The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur

by Perry, Mark

  Dern proved a valuable voice for MacArthur in Congress, for while the army chief of staff had strong allies on Capitol Hill, Congressman Ross Collins remained an outspoken and powerful enemy. For Collins, the fight with MacArthur was personal. Not only was Collins still angered by MacArthur’s victory in retaining monies for officers in the Hoover budget, but the lawmaker also wanted revenge on the army chief for describing Collins as “a Mississippi cracker.” Dern intervened, attempting to mollify the congressman while urging MacArthur to end their feud. But Dern had little success in mollifying MacArthur or his staff, which lined up squarely behind the chief.

  Only months after MacArthur’s victory on officer pensions, a reporter asked the War Department for biographical information on Collins for an article. MacArthur aide Dwight Eisenhower brushed off the inquiry, saying that perhaps the reporter should ask for the information from Collins himself: “He is a publicity seeker and would be highly pleased to find his name in print.”

  Despite these obstacles, MacArthur and Dern actually succeeded in saving millions of dollars from the ax of New Deal and congressional budget cutters—the result of both MacArthur’s cooperation on the CCC and his willingness to spend long hours at the White House in late 1933 talking with Roosevelt about the dangers of Japanese militarism and the rise of European fascism. While it’s not clear just how much MacArthur was able to salvage in his budget as a result of these informal talks, his quiet dinners with Roosevelt (noted by Roosevelt campaign mastermind James Farley, who spied MacArthur sneaking in the back door of the White House one evening) helped to ease the mistrust that existed between the two. The quiet discussions served the purposes of both men: Roosevelt could test out his political ideas on a core conservative, while MacArthur could personally lobby for more money for the army.

  It’s possible to exaggerate the impact of these informal meetings, for they did little to convince either man to shift his political views. Roosevelt was an unshakable and dedicated progressive, while MacArthur retained his deep contacts with conservative Republicans. Nor, as it soon became clear to MacArthur, was a personal plea likely to result in anything more than a marginal increase in his budget—if that. A photograph from this era reflects this fundamental truth: It shows MacArthur, Dern, and Roosevelt laughing together, with Roosevelt’s head back and his eyes firmly on MacArthur. Dern is the odd man out in the picture, with MacArthur and Roosevelt’s eyes locked together in competitive camaraderie. So too it must have seemed to both of them during their informal meetings. The two smiled and laughed and exchanged views, but they remained locked together in a personal struggle, with neither giving ground. “Why is it, Mr. President, that you frequently inquire my opinion regarding the social reforms under consideration,” MacArthur asked Roosevelt during one of these dinners, “but pay little attention to my views on the military?” Roosevelt gave a blunt retort: “Douglas, I don’t bring these questions up for your advice but for your reactions. To me, you are the symbol of the conscience of the American people.” MacArthur was chagrined. “This took all the wind out of my sails,” he would later write. Roosevelt was plumbing his political views—testing out his ideas on a conservative audience. But as far as the budget was concerned, the president hadn’t even been listening. The confrontation was yet to come.

  In early March 1934, Douglas MacArthur and George Dern were shown the proposed cuts in army funding for 1935. Both men were shocked. They had received no prior notice of the cuts and had not been consulted on them. Nor had Roosevelt given MacArthur any indication of the future budget plans during their dinners together. Roosevelt based his decision on a report from the Bureau of the Budget, which recommended cuts to the army budget of some 51 percent, a drawdown that, both MacArthur and Dern believed, could fatally erode military readiness. Dern told MacArthur that he would ask for a meeting with Roosevelt to present his views, and that MacArthur should accompany him. MacArthur agreed, hoping that Dern’s voice, when added to his own, would prove persuasive. One week later, the two met the president in the Oval Office. In what became a legendary face-off, MacArthur and Roosevelt got involved in a heated exchange that led to a near break between the two—one of the worst confrontations between a senior military officer and a president in the country’s history.

