American Caesar

by William Manchester

  “Her voice is full of money,” Gatsby’s author said of one heroine, and there were times when Louise, whose bank account was certainly full of it—her stepfather was worth over one hundred million dollars—seemed to think she could buy MacArthur. Evidence to the contrary was revealed to her at 4:00 P.M. on their wedding day, Saint Valentine’s Day, 1922. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:30 in El Mirasol, the Stotesburys’ Spanish-style Palm Beach villa. West Point and Rainbow Division flags decorated the path to the altar when the groom, resplendent in dress whites and ribbons, appeared thirty minutes early. To his horror he found his bride perched on a stepladder, rearranging decorations. She hadn’t donned her diamond necklace and apricot chiffon gown and wasn’t even sure where they were. He delivered a stern lecture on punctuality. She pouted. It was an omen. Equally ominous was the guest list. There were two hundred names on it, and only one of them, Buck Wheat, was a friend of MacArthur. Pinky had flatly refused to attend. Next day a newspaper account of the event was headed: MARRIAGE OF MARS AND MILLIONS.33

  Louise’s new mother-in-law moved out of the superintendent’s mansion and into Washington’s Wardman Park Hotel when Mars and his Millions returned to West Point after a Florida honeymoon. Feebly scrawled notes from the Wardman Park disclosed that Pinky, again invalided, planned to spend most of her time with her other daughter-in-law, Mary McCalla MacArthur, the daughter of a rear admiral. The brigadier had little time to soothe the old lady. He scarcely had time to send each of his cadets a tiny piece of the wedding cake. He was preoccupied with his own imminent move to Manila. New York reporters, sensing a story, journeyed to the academy, and Louise, annoyed because Pershing hadn’t even acknowledged her offer of an olive branch—she had invited him to dinner at the mansion—unburdened herself. To one newsman she said, “Jack wanted me to marry him . . . . I wouldn’t do that—so here I am, packing my trunks.” She told another that Pershing was “exiling” her and her new husband to the Philippines, that the Chief of Staff had warned her that “if I married MacArthur he would send him to the islands and there was a terrible climate there and I wouldn’t like it.” A letter critical of MacArthur’s transfer from the Point appeared in the New York Times. Shortly thereafter the paper carried a page-three story headed PERSHING DENIES “EXILE” ORDER. In it the Chief of Staff commented ungallantly, “It’s all damn poppycock, without the slightest foundation and based on the idlest gossip. If I were married to all the ladies that gossips have engaged me to, I’d be a regular Brigham Young. ‘ MacArthur was being reassigned, he said curtly, because it was time he had a little foreign service.34

  Late in June the retiring superintendent left the academy’s fate to the reactionary Sladen, and after an extended leave MacArthur, Louise, and Louise’s two children, Walter Jr. and little Louise, sailed from San Francisco on the liner Thomas. When they docked at Manila’s Pier Five, he later wrote, “once again the massive bluff of Bataan, the lean gray grimness of Corregidor were there before my eyes in their unchanging cocoon of tropical heat.” With the help of Manuel Quezon, now president of the Philippine senate, he moved his new family into No. 1 Calle Victoria, the “House on the Wall,” as it was known to Filipinos, a lovely eighteenth-century building, with exquisite gardens, perched on the towering 350-year-old stone wall encompassing the ancient inner city of Manila. Whatever Louise’s feelings about his new post, he himself was delighted: “It was good to be back after eighteen years and to see the progress that had been made. . . . New roads, new docks, new buildings were everywhere.”35

  Pinky MacArthur with photo of her son Douglas, c. 1925

  First he was assigned to command the Military District of Manila and then the Philippine Scout Brigade. To distinguish him from his father, who was still remembered in the islands, he became known as “General MacArthur the Younger. “ General MacArthur the Younger, like General MacArthur the Elder, scorned the color line; he cultivated Quezon and his friends, rejoiced in the enthusiasm of his native troops, and tackled every task with zest. This was even true of an order to survey the whole of mountainous Bataan, that jungly peninsula lying three miles from Corregidor at the mouth of Manila Bay. “Why that’s a job for a young engineer officer and not for a brigadier general,” said George Cocheu, once his yearling roommate at the Point and now a major on his staff. Outraged, Cocheu asked, “What are you going to do about it?” The brigadier replied, “Obey it, of course. It’s an order. What else can I do?” And so, leaving the cool House on the Wall, he personally mapped forty square miles of the malaria-infested headland, covering, as he later wrote, “every foot of rugged terrain, over its trails, up and down its steep mountainous slopes, and through its bamboo thickets. ”36

