Nineteen twenty-nine started as another promising year in the life and prodigious career of William Leahy. After the failure of the Geneva Naval Conference of 1927 to extend building limits to auxiliary vessels, the US Navy had commenced construction of the most powerful cruisers in the world. As the chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, the body responsible for the production of new naval vessels and the stockpiling of weapons and ammunition, Leahy held a great deal of influence over this process. Weighing in at 10,000 tons and armed with 8-inch guns, these nimble greyhounds represented a leap forward in technology for the class, boosting America’s fighting prowess at sea. Moreover, under Leahy’s direction, a number of battleships were modernized, their horizontal armor strengthened, their antiaircraft batteries augmented, making them more resistant to air attack.
Overseeing one of the larger budgets in the US government, Leahy estimated that his office was set to spend $20 million annually. So much money sloshed around the Bureau of Ordnance that he began to fear that much of it was being wasted. That year he crossed the continent to visit a new ordnance-storage facility located in the desert outside Hawthorne, Nevada. A classic example of pork-barrel politics, the new depot cost $3 million. Leahy thought it would have been more economically sound to throw the explosives into the sea—which, incidentally, lay more than 200 miles to the west. Despite his frustration over the project’s wastefulness, he was remarkably understanding about its political purpose, admitting that the poor district obviously needed the financial support that came with the facility.1
Leahy’s relaxed attitude may have been due to a happy development in his home life. The previous year, William H. and his wife, Elizabeth, had welcomed a daughter, whom they named Louise. Leahy quickly became a doting grandfather. He eventually nicknamed her “Louisita,” and the joy she brought would become one of the great constants of Leahy’s life. Unfortunately, his joy was soon to be tested.
The stock-market crash of October 1929 hit the United States like a full dreadnought broadside. As the American economy sputtered and then failed, prices on goods plummeted; across the nation, workers were laid off and industrial production crumbled. Eventually the stock market lost almost all its value, and bankruptcy, both personal and corporate, spread across the country. Within a few years, government tax revenues dropped by more than half.2
For the navy, the productive years of the late 1920s were brought to a halt. President Herbert Hoover, who assumed the Oval Office in 1929, was not a believer in a big navy to begin with; facing collapsing government revenues, he singled out the fleet for economy. The first thing he did, in 1930, was agree to a new naval arms-control treaty. During what is known as the first London Naval Conference, Hoover’s representatives worked out a deal with the British and Japanese that extended the Washington ratios to most classes of auxiliary vessels.3 Having placed limits on his nation’s fleet, the president then brought an ax to the navy’s budget, ordering that naval spending, which had peaked at more than $400 million in the fiscal year of 1930–1931, be cut to $340 million in 1931–1932, a reduction of 15 percent.4
Most of the cuts fell on the naval construction budget and salaries.5 The Hoover administration stopped the construction of two aircraft carriers, three cruisers, one destroyer, and six submarines.6 Leahy, in charge of enforcing the cuts, was devastated by their human cost. He discovered that because of the canceled ships, the Bureau of Ordnance was directly responsible for 5,000 industrial workers losing their jobs. Leahy was no fool and knew that these shipyard workers, who had some of the best-paid industrial jobs in the country, would find it practically impossible to gain employment elsewhere in the midst of the economic tsunami.7 He also knew whom to blame: Herbert Hoover.
