On the evening of September 21, 1921, Capt. William D. Leahy stood on the bridge of the USS St. Louis—a 9,500-ton cruiser with a crew of 650 officers and men—and pondered an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. His ship, in a poor state of repair, its engines operating far below capacity, was part of a US task force sent to observe one of the most horrific conflicts in the postwar era, the struggle between the Greeks and Turks for control of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. On that evening, Leahy, the senior commander of all US vessels in the area, was patrolling along the Black Sea coast of Turkey, just offshore of the town of Samsun.
At first, the war had gone well for the Greeks, then had devolved into a bloody stalemate. In the regions they controlled along the coast, the Turks began to deport the Greek populations from lands that had been their home since the time of the Roman Empire. Deportation often meant death, as women and children were forced to march to the interior of the country without food or warm clothing, easy marks to succumb to the forces of nature. Leahy’s orders were to not intervene under any circumstance. The Americans were there only as observers, to protect US nationals and their property. But Leahy, a man of strong conviction, was not the type to sit back passively as disaster loomed.
Who was the man walking the decks of the St. Louis? At forty-six, he was just entering middle age, and no one would have described him as beautiful: the first deep wrinkles had opened around his eyes, and though he worked hard to maintain a constant weight, the hint of jowls had appeared below his jawline.1 This extra flesh started to diminish what was already not a strong chin and accentuate his large, crooked nose. He was of medium height, but his narrow shoulders and large head made him seem smaller than he was. Though hardly a handsome man, he stood erect, and his blue eyes, framed by bushy eyebrows, remained penetrating. If pleased, they could be mirthful; if angry, “freezingly cold.”2 The aging of his face, if anything, accentuated the strength of his stare, making him appear even more owl-like.
Physically vigorous, he was also decisive and confident when it came to his profession. Doing his best to live up to the masculine ideal of his era, he was, for want of a better cliché, a man’s man. He drank, smoked, and gambled. He spoke with a staccato rhythm and, if the situation was right, used the saltiest language overlaid by a wide range of phrases that would be considered either macho or horrifying today. In his diary or letters, the profanities were absent; his writing was formal and non-ornamental. Yet when he spoke with those he trusted, he used a completely different, animated vocabulary.
Now faced with a situation that meant life or death for countless people, Leahy was tasked with arguably the trickiest assignment in the US Navy. Earlier that day, he had heard that there were hundreds of Greek women and children imprisoned in a warehouse and about to be deported. He went ashore and pleaded with the Turkish officer in charge to show mercy. His entreaties worked, at least temporarily. The officer made a pledge “on his honor” not to deport the Greeks to an almost certain death. Leahy, a man of honor himself, believed that in securing this vow he had given the Greeks a chance at life.
Once back on board, he faced another dilemma. That evening a Greek boy from the countryside outside of Samsun swam out to the St. Louis to escape capture. To Leahy he looked to be fourteen years old, which was considered military age by the different sides of the conflict. Leahy had orders not to interfere, and though he should have sent the boy back to shore, he quickly decided not to. “Our plain neutral duty was to turn the boy over to the Turks who would probably have shot him as a spy,” Leahy wrote. “We might have compromised by telling him to again take his chances in the sea, but that would have been almost as certainly fatal as a firing squad.” Giving him a naval uniform and a meal, Leahy “in plain but very secret violation of all the rules of neutrality made him an honorary member of the crew until it was possible for him to make contact with his countrymen in a safe area.”3
Leahy’s decisiveness and moral bravery in quickly deciding to contravene orders to do what he believed was right was typical of his professional behavior in the 1920s. When he returned from Europe after the war and took up the Gunnery Practice Department, he had already been marked out as one of the most self-confident and successful officers of his generation. Over the next decade, his performance would only add to his reputation within the fleet. Leahy’s ability to swing powerful appointments in Washington became an open and envied secret among other naval officers.4 A certain smugness entered into his language when he discussed navy politics. In 1919, when Chief of Naval Operations Benson retired from the fleet, Leahy let out a squeak of satisfaction, remarking that the new chief, Adm. Robert Coontz, was “much brighter.”5
The end of World War I was the ideal time to be the director of gunnery, as the US Navy was preparing to possess the most powerful battleship fleet in the world. In 1916 the Wilson administration, worried about the prospect of either the Germans or the British winning the war, had unexpectedly pushed for the construction of a large fleet of advanced battleships. Congress eventually approved funding for nine of the most powerful dreadnoughts designed up to that time.6 If completed, they would have given the United States an unparalleled striking force at sea. Such a fleet of super-dreadnoughts put an even greater emphasis on gunnery, as the ranges at which they could engage an enemy were considerably greater than any ship yet built.
