American Caesar

by William Manchester

  The terrain was just as merciless going the other way, with the additional handicap that the worst of what Australians call “the wet”—the rainy season—was upon them. On October 1 MacArthur ordered his field commanders to push the disease-ridden enemy back across the Kumusi, but it wasn’t really necessary; the Japanese retreat had become a rout. So eager were they to fall back on Buna and Gona, where they knew godowns bursting with rice awaited them, that they trampled one another underfoot. Before the campaign ended they had lost over ten thousand men, including Horii, who drowned in the swollen river. (“An ignominious death,” MacArthur said with satisfaction.) On other terrain the diggers of the 7th Division and the GIs of the 41st and 32nd divisions might have fallen on their rear, but Allied motivation was less withy than that of the starving Nipponese, and the precipices of the Owen Stanleys made swooping, imaginative stratagems impossible.55

  MacArthur with Australian troops in New Guinea

  The natives thought both sides mad. To them New Guinea was the land of dehori, one of the most frequently heard words in their Moto language, which roughly corresponds with the Spanish manana, the Malayan ti d’apa, and the Chinese maskee. It means “wait awhile,” preferably a long while, especially during the wet. They vanished into the bush when offered trinkets in exchange for the use of their strong backs. Therefore Allied infantrymen on the Kokoda Trail, like the Japanese before them, became beasts of burden. In such circumstances, George H. Johnston wrote, “your mental processes allow you to be conscious of only one thing—‘The Track,’ or, more usually, ‘The Bloody Track.’ Up one almost perpendicular mountain face more than 2,000 steps have been cut out of the mud and built up with felled saplings inside which the packed earth has long since become black glue. Each step is two feet high. You slip on one in three. There are no resting places. Climbing it is the supreme agony of mind and spirit. The troops, with fine irony, have christened it ‘The Golden Staircase!’ ”56

  Such troops needed a target for their frustration, and MacArthur, with his grandiloquent communiques, his posturing, and his gold-encrusted cap, was the obvious candidate. Like the troops on Bataan the previous winter, they circulated apocryphal stories about his life of luxury behind the lines. To some extent this was his own fault. He allowed the sycophantic LeGrande Diller to give reporters a photograph of the General and Eichelberger in a jeep with the caption: “Generals MacArthur and Eichelberger at the front in New Guinea,” when the picture had actually been taken at a training camp in Rockhampton, Australia. (In a corner of the print the nose of a Packard was visible. As Eichelberger dryly pointed out in a letter to his wife Emma, “Miss Em,” there were no Packards on the Kokoda Trail.) MacArthur also permitted Diller to release stories reporting that he was personally leading the drive on Papua, when in fact he didn’t visit Moresby until mid-autumn, long after the enemy withdrawal had begun.57

  This was sad and unnecessary. It encouraged unjustified slanders; his hat carried no more braid than that of a naval flag officer, for example. The suspicion that he was still vying with his father’s dash up Missionary Ridge is irresistible, and would explain why he permitted fawners around him to award him such minor honors as the Combat Bronze Star with Arrowhead and the Air Medal. “Probably no other commander-in-chief,” one military historian writes acidly, “would have allowed his staff to recommend him for decorations in this way or would have shown such boyish delight when he received them.” Probably not, but few great captains have been hungrier for glory.58

  Army fliers were as quick as infantrymen to circulate malicious stories about the General. Among other things they believed that MacArthur was afraid of flying. Kenney heard this rumor and decided to test it. As he tells the story, “One evening in September in his apartment in Brisbane I casually remarked that I was going up to New Guinea again soon to inspect the air units and would like to have him come along also to look over my show. He replied instantly, ‘All right. Let’s leave tomorrow. I’ll be your guest.’ “ They were a hundred miles out, over the Coral Sea, when one of the engines quit and they turned back for repairs. The General was sleeping. Kenney touched him on the knee. His eyes snapped open. He said, “I must have dozed off. Did you want something?” Kenney replied, “I just wanted to tell you that this is a good airplane. In fact, it flies almost as well on three engines as it does on four.” MacArthur said. “I like to listen to you enthusiastic aviators, even when you exaggerate a little.” Kenney said, “All right. We’ve been flying on three engines for the last twenty minutes and you didn’t know it. In fact, you didn’t even wake up. If you look out that window you can see the propeller of the number-two engine standing still.” The General looked out, grinned, and said, “Nice comfortable feeling, isn’t it?” Kenney recalls, “He took it a lot more coolly than I did the first time I had a bomber engine quit.” The next morning they again boarded the B-17 for the overseas flight. It took six hours. MacArthur slept through three of them.59

