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

by Perry, Mark

  While the presence of mistresses in Washington wasn’t unusual, the army chief’s relationship with Cooper was potentially embarrassing, particularly for a public figure who aspired to higher office. So Isabella was kept firmly under control and was instructed by MacArthur to stay at home where he could visit her at his leisure. But Cooper had something different in mind when she came to Washington, dreaming that her life in America would follow the course it had in the Philippines, albeit on a much larger stage. She wanted to go to Hollywood. She wanted to be a star. So, predictably, she chafed at her imprisonment, and by early 1934, she and MacArthur were arguing. MacArthur responded to her entreaties by plying her with money and sending her on vacation to Havana; he then suggested she return to the Philippines. She refused. Finally, discovering that she was engaged in a relationship with a Georgetown University law student, MacArthur sent her a brusque note: “Apply to your father or brother for any future help.” That is when, with the help of Ross Collins, Drew Pearson and Robert Allen discovered her. It was as if she had been sent from heaven.

  Pearson and Allen visited the Chastleton, but Cooper had already left. She wasn’t hard to find, however; there were few young Eurasian women living in Washington, and the two reporters located her, finally, in a simpler apartment in another part of the city. Cooper provided Pearson and Allen with a windfall of information on MacArthur, but unlike the anecdotes provided by Louise, Cooper’s information was politically explosive—she claimed that MacArthur told her that he, and not George Dern, ran the War Department (“Dern is a sleepy old fool,” MacArthur said), that he was the power behind Herbert Hoover (he was “a weakling,” MacArthur bragged), and that he referred to Roosevelt as “that cripple in the White House.” She also provided Pearson and Allen with a fistful of love letters from MacArthur and said she was prepared to testify in court to everything he had told her.

  Pearson and Allen provided this information to their lawyer, who told MacArthur’s counsel that during the upcoming trial he would call Cooper as his first witness. The information had the desired effect. Not only was MacArthur horrified at the prospect of having his affair made public, but he also knew that his private comments about Dern and the president would prove particularly damning. He dispatched Dwight Eisenhower to look for Cooper, but she wasn’t at the Chastleton or even at the apartment where Pearson and Allen had found her. The two columnists had wisely bundled her off to Baltimore, where she lived under the watchful eye of Pearson’s brother. Fortunately for MacArthur, this sordid scandal had a reasonable ending: He agreed to drop the lawsuit and silenced Cooper with fifteen thousand dollars. She used the money to set herself up in business as a hairdresser in the Midwest and as seed money for a trip to Hollywood, where she scouted out film opportunities.

  Years later, Admiral William Leahy, who served as Roosevelt’s military advisor and would later be the titular head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, heard of the scandal and was surprised that MacArthur had agreed to drop the lawsuit. “He was a bachelor at the time,” Leahy said. “All he had to do was say ‘so what?’” Leahy suspected that the real reason MacArthur was so anxious to rid himself of Cooper was that he feared what his mother “Pinky” would say. “It was that old woman he lived with in Fort Myer,” he explained. But if that was true, it was only partly so. MacArthur also had Roosevelt—“that cripple in the White House”—to worry about, as well as the coterie of New Dealers who continued to lobby for his removal. But although MacArthur intended to keep his relationship with Cooper secret, numerous administration officials knew of it. Among these were Steve Early and Harold Ickes. Ickes even kept a running account of the MacArthur scandal in his diary. And Early and Ickes weren’t the only ones who knew about Isabella Cooper—Roosevelt also knew about her.

  What is extraordinary about the Cooper incident is not Roosevelt’s reaction to it, but the steps he took to defend his chief of staff. In writing his memoirs, Pearson revealed that Roosevelt not only recommended that MacArthur sue the reporters, but also named the price the army chief should exact: precisely $1.75 million. Roosevelt then went further. In mid-May 1934, after Pearson and Allen published a column on MacArthur’s “dictatorial, insubordinate, disloyal, mutinous and disrespectful” behavior during the Bonus March, Roosevelt told his cabinet that he thought Pearson was a “chronic liar,” that he had “authorized” MacArthur to sue them, and that he wanted them “out of business.” Roosevelt couldn’t have made his wishes any clearer: He supported MacArthur and expected his cabinet to do the same. Pearson was shocked. “Two members of the Cabinet, who felt this to be a most unethical way to suppress journalistic enterprise, promptly told me about it,” he wrote. “Frankly it gave me a jolt to learn that the President of the United States would encourage a libel suit against two newspapermen who had supported the chief goals of his administration.”