  This was not, as Louise suspected, a new humiliation visited upon him by the vengeful Pershing. Surveying Bataan, though drudgery, was in fact worthy of a general officer. At the end of that year a panel of generals and admirals met in Washington to draft a strategic response to a sudden, hypothetical invasion of the islands by forces from the Empire of Japan. Should that contingency arise, it had been decided, the defenders would withdraw into the peninsula, holding out there and on Corregidor for six months, at the end of which time, it was expected, a relief expedition would arrive. This blueprint was christened War Plan Orange, or WPO; subsequent drafts of it would be called WPO-i, WPO-2, and WPO-3. MacArthur had reservations about all of them, not only because they seemed unsound to him but also because the forces available to implement them were so thin. The only American regiment in the islands, the 31st Infantry, was commanded by a doddering officer who had fought in the last Sioux war. Proposals to reinforce the 31st had been rejected by Washington, where it was felt that reinforcement would alienate Tokyo, already indignant over the congressional decision to bar further Japanese emigration to the United States.37

  WPO being top secret, MacArthur couldn’t share his worries with his wife, who was rapidly becoming bored with life in Manila. Now and then there were bright moments. One came when Billy Mitchell and his bride arrived for a two-week visit, WELCOME GENERAL MITCHELL read a crude sign on the fuselage of a plane circling over San Bernardino Strait, and Douglas and Louise greeted the newlyweds at the dock. But such episodes were few. More frequent, and increasingly annoying, were the vexations of military life in the tropics. Young Walter fell off a horse. Little Louise came down with malaria. Had the brigadier’s wife been more domestically inclined, she might have found solace in nursing them. As it was, the parent they saw most often was their stepfather, who, genuinely fond of all children, doted on them. Their mother was usually off pursuing excitement in the blastfurnace heat. In desperation she had herself sworn in as a part-time Manila policewoman and arrested a man for “abusing his horse. ‘ That was amusing, but the diversion soon palled. To friends at home she wrote that life in the Philippines was “extremely dull.” She tried to interest her husband in leaving the army and becoming a stockbroker—at her suggestion J. P. Morgan and Company actually approached him—but he wasn’t interested.38

  More and more, in consequence, she found herself drawn to the social activities of Manila’s American elite. That was unwise. “As a result of my friendly relations with the Filipinos,’ MacArthur later wrote, “there began to appear a feeling of resentment and even antagonism against me.” The source of this feeling was the white community, which was aping the worst features of British colonialism. Louise now began to identify herself with this subtle racism. Occasionally at parties she even delighted her hosts by poking fun at her absent husband, gently mocking his vanity and dignity. “Sir Galahad conducted his courtship,” she said, “as if he were reviewing a division of troops. ‘ To another group she revealed that she had joined a cycle club but that MacArthur would not be riding with her. “Why not?” someone asked roguishly, and she replied with a laugh, “Heavens! Can you imagine Douglas on a bicycle?”39

  Always in the background lurked the formidable figure of General MacArthur the Elder’s widow, eleven thousand miles away but ve
ry much present in spirit. The brigadier had written a Washington friend: “Go and see mother and write me exactly what her condition is.” The precaution was unnecessary. Pinky provided that information by every post until, in February 1923, Douglas's sister-in-law stepped into the breach, MOTHER CRITICALLY ILL—COME HOME AT ONCE read the cable from Mary, and MacArthur, Louise, and her children returned on the next ship. The invalid recovered speedily, but the alacrity of MacArthur’s response to the cable was a sign of how closely he still felt bound to her. That bond was strengthened by the death of his brother that December of appendicitis. Up and about, the old lady threw her redoubtable energy into a campaign for her remaining son’s further rise in rank. It was time, she decided, that the War Department made him a major general. As it happened, he had two women stumping for him. His wife, hoping that advancement would bring a transfer to a more congenial post, was working along the same lines.40

