American Caesar

by William Manchester

  MacArthur’s affair with Isabel may be excused, if it needs an excuse, by the dullness of Washington during those years. He had been singled out long before as one of the Hoover administration’s few colorful men. In the first months of his new tenure he seems to have made a genuine effort to keep his profile low, wearing civilian clothes in his State, War, and Navy Building office, granting few interviews, avoiding cocktail and dinner parties, seldom appearing in the gossip columns of newspapers, and spending his evenings with the books his father had bequeathed him. But he cut too striking a figure to avoid the limelight. Everyone in the capital knew of his extraordinary devotion to his mother—how he rode home to lunch with her every day when in Washington, and how, whenever he traveled by air, he always wired her he was safe once the plane had landed. It quickly became common knowledge that he sat at his desk wearing a Japanese ceremonial kimono, cooled himself with an Oriental fan, smoked cigarettes in a jeweled holder, increasingly spoke of himself in the third person (“MacArthur will be leaving for Fort Myer now”) and had erected a fifteen-foot-high mirror behind his office chair to heighten his image. There were other examples of his vanity. While traveling in the Balkans he insisted that he be provided with a private railroad car. “Douglas,” a friend explained unconvincingly, “would just as soon have traveled on roller skates if he had been there as a private citizen. But the dignity of the American nation required that the Chief of Staff travel in a private car. So Douglas hollered until he got it—not for himself personally but for the American Chief of Staff.”66

  That was during the first of two European journeys he made under Hoover. In the fall of 1931 he observed French army maneuvers near Reims, where French War Minister André Maginot presented him with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor (unlike Maginot, who believed in rigid lines of defense, MacArthur reported to Hurley, “The next war is certain to be one of maneuver and movement. . . . The nation that does not command the air will face deadly odds”), and then continued on to Yugoslavia, where he was received by King Alexander and became the only foreign officer to watch that year’s maneuvers of the king’s army. His stay in Belgrade was cut short by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Back in Washington, he supported Stimson’s proposal that the United States run “a calculated risk of going to war with Japan” by imposing economic sanctions. Hoover, unwilling to provoke Tokyo, refused.67

  The General liked the Republican President and thought his domestic policies admirable, but he despised his weakening of the army. When Hoover suggested that he attend the fifty-one-nation disarmament conference in Geneva, MacArthur declined, explaining that “the way to end war is to outlaw war, not to disarm.” Instead he took his second trip, to inspect the armies of Turkey, Rumania, Hungary, Poland, and Austria. After Hitler seized power the Nazis invited him to attend German maneuvers, but by then the White House had a new tenant, and the General declined, explaining that he was preoccupied with “the unusual activities affecting our Army this summer in connection with the Civilian Conservation Corps as well as other things.” His refusal reflected, not disapproval of the new regime in Berlin, but a dawning understanding of the humiliating explanation for his welcome in foreign capitals. While appreciative of the United States’ war potential, and thus eager to court its goodwill, other nations knew that they had nothing to fear from its military establishment. MacArthur led the sixteenth largest army in the world. There were just 132,069 Americans in uniform, fewer than the Portuguese or the Greeks, and their equipment was appalling. Fortune reported that the U.S. Army “forever walks the wide land in the image of a gaping-mouthed private carrying an obsolete rifle at an ungraceful angle. “ During the General’s years as Chief of Staff the government spent between $284 million and $347 million on his forces—compared with the country’s $80,000-plus million defense outlays in the late 1970s.68

  Much of his time was spent fighting to protect the little army he had. Because the War Department accounted for the largest chunk in the national budget, Congress was determined to cut it after the stock-market crash. MacArthur couldn’t do much to stop that; the best he could do was assign priorities. In general he tried to avoid favoritism among the services and spent what he was given on personnel rather than materiel, reasoning that equipment becomes obsolete but leadership does not. Thus he abandoned Major Adna R. Chaffee Jr.’s tank arm in 1931 but warded off an attempt to cut the officer corps from twelve thousand to ten thousand the following spring. “For seven long, dreary months General MacArthur fought the forces of destruction in the Congress,” the Army and Navy Journal said editorially that July 16. “Willing to make concessions on travel, subsistence, comforts, Yes, said General MacArthur, but on man-power, No!”69