  But Franklin Roosevelt didn’t need two newspapermen to support “the chief goals of his administration”—he needed Douglas MacArthur to support them. And by May 1934, the president had him. MacArthur had not only collaborated with Roosevelt in supporting one his most cherished programs, but also kept private his doubts about the president’s economic programs. While MacArthur had quietly lobbied Congress for increases in the army budget, he never publicly denounced Roosevelt or called into question the president’s views. Roosevelt, for his part, reciprocated by keeping MacArthur on as chief of staff and remaining silent when MacArthur won congressional victories that restored the planned cuts to the officer corps. In fact, the more Roosevelt’s political allies insisted that MacArthur leave, the more Roosevelt insisted that he stay. This was Roosevelt at his most masterful: Relieving MacArthur would have pleased Roosevelt confidante Josephus Daniels, as well as Harold Ickes and Ross Collins, but it would have thrown down the gauntlet to the Republicans, igniting an ugly partisan fight that Roosevelt didn’t want. In retrospect it’s not at all surprising that Roosevelt made these calculations; what’s surprising is that his supporters didn’t understand them.

  Despite his work on the CCC and the president’s support for him in the cabinet, the scandal over Cooper subdued the army chief of staff. His confrontations with Ickes and Collins and his continuing, if sotto voce, disagreements over the army budget might not have driven him away from Roosevelt, but the president’s defense of him did little to close the rift between MacArthur and the president’s team. In fact, nothing had changed since the day Roosevelt had become president: MacArthur was viewed with suspicion by Roosevelt’s closest aides and was greeted at administration events as an interloper. He was “a lonely figure,” one journalist noted. “No one spoke his language. No one wanted to speak it. At the Army-Navy reception at the White House he would arrive just in time to lead the officers in the President’s receiving line, pay his respects to the First Lady, for he is the spirit of chivalry, and go back to work.”

  The degree of MacArthur’s isolation from the administration became obvious in February 1934, when Roosevelt sent White House troubleshooter James Farley to ask army air corps head Benjamin Foulois whether the army’s planes could carry the nation’s airmail. Farley’s inquiry was the result of a Senate investigation that showed that the postmaster general had awarded contracts to commercial aviation companies without competitive bidding. When the investigation uncovered widespread fraud, the contracts with the commercial carriers were canceled. But someone had to carry the mail, and Foulois told Farley that his pilots could do it. Roosevelt was reassured, but over the next eight days, the army air corps suffered eight separate crashes—the result, Foulois claimed, of unpredictable weather and navigation errors. Eight pilots died in February, and three more in March. Embarrassed by the crashes, Roosevelt called MacArthur and Foulois to the White House. “General,” he asked Foulois, “when are those airmail killings going to stop?” The answer enraged Roosevelt: “Only when airplanes stop flying,” Foulois said. Although the crashes ended, the air corps was saddled with carrying the mail until May, when new contracts
were signed with commercial carriers. It was a harrowing four months for the corps, and at the end of it, Foulois was targeted by Congress for the handling of his pilots.

  Foulois was a controversial figure. Taught to fly by the Wright brothers, he had quarreled with Billy Mitchell in France during World War One and was replaced by him. Even so, Foulois was an outspoken advocate of air power and rose to head the air corps during MacArthur’s tenure as chief of staff. Foulois and MacArthur had become friendly in 1911, when a plane Foulois was piloting at Fort Sam Houston in Texas lost power and just missed plowing through a row of tents, including MacArthur’s. Foulois’s plane just grazed MacArthur’s quarters, hitting a military buggy whose horses then galloped away in terror. Standing unharmed near the wreckage of his plane, Foulois turned to see MacArthur headed toward him. “Benny, what’s going on over there?” MacArthur asked. Dusting himself off, Foulois explained that he had the choice of crashing into the buggy or into MacArthur’s tent. MacArthur surveyed the scene: “Benny, speaking as a disinterested bystander, I’d say you made the right decision.” Over the next twenty-five years, Foulois retailed this story as “the day I saved Doug MacArthur’s life.”

