William Daniel Leahy died with a crooked nose and little money. The two were related, and it’s best to start with the money. Upon his death in 1959, his net worth was shockingly small, considering he had spent more than a decade as one of the most powerful men in the world, shaping America’s military and diplomatic policy while hobnobbing with the rich and famous. His property, savings, and investments combined were valued at only $113,903, a sum worth just over $900,000 today.1 This would mark his economic status as lower middle class. This surprisingly small figure was mostly the result of choice, with a dash of bad luck. Throughout American history, senior military and political figures have used their positions and influence to enrich themselves, becoming high-paid lecturers, media personalities, business executives, or lobbyists. Leahy could have done so as well, yet he chose not to.
Economically cautious, he learned early to get by with little in the way of luxuries, a lesson that held for the rest of his life. He was born in Hampton, Iowa, on May 6, 1875, to Michael Arthur Leahy and his wife, Rose Mary Hamilton, both first-generation Americans of Irish-born parents. Like many a son of Irish immigrants, William was told by his paternal grandmother, Mary Eagan Leahy, a native Gaelic speaker from Galway, about how his family had been great chiefs in the west of Ireland before being dispossessed by the hated British. The last Leahy chief had supposedly fought for the Catholic king James VII at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the loss of which spelled the end of the family’s prosperity. Mary Eagan had immigrated to America with her husband, Daniel Leahy, in 1836, and they had moved steadily westward from New England to Wisconsin, where they raised their four sons, including Michael.
Michael was one of those second-generation Americans who lived on the edge of success without ever reaching the Promised Land. At the age of twenty-four, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a law degree. With the Civil War raging, he enlisted in the 35th Wisconsin Regiment and was commissioned a captain, a sign that he had achieved a certain level of educational and social attainment. After the war, he embarked on a career in law and politics. In 1868, he decided to move to Hampton, Iowa, a farming community, to start a new life. There he married Rose, opened his law practice, and entered politics, being elected to the state legislature in 1872.
Little today is known of Rose. Three years after her husband’s electoral victory, she gave birth to their first son, William Daniel Leahy. From William’s birth certificate we know that she was twenty-four years old when he was born, thirteen years younger than her husband, but little else. Her son’s diary leaves the impression he was emotionally distant from his mother—the detached, formal nature of the diary was indeed a reflection of his character—but in fact he loved her dearly.
Michael gives the impression of treading water in Iowa. He and Rose continued producing children—they would have five more sons and a daughter—while Michael continued getting reelected to the state legislature.2 Yet he could rise no further, and in 1882 he packed up his large family and moved back to Wisconsin. The Leahys settled first in Wausau, in the middle of the state, where Michael’s brother had established himself as a prominent lumber merchant. Once again, success eluded Michael, and in 1889 he moved the family to Ashland in the far north of Wisconsin.
Ashland was the city with which William Leahy would most identify his youth, and one can see why Michael chose it. By 1890 Ashland had grown into a bustling little transport hub, servicing America’s burgeoning industrial economy. Situated on an excellent harbor on Lake Superior, Ashland expanded because of its access to the rich iron ore veins, timber stores, and copper mines of northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Rail lines were built linking Ashland to these resources and they poured into the city, where they were put on ships and moved to the factories of the lower Midwest. Ashland grew from almost nothing in 1880 to more than 13,000 people by 1900—more than 50 percent larger than it is today.3
When the Leahys arrived, Ashland still had a whiff of the frontier. The Chippewa Indian Nation, which had dominated the area before whites piled in, remained a significant presence, and for the rest of his life Leahy felt a connection to the tribe. Though we might scoff at it now, he felt proud to be made a member of the Chippewa in the 1930s. Ashland itself was ramshackle, a jumble of new, ever-changing buildings linked by dirt roads and wooden walkways. Leahy’s time there seems completely ordinary. He went to high school, where he did enough work to get by but was not a standout student. He developed his lifetime interests in fishing, hunting, and football.
