Running Critical, by Patrick Tyler

...These tapes, which were subsequently handed over to Mr...

...Rickover had been defeated by the relative resource commitments of the superpowers in the silent war...

...Above all, it is a "story of three men...

...He may be right...

...But then, briefly and belatedly, Mr...

...Takis Veliotis: the rough-hewn Greek shipbuilder would claw his way to the top of General Dynamics—if his shadowy past did not catch him first...

...He is right, and he doesn't even know why...

...Tyler obliges by revealing the military-industrial-congressional complex's conspiracy to foist a new attack submarine on a Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who was so determined to reduce defense spending that he cut his estimates of Soviet naval strength to fit his budget cloth...

...There were a number of promising developments in submarine technology, but only one completed plan for anew ship: Admiral Rickover's...

...Indeed, no detail of corporate infighting or personal recrimination appears too minor to recount...

...When the low bid disarmed the submarine's critics, Admiral Rickover rewarded General Dynamics with a contract to build all of the first eleven attack submarines at General Dynamics' Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Connecticut...

...Veliotis's tape recorder...

...Admiral Rickover and his allies thought this estimate was too conservative, and, when a Soviet submarine was discovered tailing the Enterprise, they seized the opportunity to prove it...

...If this were, say, a novel by Arthur Hailey (add a few scenes with the wives and mistresses, retitle it Submarine, and it plausibly could be), the advance posters in the bookstores would profile these three larger-than-life leading characters...

...Had the decision waited just two years, until 1970, would any new submarine have been built in the decade that followed...

...issues provide useful cover...

...But all conspiracies must come to their tragic denouement: Somewhere in the midst of all the chaos, the United States lost so much ground in the silent war with the Soviet Union that by the early 1980s no one could say with any certainty who was ahead...

...Tyler adds a crucial point: The Soviets had spent tens of billions of dollars on submarines, while Rickover had a couple of billion to build a competitive fleet...

...Wier sees only the greed and the jockeying for power, but surely his conspiracy was also, in part, a conspiracy to keep the submarine program alive until the American people came to their senses and paid their bills...

...Tyler's vivid storytelling notwithstanding, the story of America's submarine fleet is not really a "story of three men," nor even—at least not yet—a story of heroes and villains...

...General Dynamics' low bid reflected David Lewis's understanding of this fact...

...So did Admiral Rickover's desperate efforts to bully the shipyards into greater efficiency, and successive Navy secretaries' willingness to reimburse their shipping contractors (Newport News and Litton as well as General Dynamics) for some of the cost overruns they incurred after underbidding their contracts...

...Their story, or the story of the SSN 688, opens dramatically in 1968 with a race between the U.S...

...T his is to skip lightly over more than two hundred pages of high boardroom drama: David Lewis bribing and browbeating his accountants and managers into disguising General Dynamics' mounting losses at Electric Boat from Wall Street and the SEC...

...The CIA had claimed that this class of submarines, the Soviets' oldest, traveled at a speed of only 25 knots...

...Takis Veliotis bludgeoning the shipyard into reducing costs while collecting subcontractor kickbacks in his Swiss bank account...

...What he cannot deny is the political wisdom of Admiral Rickover's refusal to take a chance on new designs, and the delays they would inevitably produce, at a time when the Enterprise incident had captured Congress's fickle attention...

...Tyler concludes: "The shame of the long history of the nuclear attack submarine is the shame of those who helped create the system and those who accepted it, opting for expediency and short-term success at the expense of long-term sanity...

...David Lewis: the easy charm of an old-style Southern gentleman hid a ruthless determination to protect his company and his reputation, even against the truth...

...Tyler is convinced that the admiral's overweening pride stood in the way of better alternatives to the SSN 688...

...Hyman Rickover: the crusty old admiral knew what he wanted and set out to destroy anyone who stood in his way...

...Fights are all about power and personalities...

...Only one thing was sure: the Soviets had outbuilt the United States by more than two to one . . . The implication is that "all the chaos" was to blame for this growing military imbalance...

...It was not true...

...Tyler's account, "the story of [the SSN 688 attack submarine] is a story of ambition, commercial greed, and the exercise of unmoderated power in the peacetime system of defense procurement...

...Instead it is preeminently a story of the geopolitical struggle between a great land power that decided to create the world's largest and most deadly submarine fleet, and the great maritime power that could not bring itself to match this effort...

...RUNNING CRITICAL: THE SILENT WAR, RICKOVER, AND GENERAL DYNAMICS Patrick Tyler/Harper & Row/$19.95 Mary C. N. McConnell THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 43...

...Tyler, are quoted at interminable length...

...Thus, in Mr...

...General Dynamics wrote off a $359 million loss, and the Navy turned over $639 million in taxpayer dollars to the corporation...

...It is of course the duty of a modern-day investigative reporter to uncover conspiracy...

...The United States needed a faster attack submarine, quickly...

...When he was defeated, he went out swinging at the shipyards, as if they had somehow defeated his destiny...

...Hawkish members of the congressional armed services committees thus accepted, with a wink, Admiral Rickover's modest proposal to build a single prototype submarine, recognizing thata multi-billion dollar request for a new fleet would irresistibly follow...

...Eventually the reckoning camedue...

...Under David Lewis's leadership,- General Dynamics then presented the Navy with a much lower bid for the first attack submarines than the corporation's shipyard engineers considered plausible...

...He has adopted the pseudo-novelistic style of the Poses investigative reporting: "The noontime air was crisp on a spring day in 1971 when Hilliard W. Paige pushed through the turnstile into the wind tunnel that was Lexington Avenue...

...carrier Enterprise and a Soviet November-class submarine...

...He has also adopted that newspaper's characteristic perspective on issues...

...As the carrier deliberately picked up speed, the unsuspecting Soviet commander brought his submarine to 31 knots, and precipitated a defense procurement crisis...

...The inevitable and massive cost overruns, pushed even higher by inflation and the energy crisis, ignited a protracted battle between General Dynamics and the Navy to fix blame and financial responsibility for the submarine's troubles...

...The oldest and preMary C. N McConnell is a free-lance writer living in Chicago...

...sumably slowest Soviet submarines, it turned out, were faster than anything we had in our fleet...

...Couldn't some of this so-shocking procurement conspiracy—the useful myth of the prototype, the tacit acceptance of underbidding, the Navy's ultimate willingness to buy peace with the shipyards—be attributed to the uncompromising fact that throughout the 1970s America's defense was costing more than Americans were willing to pay...

...Admiral Rickover shouting over the telephone and into Mr...

...After much lobbying, and some for-the-record spasms of congressional outrage at defense industry cupidity, a deal was cut...