The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  With his story in print, King was further plagued by declining health. There was not much more for him to do. As his principal biographer wrote, “King’s life came to an end gradually, painfully, and pathetically.” It was not the way he would have wanted it. With additional strokes, his mind was a prisoner in a body that became increasingly crippled and marked by slurred speech and an unsteady hand. He became a regular in a suite at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, journeying only to the naval hospital in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for the summers.

  But even as the inevitable appeared before him, King retained his sharp wit. When the navy dispatched George Russell, King’s onetime flag secretary, to find out the admiral’s wishes in keeping with the planned state funerals for five-star admirals and generals, King, when he learned the reason for the visit, gave a hearty laugh and remarked, “Well, Russell, I hope this isn’t urgent.”6

  It wasn’t, but eventually King died in Portsmouth on Monday afternoon, June 25, 1956, at the age of seventy-seven. His broken body was flown to Washington, D.C., and lay in state at the National Cathedral. King, who had approved or disapproved so much with a penciled “Yes, K,” or “No, K,” was responsible for the brevity of the service. Read from the Book of Common Prayer, it contained only one hymn: “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” Twenty minutes later, the procession formed for the drive to Fifteenth Street and Constitution Avenue and the march to the Capitol.

  The day was sunny and pleasant in temperature—a rare touch of Washington at its best before the dog days of heat and humidity. Hymns that King had chosen, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “God of Our Fathers,” with its stirring trumpet fanfares, accompanied the flag-draped casket on its way. But King’s final destination was not to be Arlington. He wanted to be buried within sight of the grounds and the institution that had started him on his way and had always been part of who he was. He was going home to Annapolis. There, in the Naval Academy Cemetery on a tree-covered knoll above the Severn River, King was laid to rest. Mattie, who had suffered her own health problems and had been content to call Annapolis the family home over the years, would join him there in 1969.7

  Nimitz, in part because of his personality but also because of Catherine and his abundant and supportive family, made the postwar transition far easier than King or Halsey. First came his two-year stint as CNO. He remained an ardent champion for the navy as he oversaw postwar demobilization and worked toward the structure of independent service branches within the unified Department of Defense that was finally instituted by the National Security Act of 1947. Perhaps most significantly, Nimitz advocated the navy sharing responsibility with the air force for delivering atomic weapons. In time, this resulted in submarines and aircraft carriers as key players in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

  Nimitz steadfastly refused to write his own memoirs, but that did not stop him from writing articles supporting the navy and serving as coeditor of several books, including Sea Power with E. B. Potter, who at Catherine’s request would eventually write the admiral’s biography. Nimitz also steadfastly refused to linger in Washington once his tenure as CNO was complete, even though the navy offered to provide him with an office there as an active-duty fleet admiral. Instead, in December 1947 Chester and Catherine headed for California.

  In San Diego, daughter Kate and James Lay’s children, including a set of twins born in 1948, were key attractions for the doting grandparents. But it was in Berkeley, scene of their happy family days during Nimitz’s NROTC tour at the University of California, that they found the perfect house. After years of navy bases and hotel rooms, Chester and Catherine settled into a Spanish-style home with a grand view of San Francisco Bay. Chet and Joan soon arrived in Berkeley with more grandchildren when Chet was assigned as executive officer of the campus NROTC unit. The senior Nimitz also became a regent of the university.

  But by the end of 1948, Nimitz, too, was showing signs of an uneasy retirement. Even so patient a man as he could spend only so much time gardening—which he did with a vengeance—and attending occasional VIP events. With Catherine’s blessing, he accepted a position with the United Nations as the plebiscite administrator for Kashmir, the area hotly contested between Pakistan and India as those countries split and became independent of Churchill’s British Empire. When neither country could agree to a vote or Nimitz’s subsequent attempts at arbitration, he returned to Berkeley in the spring of 1950, although he continued to serve as a roving ambassador for the United Nations for another two years.