While playing a rowdy game of football one day, Leahy’s nose was broken. As he could still breathe through it, and the family had little spare money, he left it untreated. Sixty years later, Adm. Chester Nimitz noticed the defect for the first time when his eye was drawn to the crooked nose in a portrait of Leahy being painted by well-known naval artist Albert Murray. “You fellows have known me ever since my late teens and never seen it any other way,” Leahy responded when Nimitz asked about his nose, “so you thought it was normal and it never even occurred to you that it was bent out of place like it really is.”4
His family’s lack of money helped to shape Leahy’s desires. It certainly made him resourceful and at the same time able to cope without many possessions. On the other hand, it also made him want to get the hell out of town. Though Leahy would later remember Ashland fondly, when he graduated from high school, he wanted to experience something new. Michael hoped that his eldest son would follow in his tracks and study law at the University of Wisconsin, but for William that option held little appeal. His great hope was to secure admission to the US Military Academy at West Point, but there were no appointments available from local members of Congress. One did, however, have an open slot for Annapolis, as naval positions were less prized by the boys of the Midwest. Leahy jumped at the chance, hopped on a train to Maryland, and never looked back.
Later in life Leahy would reminisce about having developed a love of sailing ships by watching them cruise in and out of Ashland’s port, but that seems to have played only a minor role in his choice. Going to Annapolis provided three things that suited his nature. First, it offered the opportunity for adventure. Though Leahy would later be seen as a grumpy, parochial exemplar of Middle America, as a young man he wanted to see the world, and the navy allowed him to spend many exciting, interesting years living outside the United States. Second, it allowed him to live a life of national service. Michael Leahy had raised his children to see themselves first and foremost as Americans, not Irish Americans. In the Leahy household, there were no divided loyalties or identities, and this had a huge impact on young William. Finally, a career in the navy held the possibility of service with financial security. William Leahy, not a natural businessman, always seemed uncomfortable dealing with money and investments. A career in the navy meant he could combine love of country and the values for which he believed it stood in a career that provided stability. That he eventually liked being at sea was gravy on top.
When he boarded the train to Annapolis in 1893, the trip alone was a gamble. Those who were offered appointments were still required to take an entrance examination, and that was only on offer at the academy itself. If a student failed, he typically returned to his hometown in disgrace, sometimes suffering the indignity of having to pay for his own transportation. Fortunately, Leahy, somewhat to his surprise, made it through the exam process and was welcomed into the United States Naval Academy as a new midshipman.
The first thing he had to learn was how to sail. It is an interesting side note to history that the highest-ranking American military officer when the first atomic bomb was dropped had learned to sail on the USS Constellation, a ship of wooden walls and cloth sails that had been commissioned in 1855 and had seen extensive service during the Civil War.5 A sailor’s life on board the Constellation was closer to that of the Napoleonic era than to the days of steam and iron, much less the atomic age. Leahy remembered standing night watch in a masted crow’s nest high up in the rigging. Yet his time on the ship was no romantic adventure. The cruise was supposed to last all summer, taking the young crewmen to Europe and back to learn their craft. Yet the Constellation was in a sorry state, smelly and leaky, and she broke down before reaching Europe. The crew had to stop in the Azores before the old ship could be made right to sail back to America.
Once back, the real naval education commenced. Leahy was one of the last midshipmen to pass through an unreformed Naval Academy. His small class was educated in the unforgiving environment of the nineteenth century. Annapolis was famous for its hazing and harsh discipline, and its education was geared toward creating assimilation and cohesion.6 An entire class could be punished for one midshipman’s mistake. Once, when a slop jar (or piss pot) was rolled down the stairs after taps, every member of the class was forced to stand at attention in the middle of the night until the guilty prankster confessed.7 Normal hazing was done by upperclassmen to underclassmen, and could involve humiliations, physical tests, and even beatings. When the academy’s hazing became public in a 1921 scandal, Leahy forcefully called for the practice to be “stamped out.”8
Hazing could be particularly brutal when directed at those considered different. The US Navy was a monoculture, one of the least inclusive organizations of its day, overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and Christian. The first African American midshipman to enter the academy, twenty years before Leahy, was hazed so cruelly that he was forced out.9 He was beaten regularly and at one point his classmates even tried to drown him. From there on out, African Americans were practically nonexistent and Jews extremely rare.