Once the United States joined the war, construction on these huge ships was put on hold so that the American shipbuilders could concentrate on building antisubmarine vessels and merchant ships to transport the US force safely to Europe. At the war’s end, work on the battleships recommenced, and the first ones were slated to be ready to go to sea in 1922. Leahy was centrally positioned to take the gunnery lessons learned from the war and apply them to the preparations for this grand new force. He became a key officer in what was known as the US Navy’s gun club, which dominated much of the fleet until 1941.
Leahy’s work was noticed. In 1919, the new head of the Pacific Fleet asked for Leahy to be made his chief of staff.7 With the end of the war, the Pacific Fleet was now the focus of US naval strength, as the Japanese were seen as America’s greatest naval competitor. Leahy had no desire to leave Washington and fended off the request. He still got around, however.8 He made one long trip out to the West Coast to observe the Pacific Fleet undertake target practice. He also helped entertain two of the most senior British representatives who visited the United States, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII) and Admiral Lord Jellicoe, the commander of British naval forces during the Battle of Jutland.
In early 1921 he was sent back to European waters to take command of the cruiser USS Chattanooga. After crossing the Atlantic in March, his first few weeks were a combination of holiday and low-key duties. He toured Holland, then made a trip to England to discuss British advances in using aircraft to spot naval guns. In an echo of his first assignment, he was required to find his own way to his new ship, and while in England he heard that the Chattanooga was about to sail to Lisbon to represent the United States at the dedication of the Portuguese Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Rushing south to meet his ship, he arrived in time to be the official American representative at the solemn ceremony. In April, Louise and William H. arrived from America to stay with him. The small family took a holiday in Antwerp and Paris. As always, he found his time in the French capital too short. He kept up a frantic pace seeing as many of Paris’s “wonders” as he could.9 He visited the Louvre, the Bois de Boulogne, and Versailles, to name just a few. He took a particular interest in learning about Napoleon, visiting not only the emperor’s tomb in the grand Hôtel national des Invalides, but also being given a special tour of Napoleon’s “relics” that had not yet been made available to the public. The only thing he was unimpressed with was the new Parisian tendency to automatically include a tip in all hotel and restaurant bills.
Circumstances changed markedly in May when Leahy was transferred to the command of the St. Louis, in the waters off Turkey. He hopped aboard the Orient Express for the train journey from Paris to Constantinople, and when he arrived he entered into a world of intense heat, chaos, despair, and beauty. The city, under occupation by British and French forces since 1918, had been turned into a transit point for people fleeing in every direction. There were Russian émigrés who had escaped from the Bolsheviks, Armenians who had survived the brutal pogroms unleashed against them by the Ottomans, and large Turkish and Greek populations who mostly kept to themselves. The former resented what they saw as a Western invasion of their capital city.