  On November 6 the General moved his advance base to Moresby, and thereafter he moved so rapidly between Brisbane and New Guinea that often two luncheon tables were set for him, fifteen hundred miles apart. War correspondents’ stories about him were still datelined “Somewhere in Australia,” however, and to tens of millions of Americans that phrase was invested with a glamour unequaled by news from any other theater of war until Eisenhower landed in North Africa on November 8. MacArthur’s admirers would have been unsurprised by Kenney’s story; some of them would have wondered why the General hadn’t sprouted wings and flown on alone. During his first days down under, Australian journalists had been cautioned not to publish his name because word of his presence might reveal his whereabouts to the enemy. If they must refer to MacArthur, they were advised, they should write He, or Him, as though he were divine. This seemed perfectly natural to Him, of course. What seems odd now is that Americans of every political persuasion, and citizens throughout the British Commonwealth, accepted all praise of MacArthur as the revealed word. Even more interesting, his canonization was a direct consequence of the stand on Bataan and Corregidor—the only battle he ever lost, and, as of then, the worst defeat in the history of U.S. arms.60

  Part of the explanation lies in the fact that America’s military altar was bare of other icons that year; another is that he possessed an extraordinary sense of theater. In his self-aggrandizement he resembled John L. Lewis—the comparison would have outraged both men—who said: “He who tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.” MacArthur had been onstage for a long time, and had rarely been greeted by more than a ripple of applause, but then the house had been almost empty. Now it was crowded and enthusiastic, and the audience, as John Hersey observed, “took their hero and lifted him up and made a beautiful bronze legend of him.”61

  As early as January 13, Joseph Medill Patterson’s New York Daily News had clamored for his “rescue” and a powerful post in Washington for him. Patterson was soon joined by his sister Cissie in the Washington Times-Herald, by his cousin, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, in the Chicago Tribune, and by William Randolph Hearst and Frank Gannett in their newspaper chains. Among MacArthur’s most vocal supporters were Gerald L. K. Smith, William Dudley Pelley, and Father Charles E. Coughlin, who accused the administration of planning to throw him “to the dogs.” George Van Horn Moseley, an old friend of both MacArthur and Eisenhower (late in life Ike described him as a “brilliant” and “dynamic” officer who was “always delving into new ideas”), wrote the General on November 10, 1942, that “subversives” were terrified by MacArthur’s popularity. Moseley prophesied that the American people, outraged by the “mongrelization” of the country by “low-bred” immigrants, blacks, New Dealers, and Jews, would overthrow the government and recall the General as dictator. He predicted: “You would be damned for the moment, but in the end you would make for yourself a place in history unequaled except by our first President himself.”62

  It can hardly have escaped Franklin Roosevelt’s attention tha
t MacArthur’s fame was being exploited by his enemies; Patterson acknowledged that “the Republicans are talking about running him for President some day,” and on Capitol Hill reporters noticed that the powerful Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg kept whistling the same tune: “There’s Something About a Soldier.” Stimson irritably scrawled in his diary: “MacArthur, who is not an unselfish being and is a good deal of a prima donna, has himself lent a little to the story [of his candidacy] by . . . playing into the hands of people who would really like to make him a candidate.” His magniloquent communiques and his lordly manner at press conferences, Stimson thought, “have served to keep the story going.”63