The punishments were harsh, but the system created close-knit groups, and Leahy’s class was one of the best examples. The class of 1897 was one of the most distinguished in American history and arguably the most successful that Annapolis ever produced. It included many of the admirals who dominated the service in the 1930s, including Leahy, Thomas Hart, Harry Yarnell, and Arthur Hepburn. To this day the class is the only one to have five members reach 4-star rank while on active duty (and one to reach 5-star). Four other classes have had four members reach the 4-star rank, but these all came many decades after 1897, when the Naval Academy, and the navy as a whole, was far larger.10 The class of 1897, perhaps for this reason, remained very tight, and Leahy paid close attention to the lives and careers of many of his classmates. In return he received continuous, lifelong support.
Leahy stood out to his classmates for his level-headedness. He grew a mustache that made him look like a judge, and his classmates treated him accordingly.11 The best description of Leahy at Annapolis came from his classmate and lifelong friend Thomas Hart, who would go on to serve as one of the leading submariners of his generation, commander of the Asiatic Fleet in World War II, and a US senator from Connecticut. “As a student at the Academy [Leahy] was not good, a little lazy,” wrote Hart. “But when his classmates had a problem, a dispute about it, someone would say, ‘Let’s go ask Bill Leahy. He’s got a better sense than all of us put together.’ That was always true for his common sense, his wisdom, was profound all through his life.”12
Though he would have been loath to admit it, Leahy’s political skills were apparent even at this young age. He possessed the ability to judge the person with whom he was interacting, decide the best way to appeal to or motivate him or her, and adjust his behavior accordingly. “Leahy was a born diplomat,” Hart remembered, “and the sort of man that always gets on with others. . . . That’s always been Leahy: fundamentally wise, quick to pluck the right answer out of the air, without any powerful cerebration; intuitive, instinctive, smart.”13 Despite this intelligence, Leahy was a mediocre student. He studied French (which he would speak with an atrocious accent for the rest of his life) and played tackle on the football team’s B squad. His academic results put him in the bottom third of his graduating class, 35 out of 47. When he graduated from Annapolis, he was hardly marked for greatness.
His first assignments, however, showed that there was more to him than a below-average academic. After graduating, an Annapolis midshipman was required to serve two years at sea before being permanently commissioned into the navy. For Leahy, that meant going to war. He came of age during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection that followed, and he was thrust into the center of both. His first ship was one of his favorites. In the summer of 1897 he was ordered to join the crew of the USS Oregon, one of the newest and most powerful battleships in the US fleet. In those days, even getting to your ship could be a test of resourcefulness. Leahy was told to report to the Oregon in “whatever port that vessel might be.”14 Checking around, he discovered she was supposed to be in Seattle at the time he was to board, so after a night of celebrating with his fellow graduates, he headed across the country, undoubtedly worse for wear. When he reached Seattle, he found that the Oregon had already left for Victoria, British Columbia, to help the Canadians celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Hopping a steamship north, he landed in Port Townsend, Washington, where he found the one hotel was closed, forcing him to spend the night outside in the freezing rain. When he finally reached Victoria, he was told that the Oregon was berthed in the port of Esquimalt, a few miles away, reachable by streetcar. Thus, after a cross-country train trip and two boat journeys, Leahy arrived at his first assignment by trolley.
He was delighted that he did. Being on the Oregon provided a great lesson about the power of command. The ship’s captain, A. W. Barker, was an excellent seaman who impressed his men with his ability to handle such a large vessel in the fog and mist that regularly shrouded the Pacific Northwest.15 Yet, according to Leahy, Barker did “not possess an attractive personality” and could be very hard on junior officers. It gave the vessel a gloomy air. In early 1898, Barker was transferred and a little while later the Oregon was taken over by Capt. Charles E. Clark, whom the men worshipped. Leahy was impressed by how the change in captains completely changed the mood of the ship. It helped make the Oregon both a happy and a good ship, transforming his experience. For the rest of his life, Leahy would look to Clark as an inspiration on command.
