"Admiral Leahy had served with Roosevelt since FDR had been assistant secretary of the Navy and enjoyed the president's complete confidence. Marshall, Roosevelt's personal choice for chief of staff, brought a single-minded, take-no-prisoners dedication to his task- combined with a remarkable sensitivity to political nuance at the highest level. Arnold, underneath his affable exterior, had a genius for organization urgently required to create an air force virtually from scratch. King, to some extent, was odd man out: fiercely Anglophobic, incredibly stubborn, not as gifted intellectually as his colleagues, but a powerful command presence that the Navy needed after Pearl Harbor. FDR said King shaved with a blowtorch, and it was that fierceness that propelled the Navy, even when King was wrong (as he was in early 1942, when he refused to convoy ships in American waters)."