About that time he remarked in public: "When the shooting starts, they call for the sons of bitches." His daughter called him "the most even-tempered man in the Navy, always in a rage." Roosevelt declared he "shaved with a blow torch" then asked him nicely to go forth and win World War Two asea.
Admiral King's unpopularity may have stemmed from a tendency to candor. In 1932, at the Naval War college, he wrote a paper:
"...it is traditional and habitual for us to be inadequately prepared. Thus is the combined result of a number factors, the character of which is only indicated: democracy, which tends to make everyone believe that he knows it all; the preponderance ... of people whose real interest is in their own welfare as individuals; the glorification of our own victories in war and the corresponding ignorance of our defeats ... and of their basic causes; the inability of the average individual (the man in the street) to understand the cause and effect not only in foreign but domestic affairs, as well as his lack of interest in such matters. Added to these elements is the manner in which our representative (republican) form of government has developed as to put a premium on mediocrity and to emphasise the defects of the electorate already mentioned."
"...it is traditional and habitual for us to be inadequately prepared. Thus is the combined result of a number factors, the character of which is only indicated: democracy, which tends to make everyone believe that he knows it all; the preponderance ... of people whose real interest is in their own welfare as individuals; the glorification of our own victories in war and the corresponding ignorance of our defeats ... and of their basic causes; the inability of the average individual (the man in the street) to understand the cause and effect not only in foreign but domestic affairs, as well as his lack of interest in such matters. Added to these elements is the manner in which our representative (republican) form of government has developed as to put a premium on mediocrity and to emphasise the defects of the electorate already mentioned."
It's easy to condemn the implied statism, but the good admiral nailed salient points -- the short-sighted selfishness of Mr. and Mrs. Voter, general ignorance, and the power-lust of demagogues.
Too bad he's not still around. He'd be a useful counterweight to Touchy-Feely Washington in the super-spun Age of Obama.
