If you enjoy digging through the microfilms in the reference department of your nearby library take a look at this list of news articles on the SS United States. For a historical perspective on the beginning of the Big U, here is an early clip from the Times.
From The New York Times, February 9, 1950, Page 54:
SUPERLINER'S KEEL
LAID WITHOUT POMP
Not a Single High Official of Maritime Body or the U.S. Lines Sees 'Ceremony'
By GEORGE HORNE, Special to The New York Times
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. Feb 8 -- The greatest merchant ship ever ordered for this country had her official beginning here today in the plant of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company.
The liner, tentatively named the United States, is to be commissioned in August, 1952, according to the contract, but the yard hopes to get her ready by April of that year, in time for the travel season. The ship is being built for the United States Lines and the Maritime Commission.
In a giant building basin, while a handful of yard officials and guests watched in a cold wind, a big crane slowly settled a fifty-five ton keel assembly on a long row of timbers. It was 10 A.M. when the cables started down and at 10:20 the first chipping hammers were gunning away and another crane was lowering the next keel plate.
It was a strange ceremony, hardly worthy of the name. Conspicuously absent were the drama and fanfare to which the embryo superliner should be entitled. Not a single high official of the Maritime Commission was on hand and executives of the United States Lines stayed deliberately away. No invitations were issued, as would be normal for such an occasion.
First U.S. Prestige Liner
This ship is to be a prestige liner for the United States, the first it has had and the first in decades that will compete in the Atlantic with the British Queens for speed laurels. It will cost $70,373,000. It will be at least 980 feet long, longer than the basin in which it is being built, as indicated by converging yellow lines marked out where the stern will be, extending over the end platforms. Where the knife-like bow will rest, it will crowd into the work street itself. Under American Bureau of Shipping classification, the ship will be registered at about 48,000 gross tons.
William Francis Gibbs, of the firm of Gibbs & Cox, who designed the ship, said today he had no intention of disclosing any of the many secrets that make her a mystery liner. Yard attaches said that competitor nations were making every effort to discover her details.
Someone asked Mr. Gibbs for her speed today, and the designer, who has been credited by the Navy with signal contributions to the fleet in World War II, said dourly: "Joe Stalin would love to know."
In addition to Mr. Gibbs and his brother and partner, Frederick Gibbs, present at the keel laying were: J.B. Woodward, president of the shipyard: William E. Blewett Jr., executive vice president, and a cluster of newspaper reporters, photographers and newsreel cameramen. They were uninvited, but the yard made them welcome.
The day turned brilliantly clear for which the photographers were grateful,
but there was a kind of cloud over the vast array of cranes and trestles
and the ranks of basins and building ways, most of which are empty in this
low stage of American shipbuilding. It was an intangible cloud, spread
by yesterday's renewed attack by 
the
Controller General, Lindsay C. Warren, on the Maritime Commission's ship
and construction subsidy administration.
Commission Is Confident
Mr. Warren has found fault with the Government's assumption of a $48,000,000 share in the costly super liner, and with the subsidies granted under the terms of the merchant marine laws to other ship operators to offset lower foreign costs. The Maritime Commission is confident that its subsidy studies are defensible under the strict terms of the law, and the builders do not believe that anything will stop construction of the ship now.
The vessel has been in preparation for six years. Several thousand man-hours of work have gone into the design, and the shipyard already has 75 per cent of the steel on hand.
Shipping men generally, including those not connected with current projects, feel that with the new ships now under construction the United States is at last making progress on a segment of its economy too long neglected in peacetime.
One of the many mystery aspects of the liner is the complex of defense features. It could be said that primarily this is a Navy ship so numerous are these features including the speed, the remarkable extension of new light-weight metals in shipbuilding and her secret safeguards against dangers. There are also numerous commercially competitive factors in the design.
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Pictured Above: The
Big U's print shop typesetting machine (pre-QuarkXpress) - still on board.
-j70324
Knowledge Builder: SS United States performance specs were TOP SECRET until the Navy de-classified this information in 1978.