The assignment made a large impression on Leahy, and he was considerably more descriptive than he had been for a decade, discussing scandal and intrigue. The desperation and instability of the city made it particularly sexually charged. The British high commissioner in Constantinople, Leahy recorded, complained that other diplomats were shunning him because he went out in public with his young Greek mistress.10 Leahy personally received an offer of marriage from the already married wife of a Turkish interpreter; having seen her husband, he commiserated but decided to stay with Louise. She then offered to marry any other officer on the St Louis who was in need of a spouse. In his writing, Leahy was more open than ever before about being drawn to other women, paying particular attention to the plight of Russian émigrées. There were many around, often claiming to be princesses, trying to survive by selling what they could, including family heirlooms or their bodies. Many were forced to become mistresses of men of authority, such as Leahy, who enjoyed a safe income and could offer protection. While there is no indication that Leahy ever had an affair, he was clearly attracted to a number of different women. When attending a late-night dance at the Dutch mission, he was engaged in conversation by the charming wife of the Dutch minister.11 She spoke of her shock at seeing some Russian women living openly as concubines, while Leahy replied enigmatically that he found that many of them were easy on the eye, but that none had so far shown an interest in him.12
He might have been referring to an odd event that was retold by the American journalist Constantine Brown. Brown, whom Leahy first met in Constantinople, would become his most important conduit to the press during World War II.13 In 1921 Brown also found the Russian women alluring, developing an attraction to one who called herself Princess Tamara from Tiflis. He suggested to Leahy that the two of them escort Tamara and another self-styled princess for a night at the cabaret. Leahy agreed, but being the Annapolis-trained stickler for propriety that he was, he believed he should bring flowers to present to his date. He spent the day searching high and low throughout the city, finally scrounging up a rather homely bouquet, which he had tied up with masses of ribbons. When he presented it to his princess, she turned her nose up at the pitiful offering, saying, “In Russia . . . when a gentleman invites a lady to dinner, he always presents her with an armful of roses.” Leahy snapped, “Then why in the hell didn’t you stay there?” He turned to Brown and said, “Come on, Brownie, let’s get out of here,” and dragged the reluctant journalist away. This experience did not, however, sour Leahy on distressed Russian women. Twice more he recounted the stories of beautiful émigrées who had escaped from the Bolshevik terror with bravery and ingenuity.14*
The Russians in Constantinople sparked Leahy’s first comment on communism. During the origins of the Cold War, Leahy is normally described as being a hardliner, afraid of the threat that communism posed to the United States. Actually, from the beginning his views on communism were more nuanced. He believed that Communist efforts to infiltrate Constantinople and unleash mayhem were more comical than threatening.15
Beyond his fascination with all things Russian, Leahy was culturally engaged in Constantinople. He visited mosques and churches, was enchanted by Justinian’s great creation the church of Hagia Sophia and was impressed by a performance of the whirling dervishes.16 He considered the fourth-century BCE Sarcophagus of Alexander the single finest piece of carving he had ever seen. He also visited the famous bazaar, where he threw himself into the local custom of haggling. He purchased a pair of German binoculars for $15 and, perhaps in a genuflection to his attractions, two Russian-made silver serving trays.17 Constantinople struck him as a vibrant and exciting city, a place to which he would want to return. He paid it a great compliment when he said that it reminded him of China.
It also had a surreal atmosphere, something Leahy encountered when, of all things, a bear stowed away on the St. Louis. One day, when working in a cabin, Leahy’s orderly appeared to tell the captain that a bear was coming up the starboard gangway. Leahy, who thought for a second that his orderly had lost his mind, rushed to the deck to behold a gigantic bear “as big as an ox” lumbering around like he had not the slightest care in the world. The sailors of the St. Louis scattered, while “Mr. Bear” eventually entered the crews’ quarters, where he settled down, most content. A short while later, a delegation from the famous British dreadnought HMS Iron Duke came alongside and reported that one of their crew, a badly disciplined bear, had gone AWOL. Leahy let them board to find the deserter. While Mr. Bear was delighted to see his British crewmates, he had no desire to get in their boat, so he plopped himself down and refused to move. It took a dozen British sailors, and an extensive rope rigging, to propel the creature across the deck and down the gangway into the waiting launch, where, resigned to his fate, he sat compliantly as he was brought back to his dreadnought home.18
This one amusing story aside, Leahy’s assignment in Turkey was a real test of his diplomatic skills. He was there not to make war but to look after US interests.19 He claimed that his position required him to attend diplomatic parties and receptions on a regular basis, but then admitted that he also enjoyed the socializing a great deal.20 He assisted the American commissioner, Adm. Mark Bristol, with organizing American events.21* The most lavish took place on July 4, 1921, when the Americans celebrated Independence Day with a series of parties and a sponsored boxing match between British and US naval personnel. As a sign of the relaxed atmosphere, the enlisted men were allowed to bring their new “girlfriends.”