  Busy years in Berkeley followed. While Nimitz remained grimly indignant about the atrocities visited upon Allied personnel during World War II, he continued to respect the Japanese as a people and particularly appreciated their naval heritage. He encouraged the preservation of the Japanese battleship Mikasa, Admiral Togo’s flagship at the Battle of Tsushima, and Togo’s home, which Nimitz had visited in 1934.

  By the summer of 1963, keeping up the house in Berkeley, which Chester and Catherine called Longview, had become a burden. The navy arranged for them to live in Quarters One on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay, where adequate staff could assist with their needs. Always a walker, who had led many a navy comrade uphill and down, Nimitz was finally slowed by a shattered kneecap and osteoarthritis of the spine. He insisted on risky back surgery in an attempt to relieve the pain but caught pneumonia in the process. Several small strokes followed, and there was evidence of congestive heart failure. In and out of the hospital, he wanted most to be home with Catherine, and there, with her at his side, he died on February 20, 1966, a few days short of his eighty-first birthday.

  The obligatory state funeral in Washington, D.C., followed, but he came home a final time to California for burial under a simple regulation headstone adorned with five stars in Golden Gate National Cemetery. By agreement with his friends Raymond Spruance and Richmond Kelly Turner, they would all lie together with their wives along a treeless drive among rows and rows of the same headstones. “To me,” said Catherine, “he has just gone to sea and, as I have done so many times in the past, some day I will follow him.” She did in 1979.8

  Leahy’s postwar transition was perhaps the easiest of the four fleet admirals’ because he remained as chief of staff to the president for another four years. In the wake of Roosevelt’s death, Leahy had been blunt with Truman about his propensity to speak his own mind. Truman—himself no stranger to the blunt word—appreciated it and highly valued Leahy’s independent advice, which continued to involve a wide range of foreign affairs as well as military issues.

  Whatever else Leahy was, he was no yes-man. Among his disagreements with Truman was his adamant opposition to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. He felt that such an action would “needlessly alienate the Arabs and endanger American access to the oil of the Middle East.”9 Truman, of course, felt differently and prevailed. So, too, did the emerging Truman-Marshall line toward China after George Marshall became secretary of state in 1947. Leahy fully supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. Instead, Truman and Marshall urged Chiang to work out some accommodation with Mao Tse-tung and eventually came to the conclusion that China was lost to the Communists. By contrast, Leahy’s determination to aid Greece and Turkey against Soviet expansion contributed to the president’s decision to issue the Truman Doctrine.

  Events at home and abroad reached a boiling point in 1948 as Truman recognized the new state of Israel; the Soviets blockaded Berlin, resulting in the famous airlift; and Truman won a stunning come-from-behind election. Leahy wholeheartedly supported the airlift and Truman’s election, but he remained skeptical of the politics of the Middle East. “The President’s announcement [recognizing Israel],” Leahy wrote, “made with inadequate consideration leaves many questions unanswered” and could, he concluded, “drag the United States into a war between the two religious groups.”10

  During the heated 1948 campaign, some called for Leahy’s dismissal as an aging—he was seventy-three�
��fossil of another age, a hard-line conservative bordering on reactionary. Leahy had already told Truman that he wished to retire after the election—no matter the outcome—but in September, in the face of such criticism, he offered to do so immediately. Truman would have none of it, telling Leahy in a letter handwritten from his whistle-stop campaign train, “You are my friend and I am yours come hell or high water.”11

  After the election, health problems called for Leahy’s retirement as planned, but he stayed on active duty as a fleet admiral and regularly visited Truman at the White House and in Key West. In 1950, Leahy published his memoirs, I Was There, professing to be an eyewitness account of possibly the closest inside adviser ever to serve two presidents. The book was hardly a gripping saga, but rather a Leahy-esque recitation of the facts as he had seen them. Despite a foreword by Truman, it focused almost exclusively on Leahy’s World War II service and not his years with Truman.