  The Oval Office meeting began cordially, with Dern reviewing the threats the United States faced. Roosevelt listened politely, but as Dern continued to talk, the president grew irritated. There was something in Dern’s voice that grated on Roosevelt. Suddenly, his irritation got the best of him—and he turned on his secretary of war, berating him and, in MacArthur’s words, “using the biting diction” he usually reserved for his political enemies. “Under his lashing tongue, the Secretary grew white and silent,” MacArthur later remembered. MacArthur weighed in, hoping to ease the confrontation. The country’s safety was at stake, he told Roosevelt. But the president turned on him as suddenly as he had turned on Dern. Roosevelt’s face was ashen with contempt. “He was a scorcher when aroused,” MacArthur later wrote. “The tension began to boil over.” It was at this point, MacArthur later confessed, that he “spoke recklessly” and “said something to the general effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt.” MacArthur’s words hung in the air. Roosevelt could hardly believe what he’d heard. He wheeled on MacArthur and bellowed his response: “You must not talk that way to the President!”

  MacArthur, suddenly realizing what he’d said, backtracked. “He was, of course, right,” he later wrote, “and I knew it almost before the words had left my mouth. I said that I was sorry and apologized. But I felt my army career was at an end. I told him he had my resignation as Chief of Staff.” With that, MacArthur turned to leave the room. But even before he reached the door, Roosevelt mastered his anger (“his voice came with that cool detachment which so reflected his extraordinary control,” MacArthur remembered) and dampened the confrontation. “Don’t be foolish, Douglas,” he said, “you and the budget must get together on this.” MacArthur left the room quickly, then waited on the White House porch for Dern to appear. When he did, he was beaming, as if the confrontation had not occurred. “You’ve saved the Army,” Dern said. But MacArthur felt defeated and, without warning, was suddenly overcome by nausea. He looked at Dern and then, leaning over, vomited on the White House steps.

  While neither Roosevelt nor MacArthur ever mentioned their White House confrontation to one another in the years ahead, relations between the two remained strained, and while MacArthur later claimed that after their Oval Office confrontation the president “was on our side,” his judgment is overdrawn. The army budget remained under attack. As a salve to MacArthur, Roosevelt directed the White House budget director to make certain the army received funds from the Public Works Administration. A reprise of the model that MacArthur had used in adopting the CCC program, the PWA funding was intended to meet immediate army needs. The PWA was the brainchild of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. But the disbursement of PWA money was in the hands of Ickes, a Chicago Republican in the Teddy Roosevelt mold: He was a deeply committed progressive and critic of corporate corruption. Not only was Ickes no friend of the military, but he also despised MacArthur.

  Tasked by Roosevelt to make certain the army received its share of PWA funds, Ickes took great joy in promising financing for army projects and then, at the last minute, changing his mind. Ickes took a kind of twisted pride in his ability to show the former war hero his own power. He would call MacArthur into his office to deliver the bad news and then shared MacArthur’s reaction with his staff afterward: “It gave me a great kick to have him [MacArthur] in and break the news to him.” It was almost as if Ickes thought he was cutting funding for MacArthur, instead of for the army. In one notorious incident, Ickes prom
ised PWA funding to MacArthur in exchange for MacArthur’s promise to close a number of “little old peanut Army posts” (as Ickes described them) around the country. MacArthur felt used, but Ickes controlled a budget that would allocate some $300 million to the army for construction projects, so the army chief swallowed the insults. Eventually, Roosevelt directed the White House budget director to intervene with Ickes to make sure the army got its money. Even so, Ickes (described by a colleague as having “the mind of a commissar and the soul of a meataxe”) was among those few in the Roosevelt administration to whom MacArthur gave a wide berth, recognizing that officials like Ickes were less susceptible to reason than others.