The battleship spent most of late 1897 and early 1898 cruising up and down the west coast of North and South America, allowing Leahy to engage with some of the wider world. After a bumpy start he grew comfortable in San Francisco, and for a while it became a second home. He enjoyed its cosmopolitan nature as well as its rough-and-ready atmosphere. In early 1898 the Oregon paid a visit to Peru, which permitted Leahy to experience a truly different culture for the first time. He found it fascinating. He was captivated by the women, finding them dark-eyed and graceful, with the “unnerving” habit of staring directly into the eyes of strangers. On the cruise to Peru Leahy crossed the equator for the first time, and he experienced one of the stranger naval customs, paying homage to King Neptune’s court. Those making their first crossing were labeled pollywogs, and the veteran sailors were called shellbacks. The pollywogs were made to pay a penalty to calm the wrath of the sea god for having disgraced his domain by appearing for the first time. One of the older noncommissioned officers would get dressed up as Neptune. In Leahy’s first experience this sailor used manila rope to simulate a wild head of hair. He would be accompanied by other shellbacks in different wild getups, making up his “court.” The pollywogs would then be presented to Neptune and ritually humiliated. For the enlisted pollywogs of Leahy’s day, it could be a rough initiation. In this instance they were placed in a barber’s chair and covered from head to toe in a grotesque mixture of molasses, salt water, oil, and flour. They were then “shaved” with a three-foot wooden razor before being catapulted down a large chute into a pool of water where they were beaten by another group of shellbacks. The officers were often exempted from the most humiliating treatments, and in this case were allowed to calm Neptune’s wrath through a large offering of beer. Neptune indulged so much in the generous offering that he was incapable of delivering his closing speech. He sat there, a smile on his face, repeatedly mumbling, “I am satisfied.”
The real excitement of the cruise began in April. Whipped up by a feverish press, the population of the United States had become increasingly agitated by what it saw as Spanish brutality and incompetence in its rule of Cuba. In February 1898 the battleship USS Maine, which President McKinley had dispatched to Cuba as a sign of American interest, exploded in Havana Harbor. Popular wrath turned on the perfidious Spanish, and the navy fed this paranoia rather than admit the truth. The Maine exploded because it was a poorly designed ship and did not have enough protection between the highly explosive propellants needed to launch its large shells and the shells itself.
After the explosion of the Maine, it was thought prudent to send the Oregon to the Atlantic in case war broke out. As the Oregon was still in the Pacific, this meant that the ship had to cruise all the way around the Strait of Magellan, almost 14,000 miles, to reach its destination. While the ship was en route, the US government declared war on Spain, making the Oregon’s cruise a minor sensation: a naval vessel of the time steaming for such a distance was a serious undertaking, and the Oregon had to keep its engine functioning at close to full capacity for more than two months.16 Fresh water had to be strictly rationed, as power was needed to propel the ship, leaving only a little for the onboard distillation system. By the time the Oregon took its place off Cuba on May 30, 1898, it had become the most famous vessel in the US Navy. Leahy, for one, was immensely proud of what they had achieved.
Yet Leahy was conflicted about the war itself. He held decidedly mixed opinions about both the value of American intervention in Cuba and the way certain commanders fought the war. These doubts crystallized a few weeks after the Oregon arrived on station, when he saw American troops heading ashore and witnessed the American navy bombarding the Cuban coast.
These splendid young Americans that I saw marching their sentry posts ankle deep in hot sand with a deadly tropic sun beating down upon their heads, could have been spared much hardship if our country had been willing to let the occupants of Cuba fight it out without assistance. Our intervention may shorten the contest but it is not likely to improve the quality of the survivors.
In the evening we fired four thirteen inch shells into the town of Guantanamo, which I thought unnecessary and cruel, and then steamed back to blockade.17
Despite his reservations, Leahy was soon caught up in the great naval engagement of the war, the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in July, which saw the destruction of the Spanish Fleet in Cuban waters. Leahy served as the officer in charge of the Oregon’s forward turret during the battle, which gave him a great vantage point from which to watch the action unfold.18 During the fighting, the Oregon steamed out in front of the US force, distinguishing itself for its aggression and effectiveness.19 To the young officer it was a confused, chaotic affair, though he was sure that the Oregon had performed the best of all the American vessels. Leahy believed that it engaged four different Spanish warships and came away almost unscathed.20 He was also to be seen celebrating wildly with his crewmates when the Spanish surrendered, though from reading his diary one would get no idea that it mattered to him much at all.
