“When the shooting starts, they have to send for the “sons of bitches.”
-—Admiral Ernest King responding to a reporter’s question why he, at age 63, was chosen by President Franklin Roosevelt to lead the Navy after Pearl Harbor.
King, always blunt, was indeed an SOB: a vain, hot-tempered, argumentative, hard-drinking womanizer. FDR knew all this and picked him over eight more senior admirals because King was a doer and a fighter.