The Second Most Powerful Man in the World: The Life of Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt's Chief of Staff
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The Second Most Powerful Man in the World: The Life of Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt's Chief of Staff
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780399584824 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/03/2020 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 560 |
| Sales rank: | 447,189 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
The Education of a Naval Officer
William Daniel Leahy died with a crooked nose and little money. The two were related, and it's best to start with the money. Upon his death in 1959, his net worth was shockingly small, considering he had spent more than a decade as one of the most powerful men in the world, shaping America's military and diplomatic policy while hobnobbing with the rich and famous. His property, savings, and investments combined were valued at only $113,903, a sum worth just over $900,000 today. This would mark his economic status as lower middle class. This surprisingly small figure was mostly the result of choice, with a dash of bad luck. Throughout American history, senior military and political figures have used their positions and influence to enrich themselves, becoming high-paid lecturers, media personalities, business executives, or lobbyists. Leahy could have done so as well, yet he chose not to.
Economically cautious, he learned early to get by with little in the way of luxuries, a lesson that held for the rest of his life. He was born in Hampton, Iowa, on May 6, 1875, to Michael Arthur Leahy and his wife, Rose Mary Hamilton, both first-generation Americans of Irish-born parents. Like many a son of Irish immigrants, William was told by his paternal grandmother, Mary Eagan Leahy, a native Gaelic speaker from Galway, about how his family had been great chiefs in the west of Ireland before being dispossessed by the hated British. The last Leahy chief had supposedly fought for the Catholic king James VII at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the loss of which spelled the end of the family's prosperity. Mary Eagan had immigrated to America with her husband, Daniel Leahy, in 1836, and they had moved steadily westward from New England to Wisconsin, where they raised their four sons, including Michael.
Michael was one of those second-generation Americans who lived on the edge of success without ever seemingly reaching the Promised Land. At the age of twenty-four, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a law degree. With the Civil War raging, he enlisted in the 35th Wisconsin Regiment and was commissioned a captain, a sign that he had achieved a certain level of educational and social attainment. After the war, he embarked on a career in law and politics. In 1868, he decided to move to Hampton, Iowa, a farming community, to start a new life. There he married Rose, opened his law practice, and entered politics, being elected to the state legislature in 1872.
Little today is known of Rose. Three years after her husband's electoral victory, she gave birth to their first son, William Daniel Leahy. From William's birth certificate we know that she was twenty-four years old when he was born, thirteen years younger than her husband, but little else. Her son's diary leaves the impression he was emotionally distant from his mother-the detached, formal nature of the diary was indeed a reflection of his character-but in fact he loved her dearly.
Michael gives the impression of treading water in Iowa. He and Rose continued producing children-they would have five more sons and a daughter-while Michael continued getting reelected to the state legislature. Yet he could rise no further, and in 1882 he packed up his large family and moved back to Wisconsin. The Leahys settled first in Wausau, in the middle of the state, where Michael's brother had established himself as a prominent lumber merchant. Once again, success eluded him, and in 1889 he moved the family to Ashland in the far north of Wisconsin.
Ashland was the city with which William Leahy would most identify his youth, and one can see why Michael chose it. By 1890 Ashland had grown into a bustling little transport hub, servicing America's burgeoning industrial economy. Situated on an excellent harbor on Lake Superior, Ashland expanded because of its access to the rich iron ore veins, timber stores, and copper mines of northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Rail lines were built linking Ashland to these resources and they poured into the city, where they were put on ships and moved to the factories of the lower Midwest. It grew from almost nothing in 1880 to more than 13,000 people by 1900-more than 50 percent larger than it is today.
When the Leahys arrived, Ashland still had a whiff of the frontier. The Chippewa Indian Nation, which had dominated the area before whites piled in, remained a significant presence, and for the rest of his life Leahy felt a connection to the tribe. Though we might scoff at it now, he felt proud to be made a member of the Chippewa in the 1930s. Ashland itself was ramshackle, a jumble of new, ever-changing buildings linked by dirt roads and wooden walkways. Leahy's time there seems completely ordinary. He went to high school, where he did enough work to get by but was not a standout student. He developed his lifetime interest in fishing, hunting, and football.
