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[TL;DR] he was capable of cruel pettiness at times, and didn’t mind showing it. But he was a genius not subject to the formal concerns of mere mortals.Never met the Admiral, but I worked with people who worked for him both in the service and after.He insisted on conducting his infamous personal interviews with every single commissioned officer heading for the submarine fleet. Since we’re talking about thousands of officers, most of the “interview stories” I heard were pretty vanilla—he’d conduct a spot-survey of professional competence and could get through a number of candidates in a single day. But the spicy interview tales were spicy indeed.He had a penchant for starting interviews in a confrontational way—he wanted to knock candidates out of their comfort zone. He famously accosted young Ens. Jimmy Carter with, “Did you graduate first in your class?” and when Carter said, “No,” Rickover asked him, with some temper, “Why not? Why not the best?” That last question became the title of Carter’s autobiography.The team at Electric Boat that built Nautilus made a gift to him of a small scale model of the submarine constructed of lead. It was a prominent fixture on his desk. There was one interview that quickly passed into legend wherein an ensign appeared for his flagellation and entered Rickover’s office only to have the crafty old bastard say, “Ensign, you have thirty seconds to Piss. Me. Off.” The stricken young officer glanced around the room, saw the lead scale model, picked it up and hurled it through the window. Rickover’s office was on the third or fourth floor at NAVSEA, and the little model splatted onto the sidewalk below.“That,” Rickover said, glowering, “pissed me off.” And that guy made it to the fleet, although I think the Admiral made him pay for the window.Another celebrated interview technique was for the admiral to impatiently dismiss any effort by the subject to explain or contextualize a previous answer by literally confining the subject in his office closet and ordering him to “sing, loud.” One who underwent this was a Lt.jg in the fleet when he recounted the tale to me and said that the only song that came to mind was “Anchors Aweigh,” which he bellowed through a couple of times as Rickover conducted other interviews in his office, occasionally breaking off to shout “Louder!” at the closet door. This officer was smart enough to understand that he’d been reduced to a diagetic prop in the Admiral’s screening process, and that this ordeal was not about him but about the candidates who had to interview with the Admiral while some tone-deaf sap in the closet was singing “Anchors Aweigh.” (“Uhmm… just what kind of outfit am I signing up for, I wonder?…”Sometimes the Admiral was sometimes obviously intent on causing candidates to lose their temper. Some officers walked out of his office absolutely incandescent with rage over their treatment at the Admiral’s hands. Rickover was surrounded by a staff of nuclear officers who’d performed splendidly in their careers, and he was said to be a very difficult boss. I later worked for a former O-5 who’d been his deputy for a couple of years. He described, with considerable distaste, how the Admiral’s staff maintained what amounted to a calming room in which outraged young ensigns could shout and scream and punch the walls and howl like coyotes after their interviews—most candidates came out of his office believing they’d “failed” the screening, for which they had been preparing for years.Here is the absolute most colorful Rickover story I ever heard:The Maneuvering Room, a small enclosed space in Engine Room Upper Level, was the control center for the nuclear reactor. Procedurally, it contains a minimum of four humans. The Engineering Officer of the Watch (“EEE—OW,” casually) is the cat running the plant, He sits in an elevated chair behind the three people actually operating the control boards. On my boat, the far left panel was the Steam Plant Control panel (including the throttles), where I stood watch for hundreds and hundreds of hours as the throttleman. Next to it was the Reactor Plant Control Panel, which is the station from which one operates the control rods that (sort of) determine reactor power. I occasionally attended that station when the reactor was shutdown. On the far right, directly in front of the EOOW’s seat, was the Electric Plant Control Panel, which also consumed a nontrivial chunk of my youth. All three of these watchstanders are under the personal control of the EOOW.Outside the Maneuvering Room are about a half-dozen operators who are assigned responsibility for a particular space, and a couple of rovers with responsibilities in more than one compartment, the most consequential of which is the Engineering Watch Supervisor, the senior enlisted rate in the watchsection. For each watch section, the EWS is usually the bull nuke, and typically works in close concert with the EOOW.(Sorry, can’t help it—note that an actual reactor powering an actual vessel in a potentially lethal environment is crewed almost entirely by ENLISTED PEOPLE. There is one—ONE!