Ships
- USS Nevada (BB-36) Captain from 4 May 1920 · Relieved on 19 September 1921
Luke McNamee was born on 4 April 1871 in Mount Hope, Wisconsin. He received his appointment to the United States Naval Academy from Kansas and graduated in 1892. After training in the sailing ship Atlanta, he was commissioned an ensign on 1 July 1894 and served in Essex until 1898. During the Spanish-American War he was executive officer of the gunboat Princeton. He advanced to lieutenant (junior grade) on 3 March 1899 and to lieutenant on 1 July 1900, and in 1901 he served in the battleship Oregon.
From 1905 to 1908 he was assigned to the naval station on Guam. He was naval governor of the island from 2 November 1905 to 3 December 1906, and acting naval governor from 3 October to 28 December 1907. While governing, he pressed for more money to treat infectious disease among the islanders. He afterward inspected naval work at the General Electric plants in Schenectady, New York, and in Massachusetts.
On 26 April 1914 he took command of the new gunboat Sacramento as her first commanding officer. Promoted to captain in 1917, he became chief of staff to the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet and then served on the staff of William Sowden Sims, commander of United States naval forces in European waters. In Paris he was a member of the advisory staff that worked on the armistice and on the naval terms of peace with Germany. That duty brought him the Navy Cross, and France awarded him the Legion of Honor.
McNamee assumed command of the battleship Nevada (BB-36) on 4 May 1920, relieving William Dugald MacDougall. He remained her captain through the peacetime routine of fleet drills and cruising until 19 September 1921, when Douglas Eugene Dismukes relieved him.
He went from Nevada to the Office of Naval Intelligence, succeeding Andrew Theodore Long as director and serving from September 1921 to November 1923. In 1923 he commanded the battleship Tennessee. From 1924 to 1926 he was naval attaché at the Court of St. James's in London, where he was promoted to rear admiral. In 1926 he returned to sea for a year in command of the destroyer squadrons of the battle fleet, then spent four years in the Navy Department as director of fleet training.
As a vice admiral he commanded the battleships of the battle force in 1931 and 1932. In 1933 he was promoted to admiral and commanded the battle force until June. On 3 June 1933 he became president of the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island. He retired from that post on 29 May 1934, after forty-two years of naval service.
Out of uniform he was president and chairman of the board of the Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company, and he led the firm until 1950 while it extended its radio and telegraph links overseas. McNamee died on 30 December 1952 at the Naval Hospital in Newport, where he had been a patient for two years. He was eighty-one.