  Although MacArthur was loath to confront New Dealers like Ickes in person, he continued to walk the same fine line that he had walked since Roosevelt’s inauguration. He never spoke out in public against Roosevelt’s budget but continued to issue warnings that the American military was woefully underfunded. His was a delicate dance, though it suited Roosevelt: MacArthur was a hero of the Great War and a conservative face for the New Deal in an era of economic uncertainty—“the conscience of the American people”—and as long as he remained chief of staff, Roosevelt could point to him as a symbol of the administration’s commitment to national security. And Roosevelt realized, even if MacArthur didn’t, that his chief of staff’s complaints about army funding actually buttressed administration claims that it was getting the federal budget under control. So, while MacArthur pointedly continued to speak out about the lack of American military preparedness, appearing before civic groups and veterans’ organizations, Roosevelt just as pointedly refused to rein him in. And at the end of the summer of 1933, when rumors again circulated that Roosevelt was seeking MacArthur’s relief, the president wordlessly extended the chief’s term into the next year, signaling that he intended to keep him as the army’s senior officer until MacArthur had completed his four years as chief of staff. In all of this, MacArthur was a willing participant, allowing his ambition to override his political views. So while Roosevelt was “taming” MacArthur, he had a lot of help. As events in the months ahead would show, MacArthur was also taming himself.

  Like his father, Douglas MacArthur was an admired soldier and a tough battlefield commander. And like his father, he was his own worst enemy. Both men had a puzzling habit of offending powerful figures who might be counted as potential allies. This had happened with Arthur MacArthur in the Philippines, in the first years of the century, when he faced off against William Howard Taft, the rotund Ohio lawyer (and future president) appointed by William McKinley to serve as the archipelago’s governor-general. Taft was unpopular with American soldiers, who resented his grating habit of describing the Filipinos as “my little brown brothers.” MacArthur’s soldiers, emerging from a bloody insurrection, also found this patronizing attitude hard to swallow: “He may be a brother of William Howard Taft,” they chanted, “but he ain’t no brother of mine.” But Taft’s unpopularity offered no benefit to Arthur MacArthur, who lost his tussle with the Ohioan for control of Philippine policy, which Taft insisted remain in civilian hands. The battle with Taft was bad enough, but in the process, MacArthur offended nearly every political figure in Washington and, as a result, many of his senior military colleagues. By the time he was relieved in July 1901, few of them came to his defense. Embittered by the experience, he spent the rest of his career in command of army posts in the Pacific Northwest, waiting for orders naming him army chief of staff. The orders never came. In his son’s eyes, Arthur’s acerbic personality was transformed into calm patience. He was a man, as Douglas later wrote, “of great equanimity and modesty of character, rarely aroused, placid, congenial.” In fact, he was anything but. And neither was his son.

  In the midst of his battle with Roosevelt over the army budget, MacArthur carelessly alienated the one man, General John Pershing, whose support he needed—and who had praised him for standing up to the president on the army pension issue. The dustup occurred over the promotion of Colonel George Marshall, a Pershing favorite but in MacArthur’s eyes a suspect member of Pershing’s World War One command mafia, “the Chaumont crowd.” After doing good work with the CCC, Marshall expected and deserved a promotion and a chance at commanding American soldiers. Instead, MacArthur ordered his transfer to Chicago as an instructor with the Illinois National Guard—sidelining him and choking off his chance for promotion. Pershing was enraged by MacArthur’s decision. He admired Marshall, believing he would one day be among MacArthur’s successors as chief of staff. General Charles Dawes, the former vice president under Calvin Coolidge, agreed. He heard of MacArthur’s decision and weighed in with his own views. “What! He can’t do that,” he told Pershing. “Hell no! Not George Marshall. He’s too big a man for this job. In fact he’s the best goddamned officer in the U.S. Army.”

  Backed by Dawes and other senior officers, Pershing intervened with MacArthur, pleading Marshall’s case. Pershing’s appeal was unusual: Retired senior officers rarely lobbied serving officers on the subject of promotions, but Pershing still had considerable influence in Washington and was anxious that Marshall’s talents be recognized. But MacArthur would not be moved; he viewed Marshall’s Chicago assignment as temporary, he told Pershing, until the coveted chief of infantry command became available. But when Marshall’s name did not appear on the next army promotion list, Pershing appealed to Roosevelt, who wrote a note to George Dern. “General Pershing asks very strongly that Colonel George C. Marshall (Infantry) be promoted to General,” Roosevelt wrote. “Can we put him on the list of next promotions?” Dern denied the request; he had spoken to MacArthur, he told Roosevelt, and Marshall would have to wait. MacArthur pleaded his innocence: While Marshall was not on the current list, he explained, the colonel would be on the next list, and MacArthur hinted of big plans for him. Marshall wasn’t convinced. At fifty-five, Marshall felt that his time was running out. “I have possessed myself in patience, but I’m fast getting too old to have any future importance in the Army,” he wrote to Pershing.