  MacArthur watching French maneuvers, 1931

  MacArthur watching Austrian maneuvers, 1932

  His stratagems, which included anguished appeals to the public, brought him more attention, and gradually the portrait of him began to fill out. In the words of one of Dwight Eisenhower’s biographers, MacArthur “carried a reputation for battlefield gallantry, for intellectual brilliance, for aristocratic sentiments, for political ambition, and for personal arrogance. A great many politicians, aware of grass-roots sentiment, regarded him with distrust. It can hardly be denied that he did little to disarm his critics. On the contrary, though his reports were generally brilliant, he seemed to go out of his way in personal actions to arouse antagonism, and this in the very areas of public opinion where, as chief of staff, he most needed support. It was as though he were more concerned with the impression he personally made (particularly on the ‘better classes’) than he was in achieving results.”70

  Eisenhower himself, then a major, became the Chief of Staff’s assistant. Late in life he recalled: “My office was next to his; only a slatted door separated us. He called me to his office by raising his voice.” In many ways, Ike thought, the General “was a rewarding man to work for,” one who never cared what hours were kept and who, once he had given an assignment, never asked any questions; “his only requirement was that the work be done.” His assistant discovered that “on any subject he chose to discuss, his knowledge, always amazingly comprehensive, and largely accurate, poured out in a torrent of words. ‘Discuss’ is hardly the correct word; discussion suggests dialogue and the General’s conversations were usually monologues. . . . Unquestionably, the General’s fluency and wealth of information came from his phenomenal memory, without parallel in my knowledge. Reading through a draft of a speech or a paper once, he could immediately repeat whole chunks of it verbatim.” Eisenhower echoed Millis’s observation: “Most of the senior officers I had known always drew a clean-cut line between the military and the political. Off duty, among themselves and close civilian friends, they might explosively denounce everything they thought was wrong with Washington and the world, and propose their own cure for its evils. On duty, nothing could induce them to cross the line they, and old Army tradition, had established. But if General MacArthur ever recognized the existence of that line, he usually chose to ignore it.”71

  Like most men in the conservative War Department, MacArthur regarded Communists and pacifists as threats to the national security, and he drew no distinction between them—“pacifism and its bedfellow, Communism,” he would say, were equally reprehensible. Other soldiers were just as indiscriminate and choleric, but less ready to cross foils with civilians. The General couldn’t resist challenge. In May 1931 the World Tomorrow, a church weekly, published the results of a poll of 19,372 Protestant clergymen which had been conducted by Harry Emerson Fosdick and several colleagues. The ministers had been asked, “Do you believe the churches of America should now go on record as refusing to sanction or support any future war?” and 62 percent had answered, “Yes.” The editor asked the Chief of Staff to comment, and in the June 2 issue he did: “I can think of no principles more high and holy than those for which our national sacrifices have been made in the past. History teaches us that religion and patriotism have
always gone hand in hand, while atheism has invariably been accompanied by radicalism, communism, bolshevism, and other enemies of free government . . . . I confidently believe that a red-blooded and virile humanity which loves peace devotedly, but is willing to die in defense of the right, is Christian from center to circumference, and will continue to be dominant in the future as in the past.”72

  Fosdick protested in the New York Times, “Has the nation . . . so taken the place of God Almighty that it can conscript our consciences?” and Harold E. Fey, a contributor to the World Tomorrow, wrote that MacArthur “sounds very much like Kaiser Wilhelm in one of his religious moments.” There was more of this sort of thing to come. In 1932 the General was invited to address the graduating class at the University of Pittsburgh. He seized the occasion to argue that demonstrators protesting the government’s ineffectual responses to the spreading Depression were “organizing the forces of unrest and undermining the morals of the working man.” Some three hundred students jeered, three of their leaders were arrested and fined, and the university’s business manager, telling reporters that “we want right-minded students here,” announced that incoming freshmen would be required to sign loyalty oaths. It seemed that MacArthur had won. He hadn’t. An appeals court reversed the conviction of the three, and the press was sharply critical of the General. He said: “It was bitter as gall and I knew that something of that gall would-always be with me.”73

