American Caesar

by William Manchester

  The navy believed that MacArthur was trying to manage news from his theater, and he was. Diller saw to it that correspondents who took his advice, who advertised the commander in chief with extravagant puffs, were favored with exclusive interviews and tips on what to watch for in future operations. As a consequence, dispatches from “Somewhere in Australia” repeatedly quoted “authoritative military and civilian circles” as saying that the war against Japan would be won much more quickly if men and equipment were diverted from Nimitz and sent to Australia. Most naval officers assumed that the General, like the Minneapolis railway clerk, thought he should be made “head of the whole shebang.” MacArthur, normally voluble on all subjects, had little to say about his political aspirations, even to those around him. To this day, some of them are convinced that he had none. They err. Long before the next presidential primary he was corresponding with Vandenberg, who kept a copy of MacArthur the Magnificent displayed prominently on his Senate desk.72

  If MacArthur’s first wife wanted conspicuous protective escorts, she would have envied him now. On trips to Port Moresby he was accompanied by a fleet of planes—he rode in the lead bomber, with Vs of P-38s arrowing overhead—and in Australia he was always accompanied by a pair of bodyguards with tommy guns swinging from their shoulders. In a nation whose policemen didn’t even carry nightsticks, this inevitably attracted attention, but so did nearly everything else he did. At his direction a striped canvas awning was erected over the entrance to the housekeeping end of Lennon’s Hotel, to identify it for sightseers. His black limousine carried his four stars on the front bumper, and, on the rear bumper, the license plate USA-1. (Jean’s limousine was USA-2.) He wore all his decorations, from the Medal of Honor to his Expert Rifleman’s badge, until the Brisbane Courier-Mail carried a photograph of Eisenhower wearing none; realizing that that was more effective, the General packed his ribbons away. In Moresby soldiers would glimpse him strolling on the porch of his headquarters in a pink silk dressing gown with a black dragon on the back, holding a batch of battle reports in one hand and a head of lettuce, at which he would occasionally gnaw, in the other. As far as they could see, he never noticed them, but naturally he did; a show without spectators is pointless.73

  However, it was a show. If a role didn’t contribute to advancement toward his objectives, he wouldn’t play it. He refused to be lionized by the hostesses of Melbourne, Canberra, and Brisbane. Although the MacArthur’ would occasionally entertain an important guest at Lennon’s, invitations to dine elsewhere were declined. He and his wife attended one reception during their first six months in Australia. They stood near the door for twenty minutes, shaking hands, and then departed. Gifts sent to him were distributed among enlisted men. According to his physician, he took just one drink during the entire war, and he didn’t finish that.74

  But if he thought swashbuckling would strengthen his effectiveness as commander, no ruffle or flourish was too ostentatious. Of Bataan he said on one occasion; “Our flag lies crumpled, its proud pinions spat upon in the gutter; the wrecks of our faithful Filipino wards, 16,000,000 souls, gasp in the slavery of a conquering soldiery devoid of those ideals of chivalry which have dignified many armies. I was the leader of that Lost Cause and from the bottom of a seared and stricken heart, I pray that a merciful God may not delay too long their redemption, that the day of salvation may not be so far removed that they perish, that it be not again too late.” A few weeks later he said of Corregidor: “Intrinsically it is but a barren, war-worn rock, hallowed, as so many places [are], by death and disaster. Yet it symbolizes within itself that priceless, deathless thing, the honor of a nation. Until we lift our flag from its dust, we stand unredeemed before mankind. Until we claim again the ghastly remnants of its last gaunt garrison, we can but stand humble supplicants before Almighty God. There lies our Holy Grail.” These words, like his gestures, his bodyguards, his dressing gown, and his swank, augmented his charisma and were thus means to a victorious end. He avoided cocktail parties which Jean would have enjoyed because they were irrelevant to the defeat of Japan. Also, of course, he refused to waste his presence on a handful of people.75

  His daily routine had scarcely changed since his days as superintendent of West Point. At 7:30 A.M. the three MacArthur’ breakfasted. He spent the next two hours reading newspapers and overnight reports. At 10:00 A.M., when he was sure that his staff would be ready for him, USA-i took him to his office. Invariably he responded to their salutes with a flick of his hand and a rumbled, “Good morning, gentlemen.” Like Joffre in World War I, he refused to have a telephone in his office; the only time he used one was when Sutherland, Kenney, or Vice Admiral Daniel E. Barbey, the commander of the landing craft in his theater, called him with urgent messages during the night at Lennon’s. He had no secretary; he summoned stenographers from the headquarters pool for dictation. Most correspondence was answered in longhand. If he wanted to speak to an officer, he strolled into the man’s office, perched on his desk, and began: “Make a note.” At 2:00 P.M. he rode home for lunch and a nap. Returning at 4:00 P.M., he would remain until 8:00 or 9:00 P.M., receiving visitors and issuing orders. Jean never knew when to expect him for supper, though after a while her anxiety was eased by Huff, who would phone ahead to say that he was on his way.76

