In 1909 as the U.S. Navy basked in the glories of the Great White Fleet, William D. Leahy reported for duty aboard the armored cruiser California. Since his baptism of fire at the Battle of Santiago eleven years before, Leahy’s career had been typical of promising young officers. He received his commission as an ensign on schedule in 1899 and rotated through duties aboard cruisers and gunboats, achieving his first command on the derelict gunboat Mariveles in the Philippines. Next came a year on the supply ship Glacier, hauling beef from Australia to American troops occupying that archipelago.
In 1902, Leahy was promoted to lieutenant junior grade (j.g.), and the following year he was assigned to duty on the training ship Pensacola in San Francisco. That year, Leahy later wrote, was “the most pleasant and possibly the most eventful year of my life—interesting from every point of view as San Francisco always is to a sailor—and eventful in that I managed during the year to be married to Louise Tennent Harrington.”
Louise lived comfortably with her recently widowed mother on the corner of California and Buchanan streets just west of Nob Hill. Her sister, Mary, was engaged to future admiral Albert P. Niblack, an 1882 graduate of Annapolis and one of Leahy’s former officers. Bill was twenty-eight and Louise a few days shy of it when they exchanged vows on February 3, 1904. By then, Leahy had advanced another grade to lieutenant and helped commission the brand-new cruiser Tacoma. Six months later, when Tacoma was ordered to join the Atlantic Fleet, Leahy swapped assignments with an officer on the cruiser Boston in order to remain on the Pacific Coast near Louise, who was expecting.1
The next two years took Leahy back and forth between San Francisco and Panama on the Boston. Theodore Roosevelt’s vision of the Panama Canal was becoming a reality and the president unabashedly stationed capital ships off both coasts of the isthmus to ensure local political stability and overall American control. Lieutenant Leahy missed the birth of his son in October 1904 but happened to be in the Harrington house in San Francisco when the great earthquake of 1906 struck.
The twin themes of his irregular diary entries during these years were the need for better training and the growing threat of Japan. Frequently, they were entwined, as when he speculated that Russia’s weakness at Tsushima was a result of poorly trained men. “An untrained man on board a ship in action is of much less value than the space he occupies,” Leahy wrote, “and in view of the growing power of Japan in the Orient where our interests must conflict, it would seem wise to look to the training of our men.”2
In February 1907, Leahy had the opportunity to confront the issue head-on, reporting to Annapolis for duty as an instructor in science. He got a close look at the crop of prospective junior officers under cultivation, but he seems to have been only too glad to rotate out of the academy staff and continue his own naval education. Aboard the California late in 1909, he would receive a graduate course in command from Captain Henry T. Mayo, one of the emerging navy’s most influential leaders.
Mayo was a combination of old-school manners and twentieth-century vision. Born in Burlington, Vermont, on the shores of Lake Champlain in 1856, he graduated from Annapolis in 1876, a member of one of those meager post–Civil War classes. Mayo took part in the headline search for the Arctic explorer Adolphus Greely and later supervised the first hydrographic survey of Pearl Harbor, but he missed the glories of the brief Spanish-American War while commanding a gunboat on the West Coast. The officers of Roosevelt’s increased navy recognized Mayo’s potential, however, and after duty aboard the cruiser Albany off Central America, he was promoted to captain and given command of the California.
Captain Mayo took Leahy back to his early assignment in the forward turret on the Oregon and made him California’s ordnance officer, setting him firmly on course to become one of the navy’s top gunnery experts. Leahy found it a “not altogether agreeable change from navigating officer but a wise one both in view of the experience to be obtained and the insistence of the Captain.”3
Their first port of call together was Tokyo and the by-now perfunctory audience with Admiral Togo. Unlike Chester Nimitz, who had been impressed with the Japanese admiral, Leahy’s impressions more closely mirrored Bill Halsey’s. Both thought Japanese hospitality had plenty of show but little genuine warmth. Togo, Leahy recorded in his diary, was “a very ordinary looking Jap with all his gold lace and decorations,” but he added that most of the Japanese officers at a large dinner given by the Navy Club “spoke English that one could understand.”4
Leahy recalled these cruises with Mayo as “perhaps the most valuable and certainly the most agreeable sea duty that I have had.” He saw in Mayo qualities that he would emulate in his own commands. In Mayo, he found “a splendid seaman who was also a considerate gentleman and a very capable Naval officer.”5
By 1910, Leahy was a lieutenant commander and the gunnery officer for the entire Pacific Squadron aboard its flagship, California. He proved a strong taskmaster but also a realist. “I have so far been unable to correct apparent faults,” the perfectionist Leahy grumbled. “Much could be done by changing some officers that I have neither the rank or influence to reach.”6
But Leahy was slowly becoming exposed to those who did have rank and influence. Mayo was one, but Leahy had also been introduced to William Howard Taft during Taft’s tenure as governor of the Philippines. By the fall of 1911, Taft was well into his only term as president, and Leahy drew the assignment of serving as his temporary naval aide during a four-day visit to San Francisco. With his typical low-key reaction, Leahy confessed, “While it was interesting and instructive to be attached to the President’s personal staff, I do not think a permanent assignment to such duty could be either agreeable or valuable.”7 But when Leahy declined another teaching tour at the Naval Academy and instead jumped at the chance to go to Washington as assistant director of target practice and engineering competitions, little did he know how close this assignment would bring him to a future president.
