The submariner who became president
Carter was stationed in Groton and played a role in the early nuclear Navy
Editor’s note: This story was drawn from “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety” by Jimmy Carter, the files of the Submarine Force Museum in Groton and the archives of The Day.
To anyone in the crowd at Electric Boat on March 2, 1951, the significance of the submarine on the building ways was obvious: It was about to become the first one launched there in five years, ending the lean times that followed World War II.
But in hindsight, there was something even more noteworthy: the young engineering officer in the crew. No one knew it then, but Lt. James E. Carter Jr. was the first, and so far only, future president of the United States to serve on a submarine.
Carter, who a week ago entered hospice care at his Plains, Ga., home at age 98, had a seven-year Navy career, most of which he spent as a submariner. As a result, he had abiding ties to Groton, serving there twice and later visiting often.
After he graduated from Annapolis in 1946, Carter was on two battleships before he applied to join the submarine force. He survived the competitive selection process and reported to Groton in June 1948 for six months of training.
In an autobiography years later, Carter recalled practicing escapes from high-pressure depths at the Naval Submarine Base’s 100-foot dive tower.
“A few other trainees and I volunteered to make what was called a ‘free ascent,’ without the artificial breathing device,” he wrote. “It was crucial to watch the exhaled bubbles and not go up any faster than they did. It was a very unpleasant expe
rience, and it is still my most vivid memory of those early submarine days.”
From sub school, Carter was assigned to the USS Pomfret (SS-391), based in Honolulu. His two-year tour almost cost him his life twice. He was swept off the bridge in a storm but landed unscathed on the main deck. Later, while the sub was docked in heavy fog, the crew of a large ship, thinking themselves still away from shore, nearly dropped an anchor on the Pomfret as Carter stood on deck screaming to get their attention.
When he learned the Navy was building a new kind of submarine, designed to attack other subs, he applied to join the crew and was chosen as the sole officer attached to the vessel during the last stage of construction in Groton.
For Carter, the K-1 (SSK-1) was a new challenge, but for EB, the vessel was a godsend. With no Navy contracts after the war, the company had been reduced to building fishing boats and machines that reset bowling pins.
When it was launched on March 2, 1951, the K-1 was the latest in submarine technology, with an ungainly protrusion on its bow packed with sonar equipment. Navy men called it “The Thing.”
Carter monitored the final building and testing and came up with the sub’s procedures for operating and conducting clandestine warfare. Once the rest of the crew arrived, “collectively, we quickly utilized and improved the voluminous documents I had prepared,” he wrote.
Serving first as engineering officer, he was promoted to executive officer and qualified for command. Twenty-five years later, a former crewman living in Pawcatuck recalled that Carter “got back in the engine room in coveralls and pitched right in. He was right in the thick of things. He appeared to be a very capable officer.”
Again seeking new challenges, Carter sought to join the secret effort to build the first two nuclear submarines. In Washington he endured a psychologically grueling interview with the head of the project, Capt. Hyman G. Rickover.
For two hours, an unsmiling Rickover stared into his eyes, interrogating him about everything from Shakespeare to opera while Carter sat in a chair whose front legs had been shortened so he kept sliding off. Convinced he had tanked the interview, he was surprised to learn he had been chosen.
Leaving Groton in October 1952 for General Electric Corp. in Schenectady, N.Y., he helped build the prototype of the reactor that would power the Seawolf, the second nuclear sub, which was built by EB.
“Designing and building one of the first high-capacity nuclear power plants and understanding the submarine in which it would be installed was a constant learning process, on the cutting edge of science,” he wrote.
He put that learning into practice when Rickover sent him to Canada to help disassemble a damaged reactor core after a power plant accident. He was exposed to 1,000 times the level of radiation considered safe today but suffered no permanent aftereffects.
Carter was poised to be a consequential figure in the early nuclear Navy, but his father’s death in July 1953 changed everything. Three months later, he resigned and returned to Plains, Ga., to run the family peanut farm.
He remembered the decision to abandon his career as “one of the strangest and most unexpected events in my life.”
On Sept. 7, 1976, about 10,000 people showed up at EB’s main gate to see the former Navy officer, who had become the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.
“I’m glad to be back home,” the candidate said with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up. He told the crowd the first time he had voted was when he was stationed in Groton.
After his election victory, the new president quickly announced he wanted to ride in a nuclear submarine with Rickover, his old boss. In May 1977 in Florida, the two set out in the USS Los Angeles for an eight-hour cruise.
Rickover had been coldly dismissive of Carter’s decision to leave the Navy. But he turned effusive when his former subordinate became the commander in chief. Just after Carter took office, Rickover dug up a workbook the future president had used and sent it to him with praise for his professionalism.
“Should you decide to leave your present employment, you will be welcome once more in the Naval Reactors Program — subject, of course, to an additional interview to determine your continued fitness,” Rickover wrote.
Carter did not visit Groton while in office, but his wife did. Rosalynn Carter had loved being a Navy wife and was furious when her husband ended his career.
On April 7, 1979, she returned to EB to weld her initials into the keel of the Georgia, the fourth Trident ballistic-missile boat. In 1952, while pregnant, she had been in the crowd when President Harry S. Truman did the same for the Nautilus, the first nuclear sub.
The Carters’ third son, Jeffrey, was born in Groton shortly afterward.
Yet another event at EB brought Carter full circle. On June 5, 2004, the former president was there for the christening of an attack sub that bore his name.
In view of Carter’s career, the honor seems appropriate. But at the time, the decision to use a living person’s name was unusual, though a sub had previously been named for Rickover.
When the name was announced in 1998, some Navy people expressed nostalgia for the days of naming submarines for fish.
“I think it’s a waste of a good submarine,” a retired captain from Waterford said. “To name it after Jimmy Carter, who left this country in such an economic mess, is just ridiculous. It’s political correctness at its most vile.”
Such sentiments didn’t seem to faze Carter, who visited Groton a few months later and rode in the USS Seawolf, the lead ship of his namesake’s class. He also stopped for lobster at Abbott’s in Noank.
At the christening, Mrs. Carter smashed the traditional bottle of champagne on the hull of the Jimmy Carter (SSN23) in the dock at EB.
“I have a very strong attachment to this place,” Carter told the gathering.
That wasn’t just something to say. As president, he had approved the recently decommissioned Nautilus for use as a museum ship in Groton.
And in 2005, he lobbied to save the sub base, which had been targeted for closure. His effort infuriated fellow Georgians because the closure would have benefited their own sub base in Kings Bay.
But Carter wrote that abandoning Groton would have an “adverse economic impact” on southeastern Connecticut and result in “a loss of some of the proud submariners’ heritage.”
A week earlier, at age 80, he had climbed aboard the USS Jimmy Carter, by then a commissioned vessel, to take a cruise from Kings Bay. He was still a submariner at heart.
“This is an element of my life I would say is almost pre-eminent,” he said.