By the spring of 1926, Captain William D. Leahy had put in three years with the Bureau of Navigation, and it was time for him to rotate to sea duty. Given his contacts in the bureau, Leahy should have had an inside track on his next assignment, but he was at one of the defining crossroads that all career officers face.
The next year would mark the thirtieth since his graduation from Annapolis. If fifty-one-year-old Leahy drew command of a minor vessel, he was almost assured that he would soon be on the retirement list as a captain. But if he was posted to command a capital ship, the odds were strongly in his favor that he was destined for flag rank. If that happened and he was accorded admirals’ stars, Leahy would join a line that might someday lead to the office of chief of naval operations or commander in chief, U.S. Fleet.
When Leahy’s orders finally came through, they were for the battleship New Mexico. His future with the navy was secure. Commissioned in the closing days of World War I, New Mexico (BB-40) displaced 32,000 tons in its 624-foot length and mounted twelve 14-inch guns among four turrets. Despite being eight years old, the ship was largely state-of-the-art for battleships then on the navy’s rolls. In fact, because of the limitations imposed by the Washington Conference treaty—and obligingly followed by the United States—the grim truth from Leahy’s perspective was that the United States commissioned no new battleships between West Virginia (BB-48) in 1923 and North Carolina (BB-55) in 1941.
Captain Leahy had grave misgivings about what this lull in construction meant for the navy’s future, particularly as tensions of one sort or another with Japan had been afloat almost his entire career, but he was delighted to move aboard New Mexico and take command. The battleship was the flagship for the commander of Battleship Division Four, but unlike Ernie King, Leahy didn’t seem to mind an admiral’s presence in the flag quarters. During part of Leahy’s tour, his executive officer was Commander John S. McCain. Together, they ran a taut ship, and New Mexico garnered fleet awards in gunnery, engineering, and overall efficiency.
On one occasion, New Mexico was slated to conduct a full-power speed trial, both to test the efficiency of a recent overhaul and as part of fleet competitions. For the first twenty-two hours of the twenty-four-hour run, New Mexico surged smoothly through the seas at better than twenty-one knots. Then, with two hours to go, a heavy vibration shook the ship, indicating a bent or broken propeller.
Just because Bill Leahy was usually reserved and quiet does not mean that he lacked a competitive instinct—far from it. A lesser captain might have slowed his ship and given up. Recognizing, however, that New Mexico “had an excellent chance to win… if the full-speed trial should be successful and no chance if the trial failed,” Leahy decided to maintain full speed. The shaking became so severe that the crew feared that a main mast might snap, but New Mexico charged through the final two hours and won the engineering trophy.1
As Bill Leahy’s year aboard the New Mexico came to a close, he got the silver stars he sought and a top job to go with them. Promoted to rear admiral, he was assigned to be chief of the Bureau of Ordnance. The man with the long history of battleships and firepower was now the head of the navy’s department of big guns. One navy publication called him “a shark on gunnery.”2
Leahy would be among the last of the big-gun battleship admirals to rise to the top. Those officers destined to keep pace and follow him were more attuned to the emerging roles of submarines and aircraft carriers, but for Leahy, his advancement to flag rank marked a steady rise up the rungs of the old navy hierarchy, from his duty aboard the Oregon to his coveted new membership in the elite club of admirals.
And it was, particularly during the lean defense-spending years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, definitely an elite club. As cosmopolitan as a naval officer’s experiences might be—frequently taking him (and in those days it was only a masculine pronoun) to all corners of the globe—his personal friendships and those of his family were usually restricted to the United States Navy. It was a small, tight-knit circle, where there were strong bonds of camaraderie and loyalty, as well as inevitable competition and conflict. And the connecting thread was usually the United States Naval Academy. Assignments ashore and on ship came and went, but one’s academy classmates were forever. From Manila to Panama or Honolulu to Guantánamo Bay, the fraternity gathered just as if its members were still on the banks of the Severn.
