Humorless and overbearing while at work or at sea, King also had a hearty appetite for carousing, gambling, dancing, and philandering. He called it his “play time.” At nights on shore he was often seen in the officers’ club, draining one glass after another, speaking in a loud, raucous voice, roaring with laughter, buying rounds for the bar, playing poker late into the night, and dancing unsteadily with much younger women. He developed his own cocktail, mixing brandy with champagne in tall glasses over ice, which he called “the King’s peg.” The junior officers found, to their surprise, that he was approachable and even playful on those occasions. They sometimes worked up the courage to call him “Uncle Ernie.” He liked women, and was serially unfaithful to his wife. King seemed to take the view, shared widely among his colleagues, that heavy drinking and womanizing were natural outlets for pent-up energy or anxiety. They should not only be tolerated but actually encouraged. “You ought to be very suspicious,” he said, “of anyone who will not take a drink or doesn’t like women.” But King was always up early the next morning, as sharp as a tack, clean-shaven and turned out in a freshly pressed uniform, showing not the slightest sign of a hangover. He demanded no less of the officers with whom he had shut down the bar.
His family life was strained. He shared little in common with his wife, Martha (“Mattie”): they had developed separate lives during his long absences from home, and remained together, it seems, out of a mutual sense of duty. Theirs was a house full of women. The Kings had six daughters—Claire, Elizabeth, Florence, Martha, Eleanor, and Mildred—and finally one son, born in 1922, Ernest Joseph King, Jr. Every one of his children was beautiful, and when King was stationed in Annapolis as a captain, he found to his dismay that he could do nothing to prevent his teenaged daughters from fraternizing with the midshipmen. As a father, King seems to have been fairly aloof, but was surprisingly capable (on occasions) of tenderness. One of his daughters famously called him “the most even-tempered man in the Navy. He is always in a rage.” The quip has often been cited as evidence that King was a natural-born bully, but it could just as well be interpreted as the sort of teasing family banter that was rooted in affection. King was capable of warmth and kindness, but seems to have believed it was best to keep that element of his personality mostly bottled up. Now and again he let a bit of it out. In January 1943, at the height of the war, King sent a letter to an eighth-grader in Brooklyn who had written in connection with a class project. Did Admiral King drink or smoke? Who was his favorite movie star? What were his favorite hobbies and sports?
“Dear Harriet,” he replied:
I have your letter of January 6th—and am interested to learn that you have to do my biography as part of your English work.
As to your questions:
I drink a little wine, now and then.
I smoke about one pack of cigarettes a day.
I think I like Spencer Tracy as well as any of the movie stars.
My hobby is cross-word puzzles—when they are difficult.
My favorite sport is golf—when I get to play it—otherwise, I am fond of walking.
Hoping that all will go well with your English work, I am
Very truly yours,
E. J. King
Admiral, U.S. Navy
IN 1938, VICE ADMIRAL KING did not disguise his ambition. He openly campaigned for the jobs he had always wanted—either commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet or chief of naval operations (CNO). He believed that his service record entitled him to those exalted commands, and he was not wrong. He was eminently qualified. His experience was broad and deep, and his performance had been consistently outstanding. King had served in all the right jobs, in every domain of the service: he had gone to sea in surface ships, submarines, and aircraft carriers; he had excelled in a rich array of staff and planning jobs; he had served as a naval bureau chief; he had dealt with foreign governments and with Congress. His personnel file bulged with letters of commendation.
But in 1939, the courtly, miniature Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark was appointed CNO, and King was placed on the navy’s General Board, an advisory panel that was traditionally the last stop before mandatory retirement for senior admirals who had been passed over for the navy’s top jobs. He would revert to his permanent rank of rear admiral. It was an overwhelming disappointment—a friend said that King actually cried when he received the news. It was not clear why he had been passed over: no explanation was ever provided. It appears that Navy Secretary Claude A. Swanson and the outgoing CNO, Admiral William D. Leahy, backed Stark. King was one of only three aviators among the navy’s seventy-four flag officers, and the “big gun club” may have wanted to keep the job in the hands of a battleship admiral. King was not yet intimate with President Roosevelt, and Roosevelt, an old navy man, preferred to deal with admirals he knew and liked. Finally, there were the darker corners of King’s personality—his abrasive style, which had earned him many enemies in the navy; his heavy drinking, which might yet get the better of him; and his reputation for making advances on other men’s wives.