  Louise had made the first move. While he had been at his mother’s Ward-man Park bedside during their two-month visit to Washington, she had sought out M. Manning Marcus, a Rainbow veteran who had become an influential attorney in the capital. She had said: “I wish you would get busy and get his promotion. He’s been a brigadier general for five years now. “ Any expenses incurred in lobbying should be charged to her: “I don’t care what it costs. Just go ahead and send the bill to me personally. Don’t tell Douglas.” Marcus had contacted two colonels who had fought in the 42nd Division and the three men had called on War Secretary Weeks. Weeks had replied laconically, “He’s too young now.” When the delegation had reported this to MacArthur, without revealing his wife’s role, he had exploded: “Too young! Why, Genghis Khan commanded the union of his clans at 13 and at 48 commanded the largest army in the world. Napoleon was only 26 when he was the world’s most celebrated military leader. Mustafa Kemal Pasha was 38 when he commanded his country’s armies!” Nevertheless the approach had been less than successful. It is memorable chiefly because it indicates both Louise’s devotion to him then and his own reaction to the disclosure that pressure was being exerted on his behalf. He was, it would appear, less than outraged.41

  Pinky, of course, was a more experienced infighter in the lists of army politics. Taking pen in hand, she wrote her old correspondent, John J. Pershing, on a subject familiar to both of them: the talents and ambitions of his former commanding officer’s remaining son. She began; “It was a real joy to see you on Saturday looking still so young and wonderfully handsome! I think you will never grow old.” Getting quickly to the point, she said: “I am presuming on long and loyal friendship for you—to open my heart in this appeal for my Boy—and ask if you can’t find it convenient to give him his promotion during your regime as Chief of Staff?” She continued: “You are so powerful in all Army matters that you could give him his promotion by a stroke of your pen! You have never failed me yet—and somehow I feel you will not in this request. . . . Won’t you be real good and sweet—The ‘Dear Old Jack’ of long ago—and give me some assurance that you will give my Boy his well earned promotion before you leave the Army?” She closed with a political benediction much like those invoked from time to time by her Boy: “God bless you—and crown your valuable life—by taking you to the White House. Faithfully your friend—Mary P. MacArthur.”42

  How much effect this had on Dear Old Jack is speculative. There were other forces working for Douglas: his exemplary war record, the influential Rainbow Division association, the continuing efforts of M. Manning Marcus, and the fact that Stotesbury was a heavy contributor to Republican war chests. At all events, Pershing appointed MacArthur a major general ten days before leaving office as Chief of Staff. The New York Times observed that “he will be the youngest Maj. Gen. on the active list of the army,” that he “is considered one of the ablest and brightest of the younger officers of the regular army,” and that “with good health he stands a splendid chance of some day becoming head of the army.” The roles played by his wife and mother were unmentioned.43

  MacArthur put up his second star on January 17, 1925, the date his new commission became effective. To the delight of both women, their calculations proved correct. Overqualified now for any Manila post except the command of the Philippine Military Department, already held by another major general, he was transferred stateside, first to Atlanta, where he toured his father’s old battlefields at Kennesaw Mountain and Peach Tree Creek, and then to Baltimore.44

  Louise owned an estate in Baltimore county which was now rechristened Rainbow Hill. From there her husband could drive to his III Corps office, visit Pinky at the Wardman Park, and participate in the endless rounds of dinner parties, cotillions, point-to-point races, and fox hunts which gave his wife so much pleasure. They meant very little to him. Puritanical, austere, and ungregarious, he joined the snobbish Green Spring Valley Club less to relax than to salvage his marriage. He still recoiled from suggestions that he resign from the army and take employment in Wall Street—Louise, her brother, and her stepfather kept pressing him—but he clung almost desperately to her and her children, whom he had grown to adore. The higher his rise, he was finding, the greater his lonesomeness. Because of his immense egoism, he could stand more solitude than most men, but he needed some human warmth. He would hold his giddy flapper as long as he could.45

