Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power

Marc Wortman’s biography, not the first of Rickover but the most concise and as informative and well written as other books in Yale’s Jewish Lives are, tells three stories seamlessly: the first is the immigrant Jewish boy who adopts the United States as his new home and becomes an American, the story of assimilation and redefinition, the story of what it means to be an American. The second story is about the military—specifically, the Navy—what it was like to serve in that branch of the service in the years leading up to World War II, the politics surrounding promotion, how careers are made or unmade, why the Navy was nearly on the brink of being mothballed as a service branch after the war when the atomic bomb seemed to have made it irrelevant to American national security (Hello, General Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Arm Command). The third story is about the development of the peaceful atom, the use of nuclear power for something other than making bombs. In this regard, Rickover was a central figure.