Like Bill Leahy, Ernest J. King was also still enamored with battleships. After leaving the cruiser Cincinnati in the Far East, King was almost assigned to a lowly gunboat, but he quickly asked to see the chief of the Bureau of Navigation—essentially the navy’s personnel department—in hopes of getting a better assignment. The chief turned out to be King’s old commanding officer from the battleship Illinois, whose advice about staying aboard King had failed to heed when he sought duty on the Cincinnati.
“Admiral,” said the aide ushering King into the office, “this is Mr. King, who used to be in the Illinois.”
“Yes, I remember him.”
“Mr. King wants to go to sea in a battleship,” the aide continued.
“That is what I advised him to do some years ago,” replied the admiral with a tweak. He held no grudge, however, and King left the interview with an assignment on the battleship Alabama.8
But before reporting for duty, there was a matter left over from his days at the Naval Academy. Ensign King was still smitten with Martha Rankin Egerton, and she with him. They were married on October 10, 1905, in the chapel at West Point. West Point? Yes, West Point. Mattie was living there with her sister, Florrie, who was married to army lieutenant Walter D. Smith.
The newlyweds’ rapture knew no bounds but was short-lived. Mattie, who had been the toast of Annapolis, proved singularly focused on routine family matters and intellectually challenged when it came to other topics. “Dull” was one thing that King never was. His conversations and interests were far-ranging, and his interactions with intelligent and lively people—even if he considered himself more intelligent and lively than anyone else—held sway.
When the infatuation phase passed and Mattie failed to measure up intellectually, King quickly got bored. This didn’t stop him from fathering six daughters and one son with her, but his physical and intellectual lust quickly began to scan other harbors. Mattie in turn established a home port in Annapolis near her family and friends and continued to raise their brood there while King sailed all over the world.
There was, however, one aspect of King’s interaction with his new brother-in-law that was to color his future views of the army. King struck up a strong friendship with Smith, who eventually became a brigadier general. Together they read books about Napoleon and his marshals, engaged in long discussions about military tactics, and toured Civil War battlefields. The result was that King, who already was fairly convinced that he knew more about the navy than anyone else, now also became convinced that he was an expert on land warfare and generals as well.9
One result of King’s growing operational confidence was that when he was assigned to staff duty at the Naval Academy after a year on the Alabama, he didn’t hesitate to put into writing some of his views on shipboard organization—essentially giving division officers more direct command over their men. His contribution to the United States Naval Institute Proceedings won the 1909 prize for best essay and got him noticed as a budding authority on naval management. Recognizing the inherent conservatism of the navy, King nevertheless took the command structure to task for “clinging to things that are old because they are old.”10
After three years on staff at Annapolis, it was time for King to go to sea again. Seeking a command of his own—even if on smaller ships, as Nimitz had done—he applied for destroyers. But Hugo Osterhaus, whose attention King had first attracted by coming alongside the wrong way as a naval cadet, was now a rear admiral. Recognizing the strong points of King’s sometimes overbearing personality, Osterhaus asked him to serve as his flag secretary, essentially the military equivalent of an executive assistant.
Some would have jumped at the chance, but characteristically, King carefully reviewed the political ramifications. First, putting in for sea duty always looked good on one’s record. Second, in the still relatively small officer corps, those admirals who were deadwood and a subsequent dead end for their junior officers were readily known. King had already turned down two similar offers because he felt they “would not lead anywhere.” But Osterhaus was clearly different, and admirals who were rising stars usually lifted staff officers with them. King deferred his desire for an independent command and said yes to Osterhaus.
