This is an idea I have been kicking around. I am looking for some ideas to flesh out the biography of my alternate "Duke" (OTL John Wayne). Thank you for your ideas and input.
Marion Mitchell Morrison (born Marion Robert Morrison; May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979), was an Admiral in the United States Navy. He served as the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) between 1961 and 1965, and was in charge of the U.S. blockade of Cuba during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Morrison was born in Winterset, Iowa but his family relocated to the greater Los Angeles area when he was four years of age. A local fireman at the station on his route to school in Glendale started calling him "Little Duke" because he never went anywhere without his huge Airedale Terrier, Duke. He preferred "Duke" to "Marion", and the name stuck for the rest of his life. He entered the United States Naval Academy in 1925 and graduated in 1929. After graduation he became a gunnery officer and served on a variety of battleships through World War II. He ended the war as the third officer on the USS Alabama.
As Chief of Naval Operations in charge of the United States' quarantine of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Admiral “Duke” Morrison distinguished himself in the Navy's conduct of those operations; Time magazine featured him on the cover and called him "an aggressive blue-water sailor of unfaltering competence and uncommon flair."
After his retirement from the Navy in 1965 Admiral Morrison withdrew from public life and lived quietly in Bethesda, Maryland. He died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979 at the National Naval Medical center in Bethesda, Maryland.