Prohibition was still in effect, and while Leahy had no qualms about taking a quiet nip in the privacy of his home, he certainly avoided the carousing crowds of which Ernie King and Bill Halsey were usually at the center. There was an oft-repeated, tongue-in-cheek admonishment that claimed “a naval officer never drinks. If he drinks, he doesn’t get drunk. If he gets drunk, he doesn’t stagger. If he staggers, he doesn’t fall. If he falls, he falls flat on his face with his arms under him so no one can see his stripes.”3
In 1927, there were 8,944 officers in the United States Navy. When one reached the rank of commander, as Leahy, King, Nimitz, and Halsey had all done by 1918—albeit for Nimitz and Halsey, these were wartime ranks not made permanent until later—he was usually assured of remaining in the service until retirement after thirty years. The promising commanders were promoted to captain—something the foursome had all achieved by 1927—and then the captains were carefully evaluated for elevation to flag rank, as Leahy had just been, or put on the retirement list.
When Leahy was accorded the stars of a rear admiral, he joined an elite group of active-duty admirals—every one a graduate of the Naval Academy. The academy certainly wasn’t an absolute requirement for flag rank, but between the Spanish-American War, when Annapolis increased its enrollment, and World War II, no nongraduate attained flag rank. Leahy realized that he was “the first of my Naval Academy date to reach flag rank, which is either something to have accomplished or extraordinarily good luck.” He was now assured of employment until he reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-four, and quite possibly by then, he would reach the office of chief of naval operations (CNO).4
In 1927, the CNO’s position was one of stature and prestige, but it was certainly not the powerful position it would become. Secretary Josephus Daniels’s pre–World War I reorganization of the navy’s hierarchy was still in place. There were eight largely independent bureaus with their bureaucratic abbreviations—Construction and Repair (BuC&R), Engineering (BuEng), Medicine and Surgery (BuMed), Navigation (BuNav), Ordnance (BuOrd), Yards and Docks (BuYard), Supplies and Accounts (BuSandA), and the new kid on the block, Aeronautics (BuAer). Each of the bureau chiefs was a chieftain within his own realm—fighting with his fellow chiefs for budget and other priorities—and the chief of naval operations was merely the primus inter pares, or “first among equals.”
Within Leahy’s Bureau of Ordnance, the battleship was still king. But the continuing adherence of the United States to the restrictions of the Washington treaty meant that no new battleships were coming down the ways. What’s more, some isolationists and antimilitary types claimed that the limits of the treaty were only caps not to be surpassed and that it was just fine if naval strength fell well below those levels. In fact, opposition to the military in general during the late 1920s was so strong that senior officers in both the navy and army were ordered to wear civilian suits instead of uniforms if they were on duty in Washington. Too much braid showing was judged to be a bad thing.
Attempting to increase fleet strength, the navy’s General Board—essentially an advisory group of senior admirals who were putting in time until retirement—battled the Coolidge and Hoover administrations’ political opposition to all but a minimum of defense spending. Efforts came to a head at events surrounding the London Naval Conference of 1930. Admiral Leahy had to step adroitly to avoid being caught in the crossfire. If battleships had been the focus of the Washington Conference of 1921, cruisers were in the forefront in London.
Aside from dickering with Great Britain and Japan on overall ratios, the American delegation found itself divided on whether heavy or light cruisers best served its purposes. While the British sought a larger number of 5,000- to 6,000-ton “light” cruisers mounting 6-inch guns, most American representatives favored the 10,000-ton “heavy” cruisers mounting 8-inch guns, which would be more self-reliant in the vast distances of the Pacific and equally useful should the need arise in the Atlantic.
While the preponderance of navy brass supported heavy cruisers, President Herbert Hoover tapped Admiral William V. Pratt, then commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, to be his administration’s chief spokesman. Pratt—who had earlier taught destroyer tactics to Bill Halsey—sought compromise with the British by recommending eighteen heavy cruisers—instead of the twenty-three championed by the General Board—and allocating the remaining tonnage to light cruisers, on the theory that they were not necessarily unsuited to Pacific operations.