But the looming war would soon retrieve King’s hopes. He did not treat his appointment to the General Board as a restful transition to retired life—he used it as a megaphone to condemn what he thought to be a criminal lack of naval readiness. He supervised efforts to upgrade the navy’s antiaircraft systems, and shoved a $300 million appropriation through Congress. In late 1940, Navy Secretary Charles Edison (Swanson’s successor) put King up for the job of commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet. President Roosevelt, who was also getting to know King better, readily agreed. King helped Navy Secretary Frank Knox “learn the ropes,” after the latter was appointed to that post (succeeding Edison) in July 1940. The admiral handled the arrangements to transport Roosevelt and his entourage to Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, in August 1941, for the first wartime summit with Winston Churchill. He gained a public profile as the German U-boat offensive heated up—in November, his stern face appeared in Life magazine, with the headline: “King of the Atlantic.” His flagship was based in Newport, Rhode Island, but he found it necessary to take the overnight train to Washington every two weeks. “Well,” he would tell his staff officers, “I’ve got to go down to Washington again, to straighten out those dumb bastards once more.”
“We’re living in a fool’s paradise,” King declared on December 7, 1941, when news arrived of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ten days later, Secretary Knox and the president huddled in the White House. Concurrently with their decision to replace Kimmel with Nimitz, they agreed to bring King to Washington as commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, or CINCUS. For the time being, Stark would remain as CNO, with a portfolio of duties that included long-range war planning and the overall administrative management of the navy. But by the following March, Stark would be edged out and King would hold both of the navy’s two top jobs, making him the most powerful admiral in American history.
King’s first act as C-in-C of the fleet was to get rid of the acronym denoting his command, which would appear under his name on all his outgoing orders and communications. “CINCUS” looked fine on the page, but when pronounced out loud—“Sink us”—it sounded too much like the punch line in a Bob Hope routine. King would not stand for it, not after Pearl Harbor. He ordered it changed to “COMINCH.” After he absorbed Stark’s command, he would be designated as “COMINCH-CNO.”
In the past, CINCUS (or COMINCH) had been a seagoing billet in a battleship, but King moved his headquarters to a suite of offices in the Navy Department building on Constitution Avenue in Washington. He preferred to be close to the White House, to the secretary of the navy, to General Marshall and the other military chiefs, and to Congress. “Where the power is,” he said, “that is where the headquarters have to be.” There was no existing COMINCH staff—the position had most recently been held by Admiral Kimmel, concurrently with his command as CINCPAC in Pearl Harbor. “Nothing was ready,” King later recalled. “I had to start with nothing.”
He assembled a rudimentary staff by bringing a handful of members of his Atlantic Fleet staff down from Newport. He also plucked several key officers from Stark’s staff—including the latter’s war planning chief, Admiral Richmond K. “Kelly” Turner, who would serve as King’s assistant chief of staff. He summoned a dozen more officers from seagoing billets in the Atlantic and Pacific, though none came with much enthusiasm. As a rule, naval officers in staff jobs clamored to be sent to sea, and those at sea bitterly remonstrated against being recalled to Washington. All wanted a chance at combat. Captain Charles M. “Savvy” Cooke, Jr., who commanded the battleship Pennsylvania at Pearl Harbor, wanted no part of the job offered him by King, that of the navy’s chief planning officer. King replied baldly that the needs of the navy would come before the preferences of the individual. “I am fully in sympathy with your wish to stay at sea,” he wrote Cooke, “but have also to remark that you must expect to be placed where others consider that you can do the most good to the general cause—in which I am sure you will agree.” King’s policy throughout the war would be to rotate officers in and out of Washington; he insisted on “continuous turnover,” sending staff officers out to the theaters of war, and bringing others in from sea duty to headquarters. He argued, persuasively, that the experience and perspective thus disseminated would improve the performance of the entire service.
