William Anderson

US commander who took his submarine under the North Pole
The United States was still reeling from the impact of the Soviet Union launching the first Sputnik satellite when, on August 3 1958, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, marked its position directly beneath the North Pole. By the time the vessel arrived in Britain to complete its 21-day, 8,000-nautical mile underwater journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic, its captain, Commander William Anderson, and his crew were national heroes. Anderson returned to a ticker-tape parade in New York and received the Legion of Merit medal from President Dwight Eisenhower, who awarded the crew the first presidential unit citation to be given in peacetime.

But Anderson, who has died aged 85 of kidney failure, was far from a stereotypical cold warrior. After retiring from the US navy in 1962, he advised President Kennedy on the formation of the Peace Corps, and went into politics in his native Tennessee. He lost an independent campaign for governor, but was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1965.

His finest moment came in December 1970 when he stood in the House to attack the FBI chief, J Edgar Hoover. Hoover had attempted to influence the impending trial of the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Roman Catholic priests arrested for attempting to destroy draft files, by accusing them in the press of planning, among other acts, to kidnap government officials - though no such allegations featured in the charges. As a result, his then wife Yvette told the Tennessean newspaper, "Bill got really hot under the collar."

Anderson had met the Berrigans after their arrest. Now he charged Hoover with "resort[ing] to tactics reminiscent of McCarthyism, using newspaper headlines and scare dynamics rather than the due process of the law". The Vietnam war was only one issue, he explained afterwards, but he was also concerned with the Nixon administration's willingness "to throw the bill of rights out the window".

Anderson had reversed his original support of the Vietnam war for good reason. He was bothered by the increasing number of deaths of soldiers from his conservative, rural southern district and by what he saw as a lack of will to win. He undertook a fact-finding mission to Vietnam with California congressman Augustus Hawkins. At Con Son prison, they discovered suspected Viet Cong fighters hanging in tiger cages.

Anderson, who had been re-elected with 80% of the vote in 1970, lost his seat in the Nixon landslide of 1972. In retrospect, he might have been a good choice to replace Thomas Eagleton (obituary, March 6) as George McGovern's running mate. In the event, he lost the election partly because of his increasingly liberal politics, but more as a result of gerrymandering, which replaced solidly Democratic areas of his district with more wealthy, conservative parts of suburban Memphis.

Anderson was born in rural Bakerville, Tennessee. He spent his secondary school years at nearby Columbia military academy, and was then accepted by the US naval academy at Annapolis, Maryland, graduating in 1942. After a year of submariner training at Groton, Connecticut, he commanded submarines in the Pacific for the rest of the war, winning the Bronze Star.

After teaching in naval reserve college programmes, he returned to active duty in 1951, commanding a submarine during the Korean war. In 1955 he was named as head of the tactical department at Groton, and then assigned as an aide to Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US nuclear submarine programme. He took command of the prototype nuclear sub, the Nautilus, in June 1957. Its nuclear engines eliminated the need to surface to recharge batteries, and new computers and communication devices made undersea navigation practical. The atomic engines meant the sub could be larger, and more comfortable, than any previously built.

The Nautilus's secret mission to the North Pole began on July 23 1958, when Anderson and his crew left Pearl Harbor. The submarine submerged under the Arctic ice off Point Barrow, Alaska, on August 1. It crossed the North Pole at 11.15pm on August 3 and ended its journey under the ice when it emerged in the Greenland sea on August 5. At 400ft deep, Nautilus marked its North Pole position as the crew crowded around the control room, and then passed a moment of silence ordered by Anderson. Although he described the four days under polar ice as "the most remarkable feat of navigation ever done", in later years he would compare it to travelling on the Jersey Turnpike, asserting that "when we thought about the people who did it the hard way, with dogsleds, over ice, against incredible wind and low temperature, we felt like our way was easy."

After leaving Congress, Anderson became chairman of the Digital Management Corporation. He applied what he learned there to found, with Patricia Walters, who became his second wife in 1980, the Public Office Corporation, one of the first firms to specialise in applying computer analysis to congressional elections. The first of his three books, Nautilus 90 North (1959, with Clay Blair), was a bestseller and he later produced a children's version, First Under the North Pole, and The Useful Atom (with Vernon Pizer). He is survived by Patricia, three sons and a daughter.

· William Robert Anderson, submariner and politician, born June 17 1921; died February 25 2007

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