Ronald H. Spector
George Dewey was more than sixty years old when he attained worldwide fame as commander of the U.S. Navy's Asiatic Squadron during the Spanish-American War. Using keen intelligence, sheer nerve, and superior fire-power, Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in the Philippines and established the United States as a major power in the Pacific. For this, Dewey was named Admiral of the Navy and became a national hero.,This biography, the first scholarly study of Dewey in more than twenty-five years, takes Dewey from obscurity in 1898 through the victory in the Battle of Manila Bay, which elevated him to the status of "instant folk hero," to the end of his life in 1917. The author focuses mainly on Dewey's public life, concentrating on his tenure of service from the Manila Bay victory onward and on his influence on the achievements and failures of the American naval establishment in the early twentieth century.,Though Dewey was, according to Spector, "neither a remarkable thinker nor a brilliant innovator," he was directly responsible for "assembling talented young officers and putting them to work on questions of interest to the navy. . . . His talents lay in channeling the energy and abilities of his more gifted young colleagues into projects of importance to the navy.",Admiral of the Ocean Empire, the first scholarly biography of Dewey written with the benefit of access to the records of the Navy Department as well as to Mrs. Dewey's diary and the Dewey family correspondence, provides an important new perspective in American naval history.
Admiral of the New Empire: The Life and Career of George Dewey