By all accounts former President Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at age 100, was thrilled when he, as a former naval officer and submariner, found out in the late 1990s that the U.S. Navy would name its newest attack submarine in his honor.
But until the submarine’s commander, Don Kelso, and a retired Navy admiral overseeing its development showed up at his home in Plains, Ga., Mr. Carter had no idea that his namesake warship held a wealth of secrets known only to a handful of people.
Over the course of an afternoon, Mr. Kelso, then a Navy captain commanding the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter in the final stages of its development in early 2005, sat at Mr. Carter’s dining room table as the retired admiral briefed the former president on the submarine’s unique capabilities.
“He was in awe,” Mr. Kelso said in an interview. “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.”
Publicly, just about the only detail the Navy or Mr. Kelso will acknowledge is that the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter is an advanced Seawolf-class submarine — an undersea hunter-killer designed for special missions.
But as the warship neared its commissioning date in February 2005, it became clear that it had been built specifically to replace a legendary spy sub, which for decades took on daring high-risk intelligence collection operations like tapping underwater Soviet communications lines.
To make room for divers and unmanned underwater vehicles to covertly enter and exit the Carter while submerged, the Navy built the submarine 100 feet longer than other Seawolves. And unlike any other Navy submarine, the Carter is fitted with small thrusters at its bow and stern, allowing it to quietly hover in place for extended periods during undersea spy missions.
Today, details of the Carter’s missions remain among the Defense Department’s most tightly held secrets. Access to that information is so restricted that perhaps only a few officers on the submarine and maybe a few dozen people ashore will know what the vessel’s actual mission is while at sea, according to a former senior Navy official.
Long before Navy leadership decided to brief Mr. Carter on the submarine’s full capabilities and intended missions, he was intimately involved with its crew.
In February 2000, when the crew of the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter first came together at Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin, Pa., Marc Denno was assigned as their commanding officer — assembling the heart of the submarine, its crew, on dry land before it moved aboard the sleek and stealthy black warship going through its final assembly in Groton, Conn. Mr. Denno, then a Navy commander, decided to reach out to Mr. Carter to establish a relationship with the former president at the outset of his time in command.
Mr. Carter picked up the phone when Mr. Denno called, and began a warm friendship with the sub’s crew. One of Commander Denno’s early tasks was to draw up the ship’s crest — a heraldic design that would be part of the submarine’s identity. Based on Mr. Carter’s input, the crest has the presidential seal at its center, flanked by an atomic symbol — a nod to Mr. Carter’s early role in establishing the Navy nuclear power program — and an old-fashioned spoked wooden wheel.
The former president explained to Mr. Denno that his surname came from a Middle English and Anglo-Saxon word that means wheel-maker, or one who transports goods by wheel.
At the crest’s bottom are the words “Semper Optima” — Latin for “Always the Best” — a nod to a theme from Mr. Carter’s 1975 campaign book, titled “Why Not the Best?” The book took its name from an anecdote told by Mr. Carter about being interviewed in the early 1950s for possible duty in the United States’ new nuclear-powered submarine force.
The officer heading the program, Capt. Hyman G. Rickover, asked Mr. Carter — who had excellent grades as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. — if he had always done his best academically. After some thought, Mr. Carter wrote, he replied that he had perhaps not always done his very best, leading Captain Rickover to ask: Why not?
Mr. Carter conceded in his book that he was never able to forget that question, which he said left him shaken. He was accepted for the Navy’s elite nuclear-powered submarine program, and in his memoir reflected on how hard he worked to keep up with Captain Rickover, who became his boss.
Mr. Carter’s early career as a submariner began after he graduated from the Naval Academy as a member of the class of 1947, which finished its studies a year early because of the pressures of World War II. He served for six years before returning to Georgia.
Mr. Carter is the only Naval Academy graduate to win the presidency, though many have tried in the years since he occupied the Oval Office.
Ross Perot, Class of 1953, ran as an independent in 1992. His running mate was another alumnus, Vice Adm. James Stockdale — a former pilot who received the Medal of Honor for his service as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Mr. Perot died in 2019, and Admiral Stockdale in 2005.
John McCain, Class of 1958 — who served as a prisoner alongside Admiral Stockdale and was later elected to two terms in the House of Representatives and six in the Senate — first ran for the Republican nomination in 2000. He succeeded in 2008 but lost the general election to Barack Obama. Mr. McCain died in 2018.
Jim Webb, Class of 1968, one of the most highly decorated Marine infantry officers of the Vietnam War, became the junior senator from Virginia in 2007 and ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic Party nomination in 2015.
Among the many facts that new plebes, or freshmen, at the Naval Academy have to memorize are details about the service of famous graduates like Admiral Stockdale, but although Mr. Carter is to date the only president to come from Annapolis, until recently the school had few if any markers noting he had studied there.
On Feb. 17, 2023, the school officially renamed an academic building in Mr. Carter’s honor. Previously, the building, which was built in the early 1900s, was named for Matthew Fontaine Maury, a Confederate officer.
The newly renamed Carter Hall is not far from the school’s engineering building, which was named Rickover Hall upon its completion in 1975, in honor of Mr. Carter’s former boss, who by then was a four-star admiral. Admiral Rickover retired in 1982 after 63 years of service.
That such official naval honors came to Mr. Carter later in life did not appear to bother him. According to Mr. Kelso, Mr. Carter took great joy in corresponding with the crew of his namesake submarine, and he took the former first lady, Rosalynn Carter, to meet the ship at the naval base in Kings Bay, Ga., in the summer of 2005 for an overnight V.I.P. cruise following the ship’s commissioning.
“He drove the ship,” Mr. Kelso said, “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,” Mr. Kelso recalled. “And I think he had a ball.”
While giving Mr. Carter the top-secret briefing of the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter’s capabilities in 2005, Mr. Kelso and the former president talked about the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan — a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier christened in 2001 to honor the man who beat him in the 1980 general election.
“The former president said with the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter he could easily take out the Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, and he thought it was pretty cool that his submarine had all that capability,” Mr. Kelso recalled with a laugh.
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