This theory was not unreasonable, but when the U.S. Senate ratified the results of the London Conference in July 1930, the General Board cried foul and asserted that Admiral Pratt had sold out the U.S. Navy to appease the British. Chief of Naval Operations Charles F. Hughes, a Leahy mentor as well as the admiral who had once advised King to take more risks in his career, was particularly incensed. Leahy mirrored Hughes’s thinking that the treaty granted Japan and Great Britain “advantages that they had not previously possessed… [and] was not advantageous to our National defense.”5
Although the treaty gave Japan parity with the United States in submarines, it also showed how idealistic negotiators were in thinking that they could put the offensive power of the submarine back in the box and outlaw unrestricted submarine warfare. It decreed that “except in the case of persistent refusal to stop on being duly summoned, or of active resistance to visit or search, a warship, whether surface vessel or submarine, may not sink or render incapable of navigation a merchant vessel without having first placed passengers, crew and ship’s papers in a place of safety.” For these purposes, the ship’s boats were “not regarded as a place of safety unless the safety of the passengers and crew is assured, in the existing sea and weather conditions, by proximity of land, or the presence of another vessel which is in a position to take them on board.”6
Such naïveté! Submarine skippers had seen enough antisubmarine efforts during World War I to know that the last thing they would do in another war would be to surface and politely hail a likely target. But it was the cruiser debate that rankled Admiral Hughes the most, and he spoke his mind about it, including to Admiral Pratt. As evidence of how little power the CNO held in those days, Pratt, far from being cowed by CNO Hughes, went to President Hoover and requested that he be named as Hughes’s replacement. This threatened to split the navy’s admirals into pro-Hughes and pro-Pratt camps. Leahy might have kept quiet and attached his future to Pratt, who appeared to be the rising star, but he loyally supported Hughes and the heavy cruisers instead.
But Pratt was a force not to be stopped, and when Hoover proposed extensive budget cuts that Hughes had no desire to implement, he took early retirement, and Hoover hastened to appoint Pratt to his position. This left Leahy in the uncomfortable role of a bureau chief who had opposed the new CNO.
Leahy decided rather quickly that staying in Washington in close proximity to Pratt was likely to lead to a clash of wills that might spell doom for his own plans to occupy the CNO’s office. So he was delighted to be asked by a pro-Hughes admiral, Jehu V. Chase, who had replaced Pratt as commander of the U.S. Fleet, to go to sea as his chief of staff. But Pratt quickly flexed the muscles that Leahy was wary about and soon replaced Chase with a choice of his own. Leahy scrambled to find another position and settled on commander, Destroyers, Scouting Force, where one of his division commanders was to be Captain William F. Halsey, Jr.7
Bill Leahy returned to sea duty in the spring of 1931 with a great sense of relief. But while he was able to escape the political infighting of Washington, he was unable to avoid either the gathering clouds of international unrest or the economic downturn of the Great Depression. That September, Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria—arguably the opening round of World War II. But the rest of the world was strangely disconnected from events in Asia. Only one week before the invasion, Great Britain’s representative to the League of Nations had declared, “There has scarcely been a period in the world’s history when war seems less likely than it does at present.”8 Now China furtively appealed to the League for assistance.
On the home front, the excesses of the Roaring Twenties had finally run their course, and as the country fell headlong into an economic black hole, money for military personnel and operations was squeezed to a trickle. Men like Bill Halsey pleaded to take their destroyers to sea for training exercises, but fuel oil for their engines was just one of many requirements in tight supply.
In one rare case of extravagance, the navy participated in the 150th-anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Yorktown and the French naval victory over the British at the Battle of the Capes. The principal French participant attending the celebration was Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, still hailed as the victor of the catastrophic bloodbath at Verdun during World War I. Pétain, who exuded the supreme, if somewhat misplaced, confidence of France between the two world wars, was met by a host of American military officers, including Leahy, who would have occasion to meet Pétain again a decade later under far different circumstances in Vichy, France.
The festivities included daily luncheons attended by the foreign guests and all flag officers of the American fleet. One day there was a ceremony at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, dedicating a plaque to French soldiers who had died there in an improvised field hospital a century and a half before. The requisite luncheon with ample liquid refreshment followed at nearby Carter Hall, a recently restored colonial mansion. “At Carter Hall,” Leahy wryly noted, “the 18th Amendment [Prohibition] did not apply.”