Leahy identified the largest American economic interests as the Standard Oil Company and a number of large tobacco farms in the interior. The latter were particularly vulnerable, as the war had led to much of their workforce running away. This reconfirmed his general anti-imperialist credentials. He believed that most of the diplomatic representatives of the Great Powers were there to try to grab “their pound of flesh” from Turkey, and he wanted the United States to stand aside from all that.22 For instance, Leahy believed that the British and French had inserted themselves so prominently in the war to try to dominate the area, preferably through the imposition of a Greek government that they could control.23 Leahy wanted the United States to play no political role in the region—a position he maintained for the rest of his long career—and worked very hard to be seen as an honest broker by all sides. He was convinced that in doing so, the Americans were the only power seen as even-handed by the Turks. This allowed him and the other US officers to provide protection for US nationals, such as the tobacco farmers, who had to travel to the interior of the country to look after their assets.
Leahy’s experience in Turkey showed an interesting evolution. When he first arrived, he wrote a rather flippant letter to Albert Niblack describing Greeks and Turks “merrily burning each others villages and shooting each other throughout the western part of Asiatic Turkey.”24 Soon, the tragedy of what was happening in the country changed his tone. The cruelty of what he witnessed led him to write one of the bleakest reports of his entire career. When he left he prepared a report to the chief of naval operations that spoke of the great atrocities committed by both sides and the historic suffering of the civilian populations. It was a situation of such great cruelty that it surpassed the horror stories he had heard about World War I.25 He guessed, rightly, that the Greeks would end up losing this war and the result would be a biblical level of suffering.
Though Leahy served off Turkey for only a little more than half a year, the experience had an outsized impact on both his emotional responses and international outlook. When he sailed the St. Louis back to America in November 1921, he was returning to a country with rather different issues. The strategic changes for the US Navy were many, and potentially destabilizing. In December an international conference commenced in Washington to discuss ways to regulate the world balance in naval power.26 Known as the Washington Naval Conference, it included representatives of all the great sea powers: the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy. The meeting began with a dramatic proposal by the US Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, offering to scrap every large battleship being built under the terms of the 1916 program if all other major powers ceased battleship construction as well. With building stopped, and all future battleship building frozen for a decade, Hughes proposed that battleship strength then be controlled through a ratio, giving the United Kingdom and the United States equal forces, and Japan 60 percent of this. The ratio as agreed is sometimes known as the 5-5-3 agreement.
The Washington treaties that emerged from this conference are some of the most famous and controversial of the twentieth century.27 For a while they seemed to herald a new era of peace. Not only did they lead to a halt in battleship building, they froze base construction throughout much of the Pacific Ocean. In a swipe, the possibility of the United States building up the world’s largest fleet was ended. For many in the US Navy, the whole process left a bitter taste. For officers of Leahy’s generation, it significantly lessened the possibilities for major command, making further advancement in the fleet that much more difficult. They saw a United States, with the world’s largest and strongest economy, and possessing the raw materials to construct the greatest fleet in the world, abrogate that ability to an international system that both gave the resented British Navy parity and the Japanese Navy too much relative strength.
Leahy was not one of these officers. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he judged that the offer was a good deal for America, even if it could harm his own career. His honorable stand may have been made easier by the fact that he continued to excel in the commands he was given. Even with fewer jobs available, he had a high chance of getting the best ones. When he returned to America he was still slated to remain at sea a little while longer and was given his first flotilla command. He was put in charge of a squadron of minelayers, raising his flag on the USS Shawmut. He spent most of 1922 cruising up and down the East Coast with his squadron, training and attending ceremonial events. He did his customary thorough job, so that another senior officer, Adm. Newton McCully, who was serving as the chief of the Bureau of Navigation, the second most powerful position in the Navy Department after chief of naval operations, asked for Leahy to be his chief of staff. Once again, Leahy got himself out of a job he did not think would help his career. He was no longer interested in being anyone else’s chief of staff. He spent his time drilling the squadron to be as effective as it could be. In his expertise of gunnery, he was particularly successful. Under his direction the Shawmut produced some of the best long-range gunnery results in the fleet.28
The ship also took part in a number of exercises involving a controversial new weapon: aircraft. In the 1920s Leahy was one of the more cautious American naval officers when it came to the power of aircraft. Before the war, he had thought little on the subject. He had been introduced to the notion of military airpower in 1911 by Glenn Curtiss, among the most famous pioneers in US aviation history.29 Stationed on the West Coast at the time, Leahy watched Curtiss, who operated a pilot school near San Diego, make many flights that year, and heard him discuss the future of airpower. Curtiss insisted that while aircraft could do little presently, it possessed real potential for future development.
