A high school dropout and a batboy for the New York Yankees,
Vice Admiral John T. Hayward (1908 – 1999) began his naval career
in May 1925 as a recruit at the Newport Naval Training
Station. Subsequently he would graduate from the Naval
Academy, class of 1930, and enjoy a career marked by a driving
desire for professional excellence through education. In 1944,
Hayward joined the Manhattan Project at the China Lake Naval
Ordnance Test Station in California, where he helped to develop
the implosion components of the bomb dropped over Nagasaki,
Japan, on 9 August 1945. In the early 1950s, he helped plan
atomic weapons laboratory work at Los Alamos and Sandia and
worked for the foundation of the Livermore Laboratory program
in 1952, in close collaboration with Dr. Edward Teller. After
becoming a flag officer, he commanded the Navy’s first nuclear
power Task Force in USS Enterprise (CVN 65) in 1965. As the
thirty-fourth Naval War College president, he introduced a dynamic
program to make over the Navy’s highest professional school along
the lines of civilian colleges. The focus on professional curriculum,
student requirements and faculty, was co-implemented also by a
program for appropriate facilities that would ultimately lead to the
construction of Spruance, Conolly and Hewitt Halls duringthe 1970s.