Even before the Depression, Leahy had been no fan of Hoover.8 He believed the president, a Quaker and a rumored pacifist, had no understanding of naval power, nor sympathy for the fleet. He also believed, perhaps unfairly, that Hoover had made his fortune not as an honest businessman but more out of a talent for self-promotion. Once the economy tumbled, his doubts about Hoover became pathological. Leahy came to dislike everything about the president: his speaking voice, his foreign policy, his naval policy, and most important his supposedly supine response to the Depression.9 While Leahy would never have criticized a president publicly, and disapproved of those who did, in private he was scathing. In October 1931, he attended the four-day gala held by the US government celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown, which decided the American Revolution. It was a lavish affair, attended by the likes of French field marshal Philippe Pétain, German general Kuno von Steuben, and America’s own John J. Pershing. Mingling with some of the most influential and powerful men in the world, Leahy was happy to see that Prohibition rules “did not apply” during the celebrations. Yet his irritation rose at the appearance of Herbert Hoover. “At the forenoon exercises, Mr. Hoover read a very mediocre address that referred lightly, if at all, to the combatants of Yorktown,” Leahy vented in his diary. “During the reading, a puff of wind blew away some of the President’s prepared address and he stood mute and apparently uninterested while aides secured the disturbed manuscript, after which he proceeded with his reading. A more vigorous wind would not have annoyed spectators. . . . The paper read by the President did not impress me or any person to whom I talked.”10
His hatred of Hoover led him to fall out with the chief of naval operations. Adm. William Pratt, who had served as CNO since 1930, was in Leahy’s eyes a political schemer too closely identified with Hoover.11 Relations between the two officers were made worse when the CNO supported the building of a new class of cruiser that Leahy considered pointless. Pratt reciprocated Leahy’s disdain. Eventually the CNO tried to sideline Leahy with an unsatisfactory posting. Without consulting him, Pratt assigned Leahy to be the chief of staff to the commander of the Pacific Fleet.12 Leahy smelled a rat and went straight to the chief of the Bureau of Navigation, which oversaw such transfers, and blocked the move. As he explained in a letter, he was more than happy to use “strong-arm methods” to thwart Pratt.13 Still, Leahy thought it best to get out of Washington for a while, and in 1931 he accepted the command of the navy’s scout destroyers.14
First based out of Brooklyn, the scout destroyers were redeployed to the West Coast for much of Leahy’s command. When Leahy headed west, he was clearly suffering from anxiety brought on by his personal experience of the Depression. Though it might not have been apparent to those on the outside, his finances were slowly collapsing. Federal budget cuts had meant reduced pay for all naval personnel, which in and of itself was not too devastating, as the cost of most items had fallen as the economy contracted. Yet having purchased a new town house at the height of the boom, Leahy was now forced to sit by and watch its value crater. The Florida Avenue property, which he had purchased for $20,000, soon became a millstone around his neck. Not long after Leahy took command of the scout destroyers, he moved Louise into an apartment and rented out the town house. Yet he could only find a tenant willing to pay a rent that would not even cover the cost of repairs needed to keep the house habitable. He felt the pinch so much that he even referred to it when responding to a letter from an admirer asking whether he would recommend a career in the navy to a young man. Leahy was mostly enthusiastic, yet admitted that “a military and naval career has always given and now offers very little material reward for success.”15
Even more worryingly, his two largest investments were in the exact sectors of the economy most threatened by the Depression. His large piece of agricultural land in Colusa County became almost worthless. The collapse in food prices made the value of the land plummet, and even raising enough money to pay his annual land tax bill became a struggle. The decline of the property’s value unsurprisingly also made his part ownership of the Colusa County Bank a risky proposition. In an era before federal insurance, banks were uniquely vulnerable to collapse if their depositors either lost faith in their liquidity or fell on such hard times that they started taking their money out of the bank at too fast a pace. Ominously, both were happening in Northern California.
At this time, Leahy began to suffer from some of the same stress-related psychosomatic conditions he had first experienced during his son’s illness in 1923. In 1932, as he was passing through California, Leahy took time to stop at Warner Springs Spa, just outside of San Diego. There guests were given splendid sleeping cabins, good food, and access to a large swimming pool. They could also drink the heavily sulfurous mineral water, which bubbled out of the ground at a constant 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Leahy loved the spa, admitting that it was the perfect place to recover from “nervous exhaustion.”16 Yet the trip was no panacea. Later that year he was hospitalized for two days due to a stress-related stomach complaint.17 After a thorough examination, his doctors told him there was no physical reason for his distress.
