Ships
- USS Lexington (CV-2) Captain from 30 June 1930 · Relieved on 31 May 1932
Ernest Joseph King was born in Lorain, Ohio, on 23 November 1878, the son of James Clydesdale King, a Scottish immigrant who worked in railway repair shops, and Elizabeth "Bessie" Keam, who came from Plymouth, England. The family moved with his father's railroad jobs and settled in Cleveland, where young Ernest attended the Fowler School. He went to work rather than high school for a time, then won a Naval Academy appointment over thirty other applicants and entered Annapolis on 18 August 1897. Classmates called him "Rey," Spanish for king. As a cadet he served in the cruiser San Francisco during the Spanish-American War, and he graduated fourth in the Class of 1901.
He got his first command, the destroyer Terry, at Veracruz in 1914, and he served on Admiral Mayo's Atlantic Fleet staff in World War I. Between the wars he headed the Naval Postgraduate School and commanded submarine divisions. He directed the salvage of the sunken submarines S-51 and S-4, which won him the first of three Distinguished Service Medals. He qualified as a naval aviator in 1927 and commanded Lexington from 1930 to 1932. Afterward he served as Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics and on the General Board, and in February 1941 he became commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet.
After Pearl Harbor he became Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and in March 1942 Chief of Naval Operations too, holding both of the Navy's highest positions at once. As a member of the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff he ran the Navy's global war, including the campaign against the U-boats. At the Allied conferences he backed Europe first, a maritime offensive across the Central Pacific, and aid to China. On 17 December 1944 he became the second fleet admiral in the Navy's history.
After the war he co-wrote his memoir, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (1952), with Walter Muir Whitehill. A stroke in August 1947 left him in naval hospitals at Bethesda and Kittery, Maine, and he died of a heart attack at Kittery on 25 June 1956, at 77. After lying in state at the National Cathedral, he was buried in the Naval Academy Cemetery, where his wife, Mattie, joined him in 1969. His papers are in the Academy's Nimitz Library.