The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  To be sure, there was great inertia within the country. Since December 7, 1941, the country had been united in purpose, and that purpose—the ultimate defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan—dominated all decisions. There was no crossroads that called for a major change in policy. The American public might take comfort in FDR’s words of hope and determination emanating from their radios, but Roosevelt himself, having set the wheels in motion, could find satisfaction in the knowledge that the country was charging along on the largest and most rapid military industrialization in history.

  Certainly, George Marshall was a key figure in picking the right leaders for the fight and in overseeing the operations of the army’s ground and air forces. Ernest King was second only to Marshall in providing this sort of total leadership for the navy’s efforts, and from his first pronouncements in the Pacific, King’s contributions as a true global strategist may have surpassed even Marshall’s. But increasingly in the last year of Roosevelt’s life, there is strong evidence that the man who picked up the presidential slack, the man who remained not only his number one military adviser but also became his unquestioned chief counselor and trusted confidant on all matters, was William D. Leahy.

  Roosevelt’s decline first attracted major attention when he failed to bounce back with his usual good humor and energy after the Teheran Conference of December 1943. He endured a tough winter of colds, stuffy sinuses, and bronchitis and showed little sign of recovering with the approach of spring. Nimitz met with him in Washington that March and came away convinced that the president was not well, recalling that “his face was ashen and his hands trembled.” As Leahy discreetly put it, “The terrific burden of being in effect the Commander-in-Chief of the greatest global war yet recorded in history began to tell on Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.”4

  Even as the coming offensives at Normandy and in the Pacific demanded attention, Leahy found that “of great concern to all of us as the spring of 1944 approached was the failure of our Commander-in-Chief to regain his accustomed good health.” Dr. Bruenn first diagnosed the real reason in an examination on March 28 that found the president to be suffering from hypertension and congestive heart failure. The solution was to pack FDR off to Bernard Baruch’s Hobcaw estate in South Carolina for an uninterrupted rest. “The quiet of the place,” Leahy remembered, “was almost oppressive.”5

  Pa Watson and Wilson Brown, the president’s army and navy aides, respectively, accompanied the presidential party, as did Dr. Bruenn, but it was Leahy who served as the focal point for information flowing to and from FDR. In the morning, Leahy dealt with messages from Washington and London and dispatches that the Map Room in the White House otherwise sent to Leahy’s office in the East Wing. Next came the mail and its required replies. While the president napped in the afternoon, Leahy caught up on other work before the president’s requisite late afternoon outing that usually entailed a short drive or fishing excursion.

  By the time Roosevelt was deemed well enough to return to Washington, a leisurely month had passed. For Leahy, who was so concerned about the sixty-two-year-old president, the visit ended on May 6, his own sixty-ninth birthday. It was not always a young man’s war.

  The president’s absence from Washington that spring fueled speculation about whether he would be a candidate for reelection. In one unguarded moment, Roosevelt confessed to Leahy, “Bill, I just hate to run for election. Perhaps the war will by that time have progressed to a point that will make it unnecessary for me to be a candidate.” But time was hardly on his side. Roosevelt nonetheless waited until July 11, just before the Democratic National Convention convened, to announce his candidacy.6

  But FDR never returned to his pre-1944 work schedule. Four-hour days became his norm, and frequently even those hours were abbreviated. Leahy inevitably picked up some of the slack, but then the workload—and the resultant power—centered all the more on the admiral when the president’s other chief confidant, Harry Hopkins, fell gravely ill.

