American Caesar

by William Manchester

  Upstaging Franklin Roosevelt was not so easy. The President, like the General, was an accomplished actor. As the War Department budget dropped from $304 million to $277 million, MacArthur began to suspect that his greatest adversary was in the White House. Late in life he would say of these years that Roosevelt “had greatly changed and matured” since their World War I relationship and that “whatever differences arose between us, it never sullied in the slightest degree . . . my personal friendship for him.” It was more complicated than that. His encounters with the President always left him feeling thwarted. Speaking of MacArthur and others, Rexford Tugwell said: “All were frustrated by the fiercer concentration, the wilier talents, the greater power of the Roosevelt personality. None could compete successfully. He was, as Willkie said, ‘the champ.’”81

  John Gunther has pointed out that the President and the General were alike in many ways. Both were intensely patriotic, authentic patricians, and always onstage. Each was dominated by an ambitious mother who lived to great old age, and each cut a dashing figure. Roosevelt was subtler and more of a fixer, but the greatest difference was in their political outlooks. FDR was guided by his liberal vision. Despite the whispers of some New Dealers, MacArthur was not a reactionary of the Father Coughlin stripe. As he would demonstrate during his proconsulship in Tokyo, he too cherished liberal goals. But in the 1930s he was still a Herbert Hoover conservative and good friend of West Pointer Robert Wood, who was now head of Sears, Roebuck and who probably introduced him to James H. Rand of Remington Rand at this time. Like them, MacArthur was appalled by the social programs which Hoover’s successor was passing through Congress. He was also baffled by the new President’s finessing skills. Roosevelt could charm anyone, even MacArthur. Once during a White House dinner the General asked: “Why is it, Mr. President, that you frequently inquire my opinion regarding the social reforms under consideration, . . . but pay little attention to my views on the military?” His host replied: “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. “ This, MacArthur later said, “took all the wind out of my sails.” It meant, of course, absolutely nothing.82

  Late in life James A. Farley would recall how the General, bypassing Secretary of War George Dern, would slip in the back door of the White House to beg more funds for the military establishment from Roosevelt. Dern was present, however, during the most memorable confrontation between the President and the General. The Bureau of the Budget, determined to pull the government out of the red, announced that War Department appropriations for the coming fiscal year would be reduced by $80 million. Dern asked for a conference with FDR and took MacArthur with him. Roosevelt was adamant: funds for the regular army would be cut 51 percent; funds for the reserves and the National Guard would also be reduced. The General, his voice trembling with outrage, said: “When we lose the next war, and an American boy with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat spits out his last curse, I want the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt.” FDR, livid, said, “You must not talk that way to the President!” MacArthur would remember long afterward that he apologized, “but I felt my Army career was at an end. I told him he had my resignation as Chief of Staff.” He turned toward the door, but before he could leave Roosevelt said quietly, “Don’t be foolish, Douglas; you and the budget must get together on this.” Outside, Dern said jubilantly, “You’ve saved the Army.” The General recalled: “But I just vomited on the steps of the White House.”83

  MacArthur, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Secretary of War George Dern

  That was in the spring of 1934, a bad time for MacArthur. Without consulting him, the President terminated airmail contracts with commercial airlines and ordered the army Air Corps to do the job. Within a week eight planes had crashed, and though Hap Arnold believed afterward that the lessons learned led to the development of the heavy bomber, the Chief of Staff was greatly criticized at the time. That same month he unwisely filed suit against Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, writers of the “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” The General asked $1,750,000 in damages, charging that they had ridiculed him, described his treatment of the bonus marchers as “unwarranted, unnecessary, arbitrary, harsh, and brutal,” and generally depicted him as “dictatorial, insubordinate, disloyal, mutinous, and disrespectful of his superiors in the War Department.”84

  The columnists were worried until Congressman Ross Collins of Mississippi, who lived in the Hotel Chastleton, told Pearson that until recently a suite on his floor had been occupied by a lovely Eurasian girl whose most frequent visitor had been Douglas MacArthur. Pearson found her and paid her for MacArthur’s love letters. At a pretrial hearing, Morris Ernst, Pearson’s attorney, disclosed that he expected to take testimony from one Isabel Rosario Cooper. MacArthur’s mystified lawyer relayed this word to him, and the General dispatched Major Eisenhower to find his jilted mistress. Ike couldn’t do it; Pearson’s brother Leon kept her out of sight in a Baltimore hideaway until MacArthur dropped the suit. Pearson and Allen reported to their readers: “No money was paid by us to General MacArthur for costs or otherwise. No apologies or retractions were given or asked for.”