President Hoover came down from Washington to review the ships assembled for the Yorktown occasion and delivered a speech that Leahy, perhaps still smarting over Hoover’s support of Admiral Pratt, found “very mediocre.” When a gust of wind scattered pages of the president’s prepared remarks from the lectern, aides scurried to retrieve them while Hoover “stood mute and apparently uninterested.” That seemed to be the attitude of his audience as well. “A more vigorous wind,” Leahy recorded, “would not have annoyed the spectators.”9
It may have been the perspective of his advancing years and new rank, or some combination of the current unrest in Manchuria and the historical retrospective of Yorktown, but Leahy’s diary at about this time began to contain more of his thoughts on policy and strategy for the United States, rather than merely recounting the people and places he had seen. During these years, Leahy was rather unabashedly an isolationist who eschewed foreign entanglements for America, but he nonetheless firmly believed that the United States had to maintain a strong defense to protect that isolation.
The possibility of war with Japan was openly discussed, just as it had been since Leahy’s early days in the navy. Leahy didn’t like the prospect. “A war with Japan at the present time,” he wrote, “would be of sufficient length to almost certainly destroy the existing social order in America and it would seem that some strong character must appear in our political organization to bring us back to the fundamental principle of ‘No entangling alliances.’ ”10
“Some strong character” was indeed rushing in from the wings. Having persevered over the confining indignities of polio, Franklin D. Roosevelt was again on the national stage. Elected governor of New York in 1928, Roosevelt was physically but a shadow of the man who had sailed with Leahy on the Dolphin to Campobello. But if anything, Roosevelt’s mind now worked overtime to make up for his physical limitations. Witty, infectiously cheerful, and a master of small talk to obscure anything of substance he wished to keep to himself, Roosevelt promised to be a strong tonic to the aloofness of Herbert Hoover.
“Franklin Roosevelt is a gentleman by all standards of comparison…,” Leahy wrote in his diary. “In any event he would start with the advantage of facing a situation and an executive organization where any change will be an improvement.”11
But such change would not necessarily be painless. As the Depression deepened and unemployment soared, the good news for military personnel was that at least they had steady, albeit low-paying, jobs. But then, in the fall of 1932, just as the presidential election was in full swing, the Navy Department ordered all officers to take one month’s leave without pay each year and instituted a 10 percent reduction in their allowances for quarters and subsistence. “This is a hardship on officers,” Leahy grumbled, “because they did not during prosperous times receive any increase of compensation and now in times of distress they are required to contribute to the country’s deficit.”12
These cutbacks meant that Leahy’s destroyers and the rest of the fleet spent most of the summer of 1932 in port in San Diego. Bill Halsey was among those chafing at the confinement, although he and Fan at least had more riotous social distractions than Bill and Louise Leahy allowed themselves.
If nothing else, this downtime gave Leahy an opportunity to put more of his growing concerns for the future into writing. Among his prescient predictions were that Germany would refuse to pay its war reparations under the Treaty of Versailles and demand military parity with the rest of Europe, the League of Nations would prove impotent in maintaining friendly relations in Europe or forestalling Japanese aggression in Manchuria, and another war in Europe was “inevitable.”13
While there is no record of his doing so, Leahy, if he voted at all, almost certainly voted for Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 election and contributed to FDR’s eighteen-point margin of victory. Roosevelt’s election was particularly pleasing to Leahy because he believed “from personal knowledge of the man that he will use his office more directly for the benefit of the United States…. The Country and the Navy undoubtedly face a bad period, but I believe their policies will now be directed by a man whose point of view is wholly American.”14
But the pain was indeed coming. The following January, Leahy received notice that the Colusa County Bank had closed its doors and glumly noted, “This probably destroys the remainder of my life-time savings.”15
A few weeks later, Leahy listened along with “everybody” to Roosevelt’s “stirring inaugural address.” He found it “a definite promise of leadership, and perhaps this Roosevelt is the American that we have been wishing for.”
