Fewer than two hours after President Truman started speaking to Congress on March 12, 1947, he was airborne, having taken off on a five-hour flight to Florida. The strain of the previous three weeks had exacted a toll, and Truman’s doctor ordered him to take an immediate rest. After landing at Boca Chica Airfield, the president and his party of seven trusted companions, including Admiral Leahy, Clark Clifford, Harry Vaughan, and William Hassett, Truman’s secretary, were quickly whisked to the submarine base at the US Naval Station on nearby Key West.1
The William Leahy who clambered down the gangway of the president’s plane into the soothing warmth of southern Florida was noticeably changed, both physically and emotionally, from five years at the center of power. To many of Truman’s young staffers, he seemed impossibly old. They nicknamed him the “sea dog,” and he looked the part. His hair, which had been thinning for decades, was almost gone from the crown of his head. Where it had been gray, it was now increasingly white. His eyebrows had grown bushier and could stand out alarmingly. The wrinkles on his face had deepened and lengthened, and the previously small jowls hung down lower, accentuating his overall chelonian appearance. Though he still stood erect, his belly peeked out over his belt. In casual clothes, he would hike his trousers up high to cover the bulge.
It was because of Leahy that the president’s party was in Florida in the first place. In November 1946, on Leahy’s recommendation, Truman had visited Key West—and fallen in love. A small naval base on the southernmost tip of Florida, Key West had everything Truman needed to recharge. The clear blue water was warm enough to swim in year-round, the sea breezes soothing, and the modest but comfortable accommodations exactly to the president’s taste. Truman could unwind, play poker, have a drink, and sing in comfort and privacy. He would visit eleven times before leaving office, bringing Leahy with him every time the admiral was healthy enough to come.
It was an indication of how their relationship was evolving. As Truman diverged from the admiral on policy recommendations, he integrated him more and more into his personal space. At holidays, not just to Key West but also Camp David, Leahy was now an automatic companion. The president also brought the admiral on overseas trips and in one case sent Leahy to be his official representative. It was almost that by making him more of a friend, he was providing compensation as Leahy’s direct influence began weakening. Leahy, whose life could have been much lonelier, was gratified. Sometimes women showed interest in him, including some who sent him proposals by mail. One particular suitor was a California widow almost twenty-five years younger, who mailed in a picture of herself for his approval and began her letter, “All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy—You must not let that happen to Willie Leahy!”2 While the admiral was happy to remain devoted to his late wife’s memory, he still needed human companionship, and being part of the president’s lively social circle mattered a great deal.
In Key West, Truman and those closest to him would stay in the commandant’s house, quickly dubbed the Winter White House. Built in a style best termed Militaro-Caribbean, it was shaded by palm trees and only a few yards from the sea. The president stayed alone in the best bedroom—he banned women, including his wife, from his holidays in all but exceptional circumstances—and since there were only four other bedrooms, everyone had to have a roommate, except Leahy. The admiral was given a private room next to the president, which turned Clifford green with envy. The younger man was so irritated that for a while he avoided coming to Key West when Leahy was there.3
This one tiff aside, Key West was a place to escape. Mornings were mostly spent on base. Breakfast was between seven and eight, and Leahy and Truman were among the first to rise. Conversations around the table were at times serious, as the president and his chief of staff re-created their White House roles, with Leahy briefing Truman about overnight events. At other times, they talked sports or the weather, and even bickered. Truman respected Leahy, but sometimes he enjoyed taking the older man down a peg or two. Now at seventy-one years of age, Leahy could come off as grumpy and imperious, and one morning Truman finally called him on it. It had been understood that when Leahy ordered prunes for breakfast, he was to get exactly three. On this morning, a bowl with three prunes was dutifully placed in front of him. Leahy impatiently motioned the waiter to come back. Perhaps the prunes were too big, or he decided he didn’t want them after all, but regardless, Truman stared the admiral down, taunting him: “Don’t you say a word to that boy—I heard you tell him three, you eat them.”4 Leahy shut up and ate his fruit.
The prune incident was not representative of the general atmosphere at Key West. The younger members of the White House staff were fond of Leahy. Louis Renfrow, who became one of Truman’s aides during this time, recalled, “Admiral Leahy was one of the finest men, and probably the most serious individual you’ve ever met, and yet he had no feeling about trying to impose his importance on anyone.”5 Philleo Nash, another Truman aide, did not get to know Leahy until their paths crossed at Key West. They bonded over a shared Wisconsin heritage, and Nash quickly discovered that spending time with the old admiral was one of the best things about being there. He considered Leahy to be one of the finest people he had ever met, describing him as “very, very charming.”6
Days at Key West were typically passed sedately, with the president wandering the base, chatting with sailors. Many mornings involved a trip to the enlisted men’s beach. Truman’s party would don their swimming trunks for a quick dip, sometimes followed by volleyball matches or beach football. But much of the time was spent loafing and sunbathing. Leahy, conscious of his dignity, often avoided swimwear.
