Happy Birthday, Mr. President

AP Photo

By Steve Haner

I love this photo, for some reason.  The lieutenant in the background is President Carter, 95 today.  Our last WWII vet president, but I very much hope not our last military veteran president. There are veterans in the Democratic field.  This is an AP photo now appearing on the Richmond Times-Dispatch webpage,  where you can read the story behind it.  It was 1952, and the boat was the USS Barracuda.    Now, Barracuda was not a Newport News ship, sadly, nor was Carter’s last assignment, the nuclear USS Seawolf. It is always a mark in someone’s favor that Admiral Rickover personally selected them for the nuke Navy.  That took the right stuff, too. 

The death of his father ended his Navy career soon after.  That other company in New England we shall not mention also built this one.  There is no higher honor than a ship of the line in the world’s finest navy named for a living person.  We now return you to your regular programming.  (Note:  If you read this when I first posted it, I had the wrong “Seawolf” linked…and it wasn’t built by NNS…fixed that.)