  Hopkins, who, Leahy said, “appeared to many of us to be living on borrowed time,” was absent from the White House for much of 1944. Leahy generously claimed that the additional work left to him by Hopkins’s absence “brought a new appreciation of the tremendous selfless contribution Hopkins had been making to his country,” but the end result was that the memo pad Leahy took each morning into the president’s study “began to have more entries.” In addition to the usual military matters, more and more foreign policy and political issues filled Leahy’s docket.7

  Next came the visit to Pearl Harbor, where Douglas MacArthur, who had not seen Roosevelt in person since 1937, added his own evaluation of the president’s health. MacArthur professed to be “shocked” at the president’s appearance and claimed, “He was just a shell of the man I had known.” To his own physician, the general was even more blunt as he whispered, “Doc, the mark of death is on him! In six months he’ll be in his grave.”8

  The Alaskan cruise and speech debacle at Bremerton followed, but before Roosevelt got into the fall campaign, another conference with Churchill at Quebec highlighted Leahy’s ascendant role. Hopkins was not present, and it was Churchill’s wife, Clementine, who best put her finger on it. “[Hopkins] seems to have dropped out of the picture,” she wrote their daughter Sarah. “We cannot quite make out whether Harry’s old place in the President’s confidence is vacant, or whether Admiral Leahy is gradually molding into it.”9

  There was no one moment or issue that cooled the relationship between FDR and Hopkins, but a combination of Harry’s remarriage, his subsequent move out of the White House, and his ensuing illness robbed him of his status as the indispensable sidekick he had once been. Leahy, while never a “sidekick” in his relationship with FDR, nonetheless filled the void as counselor. And Hopkins’s distancing from FDR did not necessarily mean that the administration was deprived of his advice. Hopkins and Leahy enjoyed a very close relationship and somewhat of a mutual admiration society for the work each knew the other was doing. Hopkins, for example, met with Leahy “on matters concerned with both domestic and international politics” just before Leahy left for Quebec with the president. This, of course, was a further broadening of Leahy’s portfolio.10

  But there was one other insight at Quebec into FDR’s deteriorating condition. One evening, Roosevelt and assorted staff watched the new film Wilson, about the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and his ill-fated fight for the League of Nations. When the film reached the point where Wilson’s health broke down and he suffered a stroke, Dr. Bruenn, who was sitting near the president, heard Roosevelt mutter, “By God, that’s not going to happen to me!”11

  What did happen, of course, was his reelection, with Harry Truman as his running mate. Leahy was among the close circle that gathered with the president at Hyde Park to monitor the returns. The dining room in the Springwood mansion was outfitted with two ticker tape recording devices and a radio speaker. As the election reports came in, the president and Leahy recorded them state by state. By the time northern New York, traditionally more Republican, was tallied, Roosevelt seemed confident of victory and sat down to a midnight supper. Leahy continued to tally results until 2:00 a.m., when the president’s reelection was certain.

  Leahy went to bed early that morning but had trouble sleeping, a fact he attributed to “coffee after dinner at midnight.” Perhaps. He may also have been privately agonizing over how long the man who was clearly wasting away in front of him might live and what consequences it would have for the country.12

  Ahead lay the Yalta Conference, but in the interim there would be increasing evidence of Leahy’s growing role. Witness three otherwise unrelated episodes.

  In mid-December, when Leahy received his appointment as the first five-star fleet admiral and undeniably the country’s ranking military figure, among the congratulations that flowed in was a letter from Harry Hopkins. Far from resenting Leahy’s ascendancy out of his own decline, Hopkins remained true in his friendship and advice to Leahy. “No one kno
ws better than I,” Hopkins concluded, “of your devoted service to the President and your country.”13 Coming from the consummate insider, that was high praise indeed.

  Then there was a knock on Leahy’s door at 5:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Even in wartime Washington, most were pausing, because it was also a Sunday night. Leahy’s caller was Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. The secretary wanted to discuss a major navy personnel issue—almost certain to be unpopular—about moving retired officers currently on active duty back to inactive duty as the war wound down. Forrestal was at Leahy’s door that evening because the president, who had once immersed himself in navy minutia, had told Forrestal to resolve the matter with Leahy. Roosevelt was clearly comfortable giving Leahy wide latitude.14

  Finally, there were the after-dinner remarks on the evening of Roosevelt’s fourth inaugural. Given the wartime conditions, the inaugural ceremony itself, on January 20, 1945, was held on the south portico of the White House. At a small dinner that evening, FDR might well have made some appropriate remarks himself, but he asked Leahy to do it instead. In a speech of about six hundred words, lasting barely five minutes, Leahy put forth the Roosevelt Administration’s overriding goal.

