't believe in grades. He would frequently say, I can lead you to philosophy, but I can't make you think. Our grade was dependent on the number of papers we submitted rather than the quality of our work. While the other students submitted four two-page papers to get an A, I submitted one very good 60 page paper, essentially daring him to give me a C. And he did.

I gambled and lost. I could see the rage starting to build. I think it started somewhere in his neck, but maybe it started lower than that.

I couldn't really tell because his lower regions were obstructed by the stack of papers. By the time this passion had risen to his head, it had grown to what can only be called Rickoverian proportions. And his eyes, the fire in his eyes, was not that of an old man.

This was a young, visceral anger. That's bullsh-t, he stood halfway up, spittle shot out of his mouth as he yelled. Summarizing a much longer tirade, the gist of what he screamed was, I've heard a lot of bullsh-t in my day, but I have never, ever heard such bullsh-t before. I've heard a lot of bullsh-t in my day, before. I want you to know, young man, that you now hold the bullsh-t record. Get out of here.

Get the hell out of my office. At this point in my life, I would not have called myself an overachiever. And I kind of gloried in the possibility that now, after all these years, I might finally hold a record at something. And I had earnestly, simple-mindedly, stupidly wondered what I could have said or done to earn such wrath. I also honestly began to wonder if I really had the stuff he was looking for.

Would I be accepted into the program that was, at the time, the most prestigious the Navy had to offer? I followed the PCO down the hall to what I presumed would be the same office. And to my surprise, when I stared through the door, I was looking into a closet, the closet of legend. I would now have the honor of referring to myself as one of the closet survivors.

In there, the PCO said, and then he left. I wondered about the criteria for putting malcontents in the last baron office, as opposed to this closet. My Catholic upbringing provided the answer. I concluded that the office was sort of a nuclear purgatory, saved for those innocents who were guilty only of original sin. That is, those who, through no fault of their own, were simply stupid by birth. The closet, on the other hand, was reserved for those truly despicable characters who had actively, if not knowingly, sinned against him.

Those who were actively stupid, not merely passively so. It all made sense in a nuclear justice sort of way. But it wasn't the kind of closet I had imagined when hearing that miscreants had been banished to the closet. In my mind, the place of banishment was a coat closet, or a storage room of some sort. Instead, my current station was actually one of those janitorial closets with brooms and bad smells in a deep sink. For almost two hours, I considered my plight while pondering the intangibles of this closet. I contemplated the fine art of dust mop construction.

I remembered the many times I had been trusted with operating such equipment in my first real job, when I was still too young to drive, sweeping and mopping floors. And although I was successfully killing time, I was completely missing the point. Maybe it was because of the boredom, or maybe a couple of stray neurons in my brain collided in a freak fission-like accident, but eventually I began to think. I traced the sequence of events in my life that had led to this day. I began to recall the drive that caused me to toss off the constrained dreams of a young steel town boy and apply for an appointment to the academy. And while searching for my motivation, I began to ponder my heritage. My grandparents were immigrants who escaped from Italy to avoid the unhappy fate of a poor dirt farmer in a poor dirt land. At one point, my father's father found employment in his new homeland by digging ditches for a living, happy to drill sewer lines through solid Ohio sandstone with nothing more than a pick ax and a hard steel shovel.

My mother's father had toiled his entire life shoveling coal and working the steel mills. I remembered that even at a very early age, I understood the travails of a hard life. And so, while still just a young boy, I made a commitment to myself that for me, it would be different.

And suddenly, there in that janitor's closet, among those mops and brooms, I had an epiphany. So when the door finally opened, I rose from my deep sink sofa and walked into the admiral's office with confidence. Are you ready to tell me the truth?

He asked. Admiral, it doesn't matter what grade I got in philosophy. What matters is that I could have worked harder but didn't and by not giving my best effort, I betrayed myself and I betrayed the investment the country was placing in me. And although I didn't say it, I also knew that I had betrayed my past. And amazingly, for the very first time, the admiral looked at me. The rage was gone, the fire was gone and it was now after 11 p.m. All I saw was an old man with the weight of the greatest submarine force in the world on his shoulders.

That's right, he said. If you give less than you're able to, you'll let everyone down. Me, your ship, your navy, your country. I can't use people like that. I can only use people who have the courage and discipline to give everything they've got. I can be one of those people, admiral.

You better be or you'll never survive my program. And that is how I was accepted into admiral Rickover's nuclear training program. I've since commanded one of the submarines the admiral brought into this world and I've served as commodore of a submarine squadron. And after all these years, I'm still not sure if admiral Rickover intended for that simple janitor's closet to serve as his mecca of wisdom and humility. Was that confinement merely a sadistic ruse, as some have said, or did he really intend for those cleaning tools to be symbols of what my life might have been?

Tangible touchstones to our collective past. I hear people frequently say that the admiral's methods were trivial or petty, but I don't believe that. I'm one of those who think there was a method to his madness. After all, I found truth in a closet and in so doing, I found myself. And a terrific job on the production by Robbie and a special thanks to Captain Bill Todie.

His book, From CO to CEO, A Practical Guide for Transitioning from Military to Industry Leadership is available wherever you buy your books. And what a story he told about being in that closet and having to come to terms with who he really was and having to tell the truth to, well, a legend. I could have worked harder and didn't.

I betrayed myself and my past. His life began on that day. The story of Admiral Hyman Rickover and Captain Bill Todie here on Our American Stories.

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