But Roosevelt was barely inaugurated when the pay of all government workers, including the military, was cut by 15 percent. This action, and the fact that the number of men authorized for the navy was also cut, weighed heavily on Leahy as he came ashore in the spring of 1933 to take his second bureau chief position at the Bureau of Navigation. “We believe that our personnel is at least as good as that of any other nation and hope it is better,” Leahy wrote just before his final round of maneuvers with the Pacific Fleet. “Knowing that through pacifist activities our ships have been allowed to fall below those of other powers, and with a certain belief that they will be called upon for war service in the not distant future I wish I knew that our personnel is in a better state of training than that of any possible enemy.”16
But if anything, the politics that Leahy had sought to escape two years before were still rampant. Admiral Pratt was nearing the end of his term as chief of naval operations. Despite his heavy-handed tactics against Admiral Hughes, Pratt had been generally content to operate as first among equals with the bureau chiefs; however, his successor, William H. Standley, wanted a stronger command authority over the chiefs and considered them his subordinates.
All that the Navy Regulations said about the relationship was that the CNO “should so coordinate all repairs and alterations to vessels and the supply of personnel thereto as to insure at all times the maximum readiness of the Fleet for war.” But to do so without any direct supervisory authority meant that the CNO had to work with the eight independent bureau chiefs and accomplish the same by exerting his powers of persuasion rather than issuing direct orders. Admiral Pratt had been content to do so; Admiral Standley was not.
Interestingly enough, the two bureau chiefs who most adamantly opposed the CNO exerting more authority were Bill Leahy and Ernest King, the latter recently appointed chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Both felt that the bureaus should be directly responsible to the secretary of the navy and not the CNO. Admiral Standley protested so loudly that the entire matter was referred to President Roosevelt for a decision. FDR opted to keep the status quo—muddy though it was—and continued to charge the CNO with responsibility for operational readiness even though he had to achieve it by reaching consensus with the bureau chiefs.
Leahy’s and King’s opposition to greater CNO authority may have served them well in their current positions, but given the fact that neither had ever been shy about voicing his own aspirations to be CNO someday, one wonders whether they were truly thinking long-term. For his part, Admiral Standley never forgave them for their opposition.17
Two years later, when Leahy was ready to move back to sea duty after his term as chief of the Bureau of Navigation, the feud was still raw. Admiral Joseph M. Reeves, the commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, recommended that Leahy become commander of Battleships, Battle Force, with the rank of vice admiral. Standley tried his best to stop it.
“Admiral Standley is now persistently and vigorously opposing this nomination with the purpose of eliminating me from any prospect of promotion in the Fleet or of succession to his office when he retires,” Leahy wrote in his diary. “Secretary [of the Navy] Swanson wants me to succeed Admiral Standley which is undoubtedly the cause of the latter’s attitude.”18
CNO Standley chafed even more when his “first among equals” position prevented him from ordering otherwise. But Leahy was also lucky that he enjoyed good relations with the White House; Carl Vinson, the chairman of the House Committee on Naval Affairs; and Secretary of the Navy Claude A. Swanson. When Vinson wrote Swanson to give high praise to Leahy upon his appointment to the fleet, Swanson’s response was unequivocal. “I concur in everything you say regarding Admiral Leahy,” Swanson told Vinson. “Admiral Leahy enjoys to the fullest extent the esteem and confidence of his fellow officers”—Admiral Standley apparently notwithstanding.19
There were others who also seemed to hold Bill Leahy in high regard. The 1935 “Propaganda Book” for the Japanese navy recognized him as a rising star. “He is a thoroughgoing advocate of the big-ship–big-gun doctrine and is known as a tactician of the highest authority on their use in a decisive battle. In other words, he is a student of the strategy of a powerful navy forcing a weak enemy into decisive action.” The Japanese report went on to describe Leahy as “a proponent of decisive battles with big ships and the leading advocate of big guns,” but it also gave him credit for understanding that “the forerunner of the big-gun battle is control of the air by a powerful air force.”20
Leahy and the navy had certainly not forgotten the rising force of airpower, and in the meantime Ernie King had pushed Bill Halsey to embrace it full bore.
After Bill Halsey’s tour commanding destroyers in the Pacific for Leahy, his shore duty took him to the Naval War College in 1933 for the junior course. Newport proved an unexpected reunion of sorts. Steady Raymond Spruance was on the faculty, and Captain Ernest King was there that year taking the senior course. And living nearby part-time and giving an occasional guest lecture was a mentor to all three, retired admiral William S. Sims, who had, if anything, grown more vocal in his criticism of a navy he felt was not adequately in step with the future.