After lunch, the party would sometimes go fishing, the waters around Key West being some of the finest deep-water fishing grounds in the world. Truman was not nearly as passionate about the sport as Roosevelt, and the trips were spent in idle relaxation. “Adm. Leahy and I went fishing yesterday—unannounced,” Truman wrote to his wife, Bess. “They do it differently here. We sat on the back end of a crash boat in two easy chairs and had a navy captain bait our hook and take the fish off. It was a trolling job entirely. I caught three and the Adm. three. . . . They were nice fish but I don’t know why we caught them except that this is Friday and we can furnish some of our Catholic friends something they can eat today.”7
Truman enjoyed inspecting the base’s naval vessels, and often invited Leahy along, giving him the prized seat next to him in the car. On one inspection tour, Truman’s devilish nature came out and he took pleasure in tormenting the old admiral. A captured German Type XXI U-boat, the most advanced submarine of the day, was brought into the base. When a ride in the boat was mentioned, Leahy shuddered, muttering under his breath, “Count me out, I’m not the least bit interested in it.”8 Though he recognized the military value of submarines, he considered them “dirty things,” and throughout his career had avoided serving on them.9 Truman saw an opportunity to correct this shortcoming. He immediately scheduled a visit, listing Leahy as an official member of his party.10 Once the president’s crew had clambered inside the U-boat, Truman, much to the evident worry of his security team and an increasingly alarmed Leahy, ordered the sub to dive. Soon they were 450 feet below sea level, and the air became stale and dank. The admiral was miserable. Once safely ashore, he kept his discomfort to himself and spoke only of his admiration for German technology.11
Perhaps Truman’s favorite activity at Key West was gambling. Poker games went on morning, afternoon, or evening, whenever Truman felt the urge—although all mention of poker was censored in the president’s activity logs.12 Leahy knew how to handle himself at a poker table, and Truman learned quickly to respect his prowess, writing to his wife that he had lost $3 one evening while the admiral had won more than $40, commenting that Leahy was “a tough player as you’d imagine.”13
To Leahy, poker was a man’s game to be taken seriously. Truman was known to throw pots so that less wealthy staff members would not lose too much. Roger Tubby served as White House assistant press secretary after Leahy retired, though he was at Key West for one of Leahy’s last visits. He witnessed the two men in action:
I had one disastrous evening at the poker table . . . in no time at all I was really in the hole. I think the President realized that I was rather unhappy. I had four children at home. I remember one particular hand where it was straight poker, and so I thought, “Now I know what I’ve got.” I came up with a pretty good hand. And so I stayed in, and several others stayed in, and the pot got bigger and bigger. Then people began to drop out, and ultimately it was just the President and myself, and he threw in. I think it was Admiral Leahy [who] said, “Wait a minute, Boss. You can’t do that.” He was very improper—the whole thing was very improper. He picked up the President’s hand and looked at it and he said, “Why, you ain’t even got a pair of deuces.” Well, it was simply the President staking me, getting me out of the hole.14
While they gambled, the men smoked and drank. The logs of the Key West trips were replete with small cocktail parties. The president was even known to start his day with a shot of bourbon. By this stage in life Leahy was a daily drinker, favoring bourbon and water or martinis. Typically he had at least one at lunch or dinner, and sometimes a cocktail or two in between. He preferred his drinks stiff. At a party thrown by Harry Vaughan, a watered-down punch was served, causing Leahy to quip to Truman that he would need to fix himself a real drink when he went home.15
His lunchtime drinking was so regular that Albert Murray, the famous painter commissioned to do a portrait of Leahy, dreaded their afternoon sessions. The admiral, in full dress uniform, weighed down by heavy aiguillettes, would stroll in after a few martinis, settle into his portrait chair, and promptly fall asleep. It happened so often that Murray developed a routine to rouse him so that he could paint. “I would drop a brush on the floor, and it would wake him up. I would turn my back to him and his mouth would fall open, and he would drool all over his uniform and the aiguillettes and everything else. I would take forever to pick the brush up and when I would finally get up he would be finishing mopping himself off with his handkerchief and making the remark, ‘Gee, I must have dozed off for a moment.’”16
As much as he drank, he smoked even more. Still a chain-smoker into his seventies, his cigarettes were always close at hand. During the war, photographs of senior military figures smoking were often suppressed so as not to offend the more delicate elements of the American public. Yet many of Leahy’s wartime pictures usually featured an ashtray in easy reach. After the war, Leahy ceased to care, even allowing Collier’s to print a photo of him with a lit cigarette clenched visibly between his fingers. William Hassett teased him about it, writing, “The bold photograph with the conspicuous cigarette alarms me. . . . Shame on you not even to conceal your wickedness.”17 In April 1947, after a massage—another Leahy indulgence—the admiral fainted. His doctor told him to cut back on the cigarettes and coffee. He might as well have told him to stop breathing.