Watching the unfolding national and personal disasters, Leahy became increasingly reflective on the ghosts of his own past. In 1931 he made two trips to visit the USS Constellation, the sailing ship on which he had made his first cruise in 1893. She had been turned into a museum, and Leahy was struck by just how primitive living conditions had been back in the day. He decided to preserve a typewritten copy of the diary he had sporadically kept by hand since leaving Annapolis in 1898. After rereading his own words, he judged that the diary had “no merit in composition” and was “lacking in interest.”18 Assuming the diary would stay in the family, he composed a handwritten note for William H. in which he passed on all the information he had about his parents’ families and discussed how one could best succeed in life. He was trying to use family as a lesson; in fact, he was frustrated at what he considered his son’s meek career choices. William H. had decided to concentrate on naval engineering, and in 1931 he applied to join the Corps of Naval Constructors, limiting himself to a career based ashore.19 In doing so, his father believed, William H. was disqualifying himself from ever reaching the top jobs in the fleet. So disappointed was Leahy that, in an unusually revealing move for such a private man, he made his displeasure known to a reporter seventeen years later.20
As Leahy composed his version of the Leahy family history, what impressed him, and what he wanted to impress on his son and grandchild, was that the family came from “racially good ancestry” that had demonstrated “qualities of leadership and high-standing in the ancient world.” In and of itself, that would mean relatively little in the future. “Laws of heredity beyond our control, and at this time only vaguely discerned,” he wrote, “will probably produce a correct proportion of high and low order descendants regardless of what we may think or do, but pride of ancestry has been and is of value to us in that it makes repugnant any deviation from traditional ideas and gives strength with which to resist temptation to drift into a lower order of human society.”21
Of course there is a basic contradiction in that quote, which summarizes a constant tension in Leahy’s own nature and outlook that had become accentuated under the pressure of the Great Depression. On the one hand there was the fatalist, one could even say cynic, believing that his descendants would become what they would become, with little that anyone could do to shape the process. On the other hand, there was a desire to believe that hard work and commitment to ideals must matter, or at least should matter. Leahy certainly believed that his own career success was down to such factors. As he summarized his views to his son at that time: “The present changing social order stimulates appreciation of the fact that circumstances, customs fortunes families, and everything in history except people, change, and that those individuals who succeed are the ones who take advantage of the environment in which they find themselves.”
One reason he had the time to indulge his interest in family history was because the Great Depression made a material difference in his command of the scout destroyers. These ships were considered a vital part of the main battle fleet, a group of fast, small vessels that would range far out in front of the battle line to provide protection to the large battleships and, if possible, launch surprise attacks on the enemy’s large warships. In 1932, Leahy’s command was expanded to take in all the destroyers attached to the battle fleet, including those that were assigned to shadow the battleships to protect them from submarine attack. It should have been an exhausting command. When he was able to conduct drills, he pushed his destroyer crews hard, trying to guarantee that the exercises were as realistic as possible.22 But budget cutbacks sidelined the ships to port for long stretches, leaving Leahy ashore, living in hotels, fretting and wondering what was happening back in Washington. He did get to work with Capt. William Halsey, who would become famous in the coming war and given the nickname “Bull.” Halsey commanded one of the destroyer divisions below Leahy.
Strategically, the most important part of the post was his growing acceptance of the influence of naval airpower. The Leahy of the 1930s was far from being the blind leader of the navy’s gun club that some would have us believe. As technology changed, he adjusted his view. The aircraft of the 1920s were primitive devices that would have had real difficulty attacking modern warships at sea. By the early 1930s, however, while aircraft technology still had a long way to go, Leahy was quick to note improvements. Aircraft were faster, could carry heavier bomb loads, and were made more robustly. To protect against air attack, Leahy became a driving force in the US Navy’s push for greater air-defense efforts and to make sure that the navy could control aircraft flown from ground bases as well as aircraft carriers. He did this as the head of the Bureau of Ordnance, a position that normally connects Leahy to a big-gun ideology. His passion for increasing the US Navy’s antiaircraft protection even made it into a large story in the New York Times.23 Behind closed doors, he argued strongly for his ideas on airpower during meetings of the General Board. On February 3, 1931, the General Board (chaired by one of Leahy’s mentors, Admiral Bristol) met to discuss the future design of American destroyers. Leahy argued strongly and successfully for linked, double-mounted antiaircraft guns as opposed to single mounts.24 It was a prescient and important interjection. The United States was “unique” in providing its destroyers from 1932 onward with dual-purpose antiaircraft weapons, an important step in helping the USN develop the right antiaircraft weaponry to fight and win the Pacific war.25
On May 1, 1931, the General Board engaged in a wide-ranging discussion over the navy’s future. Leahy spoke before anyone else about the importance of the navy maintaining a ground-based air force, as he was terrified that the US Army Air Force would be given control over all aircraft not directly flown from naval vessels.26 This showed one area where he was a leader in the 1930s, in making sure that the US Navy was able to maintain and operate its own ground-based aircraft. This decision was not as straightforward as it seems. The British at the end of World War I had given control of all aircraft operations to the new RAF and its Air Ministry. Thus the Royal Navy had no control over any of the aircraft either flown from its bases or even launched from its aircraft carriers. There were many people in the US Army Air Force (and some in Congress) who believed likewise and thought that the USN should give up its independent air arm. Leahy opposed this with his usual ruthlessness.