  What the columnists did not reveal was that an officer representing MacArthur delivered fifteen thousand dollars to a Pearson agent. This went to Isabel, who, escorted by Leon, moved to a city in the Middle West, where she bought a hairdressing shop. Later she moved again, to L.A., where on June 29, 1960, she committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates; the death certificate gave her occupation as a free-lance “actress.” Long after her departure from Washington, Admiral William D. Leahy, learning of the details, told a friend that MacArthur “could have won the suit. He was a bachelor at the time. All he had to do was . . . say: ‘So what?’ . . . You know why he didn’t do it? It was that old woman he lived with in Fort Myer. He didn’t want his mother to learn about that Eurasian girl!”85

  MacArthur’s greatest contribution to the New Deal was in implementing the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which put unemployed young men to work in American forests. In less than two months he enrolled 275,000 CCC recruits, put them through a two-week training course, and shipped them to U.S. Forest Service camps in forty-seven states. He had reservations about the program—CCC boys were paid thirty dollars a month, compared with eighteen dollars for army privates, and when he suggested that they be used as the nucleus of an enlisted reserve, John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr led a pacifist protest that torpedoed his plan—but his organizational talents made the program one of FDR’s greatest successes. A nice MacArthur touch was his dispatch to the White House of a picture showing CCC recruits praying in a California church. One of Roosevelt’s assistants wrote him: “I gave it to the President, and he was delighted with it. What he liked particularly was the evidence of devotion shown by the boys. He ordered it framed, to be hung in the White House, and asked me to express his appreciation of your thoughtfulness.”86

  One of the army’s most efficient officers in achieving the CCC triumph was Colonel George C. Marshall, who established seventeen camps in the South. It didn’t do him much good. As usual, MacArthur was convinced that enemies were conspiring against him, and while he told Eichelberger that their heaviest concentrations were in the navy and the National Guard, he hadn’t forgotten Chaumont. Pershing telephoned him, saying that he would consider it a personal favor if Marshall were promoted to brigadier general. Instead MacArthur appointed the colonel an instructor with the Illinois National Guard. Later Marshall’s wife, recalling their early days in Chicago, described her husband’s “gray, drawn look which I had never seen before, and have seldom seen since.” Afterward, when Marshall became his superior, MacArthur would say, “My worst enemy has always been behind me.” He assumed that Pershing was striking back at him when Pershing refused to participate in the dedication of a Rainbow Division cemetery in Ohio. The planners told the retired AEF command
er that MacArthur had approved the idea. “That’s where you made your big mistake, boys,” MacArthur commented when they informed him of Pershing’s rebuff. “You should have kept my name out of it.”87

  It was at a Rainbow reunion in the summer of 1935 that he delivered his fustian tribute to the men who had fallen in France: “They died unquestioningly, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory. . . . They have gone beyond the mists that blind us here, and become part of that beautiful thing we call the spirit of the unknown soldier. In chambered temples of silence the dust of their dauntless valor sleeps, waiting, waiting in the Chancery of Heaven the final reckoning of Judgment Day. ‘Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.’”88

  He continued, in lines he presented as his own:

  They will tell of the peace eternal

  And we would wish them well.

  They will scorn the path of war’s red wrath

  And brand it the road to hell.

  They will set aside the warrior pride

  And their love for the soldier sons.

  But at last they will turn again

  To horse, and foot, and guns.

  They will tell of peace eternal.

  The Assyrian dreamers did.

  But the Tigris and Euphrates ran

  through ruined lands.

  And amid the hopeless chaos

  Loud they wept and called their chosen ones

  To save their lives at the bitter last,

  With horse, and foot, and guns.

  They will tell of the peace eternal

  And may that peace succeed.

  But what of a foe that lurks to spring?

  And what of a nations need?

  The letters blaze on history’s page,

  And ever the writing runs,

  God, and honor, and native land,

  And horse, and foot, and guns.89

  Elsewhere he spoke to all who would listen of the need for military preparedness, but only at West Point, when he returned there for the thirtieth reunion of his class, was his audience receptive. The speech was broadcast, and Eichelberger, who heard it over the radio, said afterward that “it took courage to face facts as he did that day.” But his warnings were ignored. In the words of an official army historian, “The army’s equipment as well as its manpower and appropriations reached a nadir when Douglas MacArthur was Chief of Staff.” Congress rejected his appeals for the stockpiling of strategic materials, and his plans for industrial mobilization, which proved invaluable after Pearl Harbor, were ridiculed at the time. Often his days were occupied with trivia: reestablishing the Order of the Purple Heart, for example, and designing a new uniform with an open jacket and soft collar.90