The victory allowed Leahy the chance to go ashore in Cuba, and once again his doubts crept in. He was saddened by the deprivation and sickness he encountered. With food and medicine in short supply, the Cuban people had endured enormous hardships. “The suffering of these fever stricken and shot torn patients made a sad picture of the cruelty of war,” he wrote. “There is glory enough for those of us who return safely or who are killed in the discharge of hazardous duty, but to a wreck of a man lying in a hospital tent, and to his mother, there is little glory in war.”21
This tonal change between the enthusiastic Leahy celebrating the victory and the somber Leahy wondering if it was all worthwhile can be seen differently. One could say that his protestations were a little staged, predictable clichés about the brutality of war.22 That might have been part of his reaction, but it was not all. In the first case, war was not seen in the late nineteenth century as an intrinsically awful thing. Many, including Theodore Roosevelt, believed that war was a positive, the ultimate test of human beings, one that could purify or strengthen the soul. Secondly, Leahy’s expressions, as hackneyed as they might sound, represent a lifelong outlook. He would remain skeptical of the value of US interventionism for the rest of his life. He was also adamant that civilians not be targeted in war. He would argue strongly for both these positions when he was at the top of the US decision-making structure.
Leahy’s dual reaction was seen right after the Spanish-American War, when he was sent on what turned out to be a formative assignment, his dispatch to the Western Pacific. When he looked back on his life as an older man, this journey was one that he returned to often. The reason was the establishment of the American empire in the Philippines. That famous archipelago, which the United States had seized from Spain, had a nationalist independence movement that did not want to merely exchange Spanish rule for American. President William McKinley, however, decided that the Filipinos were not up to the task of ruling themselves, and that it would be much better if they were made wards of the United States. A war was required for the United States to begin the process of betterment.
Leahy was desperate to get into the action. While he was still in Havana in late 1898, the US gunboat Castine passed through. Hearing that it was on its way to the Pacific, Leahy volunteered to join its crew. He was taken on by the grateful captain, who was pleased to have an Annapolis-trained sailor on board. The Castine was a shock to Leahy. A small gunboat with cramped quarters, it was a world away from the large battleship to which he had grown accustomed.
Furthermore, it was a long way to the Pacific. The Castine headed east, across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, before reaching the Indian Ocean. There she docked at Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), where another shock was waiting for Leahy. After having cruised ten thousand miles, the navy in its wisdom sent him an order to return to the United States to complete his final examinations. He was therefore left behind when the Castine sailed for the Philippines and had to wait until a steamer appeared that would take him back to America. He did not reach Annapolis until late June 1899, having spent six months sailing around the world and going nowhere.
