How They Won the War in the Pacific: Nimitz and His Admirals - Edwin P. Hoyt

I've been looking forward to reading this book for some time.  It's perhaps somewhat dated by now, as it was originally released in 1970, but it's still a good summary of the story of the Pacific War from the perspective of the admirals who fought it.  It shows Nimitz as the clear-headed leader that kept all the egos and agendas from pulling the war efforts in the Pacific apart, and explains what he did and why involving the promotion and assignment (and reassignment) of admirals during the conflict.
It may be because it predates some better research - I don't know - but I found Hoyt's explanation of some controversial episodes insightful.  He was fair to Admiral Fletcher at Midway and especially at Guadalcanal (he's not so fair in a later book I'm reading) and makes Leyte Gulf a lot clearer by explaining that far from abandoning the invasion fleet at Leyte, Admiral Halsey was never charged with protecting it if an opportunity to attack the Japanese fleet presented itself.  Whether he should have been so charged is really the question, and strangely enough, the blame here actually might have been Nimitz'.  Hoyt relates the story of how Nimitz' son, a sub commander, happened to be at CincPac when Leyte occurred, and when he read what Halsey's orders were, he told his father that the blame lay with his father for not charging Halsey with protecting the invasion fleet - Halsey did exactly what his orders told him to do (although he was at fault for not making clear what he was doing, which Hoyt explains was an example of Halsey's chronically bad staffwork).  Historians seem to assume that he should have, but that job was actually assigned to the Seventh Fleet, not Halsey's Third, and was just another by-product of the divided command structure that caused problems (which you are actually surprised weren't worse)  of having dual commands in the Pacific - Nimitz and MacArthur.  This book, by the way, illustrated those proiblems better than anything else I have read, surprisingly including E.B. Potter's Nimitz, which came out at about the same time as this book.