He died Feb. 25 after a brief illness in Leesburg, Va., his family said. He was 85.

Anderson was also a four-term congressman from Tennessee who became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. He made headlines by exposing that cells resembling "tiger cages" were being used to house prisoners in a South Vietnamese prison.

A U.S. Naval Academy graduate and veteran of Pacific submarine service during World War II, Anderson took command of the Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, in 1957.

The Nautilus' successful top-secret mission to the North Pole in 1958 began July 23, when Anderson and his crew departed Pearl Harbor.

The Nautilus submerged under the Arctic ice pack off Point Barrow, Alaska, on Aug. 1. The submarine crossed the North Pole at 11:15 p.m., Aug. 3 and ended its 1,830-mile journey under the polar ice pack when it emerged in the Greenland Sea on Aug. 5.

Worldwide acclaim greeted the 37-year-old Tennessee native and his crew, who became overnight heroes.

Anderson was dubbed "the 20th century's Capt. Nemo" in reference to the fictional submarine skipper in Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

During a ticker-tape parade in New York City, an estimated crowd of 250,000 turned out to give Anderson and his crew members a rousing ovation. Anderson appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and President Eisenhower presented him with the Legion of Merit at the White House.

At a White House news conference, Anderson bragged about his navigators saying, "I really think that this is the most remarkable job in ship navigation that has ever been done."

Elaborating, he said, "A trip across the North Pole, where there is no opportunity to observe anything outside of the ship, no opportunity to observe stars or do any type of electronic navigation, presents a very formidable problem — or what has been up to now a very formidable problem."

"Nautilus 90 North," Anderson's 1959 account of the submarine's historic voyage, which he wrote with Clay Blair Jr., became a bestseller.

Although Anderson and Blair asserted in their book that the feat was "perhaps the most remarkable voyage in the history of man," Anderson seemed to downplay the inherent dangers on the voyage's 40th anniversary in 1998.

"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," he told Life magazine.

After retiring from active duty in the Navy in 1962, Anderson unsuccessfully ran for governor of Tennessee as an independent.

In 1964, Anderson was elected to the House of Representatives from the sixth district of Tennessee as a Democrat.

Initially a hawk on the Vietnam War, Anderson did an about-face after making a two-week trip to Vietnam as a member of a House fact-finding committee in 1970. While in Vietnam, he and California Rep. Augustus Hawkins discovered that Communist prisoners of war were being held in small cells resembling tiger cages at the Con Son prison.

After leaving Congress in 1973, Anderson became chairman of the board of Digital Management Corp. He and his wife, Pat, founded Public Office Corp., a data management company specializing in computer-related services to presidential primary campaign committees and members of the Senate and House of Representatives seeking re-election.