In late 1899, he tried again to go to war. He was assigned to the USS Nevada, reputedly an unhappy ship that lived up to its reputation. His voyage across the Pacific was gloomy, enlivened only by stops in Hawaii and Guam. Guam, which Leahy reached in November, gave the young man particular pause. Another island seized from the Spanish, Guam was as close to a tropical paradise as Leahy had ever encountered. The near nudity, open sexuality, and nonacquisitive lifestyle of the islanders sparked the censoriousness that was never that far below Leahy’s surface. His first impression was that of a bigot: “The natives are indolent and worthless, having no idea of the value of time or money. Living as they do on the fruit provided bountifully by the tree used in the construction of their simple house, they do not need to work and are therefore happy in idleness. Morality as we know it is unknown to them, they consider falsehood entirely justified, marriage entirely a matter of option before the arrival of Americans.”23
Yet, after a few days in Guam, something unexpected happened: the reflective Leahy appeared, and all of a sudden a quiet life of fruit and sex did not seem so bad. “It seems to me that one might learn something about human happiness by watching these people,” he wrote. “They have little and want nothing. Living in little grass huts one storey above the pigs and chickens; wearing what clothes they can find, or none at all, and subsisting on whatever fruit happens to grow near, they appear to be happy and contented beyond the usual lot of humans.”24
Paradise could not hold him, and Leahy soon arrived in Manila, back at war. At first he had a lucky break. The Oregon appeared, and he was able to transfer to his favorite vessel. After a few days, though, he was transferred back to the gunboat Castine, which he had left more than a year earlier in Ceylon. It was at least preferable to the troubled Nevada. He was able to visit Manila, attend a dance (he thought the “white” women in attendance were very unattractive compared to the Filipinas), and tour the city. He also tried to find out as much as possible about the local culture. He visited Manila’s oldest cemetery, so cramped that older bodies had to be dug up to make way for the new. On Christmas Day he was even taken to a cockfight.25 The cocks had thin, sharp blades strapped to their bodies with which they had been trained to attack. Though Leahy was undoubtedly a warrior, he was never cruel, and he found the spectacle grotesque as the birds sliced into one another and the smell of fresh blood permeated the room. Each fight ended only when one of the birds died or ran out of the ring. Leahy made it through only three fights. During the third, which was “long and savage,” the more aggressive bird started pecking out the eyes of its opponent. As the crowd roared with excitement and money changed hands at an ever more frantic pace, Leahy got sick. He staggered out of the hall for fresh air and never went back to anything like that again.
Leahy expected to see action not long after this, but the nineteenth-century American navy being what it was, he was soon ordered to China and Japan. This trip set in motion a series of impressions that would have a huge influence on US policy in World War II and the early Cold War. Leahy loved and was fascinated with China. Many of his impressions we might consider today parochial or romantic, but for him they were intense and long-lasting. He paid close attention to the physical shape of Chinese cities and the topography of the countryside, the noises, flavors, and smells of the markets, the customs of the people. He was fascinated by China’s cultural peculiarities, such as the reburial of what were considered unlucky ancestors. He was so taken by the decorations at a cemetery in Amoy that he tried to buy a number of sketches that adorned the walls of a temple, but could not communicate his intentions clearly enough to the local priest.26 He was even fascinated by the Chinese use of slow strangulation to execute criminals. He heard of one unlucky prisoner who was supposed to be strangled horribly over a four-day period, his throat being ever so slowly constricted by two boards being pressed together. The prisoner died after two days, and it was guessed that he had been poisoned by his own wife to end the torture.
Of everything in China, he most loved Shanghai. He found the urban life there intoxicating, applauding its tolerant atmosphere. He spoke approvingly of the Western women in Shanghai being able to smoke and drink in public, a deliberate snub to the many American missionaries in the country who were preaching abstinence. For a young American officer, Shanghai offered a privileged existence, with special protected districts set aside for foreigners where lives of great luxury could be lived on small salaries. He wanted to stay longer.
Leahy’s early perceptions of China stayed with him for the rest of his life. When a navy friend wrote to him twenty years later during an assignment in the country, Leahy replied with an uncharacteristic touch of poetry: “Your word picture of the streets of Peking takes me back across the years to long ago and I can now, with closed eyes, see the swarming horde along the bund, hear the song of the stevedore coolies, and feel the heavy, mysterious leisure inducing pressure of the summer atmosphere of that fascinating world. One wonders if at the half century mark, it is like it was when only a quarter of the cycle had been run, and would like to know by personal trial.”27
His Chinese experiences allowed Leahy once again to express doubts about foreign intervention. He was in China during the high point of the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxers were a determined Chinese resistance movement, dedicated to removing foreign, and particularly Christian, influences from within China. An understandable reaction to the constant humiliations that Westerners had forced on the Chinese, the Boxers in 1900 converged on Beijing. They drove European and American nationals out of the capital and threatened to throw them out of much of northern China. Unsurprisingly in this era of imperialism, their threats brought a harsh, united response as British, Japanese, Russian, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, Italian, and American troops were brought together to crush the uprising.