  Yet it is possible to read too much in this. It is worth noting that Moseley’s bizarre suggestion was one of the few that the General completely ignored. He never rebuked anti-administration newspapers which charged that the Pacific had been split into two theaters of war in order to block his presidential aspirations, but his belief in the need for a unified command had nothing to do with politics. To be sure, the American Mercury went too far in reporting that “the General has never committed himself on any non-military subject more controversial than the weather.” He held strong convictions on public issues, and as 1944 approached he developed a keen personal interest in the presidency. His views were often far to the left of his conservative backers’, however, and his yearning for the White House never exceeded Eisenhower’s. Probably Time’s assessment of him in the summer of 1942 was fairest. He was, said Time, “a hero who is brilliant, courageous, a great leader of soldiers, but also a little overambitious, a little garish, a little rhetorical.”64

  The current householder at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue followed news of the MacArthur boomlet with immense professional interest. He told aides that he expected it to grow, and it did. FDR’s mail had been heavy after the General’s escape to Melbourne—as the General’s censor, Diller wouldn’t allow journalists to call the breakout an escape or the battle a defeat, but of course that is what they had been—and most of the writers had been pleased, with critics largely confined to the families of men left behind. In Chicago a Republican lawyer named Joseph P. Savage was already organizing a grass-roots draft for MacArthur. Although the General was not yet considered a threat to FDR, a Roper poll of other public figures conducted for Fortune reported that his popularity (57.3 percent) was nearly as great as the combined figures for Wendell L. Willkie (35.8 percent) and Thomas E. Dewey (24.7 percent). In Brisbane “sources close to” MacArthur informed reporters that he had “no political ambitions” and “would much rather be remembered in history as the ‘liberator of the Philippines’ than as President of the United States,” which was exactly what such sources would have been expected to say. Shortly after the war, Eisenhower, visiting him in Tokyo, earnestly told him that he had no interest whatever in running for office. MacArthur nodded. He said, “That’s the way to play it, Ike.”65

  On Saint Patrick’s Day, 1942, when Americans were electrified by the news that the General had successfully run the Japanese blockade, Roosevelt let it be known through an aide that he had “sincere admiration” for MacArthur, and that while he “may have smiled now and then at some of the General’s purple communiques” there was always “appreciation of him as a military genius who had worked miracles in the face of heartbreaking odds.” That, too, was the way to play it. To have tilted with MacArthur that year would have been political hara-kiri. Wendell Willkie, the titular head of the Republican party, whose own presidential aspirations could have been thwarted by the General’s supporters, said: “Bring Douglas MacArthur home. Place him at the very top. Keep bureaucratic and political hands off him. Give him the responsibility and the power of coordinating all the armed forces of the nation to their most effective use. Put him in supreme command of our armed forces under the President.” Hugh S. Johnson, who had predicted that the General would never leave his men on Luzon, seconded the motion. Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., introduced a congressional resolution naming June 13, 1942—the anniversary of the General’s induction at West Point as a plebe—“Douglas MacArthur Day.” The Library of Congress issued a bibliography listing 253 references to the General, an honor never before accorded to a living man, not even a President. When Roosevelt designated Admiral William D. Leahy as his principal military adviser, Time wrote: “Willkie’s choice (and probably the people’s) was Douglas MacArthur.”66

  The New York Times, not easily given to enthusiasm in those days, found that there was “glamour even to his name—Douglas MacArthur, compound of the Hollywood ideal of a soldier with pure Richard Harding Davis.” The Nation told its readers that “psychologically” the country was delighted by a leader with the “fighting qualities” of the General. Walter Lippmann described him as “a great commander” with “vast and profound conceptions” who “knows how to find the right men” to lead his soldiers. Philadelphia’s liberal Pen and Pencil Club, and New York’s even more liberal Newspaper Guild chapter, expressed the nation’s gratitude for his deliverance from Corregidor.67

  In Allied countries it was the same. Pravda and Izvestia had headlined the General’s flattering references to the bravery of Russian soldiers. A Melbourne newspaper devoted its front page to a photograph of MacArthur over the caption THE MAN OF THE MOMENT. MacArthur Day was a national holiday in Australia, and in Brisbane people dialed his office number, B-3211, just to hear the switchboard operator say, “Hello, this is Bataan.” The New York Sun’s London correspondent reported that “not since Valentino” had Londoners responded to any man as they had to MacArthur’s “looks and personality.” British newspapers compared him to Nelson and Drake, and Englishmen stood in line for blocks to see newsreels of his arrival at Melbourne’s Spencer Street Station.68