Leahy also saw firsthand the growing effectiveness of aircraft attacks on surface ships. He was appointed the senior officer in charge of overseeing the bombing attacks on the USS Pittsburgh, an old armored cruiser being decommissioned. These air attacks, which occurred in September and October 1931, made it more apparent to Leahy that with heavier ordnance, naval vessels were now under increasing threat. Destroying the Pittsburgh was also a bittersweet affair. She was the spitting image of the USS California, on which he had had the most important cruise of his early career. As he walked her decks before her destruction, he was seized by a great sense of sadness.
As Leahy honed his command skills in charge of the navy’s destroyers, the United States was watching the most worrisome international developments since the end of World War I. In 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army had launched an invasion of Manchuria in what turned out to be its first attempt to colonize most of China. It was seemingly a case of a military unit running out of control, but the Japanese government, led by men worried that they could be assassinated if they tried to interfere, eventually approved of their army’s invasion. Throughout 1932, the Japanese expanded their control of northern China, eventually reaching the outskirts of Beijing.
For the United States this represented a challenge to one of its basic assumptions of the last three decades. America had claimed that it stood for the “Open Door” to China, the policy by which no other nation would be allowed to colonize that vast country. It was part of a partly patronizing, partly genuine belief of many US policymakers that America could play a positive role in limiting the growth of European and now Japanese imperialism in the region. For most of his career, Leahy would have supported the idea of the Open Door with gusto. Now, however, even despite a hostile Japan on the march, Leahy was at his most isolationist. He wanted nothing to do with foreign adventurism, even if it was to defend Chinese independence. From the moment the Japanese crossed the border, he worried about the possibility of a war involving the United States.27 To Leahy, the problem was not the American people, whom he was convinced did not want war, but rather “foreign interests.” By this he meant the large European powers that would want the United States to fight the Japanese for them.28 His international outlook, shaped as it was by the Great Depression, verged on the paranoid. He claimed that if the United States had to fight Japan during the economic crisis, it might “destroy the existing social order,” and yearned for a foreign policy of international disengagement.29
In some ways Leahy’s paranoia was understandable and forgivable. While the nation was in the throes of the Great Depression, Leahy was experiencing a deep, personal melancholy. Attending a Shriners dinner in San Francisco in April 1932, he was unamused to find that the entertainment included the 1930s version of strippers. The sailor who had once indulged in rowdy nights out grumbled of “alleged entertainment that included some singing by a Russian woman . . . a lot of terrible ‘jazz’ music by a large orchestra, and a number of dances by a dozen or so almost completely naked women.”30 A few days later—his birthday, in fact—his indignity was compounded when he was invited to attend a dinner for Annapolis graduates where, once again, dancing girls were on display. He tutted that exposing older men such as himself to sexually explicit entertainment was degrading. “Entertainment provided by some kind of theatrical troupe consisted of dancing by almost naked females. That part of the evening was not interesting on ones 57th birthday, if it would have been at any age.”31
Leahy’s sour disposition was doubtlessly caused by the fact that he was about to lose his fight to avoid bankruptcy. In May he made a trip to his land in Colusa County and came face-to-face with an economic and social catastrophe. His fields and those of his neighbors were lush with crops, yet the price of food had fallen so low that all this bounty could not generate enough income to pay the land’s running costs.32 The farm laborers, whom the ranchers had no money to pay, were so desperate that they often offered to work in exchange for food. Leahy realized that his land was as good as lost and would be seized by the government because of unpaid taxes.