  He had not, however, changed his mind. Returning from Pittsburgh, he instructed officers commanding the country’s nine corps areas to send him information on any agitators posing as veterans. In the summer of 1932 that order had a special significance. Some twenty-five thousand vets and their families were already encamped in Washington, and more were on the way. Penniless in these hard times, they were petitioning the government to pay them a cash “bonus.” They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or BEF. A Veterans Administration survey would later show that 94 percent of the bonus marchers had army or navy records, 67 percent had served overseas, and 20 percent had been disabled. MacArthur refused to believe it. He thought 90 percent of them were fakes. And he never changed his mind. Long afterward Major General Courtney Whitney, his most noisome advocate, reflected the General’s view when he wrote that BEF ranks were swollen with “a heavy percentage of criminals, men with prison records for such crimes as murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, burglary, blackmail, and assault.” Whitney charged: “A secret document which was captured later disclosed that the Communist plan covered even such details as the public trial and hanging in front of the Capitol of high government officials. At the very top of the list was the name of Army Chief of Staff MacArthur.”74

  There was no secret document; there were only hungry Americans. But as Eisenhower observed of his chief, the General “had an obsession that a high commander must protect his image at all costs and must never admit his wrongs.” In addition he felt an ideological bond to Hoover, and on July 28, when Hurley told him that the President wanted the BEF evicted, he proceeded with enthusiasm. What was really needed was tact. That morning police scuffling with an encampment of vets at the foot of Capitol Hill had shot two of them. Eisenhower, a better public-relations man than MacArthur, begged the General not to take personal command of the eviction. It would only offend congressmen, he argued, and make approval of military budgets that much harder. The Chief of Staff thought he had a better idea. “MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field,” he told the major. “There is incipient revolution in the air.” Sending an orderly to Fort Myer to fetch his uniform, he ordered infantry, tanks, and cavalry under Major George S. Patton, Jr., to form around the Washington Monument. He said: “We’re going to break the back of the BEF.” To a reporter who questioned his wisdom in wearing decorations on his tunic, he replied, “Should I be ashamed of them? I earned each one in action.”75

  Eisenhower was appalled, but the General’s decision has its defenders. James M. Gavin, a political liberal who was a Fort Benning lieutenant at the time, says, “I have never read anywhere the feeling of the junior officers toward MacArthur’s participation. We all felt that it was a gesture of personal responsibility on his part, and it was deeply appreciated by us.” In this view the General’s action was a measure of his greatness; he refused to delegate the odious task to a subordinate. Wearing his ribbons is interpreted as a device for impressing the vets, some of whom had served under him. Making a production out of the operation is seen as an attempt to awe the bonus marchers, and thus discourage resistance.76

  If that was the plan, it didn’t work. The men at the foot of Capitol Hill fought back until routed by tear gas. Hooting and booing, they retreated across Pennsylvania Avenue. One of MacArthur’s young soldiers wrestled a banner from the hands of a former AEF sergeant. “You crummy old bum!” the soldier spat. A spectator called out, “The American flag means nothing to me after this.” The General snapped, “Put that man under arrest if he opens his mouth again.” That was bad enough. What was worse, and indefensible, was MacArthur’s next move. The main BEF encampment lay on the other side of the Anacostia River. Hoover was not the shrewdest of officeholders, but he knew an armed attack on the shacks and tents the bonus marchers had erected there would not look well in the newspapers. Therefore he sent duplicate orders, via two officers, forbidding troops to cross the Eleventh Street Bridge. MacArthur scorned them. To Eisenhower’s astonishment the Chief of Staff declared emphatically that he was “too busy” and did not want himself or his staff “bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.” Then he led his men across, and the tents, shacks, lean-tos, and packing crates which had sheltered the bonus marchers and their families were put to the torch. Two babies were dead of tear gas and a seven-year-old boy trying to rescue his pet rabbit had been bayoneted through the leg. Since the President was MacArthur’s commander in chief, the General had been flagrantly insubordinate. But before Hoover could act, MacArthur outmaneuvered him. Law-and-order Republicans, he knew, would approve his show of strength. Therefore he called a midnight press conference, disclaimed responsibility, and praised Hoover for shouldering it. “Had the President not acted within twenty-four hours, he would have been faced with a very grave situation, which would have caused a real battle.” he said. “Had he waited another week, I believe the institutions of our government would have been threatened.” Secretary of War Hurley, who was present, added, “It was a great victory. Mac did a great job; he’s the man of the hour.” He paused thoughtfully and said, “But I must not make any heroes just now.”77