Leahy’s growing inability to care about such things was a sign of his growing grandiosity. He was lathered in praise. Two- and three-star admirals and generals, normally not the most emotional bunch, would send him the most cloying notes.18 In 1947, he met with Lt. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer to discuss the man’s mission to China. Leahy had always liked Wedemeyer, a self-confident operator, and had been instrumental in having him named as Joseph Stilwell’s replacement in 1944. Wedemeyer outdid himself after the meeting in letting Leahy know how wonderful he was, writing, “I enjoyed so much our brief visit at the Army-Navy Club the other day. Every time I talk to you, for several days thereafter I have a feeling of happiness and contentment in the knowledge that a man of your fine character is so close to the throne. You epitomize to me the highest traditions of an American official, military or civil, and I hope that your health will maintain so that you can contribute to stability in our country.”19
Such praise, heaped on top of the many honors he received, certainly seemed to free Leahy to tease whomever he wanted (with the exception of the president). One of his favorite targets was Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was chief of staff for the army from 1945 to 1948, thus serving on the Joint Chiefs under Leahy’s chairmanship. The two never got along particularly well. Eisenhower wanted a more active Joint Chiefs, while Leahy wanted to keep the group from becoming a peacetime general staff. Leahy also distrusted Eisenhower’s political ambitions, which were an open secret in Washington. During meetings of the chiefs, Leahy would needle Ike by calling him “Mr. President,” causing sniggering around the table. Eisenhower, flustered, would be forced to deny the undeniable and claim he had no White House ambitions. Chester Nimitz was still laughing about it years later.20
After a long career, Leahy’s habits and attitudes seemed ingrained. In early November 1946, not long before Truman’s first visit to Key West, the president asked Leahy to go to Chile to represent the United States at the inauguration of the new president, Gabriel González Videla.21 Though Videla was Leahy’s friend from Vichy, where he had grown fond of the young Chilean on the diplomatic circuit, Leahy remained Leahy, as Spruille Braden, the State Department official assigned to help him prepare for the visit, discovered. When Braden looked at Leahy, he saw an old, unthinking American racist. He later recalled that Leahy “insisted on referring to the Chileans as ‘those spicks,’ although he was going down on this mission of friendship.”22
Despite his callousness, Leahy enjoyed his visit. He was flown down to Panama, where he boarded the great battleship USS Wisconsin for the cruise to Valparaiso. A large overflight of aircraft marked his arrival, and when his task force reached Chilean waters, he was greeted by an eighteen-gun salute, one more than he believed he was entitled to. Once on land, he had a number of confidential meetings with President Videla, speaking a combination of French and English, a pattern they had established in Vichy. They discussed both foreign and domestic policy, and Leahy, again revealing how the New Deal had penetrated his thinking, applauded Videla’s plan to break the power of old economic monopolies, describing him as a Chilean equivalent of an American Democrat. On the cruise home, the old admiral had to be transferred from the Wisconsin to a destroyer by highline, suspended over the sea in a small steel crate, which swayed from side to side as he was being transported.23 He might have preferred a submarine dive.
Back in Washington, Leahy did his best to improve US-Chilean relations.24 He continued to be in regular contact with Videla, helping the Chilean president even after he had added Communist members to his government.25 Leahy returned to South America a few months later, this time accompanying President Truman to Brazil in late August 1947 to attend the closing of the Inter-American Conference, which was being held in Rio de Janeiro, and then the formal celebrations of Brazil’s Independence Day. Rather than flying home, the president elected to sail back aboard the great battleship USS Missouri. It was the first time Truman had ever crossed the equator while at sea, which meant, according to naval custom, the president’s initiation into the court of Neptune. Nearly half a century had passed since Leahy had experienced his own initiation as a young sailor back in 1898. He took part in the silly ceremony, playing the role of Number One Shellback, standing next to the sailor performing Neptune as the president participated with gusto.26 Truman was spared any indignity, but was asked to provide each member of Neptune’s court with an autographed picture.
A few days after arriving in Washington, a small ceremony was held in the Oval Office in which the CIA’s first director, Sidney Souers, was sworn as the executive secretary of the new National Security Council. At the same time, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who had served under Leahy in Vichy, was sworn in as the new head of Central Intelligence. On the surface, Leahy’s influence still looked immense, as both men had been handpicked by him. Yet the ceremony marked the beginning of the end.