Leahy’s sympathy for his fellow Americans suffering from the Great Depression led him to take some surprisingly radical positions. In March 1932 tens of thousands of World War I veterans descended on Washington, DC, and set up a shantytown on Anacostia Flats, only a few miles from the Capitol. Nicknamed the Bonus Marchers, they called for the early payment of government bonuses for their military service and planned to stay in their makeshift town until they received help. In late July, they were forcibly evicted by the head of the army, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Using tanks and cavalry, MacArthur brutally pushed the veterans from their new town before burning it to the ground. To many military officers, the Bonus Marchers represented a threat to domestic order, yet Leahy exhibited remarkable sympathy toward the downtrodden men, writing that they were “undoubtedly entitled to much more than they will ever get” from the Hoover administration.33 Though personally his own straits were not so dire, he empathized with their condition, noting that naval officers had just had their pay cut by another one-twelfth, as they were forced to take an extra month of unpaid leave every year. As he reflected on the future, this further pay cut made things look very bleak indeed: “This added to the failure of income from nearly all investments and increased taxes will be a difficult burden for most of us. I have a fear that the next year will be worse instead of better.”34
October 1932 brought even more turmoil. For four days, Leahy sat on the court-martial board of an old friend, Capt. George W. Steele. A decorated thirty-year veteran of the fleet, Steele had been in command of the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga that August when she ran aground not far from Los Angeles.35 Though Leahy thought there were some extenuating circumstances, and tried to understand what had happened to his friend, it is clear that Steele had made significant mistakes while in charge of one of the United States’ largest warships.36 Steele was eventually allowed to resign instead of being fired, but his career was over.37 Two days after the end of this most unpleasant duty, Leahy left the opulent El Cortez, San Diego’s landmark Spanish Renaissance hotel that had opened in the late 1920s during the economic boom that would seemingly never end. As he opened the door to his car, parked just outside the hotel, he was greeted by the barrel of a pistol. In the backseat sat a masked man who had been lying in wait. The man, his gun aimed at Leahy’s head, quietly ordered Leahy to get into the car and close the door. Leahy’s military training kicked in. He immediately slammed the door shut, ducked low, and took cover behind a neighboring vehicle. Once out of the direct line of sight of his assailant, he retreated into the hotel and called for the police. It was a lucky escape. Leahy heard later that this was one of a series of armed robberies being carried out at the time.
Yet in the midst of this chaos and despair, Leahy saw one sign of hope, his old friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Over the previous decade Roosevelt had undergone an extraordinary rise and fall in political fortunes, only to rise once again. In 1920 he had been selected as the Democratic nominee for vice president. Though he performed impressively on the campaign trail, the Democrats were swamped by the Republican landslide led by Warren Harding. Not long afterward, Roosevelt’s life took a particularly dark turn when he contracted polio, one of the most frightening diseases of the time. In 1921, as he was vacationing with his family on Campobello Island, Roosevelt started complaining of chills. Less than two weeks later he was completely paralyzed from the waist down. Polio was incurable and mysterious, and Roosevelt could easily have wallowed in his misery, using his money to allow for a long and comfortable period of reclusion. Instead, his disease, if anything, provided motivation for him to move forward—a resoluteness Leahy would have appreciated as much as anyone. After a few years of emotional recalibration, Roosevelt reentered politics. In 1928 he was one of the few positive signs for the Democratic Party when he was elected governor of New York. When the stock market crashed a few months later, the fortunes of the Democrats were transformed as Hoover and the Republicans seemed unable to cope with the unfolding disaster. Roosevelt went to work, and in 1932 he had secured enough support to make himself the Democratic nominee for the presidential election.