When King arrived in Washington to set up shop the week before Christmas, pandemonium reigned. “I found Admiral King enthroned in the most disreputable office I have ever seen,” an incoming staff officer recalled. “Someone had moved out in a hurry, taking the furniture with him, but not the dirt. The admiral had liberated a flat top desk from somewhere and a couple of chairs. . . . That was all there was. I recall thinking that as the headquarters of the greatest navy in the world it fell somewhat short of being impressive.” King and his clerical staff inhabited two rooms on the third deck (floor) of the Navy Department building. The decor was spartan and utilitarian: white plaster walls left blank with the exception of a single analog clock, windows blocked by white Venetian blinds, nondescript wooden desks and chairs, green steel filing cabinets, a linoleum floor. When King needed a member of his staff, he pressed a button in his office. A buzzer sounded harshly in the adjoining room, sending a team of yeomen and secretaries into action.
The job came with lavish perks. King would have at his beck and call a Cadillac and driver, a twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar with aircrew, and a flagship. As his flagship he chose a 1,200-ton, 257-foot private yacht, the Dauntless, formerly owned by the Dodge family. She would remain at a berth in the Washington Navy Yard for most of the war. After assuming the duties of CNO, King would also have an official residence in the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue in northwest Washington (since 1974 the official residence of the vice president of the United States). Throughout the war, King’s wife, Mattie, would live at the Naval Observatory, and King would spend most nights aboard the Dauntless. There was some grumbling in Congress about the cost of maintaining two residences for one man, and whispers that King was using his yacht as a private refuge for his trysts—but the expense was trivial in the general mobilization for war, and no one chose to make an issue of it.
THE MORNING AFTER PEARL HARBOR Winston Churchill had told his cabinet he intended to visit Washington as soon as Roosevelt would have him. He needed to be sure that Britain’s new ally did not go about fighting the war the wrong way. Above all he feared that the Americans, boiling over in righteous fury at Japan, might divert the better part of their strength from Europe to the Pacific. In prompt reply to Roosevelt’s cable of the previous evening, in which the president assured Churchill that the United States was now “in the same boat with you and the people of the Empire and it is a ship which will not and cannot be sunk,” the prime minister asked, “Now that we are, as you say, ‘in the same boat,’ would it not be wise for us to have another conference? We could review the whole war plan in the light of reality and new facts, as well as the problems of production and distribution. I feel that all these matters, some of which are causing me concern, can best be settled on the highest executive level. It would also be a very great pleasure to me to meet you again, and the sooner the better.”
Roosevelt stalled for time, referring to the press of business in Washington and his concern for the perils Churchill would face in crossing an ocean infested with German U-boats. His real concern, however, was how Churchill’s presence in Washington would play politically. The United States and Britain were Allies in the war against Japan, but not (until Thursday) against Germany or Italy. It was well understood that Churchill would do everything in his power to correct the discrepancy. Replying to Roosevelt’s stated concerns for his safety, Churchill cabled on December 10: “We do not think there is any serious danger about return journey. There is, however, great danger in our not having a full discussion on the highest level about the extreme gravity of the naval position as well as upon all the production and allocation issues involved . . . particularly in Pacific.” Roosevelt acquiesced. “Delighted to have you here at White House,” he replied. Referring to the dismal news of the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya, he added, “The news is bad but will be better. Warm regards.”
In a meeting of the British war cabinet that week, someone expressed surprise at the prime minister’s newfound assertiveness. Churchill had taken care to use a deferential tone in his earlier dealings with the Americans. According to General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, there was a “wicked leer” in the prime minister’s eye as he replied: “Oh! That is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her; now that she is in the harem, we talk to her quite differently!”
