"Admiral Leahy has largely disappeared from the national mind. Despite the enormous power he wielded during World War II, a war the United States fought to his strategic ideas more than any other and a conflict that still shapes America's identity, there are today no William D. Leahy foundations, public schools, statues, or libraries. As his greatest service was in the White House, the US Navy has remembered him more shoddily than they should. In 1962, a new guided missile cruiser, the USS Leahy (DLG-16), was named for him. It was the best ship of its class, and would serve with distinction into the 1990s, but it was hardly a vessel worthy of the highest-ranking sailor in American history. A simple marker, in a small park in Ashland, Wisconsin, sandwiched between Lake Superior and a highway, serves as one of America's few tributes to a man who, more than any other, helped America triumph in World War II. Leahy would have preferred it that way."