""When they get in trouble they send for the sonsabitches." Asked whether he had said said this, Admiral King replied no, he had not, but he would have if he had thought of it. They were indeed in trouble when they sent for King, bringing him from the brink of retirement to be Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and King would have been ready to admit that he enjoyed a reputation for toughness and ill temper that had few equals in the upper ranks of the U.S. Navy. He took charge of that navy at the depths of its despair and lifted it to the heights of triumph. He was a hard man in a hard time, well suited to lead a fighting fleet, but he was also a thoughtful man of a breadth and incisiveness that gave him an early and enduring grip on Allied strategy. Much of the war went the way he wished it to. The strongest mind within the American Joint Chiefs of Staff was the mind of Ernest J. King."
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Military leaders from the United StatesLegion of Honour recipientsPeople from ClevelandAviators from the United StatesNavy Cross recipients
Original Language: English
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Sources
Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War (1987), p. 153
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_King
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Ernest King
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