He and a grand entourage of advisers and staff, including all the military chiefs of staff except Brooke (who would mind the store in London), embarked on the battleship Duke of York on December 12 for the Arcadia Conference. During the eight-day passage, Churchill drafted three major papers outlining the British view of the war in preparation. When not working he slept, lay awake in bed with a novel, or watched movies. It was a tumultuous winter crossing, with hatches battened down and passengers barred from walking on deck. Churchill told his wife it was “the longest week I have lived since the war began. We have had almost unceasing gales.” Paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, he remarked: “Being in a ship in such weather as this is like being in a prison, with the extra chance of being drowned. . . . No one is allowed on deck, and we have two men with broken arms and legs.”
The ship anchored in Hampton Roads, off Norfolk, Virginia, on the evening of December 22. The Duke of York was to have continued up the Potomac River to Washington, but Churchill was anxious to arrive, and asked to be flown to National Airport. From the air at night the city made a majestic sight, spread out and ablaze with lights. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, the blackout was only sporadically enforced. Churchill’s aide-de-camp, Commander Tommy Thompson, was moved. “Washington represented something immensely precious,” he wrote. “Freedom, hope, strength. We had not seen an illuminated city for five years. My heart filled.”
On the tarmac they found the president waiting, leaning against his limousine. “I clasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure,” recalled Churchill in his memoirs. Lord Moran (Sir Charles Wilson), the prime minister’s personal physician, was impressed by the size of Roosevelt’s head. “I suppose that is why Winston thinks of him as majestic and statuesque, for he has no legs to speak of.” The president remembered the faces and names of many members of the Churchill party, whom he had met briefly the previous August at the shipboard summit in Placentia Bay. Diplomatic protocol had not required that he drive to the airfield to welcome his visitors, and the gesture was not overlooked by the British. It was a good start.
Churchill had planned to stay at the British Embassy, but when Roosevelt invited him to be a guest at the White House, the British leader accepted at once. Five aides would accompany him, and the rest of his party
would lodge at the nearby Mayflower Hotel. The invitation had apparently been extended without fair warning to the first lady—the White House staff would have to scramble to prepare the rooms. Though she was (as always) a warm and graceful hostess, Eleanor later took the unusual step of venting her irritation in her national newspaper column. “It had not occurred to him,” she wrote of the president, “that this might require certain moving of furniture to adapt rooms to the purposes for which the Prime Minister wished to use them.”
Churchill was moved into the Rose Suite on the second floor of the White House, with an adjoining room for his valet. The Lincoln Study, across the hall, accommodated his two secretaries. Harry Hopkins’s bedroom was just down the hall; next to that was the Monroe Room, where Churchill’s staff set up his map room. A gloomy hallway, cluttered with Christmas presents for the extended Roosevelt family, connected them all.
At dinner that first night, the conversation ranged widely across the war. Roosevelt had not had time to read the papers prepared by Churchill, so the prime minister did what he did best of all. He talked, and talked, and talked, about every aspect of the conflict: the situation in French North Africa, the battles raging in Libya, the Russian front, the war at sea, the Japanese onslaught in the Pacific. Roosevelt offered a toast, that first night: “I have a toast to offer—it has been in my head and on my heart for a long time—now it is on the tip of my tongue—‘To the Common Cause.’”
“My report home shows that we cut deeply into business on the night of our arrival,” wrote Churchill after the war. To the prime minister’s great relief, Roosevelt quickly allayed any concern that the main thrust of the American war would be diverted away from Europe. Not only would munitions and supplies continue to flow to Britain and Russia, he declared, but such shipments would be increased, notwithstanding the emergency in the Pacific. In his first cable to Brooke and the war cabinet in London, Churchill wrote that the question “was not whether but how” the Europe-first principle would be carried out.