  These were bleak years for a professional soldier: the era of Kellogg-Briand, meager military budgets, obsolete weapons, and unglamorous rescue missions amid floods and mining accidents. At Rainbow Hill the General spent long evenings reading about the pacifist movement. He thought it sinister. He spoke vigorously against it before the Soldiers and Sailors Club in New York—“No one would take seriously the equally illogical plan of disbanding our fire department, or disbanding our police department to stop crime”—but the speech attracted little attention. Much of his time was spent as a glorified flack, huckstering ROTC and CMTC (Citizens’ Military Training Corps) programs—writing handouts, showing slides at Rotary and Kiwanis meetings, setting up movie newsreels on training camps, designing CMTC Christmas cards, and distributing in bus and train stations racks of leaflets extolling preparedness. To the War Department he reported that the folders emphasized “the advantages to be gained by young working men in the matter of improved health, strength, general physical development and discipline, coordination of effort, increased responsibility and teamwork, which ultimately redound to the advantage of the employer.” He was elated when “publicity was given in practically all newspapers in the Corps Area to the endorsement of the Daughters of the American Revolution and their laudable plans for promoting greater interest in the CMTC.”46

  It was all rather depressing, but the worst episode in his three Baltimore years had come at the outset, when Washington sent him what he called “one of the most distasteful orders I ever received”—instructions to serve on the court-martial of Billy Mitchell. The trial, which was held in the old red-brick Emory Building at the foot of Capitol Hill, opened on October 28, 1925. Mitchell was acquainted with most of the eleven major generals sitting in judgment on him—he had known some of them for over twenty years—but he felt closest to the court’s youngest member. His grandfather had been a Milwaukee crony of Judge MacArthur, his father a Civil War comrade of the boy colonel. He himself had served under General MacArthur the Elder and had known MacArthur the Younger all his life. Small wonder that during a lull in the proceedings Billy was overheard telling a sympathizer, “MacArthur looks like he’s been drawn through a knothole.”47

  At the time newspapers pictured Mitchell as a martyr in the crusade for air power, but the indictment against him was more narrowly drawn. He was charged, not with sinking decommissioned battleships during maneuvers—which he had done twice to prove it could be done—but with “conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline” which brought “discredit upon the military service.” There was little doubt that he had done that. En route to his Philippine honeymoon, he had embarrassed General Summerall, the Hawaiian com
mander, by publicly ridiculing Oahu’s air defenses. Then, at a San Antonio press conference, he had told reporters that admirals were to blame for the crash of a navy blimp and that members of the army’s general staff, because of their stingy attitude toward fliers’ requests, were also guilty of criminal negligence. MacArthur felt his friend had been “wrong in the violence of his language.” Even airmen agreed. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who stood by him then and later led the Air Corps in World War II, said of the court-martial, “A good showing was the best that could come of it . . . . The thing for which Mitchell was being tried he was guilty of, and except for Billy, everybody knew it, and knew what it meant.”48

  What did it mean for MacArthur? During the proceedings the question was raised by columnists, who accused him of conniving in the “persecution” of Mitchell, and it would haunt him for the rest of his life; George Kenney, the leader of the airmen in the Southwest Pacific, would later find that pilots distrusted the theater commander. In his memoirs, MacArthur wrote that Mitchell was “right in his thesis,” but that was after the fact, and by then it was hardly debatable; with stunning foresight, Billy had predicted two decades before Pearl Harbor that “any offensive to be pushed against Japan will have to be made under the cover of our own air power . . . . In the future, campaigns across the sea will be carried on from land base to land base under the protection of aircraft.” MacArthur became a later convert to those views. There is no record that he held them between the wars.49

  The record of Mitchell’s court-martial, on the other hand, does not show that he rejected them. He expressed no opinions, made no motions, questioned no witnesses. Much of the time, in Billy’s words, his friend sat in the court with “his features as cold as carved stone.” His name was raised just once, and then in an aside. Congressman Fiorello H. La Guardia, a World War I flier and a partisan of Mitchell’s, testified that he had told newsmen, “I’m convinced that the background, the experience, and the attitude of officers of high rank of the Army are conducive to carrying out the wishes and desires of the General Staff.” He now added, “I want to say that at that time I didn’t know General MacArthur was on this court.” This provoked laughter, in which the judges joined.50