A post of Dr. Tilley's in 2009.
"Dr. Thomas Graham's fine book, Remembering Revell Model Kits,contains (pp. 78-79) a most interesting story about the great Rickover controversy:
"For Revell's ship model line, the decade of the 1960s began with a rousing national controvesy over one of Revell's new models. On June 19, 1961, the front page of the New York Times carried a photo of Revell's Polaris guided missile submarine U.S.S. George Washingtonalong with a story revealing secret testimony given by Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine. 'If I were a Russian,' declared the admiral, 'I would be most grateful to the United States for its generosity in supplying such information for $2.98.' (Actually it was cheaper: $1.98.) Rickover claimed top secret data had been leaked to a hobby company. He did not mention the name of the company, and both Revell and Renwall had Polaris subs in their catalogs - but the media spotlight focused on Revell....
"When Henry Blankfort [Revell's vice president for public relations] read the story he immediately recognized this as a marvelous opportunity for some free publicity. He contacted the press and told them Lew Glaser, President of Revell, would be available to answer questions at his home the following day. Then he phoned Lew. 'I'm going to tell you what to do,' he said, 'and then I'm going to disappear.' Blankfort did not want the old allegations of his supposed Communist past to muddy-up the story. When the media men arrived at the Glaser household, Lew dived into the backyard pool with a model of the Polaris sub and surfaced blowing bubbles....A photo of the episode appeared in the next day's Los Angeles Times and later as the picture of the week in Life. [It's reproduced in the book - and it's pretty funny.] The Glasers were invited to appear on radio and TV for interviews.
"Lew found himself forced into the awkward position of arguing for the inaccuracy of a Revell model. He pointed out that Revell got one big item wrong, giving the Polaris sub only eight missile launch tubes, rather than the actual sixteen. (An error corrected in later issues of the kit.) Glaser avowed that Revell had received no secret information, but had simply gleaned facts from trade and technical journals 'available to anyone who wants to take the time and trouble to look them up.' (Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1961, 1.)
"Nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell picked up the trail of the controversy and someone fed him material for one of his columns in which he called Lew Glaser a Trotskyite and denounced Blankfort for taking the Fifth Amendment during the Congressional Un-American Activities hearings of the early 'fifties.
"The boys in the model shop at Revell found all this very amusing. They had, of course, researched the model just as Glaser said, piecing together data on the submarine from whatever sources they could find. One of the model's creators, Englishman Ron Campbell, recalled that the craftsmen in the model shop had no idea what kind of motor the sub had, so he just gave it a three-stage turbine like those he had once manufactured in his previous job back in Britain.
"In the end Royle Glaser [the president's wife] pronounced it "the best piece of PR we ever had, thanks to Admiral Rickover and Henry Blankfort. We sold a jillion of the sub models because they were already in the stores."".