  Perhaps the best measure of Leahy’s worth to Truman—and Truman’s acknowledgment of the admiral’s stony discretion—was that the president confided to Leahy in November 1951 that he would not seek another term, a decision Truman did not announce publicly until late March 1952. And when Truman held his final farewell dinner in the State Dining Room of the White House for forty-two intimates in December 1952, it was Leahy, despite the fact that he had been out of the president’s direct service for four years, who held the guest-of-honor’s position at the president’s right hand. Perhaps Truman realized that in those terrifying and hectic days following Roosevelt’s death, the recent vice president of the United States, who had not even been told about the atomic bomb, owed his preparation for the world stage to Leahy’s self-effacing loyalty to their country.12

  Leahy’s last major hurrah was his eightieth birthday party at the Carlton Hotel in Washington in 1955. “When I was a young officer,” the current CNO, Admiral Robert B. “Mick” Carney, wrote in tribute, “the pronouncements of Admiral Leahy had all of the validity and authority of the Sinai tablets. Captain Leahy was my idea of what the Captain of the ship should be.”13

  Leahy was in and out of Bethesda naval hospital until the end came on July 20, 1959, with his son, William H. Leahy, himself a retired rear admiral, at his bedside. After seventeen years without his beloved Louise, Leahy was buried beside her in Arlington National Cemetery. “There never was a finer man or an abler public servant,” Truman wrote Leahy’s son. “I could always depend on him to tell me the truth, whether I liked it or not, a quality too seldom found in men of his position.”14

  Of the principal contemporaries of the fleet admirals, Raymond Spruance, always the cerebral scholar, got his wish and became president of the Naval War College. Retiring from the navy in 1948, he served a stint as ambassador to the Philippines and remained the exceedingly gracious gentleman he had always been until his death in 1969. He and Margaret are buried beside Chester and Catherine Nimitz in Golden Gate National Cemetery.

  Douglas MacArthur remained in Japan throughout its occupation. America’s only proconsul in the Roman tradition, he did not return to the United States until after his 1951 firing by President Truman over his demands to expand the Korean War into China. He died in 1964, after counseling both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to avoid a military buildup in Vietnam.

  Winston Churchill was unceremoniously voted out of office in July 1945 even as he attended the Potsdam Conference. But the bulldog returned as prime minister from 1951 to 1955. When he died in 1965, it marked the passing of the British Empire. Churchill had his quirks, but when it came to putting a determined face and a rallying rhetoric on the Allied cause, it is not unreasonable to call him, as Time did in its January 2, 1950, issue, “Man of the Half-Century.”

  The other contemporary of the four admirals who might well deserve a similar accolade—besides Franklin Roosevelt—was George Marshall. In his preparation for war, his unselfish leadership during the struggle, and his postwar service as secretary of defense and state, Marshall defined the Allied war effort and the free world’s response to the postwar Cold War. Dwight D. Eisenhower went on to succeed Marshall as army chief of staff and later became a two-term president of the United States.

  Many of the naval officers who served under King, Nimitz, and Halsey went on to lead the postwar navy. Nimitz’s deputy Forrest Sherman; Halsey’s chief of staff, Robert Carney; and Mitscher’s chief of staff, Arleigh Burke, all became chief of naval operations. Others passed from the scene early, including Marc Mitscher, who died in 1947. Frank Jack Fletcher retired with the rank of full admiral that same year and did not help his reputation by refusing to be interviewed or to write his memoirs.

  One of the most poignant appraisals of the four fleet admirals came from Roland N. Smoot after all were dead. Smoot was no outside observer. A 1923 graduate of the Naval Academy, he assumed command of the destroyer Monssen early in 1941. Monssen escorted Hornet on the Doolittle Raid, fought at Midway, and sank in Ironbottom Sound during the fury of the Guadalcanal campaign. Smoot later led a destroyer squadron at Surigao Strait and eventually retired as a vice admiral.