King spent a year with Osterhaus, who flew his flag from Minnesota as commander of the Third Division of battleships stationed in the Atlantic. When Osterhaus subsequently went to command the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California, King was assigned to the New Hampshire as its engineering officer. But after a year of that, King proved that he had picked his admirals correctly when Osterhaus was appointed commander in chief, Atlantic Fleet, and asked for King to serve again as his flag secretary. Now, as the gatekeeper of all fleet business flowing in and out of the admiral’s cabin, King would have growing influence and come to know many senior officers.
Osterhaus came to rely on King’s discretion in handling routine correspondence, and this authority only reinforced King’s self-important ways. There were limits however. Once, when King found himself without a ride back to the flagship, he ordered the admiral’s barge to pick him up across Portsmouth harbor despite the fact that the barge was waiting dockside for Osterhaus. With King aboard, it failed to return on time for the admiral, and King found Osterhaus pacing the dock in a huff. Anyone else would probably have been sent packing, but Osterhaus seems to have genuinely liked most of the arrogance that King brought with him and was content simply to admonish him, “Young man, don’t you dare to change my orders to my own barge!”11
After this second tour with Osterhaus, King went to the U.S. Naval Engineering Experiment Station at Annapolis as its executive officer in the summer of 1912. For the mechanically minded King, it was almost like being back in the railroad shops in Lorain. He delighted in tinkering with everything from boiler corrosion to the integrity of propeller shafts. He even came in contact with the very beginnings of naval aviation. With a congressional appropriation of $25,000, the navy had ordered two land-based airplanes—a Curtiss and a Wright—and one Curtiss amphibian. Three naval officers were dispatched directly to the factories to learn how to fly them.
These planes were based at a modest naval aviation camp adjacent to the station, and King watched their performance with fascination. One of the naval aviators was Lieutenant John H. Towers. King captained a torpedo boat to rescue Towers after a mishap in Chesapeake Bay one afternoon and later made his first flight with him. Despite this friendly beginning, these two egotists would be at odds with each other through most of their careers.
The high-pitched buzzing of these early canvas-covered birdcages seemed quite remote from the thunderous broadsides of 12-inch guns, but a 1912 report of aviation efforts managed to convey both a deference to the past and a bold prediction for the future. “Those who are engaged in the development of aviation for war purposes do not pretend that it is going to revolutionize warfare,” the report reassured the old guard before rushing on to assert, “but it has been fully demonstrated that of two opposing forces, the one which possesses superiority in aerial equipment and skill will surely hold a very great advantage.”12
In July 1913, after seven years as a lieutenant, King was promoted to lieutenant commander. By the following spring, it looked as if there might be a war with Mexico, and King went to Washington to once again press his request for an independent command. The only vessel available was the relatively new oil-burning destroyer Terry, then being held in reserve. King jumped at the chance and joined the ship in Galveston, Texas. Not much came of the Mexican situation as far as the Terry was concerned, but King got his first real taste of command sailing back to Charleston, South Carolina, with the entire Reserve Destroyer Flotilla.
The commander of the Second Division was F. T. “Kid” Evans, the son of Admiral Robley “Fighting Bob” Evans of Spanish-American War fame. As the destroyers departed Key West, a strong northeaster made for difficult seas, and the Terry struggled to maintain its second position in the column. Evans ordered King to close up, even though the standard distance was three hundred yards. King kept estimating the distance, but Evans finally signaled him to close alongside his leading ship, the Monaghan.
Terry surged forward to take up that station, and Evans bellowed at King through a megaphone to hold it there. The only appropriate answer—even for the sharp-tongued King—was a prompt “Aye aye, sir!” and it gave him a crash course in destroyer handling. King “told the officer of the watch to keep so close to Monaghan that he would be able to spit from the forecastle to the poop.” It worked, and in about an hour, Evans signaled his approval: “Terry, well done.”13
The girl that Ensign William F. Halsey, Jr., had been so anxious to see after the Great White Fleet dropped anchor in Hampton Roads was Frances Cooke Grandy, a belle of Norfolk, Virginia, whose family called her “Fanny.” To Bill Halsey, she quickly became just “Fan.” Despite the fact that three of Fan’s first cousins were among Halsey’s friends from his pre-Annapolis year at the University of Virginia, the Grandys were initially skeptical of this Yankee from New Jersey. In part, this was because one of Fan’s uncles had been chief engineer on the Confederate ironclad Merrimac and at least part of her family was still fighting the Civil War.