  MacArthur’s plea of innocence wasn’t convincing to Marshall, and it wasn’t convincing to Pershing. The former commander of the American Expeditionary Forces admired MacArthur’s record in the Great War, but he had less regard for the army chief’s personality. Then too, MacArthur was a follower of former chief of staff Peyton March, an outspoken Pershing competitor and critic. The two had clashed repeatedly during the Great War, as Pershing exerted his independence from War Department control—and from Peyton March. Put simply, March envied Pershing his fame, believing he, March, should get as much credit as Pershing received for winning the war. When, in 1932, Pershing’s memoirs were published to great acclaim (he won that year’s Pulitzer Prize), March decided to respond by writing his own memoirs. This was innocent enough, but MacArthur took the extraordinary step of allowing March the use of a War Department office and its staff to help him in his research. Pershing seethed. He had disliked MacArthur before, but had acceded to MacArthur’s appointment as chief of staff at Hoover’s insistence. Now, in the wake of the Marshall and March incidents, Pershing had become a MacArthur enemy.

  While the Pershing flap had repercussions for MacArthur’s standing among Pershing’s friends, it did little to undercut his status as chief of staff, and it certainly didn’t convince Roosevelt that he should be replaced. But this didn’t mean the people around Roosevelt had abandoned their views that the president should get rid of him, either by directly relieving him or by forcing his resignation. Finally, in mid-May 1934, they got their chance. That month, MacArthur filed a libel suit against muckraking reporters Drew Pearson and Robert Allen (Eisenhower described them as “two newspapermen of the lower order”), who were the authors of the gossipy “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column. The lawsuit involved claims that the writers made about MacArthur and that were based on a series of interviews they had conducted with Louise Brooks, who had been linked amorously to Pershing and was MacArthur’s former wife. Brooks fed Pe
arson and Allen all the gossip she could think of about MacArthur, including his private views on Hoover and Roosevelt. Her depiction showed MacArthur as narrow-minded, opinionated, vain, egotistical, and dismissive of civilian authority.

  But while Louise, now rotund and fighting alcoholism, was willing to make claims to Pearson and Allen in private, she was terrified of having to talk under oath. When MacArthur filed suit for personal damages (of $1.75 million), she panicked and said she couldn’t testify. With their star witness gone, Pearson and Allen scrambled, searching for a way to pressure MacArthur to drop his suit, which could ruin them. They found it in the person of a young and beautiful Filipino woman whom (in the wake of his failed marriage to Louise) MacArthur had brought to Washington as his mistress. Pearson and Allen got wind of this liaison, but they had little to go on. Then, as fate would have it, they were able to track her down. “You know, MacArthur’s been keeping a girl in the Chastleton Apartments on 16th Street,” one of the residents of the building told them. The information was solid, the source impeccable—it was that “Mississippi cracker,” congressman Ross Collins.

  CHAPTER 2

  Fort Myer

  That cripple in the White House.

  —Douglas MacArthur

  The “girl in the Chastleton Apartments,” whom Ross Collins had referred to, was Isabella Rosario Cooper, and she was beautiful. A former Shanghai showgirl and Philippine film star, Cooper had met MacArthur in Manila, then followed him to America when Hoover named him army chief of staff. But while she was thirty-four years younger than MacArthur, Cooper wasn’t naive. A 1926 Christmas card shows her smiling coyly at her Manila film fans, who flocked to watch her in Ang Tatlong Hambog (The three beggars), in which she received the first Philippine on-screen kiss. The card is signed “Dimples.” The two were often seen together in Manila, but that wasn’t the case in Washington, where MacArthur rented Cooper a spacious suite at the Chastleton Apartments, bought her an expensive wardrobe, and provided her with a poodle to keep her company when he wasn’t around. He visited her nearly every day at the Chastleton, taking several hours at lunch to do so. Knowledge of this dalliance was kept from his mother, who remained a looming figure in his life and a resident at his official quarters at Fort Myer.