  “I know no easy or happy words to say to you tonight,” Leahy began. “I know only that as we sit here 8,000,000 of our sons and our daughters, too, are outside the continental limits of the United States, carrying the battle to the enemy. They are on every sea, in every sector of the globe from poles to tropics…. It is a global war without parallel in the history of the world.”

  Then Leahy got slightly disingenuous. “I know nothing of the intricacies of politics,” he claimed. “It is not my job to know them, I am thankful for that.” None of that was true, of course. Leahy was, in fact, almost as much of a master of politics as his boss. And the fact that he could be so self-deprecating in so important a setting was proof in itself that he had learned his lessons well.

  The one mandate of the election, Leahy continued, was “to win the war… and I do not know any other person in the world who is so well qualified to execute the peoples’ mandate as the talented and experienced statesman and patriot who was inaugurated today as president of the United States.”15 These final words were indeed a tribute to Roosevelt, but the fact that FDR had entrusted Leahy with the podium in the first place was a tribute to their relationship and the president’s faith in his crusty sailor. Two days later, Roosevelt and Leahy left for Yalta.

  Winston Churchill supposedly opined, “If we had spent ten years on research, we could not have found a worse place in the world than Yalta.” It proved to be almost that bad. One wonders whether Churchill’s initial wish to stage it close to Sevastopol to allow for accommodations on board ship might not have been better, but the retreating Germans had left that town in shambles, and the Russians were making the venue decision. They opted to have the British and American delegations fly into Saki and then motor ninety miles over winding mountain roads to Yalta. For his part, Leahy would later term the gathering “the most controversial of all of the nine Allied war councils.”16

  Roosevelt and Leahy left Washington by train for Newport News, Virginia, where they and their party embarked on the Quincy, the same class of heavy cruiser as the Baltimore, which had carried them around much of the North Pacific. Along with military aides Pa Watson and Wilson Brown, physician Ross McIntire, and the by now indispensable Dr. Bruenn, the presidential party included Roosevelt’s only daughter, Anna Boettiger, who while always close to her father, had become his indefatigable champion and all-around protector in the last year of his life. Because Roosevelt, for whatever reason, preferred the starboard side of the ship, he was lodged in the captain’s cabin, while Anna got the adjacent admiral’s quarters on the port side. Leahy shared a cabin with James F. Byrnes, who was along as head of the Office of War Mobilization.17

  The Quincy crossed the Atlantic without incident, including any repeat of the friendly torpedo attack that had occurred while crossing to the Teheran conference fifteen months before. The Quincy put into Malta, where the American Joint Chiefs had already assembled to meet with their British counterparts. After boarding the Quincy to pay their initial respects, King and Marshall came away gravely disturbed by the president’s appearance. Unable to say anything in the presence of others, they nonetheless exchanged looks of consternation and nodded to each other in silence.18

  There was still plenty of American-British bickering: the British preferred a single thrust by Montgomery into Germany, no matter how slow, to Eisenhower’s strategy of a broad frontal advance; King was as adamant as ever that he wanted no help from the British fleet in the Pacific; and Churchill was still singing songs of the eastern Mediterranean. But a lot had changed militarily with their Russian allies since the Teheran Conference. In November 1943, the United States and Great Britain were still on the defensive with Stalin about a second front. Now, not only had Normandy been invaded, Paris liberated, and a drive across Europe begun in earnest, but American forces in the Pacific were preparing to invade Japan itself.