When Leahy first became aware of the seriousness of what was happening, he was still in Shanghai, very much enjoying himself. When it was thought the Boxers were going to attack the city, however, he prepared to mount the city walls and fight.28 At another time, he heard that a messmate from the Oregon serving in the marines was killed fighting the Boxers in Tianjin.29 As such, Leahy had little sympathy for the Boxers, and if he had been asked to kill, he would have done it without hesitation. Yet he also wondered whether any of this mattered for the United States. “The political situation is quite beyond my understanding,” he wrote in his diary, “but this turning up of the powers is likely to end in a noisy concert before China settles down to business again. The newspapers are attacking everybody who might be responsible for the failure of British troops to land, and the French and American Consuls General are getting most of the hammering. I do not see any reasons for us to get mixed up in the row.”30
This combination of skepticism but a willingness to do his duty became even more intense when he returned to the Philippines. When he arrived back in the archipelago in September 1900, the war was entering a particularly nasty phase. Thousands of American troops were being deployed around the islands, undertaking a brutal pacification campaign against the Filipino nationalists. The US Navy played a major role in these operations, conducting amphibious landings up and down the Philippine coast.31 Leahy was thrust into the heart of these from the moment he returned, often under the guise of surveying the Philippine coastline.32 Such a survey, Leahy believed, would take many lifetimes, but he did find the landing of troops under fire to be exciting. He rarely saw the insurgents but could hear the crackle of their rifles as he moved ashore. He was even given his first command, probably the least glamorous ship in the navy, the USS Mariveles. She was a small gunboat of 250 tons, captured from the Spanish and then refitted. She had two-screw propellers supposedly capable of generating 8 knots and mounted two 3-pound guns and two machine guns. The little ship smoked, sputtered, and regularly shed parts. Leahy loved her. “We had a crew of 25 men, and three very ancient guns, which would have just been fit for shooting at sea-gulls,” he later fondly recalled. “But she was a fine boat because she was my first one.”33
Command suited Leahy. He had to learn to control the rough-and-ready group of sailors. When the Chinese cook on board was tormented by another crewman, Leahy eventually slapped the tormentor into solitary confinement—though that did not stop the cook from jumping ship. Leahy also had to learn to get by with limited supplies, and how to handle a naval vessel in shallow waters. These were all lessons that would serve him well later.
If Leahy gained satisfaction from his professional success, he was deeply troubled by much of what he discovered about the war in general. Impressed with the insurgents’ determination and military bearing, he was troubled by widespread cases of torture being committed by US troops.34 The pressures of war had become so intense that American soldiers regularly resorted to torture or even summary execution of captured or suspected insurgents.35 At one point Leahy witnessed the shooting of a young Filipino insurgent prisoner.36 In his diary, Leahy pulled no punches. Recounting a story about the death of a local priest who died while being tortured by American soldiers, Leahy wrote:
Such things make one doubt that this is the beginning of the twentieth century. What has become of the knights of our childhood stories, who delighted in battling with foemen worthy of their steel, who treated vanquished enemies as honored guests and who away from battle were gentle souls[?] One used to wonder why all the fuss about Chevalier Bayard, “sans peur et sans reproach [sic],” who when dying gave half his cup of water to a wounded soldier. I have been taught from childhood that it is the duty of every soldier to forget his own troubles in those of his comrades, to fight with courage while the fight is on, and when it is finished, to make less bitter the defeat of the vanquished. My father was just that kind of a soldier, but in this war there are few sans peur and fewer sans reproach.37
Doubts, of course, would not keep him from fulfilling his duty. In June 1901, the Mariveles gave up the ghost. One of its two propellers disappeared into the deep, and the hobbled little ship needed so much work that it was thought better that Leahy be transferred elsewhere. He was put on the USS Glacier, which had the unexciting job of ferrying supplies between the Philippines and Australia. This would be Leahy’s life for the next fifteen months.
It was perhaps the most relaxing assignment of his career. Once the Glacier reached Australia, it could take many more weeks for the vessel to be repaired and loaded up with supplies for the return to the Philippines. Once again, Leahy played the tourist. He was fascinated by the vastness and variety of Australia, believing that the country had a great future ahead of it. Many of his impressions were completely conventional. He loved Australian beaches and hated Australian sharks. He voiced the common American view that cricket, which the sports-mad Australians played religiously, was too slow. He also made one journey deep into the outback to take part in a kangaroo hunt. The huge, empty countryside enthralled him with its sense of isolation.