—officer in place to call the shots, as opposed to Star Fleet, where the Engine Room is apparently full of ensigns who are presumably topping off lube oil tanks and monitoring the operation of the air conditioning units. PSHAW, I say!)So anyway…. My buddy Mike came to Hamilton as a newly initiated chief petty officer with a fabulous resume. He’d burned through all the schools and the practical tests and was a legitimate boss nuke—so much so that when still an E-5 he was on the short list for a vacant position on NR-1, Rickover’s pet deep-diving submersible (capable of operating at more than 900m). “Nerwin” was Rickover’s baby, he’d built it virtually independent of Congressional oversight and even held NAVSHIPS at bay, and everyone who was to serve aboard her had to complete an interview with the Admiral.Mike’s interview was sometime around 1970, I think, and by his own account he plonked it. He let the Admiral get under his skin, lost his temper during the interview and ended up telling Rickover he wouldn’t consent to serve on NR-1 if it meant ever having to talk to the Admiral again. He stormed out of the office and quickly found himself in the calming room.Being rejected for NR-1 (which was no shame in the fleet, although Mike’s rejection was the result of unusually colorful circumstances), Mike made E-6 and returned to plain old everyday nuclear submarines. A few years later he was aboard one of the brand-spanking-new Los Angeles class 688s heading out for sea trials. He was worried about these sea trials, because Rickover, as was his custom, was riding along. For the first several days they didn’t encounter each other, and Mike convinced himself that the Admiral didn’t remember him, and then came the first drill set.That was unwise, as The Admiral was said to have an elephant’s memory and be capable of extraordinarily personal vindictiveness.Mike was standing Engineering Watch Supervisor and of course got up on his toes when he saw the XO noodling around one of the switchboards. Expecting a scram drill, he drifted toward the Maneuvering Room door so as to be immediately available for the circus to come. Inside Maneuvering he found all the usual operators, plus the Ship’s Engineer and the Admiral. The XO did indeed pull the magic fuses, the reactor scrammed and the operators in Maneuvering completed their immediate procedural responses to the scram. Mike’s immediate responsibility was with the main engine, so he turned to attend to that just as Rickover said, rather loudly, “YOU’RE DEAD!” He turned back to Maneuvering to see Rickover pointing, and glowering, at the EOOW, who has dozens of thing he has to do in the aftermath of a reactor scram. But not this one, because the Admiral had just told the EOOW that he, the EOOW, was “dead.”A quick-thinking Reactor Operator took up the mike and announced, “Conn, Maneuvering—the Engineering Officer of the Watch is dead! Request an immediate relief!” Mike thereupon stepped into maneuvering as the most senior engineering watchstander still “alive” and gently displaced the “dead” EOOW from his place on his perch, whereupon Rickover ordered the EOOW to leave the Maneuvering Room. In probably less than 60 seconds a whole clutch of qualified EOOWs appeared at Maneuvering, only to hear the Admiral announce, “No reliefs are permitted!”So Mike, not a qualified EOOW, is attempting to stand that watch in the middle of the scram. A fast recovery startup was initiated, and as soon as the core was operational again the Admiral tapped the RO on the shoulder and said, “you’re dead.” Then he “killed” the Electrical Operator and the Throttleman, leaving Mike as the sole “living” nuclear-qualified watchstander operating the reactor. This is a quite extreme training scenario—Rickover’s specialty—and really from a reactor safety standpoint is deeply unwise—but the Engineer was right there in the room, watching the whole business, and shortly he was joined by the Captain, who naturally enough wanted to know who or what was “killing” his crew. Rickover didn’t evict the enlisted operators and so it quickly became quite crowded in that little room. Mike found himself obliged to bring both the electrical plant and the steam plant back online by himself, a truly massive undertaking. The Admiral was quite strict and admonished any attempt by any of the “dead” watchstanders to assist Mike.Just for context, this is the Navy Nuclear equivalent of crucifixion.“It was excruciating,” he told me. “The worst day I’ve ever had in a power plant.” But he completed the task and the engineering plant, reactor and all, ended up in a more or less correct lineup. He said the whole drill took almost three hours, because he was constantly pulling out the Manual to check his actions. Once the ship was again capable of answering bells from the Conn, Rickover restored the watchsection to life and exited Maneuvering. On his way out he offered what Mike described as “an evil grin,” and winked at him. “Of course he remembered me,” he sighed.And that was the way of the world when working for the Navy’s greatest engineering officer of the twentieth century. Star Fleet, when it comes, will need one like him.