  So it was no surprise that when the Senate committee investigating the crashes blamed both MacArthur and Foulois, the air corps head came to MacArthur’s defense. Foulois pointed out that Roosevelt hadn’t even bothered to inform MacArthur of the plan to use the air corps to handle the airmail. MacArthur then mounted a deft defense of Foulois and the air corps, confirming that he, MacArthur, had learned about Roosevelt’s decision from the newspapers. “The Executive Order of the President was made before you knew of it?” a senator asked. “Yes sir,” MacArthur answered. The response embarrassed Roosevelt, but it was the truth. While MacArthur didn’t criticize Roosevelt for issuing the order, the army chief was chagrined at having to admit that the White House hadn’t bothered to consult with him. Although Foulois was dismissed as a result of the February accidents, MacArthur’s defense of him and his fliers transformed Foulois from a MacArthur friend into a MacArthur admirer. “MacArthur was the kind of man you either deeply respected or hated with a passion,” Foulois said later. “I not only respected him. I believed him to be possessed of almost godlike qualities.”

  No one in the White House quite believed this appraisal, but MacArthur’s defense of Foulois did reinforce the chief’s following among a dedicated cadre of senior officers at the War Department. Among these was his military assistant, Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower remained enraged by MacArthur’s actions at Anacostia Flats, found the scandal over Isabella Cooper distasteful, was offended by his chief’s eccentricities (MacArthur sometimes wore a Japanese kimono over his uniform, preening before a full-length mirror), and despised MacArthur’s casual discourtesies. But Eisenhower was drawn to MacArthur, admiring both his defense of the army budget and his support of Foulois. Years later, when he was America’s most celebrated soldier, Eisenhower would swap MacArthur stories with a bemused group of reporters before bringing them up short. “If he were to walk through that door right now and say ‘Eisenhower, follow me,’ I’d stand up and do it,” he said. Eisenhower provides us with a powerful portrait of MacArthur during the Roosevelt years in the pages of his diary: “Fifty-two years old. Essentially a romantic figure. I have done considerable personal work for him, but have seen far less of him than of other seniors now in the dept. Very appreciative of good work, positive in his convictions—a genius at giving concise and clear instructions. Consideration of the principle incidents of his career leads to the conclusion that his interests [are] almost exclusively military. He is impulsive—able, even brilliant—quick—tenacious of his views and extremely self-confident.”

  If Eisenhower grudgingly admired his superior, MacArthur had good reason to appreciate Eisenhower. Texas born and Kansas bred, “Ike” was a graduate of the West Point class of 1915 but had missed the Great War, serving in army backwaters instead. Hardworking and ambitious, Eisenhower was one of the army’s few intellectuals, which is how he built his reputation. His papers on industrial mobilization, written when he was a student at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, laid out a plan for organizing the nation’s industrial assets should war come. MacArthur was impressed by Eisenhower’s work, listened closely to his ideas on industrial mobilization, and planted Eisenhower in his outer office as his personal assistant. In effect, Eisenhower served as a high-level secretary, coordinating the work of MacArthur’s office and putting the chief of staff’s views onto paper. There wasn’t anything that MacArthur saw or signed that Eisenhower didn’t see first. “My office was next to his; only a slatted door separated us,” Eisenhower later remembered. “He called me to his office by raising his voice.”