In the years following the war, Leahy seemed to be put off by what he saw as the overblown claims of the aviation lobby. Within the navy he was particularly irritated by the special treatment demanded by the new class of naval aviators. He did not like the idea of separating out naval aviators from other naval officers, and was particularly irritated by the demands of the aviators (who had a very dangerous job) for extra pay.30 Leahy was also more than a little miffed with what he saw as the grandstanding of the most famous American airman of the 1920s, William “Billy” Mitchell. An army officer who had gained public prominence in France during the world war, Mitchell returned home determined to show the superiority of the aircraft over the naval vessel when it came to defending the United States. He orchestrated, sometimes dishonestly, a series of tests in which aircraft sank a captured German vessel or obsolete American naval vessel.31 The navy, on the other hand, was hardly blameless itself, as it held some less-than-straightforward tests to show that its ships could survive air attack, but were under much greater threat from battleship attack.
As a gunnery officer, Leahy took part in a number of these tests, and was obviously motivated by a desire to thwart Mitchell. In March 1923, he participated in an exercise to sink the obsolete battleship Iowa with naval gunfire. After the vessel was relatively undamaged following a day of bombardment, Leahy guessed that the special ammunition being used in the test was too weak. The next day the ship was attacked with full-charge projectiles. Leahy admitted that the decision was made “because of a fear that the Army air service General Mitchel might broadcast a statement that modern Naval guns are unable to sink a twenty five year old ship.”32 Thankfully for Leahy, the Iowa was quickly obliterated.
Leahy had returned to the United States at a time when a great social change was reshaping the country. In 1919, the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture, supply, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, had been passed, and the next year strong enforcement efforts commenced.
Like many a navy man, Leahy was a lifelong drinker. As a young officer in 1905, he went out for a night of carousing in Panama City with a group of his fellow junior officers.33 The drinks flowed until Leahy made a late-night call on Panama’s president and his wife. The Americans ended up, appropriately lit, at a party in the US legation. Once Josephus Daniels made the navy dry, Leahy could find long sea journeys trying. In 1923, after completing one of his last legs on the Shawmut, he admitted to being delighted to come ashore and have a drink.34 His drinking habits could be idiosyncratic: if he wasn’t given a swizzle stick with his cocktail, he was known to stick his forefinger into the glass and stir.35
Leahy believed strongly that both men and women were entitled to drink, and Prohibition was not going to stop that. Despite the law, he continued to drink at navy functions, dinner parties, picnics, in public, and in private, whenever it seems that alcohol was on offer. In 1922, when Leahy was exploring the possibility of taking a course at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, he was delighted to find alcohol being served and consumed everywhere, even directly in front of the town officials.36 A few weeks later he represented the navy during a yachting competition held off Long Island. Again, alcohol was ubiquitous and Leahy remarked approvingly that drinking was a “usual and necessary” part of every dinner.37 He even went on a tour of a particularly extensive wine cellar that had been established before Prohibition, and bemoaned the fact that he had neither the farsightedness nor funds to have set up something similar for himself.38
If Leahy had some fixed ideas on drinking, by this time in his life he had clear ideas on other vices as well—and mentioned them all in the 1920s. He was a committed smoker and would be for the rest of his life. In 1923, the crew of the Shawmut gave him a silver cigarette case when he finished his command.39 It was one of a number of different cigarette cases he would receive in his career. He also liked to gamble, though, as always, in a controlled fashion. In 1923, while passing through Key West, he dropped by the Duval Club, where craps and roulette were played and drinks were poured. Leahy seemed more than happy with what he found, and even contrasted the experience with visiting casinos earlier in his career—with the only problem being that Prohibition meant that the casinos could now charge for drinks, instead of offering them for free to attract customers.