  In one week Manhattan clergymen christened newborn babies Douglas MacArthur Campagna, Douglas MacArthur Frusci, Douglas MacArthur Salavec, Douglas MacArthur Lipka, Douglas MacArthur Millar, and Douglas MacArthur MacVeigh. In remembrance of Bataan, an Indiana farmer named his two-month-overdue colt “General Mac” because “he held out so long.” Restaurant chefs named dishes for the General, and suddenly everybody seemed to be eating MacArthur Sandwiches for lunch. Hollywood starlets modeled the MacArthur Skirt, a Scottish tartan. The prettiest girl at Kansas City’s annual Beaux Arts Ball was crowned Miss MacArthur. The General’s birthplace in Little Rock was consecrated as a patriotic shrine. At the Soo Canals in Michigan, a new lock was named for him; so was a bridge in Detroit; so was a dam in Tennessee; so was a baseball park in Syracuse, New York; so was a boulevard in Washington, D.C.; so were streets in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Jackson, Mississippi. After a state horticultural society had produced a MacArthur Daffodil, a MacArthur Camellia swiftly appeared at the Pasadena Flower Show and a Mrs. MacArthur Sweet Pea at a New York convention of florists. A council of dancing masters introduced a new step, the MacArthur Glide. Georgians collected four thousand tons of scrap iron on MacArthur Day, and Alabama dedicated its first statewide blackout to the “Hero of Bataan. “ The village of MacArthur, North Carolina, which had been trying to get a post office for years, was not only granted one; the first letter canceled there bore a message to the General from Stimson and Knox. Asked to name the most important U.S. possession in the Far East, an Atlanta junior high school pupil told her teacher, “General MacArthur,” and the next morning the story was on front pages all over the country.69

  It seemed that every newspaper had to have a new MacArthur story every day, preferably with a local angle. A Washington reporter tracked down Louise Cromwell, who had two complaints: she thought the Secret Service should safeguard her from vengeful Japanese agents, and she had received a threatening letter from a woman who wrote that Louise’s former husband “was going to run for the Presidency, and no man could have two living wives and be President, so one wife would have to be bumped off, which meant me.” The Blackfoot Indians of Montana adopted him as a member of their tribe, with the name Mo-Kahki-Peta, meaning “Chief Wise Eag
le,” and the Union League of Chicago and Manhattan’s Society of Tammany elected him to membership in their organizations, events which were recorded in Butte’s Montana Standard, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times. Five Australians interviewed by a Sydney newspaperman used the same phrase; the General, they said, “will fix things.” V. R. Hood, a San Antonio dry cleaner, said, “All the people I know think God comes first and then MacArthur.” Carl Johnson, a Minneapolis railway clerk, said, “MacArthur should be made head of the whole shebang—Army, Navy, Air Force.” Emma Weickert, a Miami telephone operator, said, “I even stopped taking milk from Graham’s Dairy and am taking it now from a dairy named ‘MacArthur’s.’ “ An unidentified Topeka insurance man said, “MacArthur is the greatest general since Sergeant York.”70

  For a time there was a thriving MacArthur industry, enriching manufacturers of MacArthur buttons, pennants, and photographs. Castle Films produced a home movie, America’s First Soldier; Frank Waldrop of the Washington Times-Herald edited MacArthur on War, a collection of the General’s speeches; and Hearst’s Bob Considine wrote an adoring biography, MacArthur the Magnificent. But by the fall of 1942 everyone knew that whether he was willing or not, MacArthur might one day return, not to the Philippines, but to the White House. Forrest C. Pogue, George Marshall’s most scholarly biographer, writes that “Washington’s irritation with MacArthur’s political activities, real or imagined, did not lessen the War Department’s admiration for his generalship.” That was not true, however, of the Navy Department. The admirals knew that although the General had told war correspondents that they were free to write anything they pleased about him, Diller censored all criticism from their stories. They were not permitted to find fault with anything—strategy, tactics, morale, food, supplies, or, above all, the theater’s commander in chief.71