  MacArthur supervising eviction of the bonus marchers, 1932

  MacArthur and Major Dwight D. Eisenhower confer during the bonus marchers eviction

  MacArthur during a pause in the bonus marchers eviction

  A better judge of the public mood than any of them, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York, appreciated the political implications of the incident and was troubled. Not long afterward he was resting at his Hyde Park estate before his presidential campaign against Hoover when he received a telephone call from Huey Long. Putting down the receiver, he said to Rexford Tugwell, an adviser, that Long was “one of the two most dangerous men in the country.” Tugwell asked him whether the second was Father Charles E. Coughlin. “Oh no,” said FDR. “The other is Douglas MacArthur.” Roosevelt said to the Chief of Staff himself, “Douglas, I think you are our best general, but I believe you would be our worst politician.” In the White House one of FDR’s challenging tasks would be to exploit MacArthur’s military genius while hamstringing him politically, and he knew it.78

  MacArthur, for his part, realized that the years of the locust lay ahead for him—that a government preoccupied with the greatest depression in the nation’s history would continue to sink its cost-cutting knife into military appropriations, the largest single item in the federal budget. He made a tremendous entrance into the Roosevelt years, riding a huge stallion at the head of the inaugural parade—P
ershing, who had led such processions throughout the 1920s, was too ill to saddle up—but he was keenly aware that his Republican friends were leaving Washington, and that the new breed of bureaucrats regarded him as a lackey of the munitions industry which Gerald Nye was exposing on Capitol Hill. According to Eisenhower, who had in effect become his press officer, the General “lost himself in his work . . . most of his friends were the officers with whom he worked in the War Department. Except for his mother, General MacArthur’s life in Washington was almost entirely centered around the army, which he loved. ”79

  As Chief of Staff he could not avoid certain White House functions, but his attendance at them was perfunctory. At such affairs he would pass quickly through the receiving line, pay his respects to Eleanor Roosevelt—he was ever the courtly gentleman—and immediately return to his office on the other side of West Executive Avenue. He knew that New Dealers called him “a bellicose swashbuckler” and a “polished popinjay,” and that they liked to quote the new secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes: “MacArthur is the type of man who thinks that when he gets to heaven, God will step down from the great white throne and bow him into His vacated seat.” On the Hill the General pleaded vainly for more enlisted men and modern weapons. His troops were armed with World War I trench mortars, worn-out French 75s, and .50-caliber machine guns which were expected to serve as both antitank and antiaircraft weapons. Only twelve postwar tanks were in service; the new Garand rifles were not being produced because large stocks of 1903 Spring-fields were still in warehouses. According to Robert Eichelberger, then a major and secretary to the general staff, MacArthur’s manner was “very friendly and extremely courteous” on the Hill. “His mind was scintillating. At times he would show great dramatic ability.” But he could be pushed too far. He bridled when Nye called him a warmonger, and when one congressman, noting the army’s budget for toilet paper, asked him with heavy irony, “General, do you expect a serious epidemic of dysentery in the U.S. Army?” MacArthur rose. “I have humiliated myself,” he said bitterly. “I have almost licked the boots of some gentlemen to get funds for the motorization and mechanization of the army. Now, gentlemen, you have insulted me. I am as high in my profession as you are in yours. When you are ready to apologize, I shall be back.” Before he could stalk from the room, they expressed their regrets.80