The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

98 JULY-AUGUST 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Leahy remained concerned about the risk of the military overshadowing civilian input at the White House, and pressed hard for a special State Depart- ment liaison with whom he would meet daily. According to George Elsey, a naval officer on duty in the president’s map room (FDR’s wartime equivalent of the situation room), Leahy was “the one man around the White House who kept con- stantly saying, ‘But the State Department ought to be consulted.’” After the war ended, the victors were confronted with reshaping the global order, an opportunity they were deter- mined not to squander as their World War I predecessors had done. But just as soon as the world’s most costly war was over, a new era of militarized great- power competition was dawning, and in foreseeing the Cold War, Bill Leahy was ahead of the curve. President Harry Truman’s historic Navy Day address, which Leahy fever- ishly crafted with presidential speech- writer Samuel Rosenman, outlined the major new precepts of American foreign policy in the immediate postwar world. In addition to supporting the new United Nations, Truman issued a clear challenge to the Soviet Union’s subjugation of East- ern Europe by explicitly supporting the return of self-government to those who had been deprived of it by force. Not long after the Navy Day address, Leahy met with Winston Churchill, an old warhorse friend, to discuss the draft text of another speech. Across several days Leahy and Churchill pored over the speech, refining details and points of emphasis. Delivering the “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College soon after, Churchill declared that while the Soviet Union was no friend of Western powers or to free peoples, a peaceful accommodation and co-existence was within reach—it was a concept Leahy had steadily pressed for months inside the White House. Churchill later wrote Leahy: “Your advice on the Fulton draft proved sound.” One area in which O’Brien leaves readers wanting concerns the National Security Act of 1947. Among other things, this legislation created the modern Department of Defense, the National Security Council and the Central Intel- ligence Agency. Leahy no doubt played a major role in shaping the latter two by helping place their first chiefs, but more detail could have been shared on Leahy’s views on this historic reform of America’s national security institutions. The Second Most Powerful Man in the World is a unique treat, history retold through the lens of fresh, groundbreak- ing evidence. This is perhaps why former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright says the book “greatly enriches our understanding of wartime Washing- ton power,” or why John Lewis Gaddis suggests: “We’re all going to have some serious rethinking to do.” Despite his skill, Leahy did not exhibit Roosevelt’s effusive brotherly charm, or Churchill’s strident self-assuredness, or Stalin’s steely guile. Instead, one saw a stern-looking gentleman with an owl- ish visage who spoke deliberately but infrequently, and was always discerning but rarely forceful. Leahy may have been hard to remember at first; but, in the end, he was an individual history could never forget. n Dmitry Filipoff is the publications coordi- nator for The Foreign Service Journal . He is also the director of online content for the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC). For Filipoff’s interview with author Phillips Payson O’Brien, go to https://bit.ly/2zJCpPF.