While Leahy enjoyed his vices, he made sure to keep them under control. He never seemed to get too drunk or gamble too much. Later in his career, this restraint helped him win over Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and become a valued member of their social circles.
While Leahy was more than comfortable at a bar or casino in the 1920s, he was less at home in church. Even though he was taking baby steps toward becoming an Episcopalian, he spent little time thinking about God. While in Constantinople, he was impressed with the seriousness with which the Turkish men took their Islamic obligations, contrasting them with the lax habits of modern Christians.40 As a middle-aged man he seemed unfamiliar with the proprieties of different religious faiths. In 1922, when he was forty-seven, he attended a funeral in Honduras as part of a diplomatic mission. Leahy admitted to almost total ignorance of proper church services. “I am informed that there were two separate services, but to one unfamiliar with church procedure, there was no appreciable interval and the performance seemed continuous.”41 Once the service was over, drinks were served, including brandy, whiskey, claret, and Champagne. Leahy was much happier.
After Leahy became captain of the Dolphin in 1915, he had moved Louise and William H. from their house on Q Street to an apartment. Now back in Washington, the Leahys bought a new home on Connecticut Avenue. Settling down into the middle-class life of a conventional American, in 1923 he bought a prestige car, a Buick Coupe, for which he paid the princely sum of $2,045. After a few weeks it was stolen off the street in Washington, and turned up later, abandoned and wrecked, in Virginia. Leahy being Leahy, he had had it fully insured, and was able to restore the Buick to perfect condition. A few years earlier he had purchased a Boston terrier, whom he named Patriot. He fretted over Patriot as if he were another child. When the dog broke his leg on board Shawmut, Leahy had the best medical personnel from his squadron operate. Leahy, worried, stood holding Patriot’s paw throughout the entire operation. He was particularly pleased that his pet endured the pain with only an occasional whimper.42
When it came to his son, William H., things were up and down. Leahy was definitely the proud naval father when William H. secured a nomination for and then passed the examinations to enter Annapolis. When it came to his son’s tastes, Leahy was the predictable traditionalist. The jazz craze mystified him, as it did many parents in the 1920s when their children adopted the music as their own. He remarked in 1925 that William had decided to take up the saxophone and was learning “to blow most of the general junk that one hears nowadays.”43
In 1923, William H. caused his father a great deal of worry. That summer, during a vacation to Squam Lake in New Hampshire, William H. suffered from a series of serious lung and chest infections. Leahy was beside himself and brought his son at once to Massachusetts General Hospital, and then to the best navy doctors in Washington, to see if they could help. At particularly dangerous moments William H. ran high fevers and hallucinated. He was hospitalized for months, even spending Christmas in the hospital. In a sign of the inner turmoil that existed under his crusty exterior, Leahy admitted in his diary that the anxiety surrounding his son’s illness, which was compounded by the death of his brother Stephen, led him to experience a serious psychosomatic reaction. One December evening Leahy was awoken by stomach pains and indigestion so intense he also had to be admitted to the hospital for days of tests.44 A thorough examination revealed nothing but a few infected teeth. Leahy decided to diagnose himself, with unusually revealing results. “My diagnosis of my own trouble is nervous indigestion, caused by long continued and constant worry about the boy.”45
William H. was unable to return to Annapolis until the fall of 1924, and would be plagued by ongoing lung issues for the next few years, which his worried father often noted in his diary. Despite his nervousness over his son’s health, Leahy was not a domineering father. Even when he disagreed strongly with his son’s life choices, he did not try too hard to change them. When William H. fell in love and proposed to Elizabeth Beale in the summer of 1927, Leahy was “acutely disappointed.”46 He liked Elizabeth very much, viewed her as “acceptable . . . by any standard,” but he believed that getting married so young would adversely affect his son’s career. Leahy’s strong reservations made no difference. William H. and Elizabeth married less than a month after informing his father.