Leahy followed the 1932 presidential race with greater interest than any previous contest. Like millions of other Americans, he saw FDR as the last chance to stave off total collapse. He was elated when Roosevelt secured the nomination in July, and not because he expected Roosevelt to start lavishing money on the navy. Roosevelt had publicly supported the naval arms-control process in the 1920s.38 As a presidential candidate he continued to call for restraint in military spending.39 What pleased Leahy was his view of Roosevelt as an honest man, a “gentleman by all standards of comparison” with politically progressive views.40
During the last few months of the campaign, Leahy’s bitterness toward Hoover, indeed toward the entire Hoover administration, grew as the president seemed powerless to stop the nation’s slide into even more disorder and poverty. In addition, he believed that the administration’s foreign policy, which was being run by Secretary of State Henry Stimson, was dangerously naïve. After having gutted US defense capabilities over the last four years, Leahy saw Hoover and Stimson making pious, inflammatory remarks criticizing the behavior of other nations, particularly Japan. In his diary, he noted that Stimson’s statements had “failed to deflect Japan from its predetermined course of action.” The president and secretary of state, Leahy believed, would be well-advised to just shut up and stay out of the international crisis: “There is some danger of America getting involved with Japan if our State Department continues to take an active interest in Oriental affairs. We will probably not continue to interfere in the Orient if the present administration is thrown out of office by the November election.”41 Leahy’s opinion of Stimson as an ineffectual prig never abated.
Leahy’s joy at Roosevelt’s landslide victory in November 1932, as well as the subsequent New Deal, revealed that Leahy was never quite the economic conservative that he liked to pretend he was. For a while he praised the new president precisely because of Roosevelt’s strong left-wing economic credentials. In one of the more remarkable outbursts in his diary, Leahy wrote that the new president would not kowtow to the interests of “bankers and stock promoters” like the Republicans.42 This rage against bankers was personal, for Leahy had suffered in the months before Roosevelt’s inauguration due to what he saw as Republican inactivity to save the national banking sector.
Starting in January 1933, during the transition between Hoover and Roosevelt, the United States experienced an unprecedented run on its banking system. Panicked savers besieged their local savings institutions trying to withdraw as much money as they could. In doing so, they wrecked the viability of many small banks, such as Leahy’s. On January 26, he was told that the Colusa County Bank would be forced to shut down. He remarked, matter-of-factly, that this “destroys the remainder of my life-time savings.”43 It turned out to be worse. The collapse of the bank not only left Leahy penniless—as a part owner, it left him with a large debt. He would not be able to get out from under it until 1941, when he made a final large payment to help settle his outstanding obligations.44
For a man like Leahy, who had built his life on confidence, success, and a sense of machismo, it was all extraordinarily humbling. His humiliation was made worse when rumors of his bankruptcy spread amongst members of his Annapolis class.45 For Leahy, Roosevelt’s promises of economic relief had become crucial to his own life. After listening to Roosevelt’s inaugural address on the radio, he wrote in his diary that while he was concerned FDR might prove too radical, he was strongly supportive of the president’s anti-banking rhetoric and applauded his call for a change from Hoover’s Republican Party policies. Roosevelt, he wrote, had delivered an “indictment of every basic principle accepted by his predecessor,” and he pondered “perhaps this Roosevelt is the American we have been wishing for.”46
Even though it was too late to save the Colusa bank, one of the first things President Roosevelt did was save the American banking system. A few hours after taking office, FDR ordered all American banks shut. This banking “holiday” allowed for the nation to take a deep breath and calm its passion. By the time the banks reopened, Congress had passed Roosevelt’s Emergency Banking Act, which provided support for the banks and insurance for America’s panicked savers. On the first day that they were reopened, more Americans deposited money in their local banks than made withdrawals. The crisis had been surmounted.
Leahy applauded Roosevelt’s efforts like this to interject the government into the economy, believing that national survival was at stake. A few weeks later he had seemingly dropped even his small doubts about Roosevelt’s moves being too left-wing, writing, “It is the universal hope of all Americans that the President’s radical efforts to improve the industrial and financial condition of the country will be successful, and a certainty that if they fail the continued existence of our American Democracy will be doubtful.”47
After less than a year with Roosevelt as president, Leahy’s support, if anything, deepened. When he started his diary for 1934, he opened, for the first time in years, with an optimistic outlook: “The year started auspiciously with promise of improvement in the distressing condition of industrial and financial depression by the radical and original relief measures inaugurated by President Roosevelt.”48
Leahy had hope.