Bill Leahy had never been particularly enamored with Admiral Sims, because he felt that Sims’s “arbitrary employment of publicity for his own ends alienated most of his following.” Leahy had, in fact, carried oral instructions to Sims during World War I to stop his “publicity agents.” Leahy thought, “For those of us who are familiar with his service history Admiral Sims provides a splendid example of what not to do.”21 Given his usual low profile, Leahy clearly believed these words; King and Halsey certainly did not.
As it turned out, King’s year in Newport was cut short in April 1933 when the airship Akron crashed in a storm off the coast of New Jersey. Among the seventy-three dead was Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, King’s friendly nemesis as chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. King rushed to Washington for Moffett’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery and more important, to lobby for Moffett’s job. King was due his first stars that year, and as a new rear admiral, an immediate posting as a bureau chief would be a sign that he was still seen as an up-and-comer. Moffett, who had a love-hate relationship with King, would likely have preferred Captain John H. Towers, who had given King his first airplane ride on the Severn two decades before. Towers lobbied for it, too, but King had five years’ seniority and got the job.
Meanwhile, Bill Halsey completed his year at the Naval War College and then had the good fortune to spend another year as part of an exchange program for select officers at the Army War College in Washington. Two of his classmates were Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Wainwright and Major Omar Bradley.
By then, Rear Admiral King, as chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, made Halsey a proposal much like the one Admiral Moffett had once made him. King smiled on Halsey and offered him command of the Saratoga if he would take the aviation observers’ course at Pensacola. It was hard to tell which excited Halsey more—the chance to get into the air again or the opportunity to command a vaunted carrier.
But Halsey didn’t rush to accept on either count. He talked it over with Fan, who said that she would consent to such craziness only if the chief of the Bureau of Navigation, then still Bill Leahy, agreed that it was a good idea. Bill and Fan “both had enormous respect” for Leahy’s judgment, and when he not only agreed, but also did so without reservation, Halsey was off for Pensacola.
Only when he was on the road by himself did he have his own belated reservations. “Bill,” Halsey said to himself, “you’re fifty-one years old and a grandfather, and tomorrow morning you’ll begin competing with youngsters less than half your age!” With that thought in mind, he later claimed, he swore off liquor for one whole year.22
Halsey reported to Pensacola on July 1, 1934. Shortly after his first flights, he appears to have changed his designation from student observer to student pilot. Just how he managed it with his poor eyesight is a matter of some speculation, but his original orders to Pensacola were so modified. After twelve hours of dual instruction, Halsey took his first solo. As the last of his class to do so, he was in line for a toss in the harbor. When his ensign and lieutenant j.g. classmates hesitated to lay hands on the grandfatherly captain, Halsey egged them on, and into the harbor he went. He was always determined to be one of the boys.
But there was one superior he hesitated to tell about his new student-pilot status. When he finally broke the news to Fan, she waved his letter in their daughter Margaret’s face and practically screamed, “What do you think the old fool is doing now? He’s learning to fly!”23
To Bill Halsey’s credit, he crammed every last bit of required training into a course necessarily condensed in time because of his impending assignment to the Saratoga and fully earned his wings as a naval aviator. And true to his word, Rear Admiral King gave him command of the big carrier. Although Halsey would command other famous flagships, he always considered the “Sara” his queen and kept a special place in his heart for the ship. “First, I loved her as a home,” he later reminisced. “I commanded her for two years and flew my rear admiral’s flag on her for two more, which means that I lived on board her longer than I ever lived anywhere else. Second, I loved her as a ship; she helped me make my debut in the carrier Navy, and she initiated me into the marvels of fleet aviation.”24
But to Halsey, who was used to maneuvering destroyers as if they were 16-foot powerboats, ship handling was ship handling. It really didn’t matter the size, as long as one understood the technique. That rationale may have been called into question one day when Halsey brought the 880-foot Saratoga into Coronado Roads at San Diego. He later claimed that it was an emergency, but he dropped the anchors while the Sara was still making 9 knots, backed full, and had the ship dead in the water by the time 75 fathoms of chain had paid out.25
Halsey was truly grateful for his command of the Saratoga, and he and King forged something of a mutual admiration society that had its roots in Halsey’s destroyer proficiency during the 1932 fleet maneuvers. Halsey was a guy who got things done and King definitely liked and respected that quality.