  His most valuable hours were spent in his library at Fort Myer’s Number One quarters, pondering the future of warfare. In light of what would emerge on the battlefields of the early 1940s, his forecasts were remarkably prescient. He predicted “total war”—and called it that—with tanks, planes, and submarines as “the decisive weapons.” The next great conflict, he reported to the secretary of war, “is certain to be one of maneuver and movement. . . . The nation that does not command the air will face deadly odds. Armies and navies to operate successfully must have air cover.” In his last annual report as Chief of Staff he wrote: “Were the accounts of all battles, save only those of Genghis Khan, effaced from the pages of history, and were the facts of his campaigns preserved in descriptive detail, the soldier would still possess a mine of untold wealth from which to extract nuggets of knowledge useful in molding an army for future use. The successes of that amazing leader, beside which the triumphs of most other commanders in history pale into insignificance, are proof sufficient of his unerring instinct for the fundamental qualifications of an army.” In a word, MacArthur was anticipating the blitzkrieg, and one British reader realized it. Writing in the London Times of November 22, 1935, B. H. Liddell Hart observed that while the American army had been considered backward since the Armistice, “there has been a change recently,” and MacArthur’s report was proof of it: “In the war he made his reputation as a commander in the historic tradition: one who pushed right forward himself in order to keep his finger on the pulse of battle and seize opportunities. General MacArthur’s present report shows that in the field of military theory he is no less forward in ideas. No more progressive summary of modern military conditions, and the changes now developing, has appeared from the authoritative quarters of any army.”91

  In 1934 MacArthur was completing his four-year term as Chief of Staff, and he expected to be relieved in the autumn. But the President equivocated. At press conferences he either dodged the question or said he hadn’t decided. The fact was that he was being pressed hard by both the General’s adversaries and his admirers. Former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels wrote him that keeping MacArthur “would be deeply resented” by Legionnaires because of the BEF incident: “My earnest advice is Don’t.” Pershing felt the same way, partly because of the humiliation of Marshall but also because MacArthur had provided Peyton March with an office and a staff to help him write a book critical of Pershing’s memoirs. Powerful congressmen—despite the Chief of Staff’s haughtiness on the Hill—wanted him kept on.92

  FDR came up with a foxy compromise. On November 15 he announced that MacArthur would remain until his replacement had been chosen. That satisfied everyone, but like many Roosevelt schemes it concealed a hidden barb. MacArthur wanted Major General George S. Simonds to succeed him. By extending MacArthur’s term, FDR explained to Farley, he eliminated Simonds, who would lack sufficient time to serve a full term before reaching retirement age. Instead the President would choose Major General Malin Craig, a Pershing protégé and a favorite of the Chaumont clique. Eisenhower was with MacArthur on a westbound train when the General received a telegram announcing Craig’s appointment and reducing MacArthur to permanent two-star rank. Ike has described the General’s reaction: “It was an explosive denunciation of politics, bad manners, bad judgment, broken promises, arrogance, unconstitutionality, insensitivity, and the way the world had gone to hell.”93

  Yet his farewells in Washington had been pleasant. He was awarded another Distinguished Service Medal. Pershing sent him an inscribed photograph. FDR told him, “Douglas, if war should suddenly come, don’t wait for orders to come home. Grab the first transportation you can find. I want you to command my armies.” George R. Brown of the Washington Herald wrote: “Brilliant and magnetic General Douglas MacArthur is going out as Chief of Staff in a blaze of splendid glory, the idol of the entire Army. His work in Washington is finished. A year ago the Army was on the rocks, demoralized, discouraged, and out of date. General MacArthur has saved it by putting through Congress the most constructive program for the land defenses since the World War.”94

  One matter had not been resolved to his satisfaction. War Plan Orange was still the basic blueprint for the defense of the Philippines. “Fortunately,” MacArthur had concluded, “the man who is in command at the time will be the man who will determine the main features of [the] campaign. If he is a big man he will pay no more attention to the stereotyped plans that may be filed in the dusty pigeon holes of the War Department than their merit warrants.” By the time he received the wire which stirred his wrath, he had no doubt that the man would be big enough. The new Philippine commander would be Douglas MacArthur, and he was already headed for Manila.95

  FOUR

  To the Colors

  1935-1941

  MacArthur had entertained the thought of studying law after his tour as Chief of Staff, but developments in the Far East proved more compelling. The year before he stepped down, the Japanese completed their conquest of Manchuria and Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, granting the Philippines commonwealth status as a prelude to complete independence, which would come in 1946. Elections had not yet been held in the archipelago, but the overwhelming favorite for the commonwealth presi
dency was the flamboyant, mercurial Manuel Quezon, head of the powerful Nacionalista party, who as a young guerrilla major had surrendered his sword to Arthur MacArthur on Bataan a generation earlier. In the fall of 1934 Quezon arrived in Washington to discuss the formation of a military mission to shield the islands. According to his memoirs, he asked MacArthur, “General, do you think that the Philippines, once independent, can defend itself?” and he was told, “I don’t think that the Philippines can defend themselves, I know they can.”1

  At that time FDR hadn’t decided to extend MacArthur’s term as Chief of Staff, but the President agreed that once the General had left the War Department, he should sail for Luzon, as Quezon requested. It turned out that legislation was necessary for that, and Congress passed a bill adding the Philippines to the list of countries—the others were South American republics—eligible to receive U.S. military missions. On December 27, 1934, MacArthur wrote Quezon: “I am making definite plans to close my tour as Chief of Staff about June 10th and to leave for the islands immediately thereafter. This would bring me to Manila early in July.”2