When Leahy finally left the Shawmut in mid-1923 he was reassigned to a desk job in Washington, being, once again, put in charge of the personnel division. Now, though, he was an appropriately high rank to do the job. For three years he held the assignment, one of the least eventful periods of his life. In the world of the Washington treaties, personnel changes slowed.47 He grumbled about a plan for aviator pay, and did his best to scupper it. While he was building even more political experience, he also seemed to miss the world. He wrote a series of wistful letters to friends on overseas assignments, reminiscing about his earlier trips. He thought back on his first overseas voyage, to Peru, and, as always, spent time thinking about China. He also made a great friend in this period, the famous Antarctic explorer Richard Byrd, with whom he would remain close until death.
After three years of relative quiet, Leahy ended up with one of the most successful single ship commands in the entire interwar period. In May 1926 he was given one of the great commands about which every naval officer of his generation dreamed—his first battleship. The USS New Mexico was one of the newest and most powerful battleships in the fleet, armed with twelve 14-inch guns in three-gun turrets and considered a marvel. Everything on board was electrically powered. Nicknamed “the Queen,” a moniker that referred to her striking lines, she was beautiful in profile and rakish, with a jutting bow. Leahy claimed not to have been particularly concerned with which battleship he was given, but he could hardly have been upset to get such a plum assignment. As head of personnel one has to wonder if he played some role in arranging such an excellent command.
Leahy drove the New Mexico hard, not just in its gunnery practice but in all areas under his control. The results were remarkable. He made her unarguably the best-performing ship in the fleet. The battleships of the US Navy ran a biannual competition in three areas: gunnery, engineering, and battle efficiency. During the competitions of 1927–1928, the New Mexico topped all three categories.48 Leahy considered this result, known as the “meatball,” as one of his finest moments, and he had been willing to run great risks to achieve it. During one of the high-speed cruises as part of the engineering competition, the New Mexico developed a worrying shudder, almost certainly a major propeller problem. Leahy threw caution to the wind and continued to run the engines at full capacity. He won the trophy, but it was discovered in port that two of the propellers had badly damaged blades. Twenty-five years later, Leahy claimed that a more “cautious” commander would have slowed the ship down.49
The New Mexico was a happy ship under Leahy’s command. According to a junior sailor there was only one unpopular officer, a Lieutenant Commander Bode. Bode brought a cat with him and forced the men to build a crate big enough to accommodate a horse so that his pet could be transported in comfort.50 One irritated sailor threw an egg at Bode when the officer’s back was turned, and it splattered all over the officer’s uniform. Bode, irate, tried to goad the unseen miscreant into a fight, but the egg-thrower refused to identify himself. Leahy, who only heard of this story years later, had many fond memories of the cat, if none of Bode. He recalled Bode’s pet as a kitten that grew into an enormous friendly beast that, unafraid of rank, would sneak into Leahy’s cabin and snuggle up with him to sleep.
Leahy’s achievements while in command of the New Mexico were so emphatic that he received a special letter from President Calvin Coolidge congratulating him on the results. He was also the first member of his class to be raised to the flag rank of rear admiral.51 Furthermore, he once again received the best possible desk job available for someone of his standing. In late 1927, he was made the new chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, the second most important bureau in the navy and the one in charge of procuring all the weapons and shells for its vessels. It marked him out as one of the few officers of his generation who had a legitimate chance of reaching the position of chief of naval operations.
Leahy’s professional success was matched by what seemed to be financial security. The “richest” that Leahy would ever be was in the late 1920s. Not only did he have his naval pay, he had two significant assets that he had acquired through marriage to Louise: stock in the Colusa County Bank, where he also kept some family savings, and agricultural land in the Sacramento valley.52 Interestingly, Leahy was not particularly comfortable handling investments. He was clearly concerned with both the bank and the yield from the land, sharing his worries with Niblack.53 Like many Americans in the roaring 1920s, Leahy both wanted to believe that the good times were never going to end, yet had a nagging suspicion that the prices of these assets, because of the debts that were held against them, were overvalued. Part of Leahy really wanted to sell up and realize a profit, but he refused to act. He continued waiting for the even better times that were supposedly just around the corner. He kept spending. In 1928 the Leahys purchased a town house on Florida Avenue, near Dupont Circle in the center of Washington, for $20,000. Life was good, but tougher times lay ahead.