While playing a rowdy game of football one day, Leahy's nose was broken. As he could still breathe through it, and the family had little spare money, he left it untreated. Sixty years later, Adm. Chester Nimitz noticed the defect for the first time when his eye was drawn to the crooked nose in a portrait of Leahy being painted by well-known naval artist Albert Murray. "You fellows have known me ever since my late teens and never seen it any other way," Leahy responded when Nimitz asked about his nose, "so you thought it was normal and it never even occurred to you that it was bent out of place like it really is."
His family's lack of money helped to shape Leahy's desires. It certainly made him resourceful and at the same able to cope without many possessions. On the other hand, it also made him want to get the hell out of town. Though Leahy would later remember Ashland fondly, when he graduated from high school he wanted out. Michael hoped that his eldest son would follow in his tracks and study law at the University of Wisconsin, but for William that option held little appeal. His great hope was to secure admission to the US Military Academy at West Point, but there were no appointments available from local members of Congress. One did, however, have an open slot for Annapolis, as naval positions were less prized by the boys of the Midwest. Leahy jumped at the chance, hopped on a train to Maryland, and never looked back.
Later in life Leahy would reminisce about having developed a love of sailing ships by watching them cruise in and out of Ashland's port, but that seems to have played only a minor role in his choice. Going to Annapolis provided three things that suited his nature. First, it offered the opportunity for adventure. Though Leahy would later be seen as a grumpy, parochial exemplar of Middle America, as a young man he wanted to see the world, and the navy allowed him to spend many exciting, interesting years living outside the United States. Second, it allowed him to live a life of national service. Michael Leahy had raised his children to see themselves first and foremost as Americans, not Irish Americans. In the Leahy household, there were no divided loyalties or identities, and this had a huge impact on young William. Finally, a career in the navy held out the possibility of service with financial security. William Leahy, not a natural businessman, always seemed uncomfortable dealing with money and investments. A career in the navy meant he could combine love of country and the values for which he believed it stood, in a career that provided stability. That he eventually liked being at sea was gravy on top.
When he boarded the train to Annapolis in 1893, the trip alone was a gamble. Those who were offered appointments were still required to take an entrance examination, and that was only on offer at the academy itself. If a student failed, he typically returned to his hometown in disgrace, sometimes suffering the indignity of having to pay for his own transportation. Fortunately, Leahy, somewhat to his surprise, made it through the exam process and was welcomed into United States Naval Academy as a new midshipman.
The first thing he had to learn was how to sail. It is an interesting side note to history that the highest-ranking American military officer when the first atomic bomb was dropped had learned to sail on the USS Constellation, a ship of wooden walls and cloth sails that had been commissioned in 1855 and had seen extensive service during the Civil War. A sailor's life on board the Constellation was closer to that of the Napoleonic era than to the days of steam and iron, much less the atomic age. Leahy remembered standing night watch in a masted crow's nest high up in the rigging. Yet his time on the ship was no romantic adventure. The cruise was supposed to last all summer, taking the young crewmen to Europe and back to learn their craft. Yet the Constellation was in a sorry state, smelly and leaky, and she broke down before reaching Europe. The crew had to stop in the Azores before the old ship could be made right to sail back to America.
Once back, the real naval education commenced. Leahy was one of the last midshipmen to pass through an unreformed Naval Academy. His small class was educated in the unforgiving environment of the nineteenth century. Annapolis was famous for its hazing and harsh discipline, and its education was geared toward creating assimilation and cohesion. An entire class could be punished for one midshipman's mistake. Once, when a slop jar (or piss pot) was rolled down the stairs after taps, every member of the class was forced to stand at attention in the middle of the night until the guilty prankster confessed. Normal hazing was done by upperclassmen to underclassmen, and could involve humiliations, physical tests, and even beatings. When the academy's hazing became public in a 1921 scandal, Leahy forcefully called for the practice to be "stamped out."
Hazing could be particularly brutal when directed at those considered different. The US Navy was a monoculture, one of the least inclusive organizations of its day, overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and Christian. The first African American midshipman to enter the academy, twenty years before Leahy, was hazed so cruelly that he was forced out. He was beaten regularly and at one point his classmates even tried to drown him. From there on out, African Americans were practically nonexistent and Jews extremely rare.
The punishments were harsh, but the system created close-knit groups, and Leahy's class was one of the best examples. The class of 1897 was one of the most distinguished in American history and arguably the most successful that Annapolis ever produced. It included many of the admirals who dominated the service in the 1930s, including Leahy, Thomas Hart, Harry Yarnell, and Arthur Hepburn. To this day the class is the only one to have five members reach 4-star rank while on active duty (and one to reach 5-star). Four other classes have had four members reach the 4-star rank, but these all came many decades after 1897, when the Naval Academy and the navy as a whole, was far larger. The class of 1897, perhaps for this reason, remained very tight, and Leahy paid close attention to the lives and careers of many of his classmates. In return he received continuous, lifelong support.