  “I’ve tried to analyze the four five-star Admirals that we’ve had in this Navy,” Smoot reminisced. “You have a man like King—a terrifically ‘hew to the line’ hard martinet, stony steely gentleman; the grandfather and really lovable old man Nimitz—the most beloved man I’ve ever known; the complete and utter clown Halsey—a clown but if he said, ‘Let’s go to hell together,’ you’d go to hell with him; and then the diplomat Leahy—the open-handed, effluent diplomat Leahy. Four more different men never lived and they all got to be five-star admirals, and why?”15

  Smoot answered his own question with one word: “leadership.” Each of the fleet admirals, he said, had “the ability to make men admire them one way or another.” But far more than instilling admiration alone, each in quite different ways possessed a commanding presence that engendered commitment and resolve toward a common purpose. King demonstrated it by bluster and verve; Nimitz by putting his hand on your shoulder and saying, Let’s get this thing done; Halsey—still the fullback—by rushing though the line in such a way that everyone on the team wanted to go through with him; and Leahy by never letting his own personal feelings, or those of others, interfere with the long-range objectives and best interests of his country.

  Of the four admirals, William D. Leahy is undoubtedly the most overlooked. Yet given his roles as confidant, adviser, and enforcer for two presidents, he was arguably the most influential—a fact little recognized at the time or in numerous accounts since. A 1950 review of I Was There captured the essence of Leahy’s contribution. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, Walter Millis praised Leahy’s service to the nation, but then noted some uncertainty as to what that service truly was. “Just what it was,” Millis confessed, “a service of loyalty, of temperament, of skill in persuasion or negotiation, or advice on men or policies—does not clearly appear from this book.”16 It was, of course, a combination of all of those points, and it is perhaps to Leahy’s credit that his role remained publicly undefined and unacknowledged.

  In point of fact, Leahy was chief of staff to the president, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and de facto national security advisor all rolled into one. Leahy’s “unique experience in the Navy and diplomacy,” the Washington Post observed on his eightieth birthday, “made his contribution in the war far more valuable than appears in any public record.”17 That does not mean, however, that Leahy was a man entirely devoid of vanity. Early on, Leahy kept scrapbooks of newspaper clippings of his career and continued to do so throughout World War II after Louise died.

  The landmark study by Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War, accords Leahy scant mention, while devoting chapters to the likes of Marshall, King, Nimitz, and Eisenhower. In so many accounts of World War II, including Robert Sherwood’s defining Roosevelt and Hopkins, “Hopkins’s reputation as the President’s principal assistant in dip
lomacy and Marshall’s image as Roosevelt’s preeminent adviser on military strategy… assume such heroic proportions that the contributions of other presidential advisers and assistants are virtually eclipsed.”18 Truth be told, of course, Hopkins himself acknowledged Leahy’s central role in both diplomatic and military matters.

  As for Marshall, Leahy came to disagree “sharply” with him on postwar foreign policy—Leahy’s inherent conservatism versus Marshall’s more liberal multilateralism, in addition to the specifics over China—but Leahy nonetheless said, “As a soldier, he was in my opinion one of the best, and his drive, courage, and imagination transformed America’s great citizen army into the most magnificent fighting force ever assembled.”19

  Whatever his true opinions of his colleagues, Leahy characteristically kept them guarded and publicly polite. But his frankness nonetheless shone through when it came to the volatile King. “He was an exceptionally able sea commander,” Leahy acknowledged, but “he also was explosive and at times it was just as well that the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs were a well-kept secret.”20

  And Leahy was certainly not afraid to take King to task when the situation warranted it. In February 1944, as Churchill pleaded for yet another summit, Leahy, Marshall, and King were not receptive, but King was unusually outspoken, saying that the British were “just playing games.” As Leahy diplomatically put it, “The plain-spoken admiral did not hide his irritation at some of the tactics of our British ally…. I got King in a corner… and asked him to be more polite.”21