Bill and Fan apparently had an understanding before he embarked on his round-the-world voyage. He indeed found her waiting on his return, but not necessarily rushing toward the altar, especially with a lowly ensign. But Halsey soon had an advantage when he passed the examination for lieutenant j.g. and then, because of vacancies in the expanding upper ranks, was immediately jumped another grade, sworn in as a full lieutenant, and given command of the gunboat Du Pont.
“Do you realize,” Bill lobbied Fan, “you are being offered the heart and hand of a skipper in the United States fleet? How can you afford to delay?”
“Well, now that you make it sound so attractive,” Fan said, laughing. “I suppose I would be foolish to procrastinate any longer.”
They were married on December 1, 1909, at Christ Church in Norfolk. Among Halsey’s ushers were Annapolis grads Thomas C. Hart and Husband E. Kimmel. Thirty-plus years later, after the deadly attack on Pearl Harbor had many calling for Kimmel’s neck, Halsey would be among his friend’s most vehement supporters. Ten months after the wedding, on October 10, 1910, Bill and Fan welcomed Margaret Bradford Halsey to the family.14
Such family bliss saw Bill Halsey flirt with the idea of leaving the navy for a warmer, drier, less uncertain future ashore. But he stayed on, and from 1910, when he reported as executive officer of the destroyer Lamson, until June 1932—except for one year as executive officer of the battleship Wyoming—all of Halsey’s sea duty was on destroyers.
Like Chester Nimitz’s experiences, the best thing about these assignments was that at a very young age, Halsey learned the responsibilities and intricacies of command. As captain of his first ship, the destroyer Flusser, he also got a taste of politics.
Flusser was ordered to Campobello Island, off the coast of Maine, to take the new assistant secretary of the navy on a tour of nearby naval installations. Upon returning to the island, the gentleman, who reportedly had some experience in small boats, asked Halsey to transit the strait between Campobello and the mainland and offered to act as pilot himself. Halsey was skeptical and in a bit of a bind. He could hardly say no to his superior, but he was also well aware that “the fact that a white-flanneled yachtsman can sail a catboat out to a buoy and back is no guarantee that he can handle a high-speed destroyer in narrow waters.”
Standing close by, Halsey reluctantly relinquished the helm and watched as the assistant secretary began his first turn. The pivot point on the Flusser was near the bridge superstructure, and that meant that with roughly two-thirds of the ship’s length aft of the pivot, its stern would swing twice the arc of the bow. Clearly, there was much more to this than simply pointing the destroyer’s bow down the center of the channel.
Halfway into the turn, the assistant secretary looked aft and checked the swing of the stern just as any seasoned skipper would do. Halsey was relieved and from then on figured that this man knew his business. His name was Franklin D. Roosevelt.15
There seems little doubt that Franklin D. Roosevelt intended from an early age to follow his cousin Theodore’s footsteps into the White House. What better way to start the journey than by serving as assistant secretary of the navy? When the three-way presidential race of 1912 put Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the White House—defeating Theodore’s Bull Moose comeback try—Franklin called in his political markers in New York State and received the appointment. Like his cousin before him, Franklin was nominally subservient to a secretary of the navy who seemed an unlikely fit.
Josephus Daniels was a newspaper publisher from North Carolina who owed his cabinet post to his strong political support of Wilson. With no prior naval experience, he had, however, very decided opinions about how the Navy Department should be managed and its role in U.S. foreign policy. Some labeled Daniels a pacifist, and there is little argument that he was at least a hard-core isolationist. He intended to concentrate on coastal defenses and dramatically retract Theodore Roosevelt’s global reach.
As assistant secretary, however, Franklin Roosevelt showed that he was prepared to equal if not surpass cousin Teddy’s fervor for a global American navy. Heretofore, no one, not even Theodore, had spoken of challenging Great Britain’s long-established naval supremacy. But Franklin was only too willing to stake out such an extreme position in the hope of making a name for himself—shades of his cousin.