Leahy stood out to his classmates for his level-headedness. He grew a mustache that made him look like a judge, and his classmates treated him accordingly. The best description of Leahy at Annapolis came from his classmate and lifelong friend Thomas Hart, who would go on to serve as one of the leading submariners of his generation, commander of the Asiatic Fleet in World War II, and a US senator from Connecticut. "As a student at the Academy [Leahy] was not good, a little lazy," wrote Hart. "But when his classmates had a problem, a dispute about it, someone would say, 'Let's go ask Bill Leahy. He's got a better sense than all of us put together.' That was always true for his common sense, his wisdom, was profound all through his life."
Though he would have been loath to admit it, Leahy's political skills were apparent even at this young age. He possessed the ability to judge the person with whom he was interacting, decide the best way to appeal to or motivate him or her, and adjust his behavior accordingly. "Leahy was a born diplomat," Hart remembered, "and the sort of man that always gets on with others. . . . That's always been Leahy: fundamentally wise, quick to pluck the right answer out of the air, without any powerful cerebration; intuitive, instinctive, smart." Despite this intelligence, Leahy was a mediocre student. He studied French (which he would speak with an atrocious accent for the rest of his life) and played tackle on the football team's B squad. His academic results put him in the bottom third of his graduating class, 35 out of 47. When he graduated from Annapolis, he was hardly marked out for greatness.
His first assignments, however, showed that there was more to him than a below-average academic. After graduating, an Annapolis midshipman was required to serve two years at sea before being permanently commissioned into the navy. For Leahy, that meant going to war. He came of age during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection that followed, and he was thrust into the center of both. His first ship was one of his favorites. In the summer of 1897 he was ordered to join the crew of the USS Oregon, one of the newest and most powerful battleships in the US fleet. In those days, even getting to your ship could be a test of resourcefulness. Leahy was told to report to the Oregon in "whatever port that vessel might be." Checking around, he discovered she was supposed to be in Seattle at the time he was to board, so after a night of celebrating with his fellow graduates, he headed across the country, undoubtedly worse for wear. When he reached Seattle, he found that the Oregon had already left for Victoria, British Columbia, to help the Canadians celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Hopping a steamship north, he landed in Port Townsend, Washington, where he found the one hotel was closed, forcing him to spend the night outside in the freezing rain. When he finally reached Victoria, he was told that the Oregon was berthed in the port of Esquimalt, a few miles away, reachable by streetcar. Thus, after a cross-country train trip and two boat journeys, Leahy arrived at his first assignment by trolley.
Table of Contents
Prologue 1
Chapter 1 The Education of a Naval Officer 5
Chapter 2 Building a Career and Family 24
Chapter 3 Enter Franklin Roosevelt 40
Chapter 4 The Roaring Twenties 53
Chapter 5 Depression 70
Chapter 6 Nearing the Top 84
Chapter 7 Rising in Roosevelt's Court 100
Chapter 8 Leahy's Navy 111
Chapter 9 The First Retirement 124
Chapter 10 Governor of Puerto Rico 131
Chapter 11 Ambassador to Vichy France 143
Chapter 12 Dark Days 161
Chapter 13 Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief 177
Chapter 14 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 188
Chapter 15 The Grandest Level of Strategy 201
Chapter 16 From Casablanca to Trident 211
Chapter 17 Difficult Friends 230
Chapter 18 Top Dog 241
Chapter 19 Cairo and Tehran 249
Chapter 20 Acting President 266
Chapter 21 Leahy's War 279
Chapter 22 Atomic Bombs and Elections 291
Chapter 23 Yalta and Death 307
Chapter 24 Truman 328
Chapter 25 The End of the War 344
Chapter 26 Two Speeches 360
Chapter 27 Personal Snooper 375
Chapter 28 Priorities 386
Chapter 29 Cold War 396
Chapter 30 Key West 409
Chapter 31 On the Outside 417
Chapter 32 Fading Away 427
Chapter 33 The Forgotten Man 437
Epilogue 447
Acknowledgments 449
Appendices 451
Select Bibliography 461
Notes 469
Index 511
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