  So, in a thunderous fleet of transport planes, the American and British delegations flew from Malta to the Crimea to meet Stalin. Leahy went with Roosevelt, of course. This was the first use of the presidential-purpose C-54 that came to be called the “Sacred Cow.” The four-engine transport was equipped with a special elevator that could lift the wheelchair-bound president from tarmac to cabin in a few seconds. According to Leahy, Roosevelt, who tended to disregard his disability, “viewed these refinements as unnecessary.” But Leahy, who endured rather than relished air travel, was not above appreciating the refinements that had been specially installed on the aircraft. “There was no gainsaying,” he recalled, “that travel in the ‘Sacred Cow’ was luxurious in comparison with anything within my previous experience. However, I still continued to prefer to travel by ship, by railroad, or by foot if time were available!”19

  Once in Yalta, the American delegation was housed in the fifty-room Livadia Palace, completed in 1911 by Tsar Nicholas II as a summer retreat. Leahy claimed that the Russians had done “an amazing job” of renovating the palace in just three weeks, but suitable bathrooms, let alone basic amenities, were sorely lacking. There was only one bathroom on the entire second floor and never enough clean towels. Leahy was quartered on the first floor adjacent to the president, who was the only one with a private bath. King and Marshall were housed in the tsar’s bedroom chambers. Marshall drew the main bedroom, while King was consigned to the tsarina’s boudoir. “Salty Admiral King,” Leahy noted, “took a lot of kidding from the rest of us” because of it. Harry Hopkins, with a pallor of death over him at least as gray as that of Roosevelt, also had a room upstairs and spent most of his time in bed, except for the plenary sessions of the conference, which were also held at Livadia.20

  Then FDR demonstrated his ultimate trust in Leahy by affirming his position at the pinnacle of his advisers. “Bill,” the president said, “I wish you would attend all these political meetings in order that we may have someone in whom I have full confidence who will remember everything that we have done.” This was a new role for Leahy. Now he would be the president’s right hand in all matters, military and political. King and Marshall, for example, usually attended only the military sessions, and in fact King had so much time on his hands at Yalta that he made several side trips to inspect American coast guard cutters and the harbor at Sevastopol.21

  Ever self-effacing, Leahy expressed surprise at FDR’s request but quickly agreed to expand his role. Leahy surmised that this was perhaps evidence that Roosevelt’s near-perfect memory was fading, but at least publicly—both at the time and afterward—Leahy, who saw the president every day, maintained that he saw “no sign of any serious weakness in the President’s physical condition.”22

  Indeed, Leahy sometimes wondered whether Roosevelt wasn’t testing him. Sometimes FDR would ask Leahy’s opinion on a matter they had discussed months before and then, after Leahy offere
d his views, respond by saying, “Bill, that’s not what you told me a year ago.” The admiral would backpedal and manage an answer to the effect that: “Well, Mr. President, if I told you something different a year ago—that was wrong, because what I’m telling you now is right.” According to Leahy, after this occurred several times, it became somewhat of a running personal joke between them.23

  Still, it is hard to imagine that this banter occurred as late as Yalta or that Leahy was truly oblivious to the decline in his only client. For that is what FDR was to Leahy. On call around the clock, friendly but never a crony, totally loyal, and invariably discreet, Bill Leahy served but one master. But it would be a definite mistake to presume that he did so as a yes-man. Just the opposite was true. Leahy was not afraid to argue his personal views with FDR, but once the president made a decision, he could be confident that Leahy would carry it out to the letter no matter his prior position. Two examples of this occurred at Yalta.

  In planning the United Nations, Roosevelt was under some pressure from the British and his own State Department to include France as one of the “great power” members. Leahy, who never had much use for the strutting Charles de Gaulle, was opposed, writing afterward about as snidely as he ever allowed himself to appear in print, “I felt that conferring that status on defeated France was an extravagant stretch of the English language.” But Roosevelt deemed otherwise, and so Leahy supported the position.24