President Jimmy Carter’s time as a U.S. Navy officer might have been brief, but it served to inform the rest of his days before passing away Sunday at the age of 100. Prior to his political career and Nobel Prize-winning peacemaking efforts, Carter stood at the side of the father of the nuclear Navy during its infancy, and even got lowered into a melted-down nuclear reactor as a junior officer. Decades later, the former president was stunned to learn of the capabilities carried by the secretive spy submarine that bears his name to this day.
Ensign James Earl “Jimmy” Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, and applied to join the Navy’s nuclear submarine community a few years later, according to the Navy.
Assigned to the experimental attack submarine USS Barracuda (SSK-1), Carter had served as executive officer, engineering officer and electronics repair officer by the time he crossed paths with then-Capt. Hyman G. Rickover, the future admiral widely credited with birthing America’s nuclear sub fleet and ending a Navy practice of naming submarines after fish. Following that interview, Rickover soon tapped Carter to join the nascent effort. On temporary duty with the Naval Reactors Branch to help design and develop nuclear propulsion plants, the junior officer at times struggled to keep up with Rickover’s demanding pace.
Nonetheless, Carter wrote in his 1975 presidential campaign tome “Why Not The Best?” about how Rickover left a stark impression on him, as historian Glenn Robins recalled for the U.S. Naval Institute:
“The young Carter was near the end of a two-hour interview with Rickover, which had come to function as a rite of passage for anyone seeking entrance to the Navy’s nascent nuclear submarine program, when Rickover brought up the topic of Carter’s standing at the U.S. Naval Academy. After Carter proudly announced ranking in the top 10 percent of the class of 1947, Rickover pointedly asked, ‘Did you do your best?’ Carter hesitated but answered truthfully that he had not. To which the captain queried, ‘Why not?’”
Carter’s interview with Rickover, and the revelation that he had not always done his best, became a transformational event for the president, according to Robins.
It prompted Carter “to undergo a life-changing period of self-reflection that compelled the young sailor ‘to make the maximum effort in every single thing he did for the rest of his life,'” Robins wrote. Rickover would go on to provide counsel to Carter on a variety of topics through the years.
After Carter joined the Navy’s nuclear efforts, the 28-year-old and his crew were sent to repair the Chalk Water nuclear reactor near Ottawa, Canada, in late 1952. The reactor had suffered a partial meltdown, and a team was needed to shut it down, take it apart and replace it. Carter and the rest of the team took a train up north and soon got to work.
“They built an identical replica of the reactor on an adjacent tennis court to precisely run through the repair procedures, due to the maximum time humans could be exposed to the levels of radiation present in the damaged area,” a Navy history recounts. “Each member of the 22 member team could only be lowered into the reactor for 90-second periods to clean up and repair the site.”
Official accounts don’t clarify whether Carter was in command during the mission, or his precise role. Still, the future president did his part, Canadian journalist Arthur Milnes later recounted.
“He was lowered into the building … with his wrench, and he had to run over to the reactor casing and he had one screw to turn,” Milnes said after interviewing Carter about the incident. “That was all the time he had. And then, boom, back up.”
Carter and the others were regularly tested after the mission was finished to look for long-term health effects.
“They let us [crew members] get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now.” Carter told CNN in 2008 while reflecting on the incident. “We were fairly well-instructed then on what nuclear power was, but for about six months after that, I had radioactivity in my urine.”
In his autobiography, “A Full Life, Reflections at Ninety,” Carter recounted the distinctive perils of being a submarine officer:
“Although some enlisted men could concentrate almost exclusively on their own fields of responsibility as engine men, electricians, torpedo experts, boatswains, quartermasters, gunners or operators of navigation and fire control equipment, every officer was expected to master all of these disciplines…we knew one mistake could endanger everyone aboard.”
Through much of 1953, Carter served as the engineering officer for the USS Seawolf (SSN-575), the Navy’s second nuclear submarine. But life soon happened, and following his father’s death in July of that year, Carter resigned his Navy commission and returned to Georgia to oversee his family interests. The onetime junior officer later entered local politics and was elected president in 1976, serving one term.
Decades later, the Seawolf class fast-attack submarine USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23) was commissioned in 2005. The submarine’s commanding officer, Don Kelso, and a retired Navy admiral arrived at Carter’s Georgia home early that year to brief the 39th president on what the submarine could do, The New York Times’ John Ismay reported.
“He was in awe,” Kelso was quoted as saying. “He knew it was a special submarine, because he had some background there, but he didn’t know all the details before then of what it could really do.”
What the Jimmy Carter and its sailors have done on deployment remains a highly guarded secret within the Pentagon, and The New York Times cited an unnamed former senior Navy official as saying that just a few officers and a few dozen people on land actually know what missions the sub undertakes at sea.
TWZ has extensively reported on the Jimmy Carter, the other two submarines in its Seawolf class, and why the former president had reason to be awed when briefed on his namesake’s capabilities:
“The Jimmy Carter is the last of only three Seawolf class submarines ever built, but its hullform is different than its sister ships. During construction, it had a large plug placed in the center of its hull, making the boat substantially longer than the other two Seawolf class boats.”
“This plug accommodates room for lockout chambers, underwater remotely operated vehicles, and cargo bays for delivering and retrieving outsized cargo. A slew of other modifications were also made to the vessel. You can read all about them, as well as about the Jimmy Carter in general, in this prior feature profile I wrote about the submarine. Suffice it to say that the USS Jimmy Carter’s primary mission is espionage and spying. It can manipulate communications cables deep under the surface of the ocean and even locate and retrieve sensitive material sitting on the sea floor. It truly is America’s ultimate spying tool, and it can still hunt and fight like a normal Seawolf class fast attack submarine if it has to.”
The ship’s crest recognizes the influences on Carter’s life. It features a presidential seal flanked by an atomic energy symbol and a wooden wheel. That wheel pays homage to Carter’s surname, which came from a word meaning “wheel-maker,” according to The New York Times. The crest’s bottom features the words “Semper Optima,” Latin for “always the best,” which was an acknowledgement of Rickover’s formative words to Carter during his time in the sea service.
Carter visited his sub’s crew in the summer of 2005, and got underway for an “overnight V.I.P. cruise” following the boat’s commissioning, The New York Times recounted.
“He drove the ship,” The New York Times quoted Kelso as saying. “And I remember I was amazed because he must have been 81 at the time, and both he and Mrs. Carter climbed up a 25-foot ladder to get to the top of the submarine’s sail and rode with us as we took the ship out to sea.”
“When we dove, he got to drive from the helmsman’s station down below, and later he went down to the mess decks to meet with the ship’s crew several times,” Kelso added. “And I think he had a ball.”
During his top-secret briefing that year on the Jimmy Carter’s capabilities, The New York Times reported, the former president said his namesake could easily take out the Nimitz class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76), named after the man who beat Carter for the presidency in 1980.
Carter lived an extraordinary life, by all accounts. His time in the submarine community played a critical role in all that came after, and he remained a Navy man until the end.
“You and I leave here today to do our common duty—protecting our Nation’s vital interests by peaceful means if possible, by resolute action if necessary,” Carter told the graduating class of Naval Academy midshipmen in 1978. “We go forth sobered by these responsibilities, but confident of our strength. We go forth knowing that our Nation’s goals—peace, security, liberty for ourselves and for others—will determine our future and that we together can prevail.”
RIP President Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024
Email the author: geoff@twz.com