Arguing that dreadnought battleships “are what we need,” Franklin exhorted, “The policy of our Congress ought to be to buy and build dreadnoughts until our Navy is comparable to any other in the world.” His goal was equality at a minimum, not merely ascendancy. And as for Daniels’s coastal defense scheme, Roosevelt thought “our national defense must extend all over the western hemisphere, must go out a thousand miles into the sea, must embrace the Philippines and over the seas wherever our commerce may be.”16
So it helped the navy tremendously that it was Franklin Roosevelt, far more than his boss, who was inclined to spend time with the fleet. Roosevelt had served no time in the military, never captained a merchantman, and indeed, as Halsey initially suspected, counted his nautical experience at the helms of family yachts, but the sea was in his blood and FDR considered himself a sailor. With the possible exception of Warm Springs, Georgia, he would always find his greatest relaxation upon its restless waves.
Two years later, it was Bill Leahy’s turn to captain FDR around. After briefly looking after target practice and engineering competitions, Leahy was recruited as an assistant by his mentor, Henry T. Mayo, now a rear admiral and aide for personnel to Secretary Daniels. This gave Leahy frequent access to both Daniels and Roosevelt, as well as the host of officers lobbying for one assignment or the other.
When his tour was finished, Leahy did his own lobbying and requested command of the new destroyer tender Melville. Roosevelt was agreeable to the station, but Daniels overruled him and instead put Leahy in command of the Dolphin, the secretary’s personal dispatch boat. The downside was that this was something of a beck-and-call messenger service, but the positive aspect was that the Navy Department official doing most of the calling was Assistant Secretary Roosevelt, not Daniels.
This gave Roosevelt and Leahy plenty of occasions to sail together along the East Coast and as far as Campobello during the summers of 1915 and 1916. Doubtless they had at least some conversations about the future of the navy. During an outbreak of polio that summer, Franklin and his wife, Eleanor, kept their children secluded at Campobello longer than usual and then Roosevelt dispatched Leahy and the Dolphin to pick them up and take them directly up the Hudson to his home in Hyde Park, New York—a one-way voyage of some six hundred miles with dubious governmental purpose.
It’s important to get a mental picture of FDR at the time of his early sails with Bill Leahy. Roosevelt was an energetic and athletic thirty-three-year-old, easily motoring around on his own two legs. About the only similarity between this man who strode purposefully aboard the Dolphin and almost demanded his turn at the helm and the wheelchair-bound leader of the Allies three decades later was the pince-nez eyeglasses that perched on the bridge of his nose. The fact that Roosevelt was seven years Leahy’s junior didn’t stop him from calling the lieutenant commander “Bill.” Naval etiquette, as well as Leahy’s firm separation of familiarity from duty, demanded that Leahy call FDR either “Mr. Secretary” or “Mr. Roosevelt.” But the two hit it off.
Leahy’s entries in his diary in those years are sporadic, as well as almost painfully discreet, and he made no mention of Roosevelt, writing only that the Dolphin “operated in the Atlantic visiting the Coast of Maine, New York, Norfolk, and Savannah.” Years later, however, Leahy acknowledged his “close contact” with Roosevelt on these cruises and wrote that he held “an appreciation of [FDR’s] ability, his understanding of history, and his broad approach to foreign problems” and that “there developed between us a deep personal affection that endured unchanged until his untimely death.”17
As for Secretary Daniels, he may be best remembered for his General Order No. 99. Issued on June 1, 1914, it prohibited alcoholic beverages on board any naval vessel or within any navy yard or station and held commanding officers directly responsible for any violations. With the Prohibition movement sweeping the country and alcohol on navy vessels already limited to officers’ messes, this was not, however, quite as radical a measure in practice as it was in the headlines.18
The navy’s grog ration had gone out before the Civil War, and by 1914 liquor was served only in officers’ wardrooms, and then only if an officer wished to purchase it. These “wine messes” were akin to private clubs, where chits were signed and the bill paid monthly. Daniels promised to abolish the messes because they discriminated against enlisted men, who were granted no such access, and because there was some evidence that freedom of drink might corrupt some younger officers—Ernest J. King among them.
Doubtless there were a few impromptu parties on June 30, 1914, the night before the regulation went into effect, and among those mourning were probably Halsey and FDR, the latter of whom was never one to let Prohibition or any other order interfere with his ritual happy hour. King, who had a few run-ins with demon rum early in his career, became one of those who could take it with zest and no morning-after hangover or leave it alone completely—something he did for long periods of time.
But by the end of the summer of 1914, the navy had more on its mind than a mealtime drink. An escalating entanglement of alliances suddenly found Europe at war, despite the fact that the royal leaders of three of the belligerents were related. What role, if any, the United States might play was still murky, but every naval officer knew that the North Atlantic was no longer the barrier it had once been.