Maybe because he had so much spare time on his hands, Leahy began to discuss politics. The results were surprisingly non-doctrinaire.38 Often Leahy is described (and he described himself) as ideologically a “conservative.” Quite what this means is never clear, but it is assumed that he was a small-government, fiscal-responsibility man. A close reading of Leahy’s life, starting with his Australian reflections, reveals a more complex mind-set. Here, and much later in life, Leahy would argue for an activist role for the state and wanted to balance free enterprise with a government that could regulate and protect the citizenry.39 At one point in Australia he remarked that the country would grow faster if it had its own version of Richard “Boss” Croker, the Irish American Democratic politician who ran New York’s notorious Tammany Hall machine and who enriched himself by millions from different state enterprises.40 He also approved of some of the more democratic elements in the Australian system. While he believed that Australian labor unions had too much power to set wage rates, which made Australian goods too expensive for world trade, he also saw the benefit of the Australian system by which the state seized all unoccupied land. In 1904, once back in America, he commented that California’s Sacramento Valley would be greatly improved if the state broke up many of the massive private estates that dominated landholding in the area.41 It was the first sign that Leahy’s views on politics were far more pragmatic than one might assume.
It was also in this phase that Leahy received his first exposure to real political power. He was careful during his career to pretend he had no political identification. For the first part of his life, that was probably true, as he spoke positively and negatively about both Republicans and Democrats. What he had, however, was a real reverence for the office of the presidency. In return he expected a president to behave with dignity. When he heard in 1901 that President McKinley had been shot and killed by Leon Czolgosz, a “cowardly foreign assassin,” Leahy believed it would have been better if the shooter had been turned over to the crowd for summary execution.42 Leahy likely approved of McKinley due to the president’s lack of showiness. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, brought out more mixed emotions. Like most naval officers of his generation, Leahy believed that Roosevelt had been a good assistant secretary of the navy, yet he thought this rambunctious new president could act without the necessary gravitas at times.
On his final trip to the Philippines in September 1902, Leahy met Roosevelt’s new choice for governor of the Philippines, William Howard Taft. Invited to a reception held by Taft, Leahy walked into a gala affair in the old Spanish palace, with the crème de la crème of Filipino society and the upper echelon of US imperial rule in attendance. Leahy betrayed his almost total ignorance of religion by not being aware of the rank of the senior Roman Catholic churchman, quite possibly the first bishop ever appointed in the Philippines, Jorge Barlin.43 Leahy looked at Barlin in his bright vestments, surrounded by a crowd of Filipinos, and thought he looked like a “fat, brilliantly colored beetle.”44 He was also intrigued, but not entirely impressed, that it was a racially mixed reception. The young officer had doubts about whether the Filipinos would ever be reconciled to US rule, partly because of the oafish behavior of the Americans themselves:
The natives are proud, ambitious, and sensitive and our people will not actually admit to social equality any large number of an alien race. . . . Some of [Taft’s] guests of full equality in the palace may be pushed off the sidewalk on their way home by a high private from the rear rank and told “You may be a brother of William H. Taft, but you ain’t no brother of mine.”45
That being said, Leahy did have a touching faith in Taft’s ability to get things done, even if he could muster little enthusiasm for US rule in the islands. “It is . . . safe to assume that Governor Taft knows what he is doing and will in the end accomplish his purpose, whatever it is.”46
Leahy’s detachment indicated that it was time to go. In a transformative three years in the Pacific, he had seen more war, visited cultures quite different from those of northern Wisconsin, commanded his first vessel, and learned how to cope under the most trying of circumstances. He had even been promoted. One of the last tasks he had to do in the Philippines was take the examinations needed to rise to junior lieutenant. He passed with flying colors and was allowed to read all the fitness reports filed by his different commanders.47 They were unanimously positive, even from the commanders with whom he had disagreed strongly. He had every reason to feel confident about his future prospects.