  But Eisenhower had other qualities, including an ability to build political networks. During his work on industrial mobilization, for example, he met a group of thinkers who would be important to Roosevelt. Among them was wealthy Wall Street stock manipulator Bernard Baruch, a self-made South Carolinian who sported a bowler hat, pince-nez, and an infectious smile. Having headed up Woodrow Wilson’s War Industries Board during World War One, Baruch found Eisenhower’s work on industrial mobilization appealing. The view that Eisenhower was an anonymous presence prior to his meteoric rise during World War Two undervalues this early experience and Eisenhower’s vast network of political contacts. But it wasn’t just Baruch and those around the Southern investor who were important to Eisenhower’s emerging influence. Eisenhower came to MacArthur with a reputation as an outspoken military theorist. One of the aide’s earliest associations was with George Patton, who convinced him that the tank would revolutionize warfare. Additionally, and because of Patton, Eisenhower met Major General Fox Conner, who had been John Pershing’s military planner during the Great War. Conner, a brilliant strategist, was impressed by Eisenhower and, while commanding the U.S. garrison in Panama, insisted that Eisenhower be appointed his chief of staff. When Ike arrived, Conner provided him with a tutorial on military history and suggested that Eisenhower get to know George Marshall, the army’s most brilliant young officer. When Conner thought about the next war, he thought of Patton and Eisenhower leading great tank armies, racing over the fields of northern France with Marshall as their senior commander. This was in 1922, when people still thought the Great War was “the war to end all wars.” Conner knew better.

  Although Eisenhower’s influence on MacArthur’s military thinking cannot be known with certainty, after Eisenhower joined MacArthur’s office in February 1933, the chief of staff began to spend increasing amounts of time thinking about the next war and how it would be fought. Fox Conner’s ideas, filtered through Eisenhower, only confirmed for MacArthur what he had seen for himself during a series of trips to Europe during the Hoover years. MacArthur’s observations sparked his constant warnings about European rearmament and his deep discomfort with the rise of German National Socialism. These trips spurred MacArthur to upgrade the regimen of the army’s Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth and the curriculum of the Army War College, both of which represented the center of the service’s intellectual thinking. MacArthur also paid close attention to the development of a new combat rifle, turning down the recommendation of army developers who wanted to adopt a small-caliber Garand rifle for the army’s infantrymen. He preferred that soldiers be armed with a larger-caliber semiautomatic rifle. The resulting M1 Garand became the all-purpose rifle for the army and one of the most celebrated and reliable infantry weapons in history.

  MacArthur also began to think in greater detail about Eisenhower’s ideas on industrial mobilization, Patton’s ideas on tank warfare, and Benny Foulois’s plan to develop new fighters and bombers. It was Foulois’s views that provided him with his greatest intellectual challenge.

  Although he didn’t dismiss Foulois’s claim that one day the sky would be filled with fighters and bombers, MacArthur disagreed with Foulois’s notion that the army air corps should be made a
separate military service—a U.S. Air Force, with its own chain of command. MacArthur was willing to concede that the future of warfare would include fighters and bombers, but he wanted to make sure they were under the army’s command. His views had nothing to do with warfare and everything to do with interservice rivalry. The army’s retention of its air arm would enable it to garner a larger share of the military budget at the expense of the navy, which is what MacArthur really wanted. But much as Foulois liked MacArthur, the air corps head did not agree that the air corps should take a lower public profile.

  In the wake of the airmail scandal, Foulois ordered six B-10 bombers on an adventuresome flight from Washington, D.C., to Fairbanks, Alaska, and back. But Foulois kept the mission secret from MacArthur, primarily because the army chief was then engaged with the navy in delicate negotiations over which service would be responsible for U.S. coastal defenses. To head the mission, Foulois picked air corps flier Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, a fiery officer who had been taught to fly by the Wright brothers and was a respected survivor of the airmail fiasco. The Arnold mission was a success, with the six B-10s leaving Washington in June and returning intact on August 20, 1934. Arnold’s feat thrust him into the public limelight and dampened criticism of the air corps. But MacArthur was furious—Arnold’s Alaska mission buttressed Foulois’s argument that the air corps should be an independent service and interfered with MacArthur’s negotiations on coastal defense responsibilities with the navy. MacArthur took his retribution: He made certain that while Arnold received the Distinguished Flying Cross, none of the other mission pilots would be recognized. When Arnold protested, MacArthur angrily turned him away. Even so, in private, MacArthur was impressed: Arnold’s mission demonstrated the potential of a new generation of bombers and their long-range capabilities.