As much as King had a reputation for being cold, aloof, and impossibly demanding on many occasions, he also had a soft side. King’s papers are filled with letters to and from subordinates long since posted elsewhere or retired who admired him, and he always reciprocated with genuine warmth. When King was appointed chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics and accorded his first stars, one of those sending congratulations was a chief petty officer who had served under King years before. Writing from his current station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, John N. LaChance told King that he had not been surprised to read of King’s promotion because “I think of you often as a great naval officer.” King responded in kind, telling LaChance, “I expect you, as I’ve told you before, to come to see me whenever you are in my vicinity. I have strong and pleasant recollections of our service together—and still feel that you are one of the best real Chief Petty Officers that I’ve ever known.”26
King also could be appreciative of those who helped his career. “I owe much, if not all, to my good friends, like yourself, who turned to and lent a hand,” King wrote Edward E. Spafford. The occasion was King’s appointment as aeronautics chief, and Spafford, a New Yorker and past national commander of the American Legion, was glad to have been of help but dubious about King’s career path in aviation. King reassured him, “Please do not think I am in a ‘blind alley’—that is not my view.”27
King definitely had a long-range career plan, and his three years as chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics was a key part of it. But in the depths of the Great Depression, and with naval appropriations of any sort tight, it didn’t help matters that working with Congress and testifying before its ponderous committees were not among King’s talents. He was the lone wolf, sure that he was right and totally bored by such bureaucratic rituals.
The navy’s guardian angel in the House, Naval Affairs Committee Chairman Carl Vinson, tried to help King along, but even Vinson couldn’t always save him from himself. After King testified one day about the importance of retaining flight pay for aviators, Vinson lobbed the admiral a softball question about what effect a pay cut would have on aviation morale. “I do not wish to be thought facetious, Mr. Chairman,” King replied, “but to be perfectly straightforward, as I wish to be, we are becoming so accustomed to these matters that I really think we could muster up another grin and bear it.”28 Less is usually more in such situations, but King never understood the need to corral his tongue.
Yet he did work well with Bill Leahy, then his counterpart at the Bureau of Navigation. Together they established the Naval Aviation Cadet Program, which recruited college graduates to take aviation training and then become aviators in the Naval Reserve. It was another unheralded step toward preparation for a global war. Together, too, Leahy and King continued to joust with Chief of Naval Operations Standley over the independence of the bureaus.
Where they differed was that Leahy seems to have enjoyed more frequent access to President Roosevelt, largely because of discussions of personnel. The lack of presidential association may have hurt King when it was time to rotate out of his bureau chief’s job and back to an operational command in 1936. There were only two seagoing jobs for an aviation flag officer, commander, Aircraft, Battle Force, a vice admiral who commanded the navy’s four carriers (Ranger had joined the fleet in 1934) and their aircraft squadrons; and commander, Aircraft, Base Force, a rear admiral who commanded the navy’s seaplane patrol squadrons, centered largely on the West Coast and in Hawaii.
As the only qualified aviator—never mind that he never flew solo—King should have had precedence over flag officers who were merely aviation observers. With characteristic force of personality, he lobbied for the Battle Force assignment and the three stars of a vice admiral, but he ran into opposition from both Admiral Standley and King’s Annapolis classmate Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, who had succeeded Leahy as chief of the Bureau of Navigation. Andrews “had no intention of allowing King to get three stars before he did,” and King lacked the presidential clout to do anything about it. The result was that King ended up still a rear admiral in command of the Base Force of seaplanes.29
But one thing was certain. Out of the economic chaos of the Great Depression, the growing uneasiness of the world order in both Europe and the Far East foreshadowed ominous events. Bill Leahy and Ernest King had gotten their first stars, and now they, and the entire United States Navy, would be increasingly pushed into positions of projecting power.