  “The General,” Kenney recalls, was “not an easy man to look after.” He quickly became bored with the hotel diet; Lennon’s kitchen, which had catered to sheep ranchers who were in town for a few days, lacked variety. “No more cauliflower!” the General ordered one evening, and, a few days later, “No more brussels sprouts!” This went on until the hotel menu had been depleted. Jean then began shopping at local groceries each morning, and she and Ah Cheu prepared his meals together. Most of the rest of the three-hundred-man staff was crammed into tiny quarters in the hotel, but the MacArthur’ had three adjoining suites on the fourth floor. The dining room was in Jean’s suite. Unless he was in New Guinea, she waited up every evening, no matter how late he was, to eat with him, and even after he had come in she would have to wait a little longer if their son had gone to bed while he looked down silently on the sleeping child.77

  One night after supper he wrote a prayer for Arthur:

  Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid; one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

  Build me a son whose wishes will not take the place of deeds; a son who will know Thee—and that to know himself is the foundation stone of knowledge.

  Lead him, I pray, not in the path of ease and comfort, but under the stress and spur of difficulties and challenge. Here let him learn to stand up in the storm; here let him learn compassion for those who fail.

  Build me a son whose heart will be clear, whose goal will be high; a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men; one who will reach into the future, yet never forget the past.

  And after all these things are his, add, I pray, enough of a sense of humor, so that he may always be serious, yet never take himself too seriously. Give him humility, so that he may always remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, and the weakness of true strength.

  Then I, his father, will dare to whisper, “I have not lived in vain.”78

  MacArthur continued to work seven days a week, but sometimes he would skip his afternoon nap to take Arthur to the Brisbane zoo, or push him in a swing at a nearby public park. Little that happened to the boy escaped his alert eye; one evening he observed that his son’s hair had been cut and predicted that he would catch cold. (Arthur caught cold the next day.) He was indignant—and the Australian government was embarrassed—when, at the climax of a row between two little boys, Girard Forde, the small son of Curtin’s deputy prime minister and minister for the army, slugged MacArthur’s son and knocked him out cold. Since photographs of his parents stood on a little table beside the child’s bed, it may be sa
id that the General was rarely out of Arthur’s sight, but the boy was out of his father’s sight for long periods when MacArthur was in Papua, and it is difficult to say which of them missed the other most. When the General realized that he should spend all of December in New Guinea, he wired his son TERRIBLY SORRY BUT SANTA CLAUS HELD UP IN NEW GUINEA FOR A FEW DAYS—it seems to have occurred to no one that Christmas could be observed in MacArthur’s absence—and Courtney Whitney described the solicitous father keeping a roomful of generals and admirals waiting for a half hour while he wrote the child a long letter, commiserating with him over the loss of a baby tooth which Arthur had sent him from Brisbane. At the same time, Arthur clearly yearned for his father, if only because he knew he would be denied virtually nothing when MacArthur was at Lennon’s.79

  Jean worried about that. From time to time she convinced her husband that he, of all people, should recognize the need for discipline, but he rarely remained convinced long. The boomity-boom problem grew and grew. In the Menzies Hotel MacArthur had been too busy to give the boy anything but token keepsakes—pencils, scissors, paper clips—but now he seemed to be trying to make up for those three lost months on Corregidor, ordering aides to buy every toy in Brisbane. “Look at the boomity-boom my papa gave me!” the delighted child would shout to his playmate, Neil, the son of Lennon’s manager. This was rather hard on Neil, even when Arthur shared his gifts—allowing his friend to run around with a miniature American flag, for example, the emblem of a country neither of them had ever seen. Jean persuaded the General to limit himself to one present a day, except on his son’s birthday, when he could give him one every fifteen minutes until he reached his age.80

  MacArthur smiling down at his wife and son

  Even so, the supply of boomity-booms was periodically exhausted. Carlos Romulo helped when he returned from Washington with a bag of model aircraft. Then MacArthur’s West Point coeval, Robert E. Wood, back in uniform but still nominal head of Sears, Roebuck, stopped at Lennon’s for a few days while on special assignment for the army. He said: “I’m going to send Arthur a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, and he can pick out anything in it that he wants. I’ll see that he gets it.” The General said: “Better be careful. He might want a tractor.” Wood said: “If he does, he’ll get a tractor.” But when the catalogue arrived, the child asked for only a fifty-cent package of ice-cream-soda straws, unavailable in Australia because of wartime shortages. By this time, however, MacArthur had triumphantly told his distressed wife that he had solved the Neil problem; in the future he would get two of everything, so Arthur could give one of them to his chum. Encountering an old navy friend who managed a San Diego wholesale company which retailed toys and sports goods, Sid Huff described the now desperate situation. In Huffs words, his friend told him to “forget it. He would take care of everything. He did. Not long afterward I received two big boxes that were filled with everything from toy airplanes to balloons and boxing gloves. And there were ten of each!”81

  Jean, aghast, told Huff: “We mustn’t let the General know about this. He’ll give them all to Arthur tomorrow morning.” They searched the flat for a place to conceal them, and settled on a closet just outside the room MacArthur used as a home office, on the theory that the closer it was to him, the likelier the possibility that he would overlook it. Eventually he did open the door and peer in, but then he agreed that his wife was entitled to a “secret closet” which was out-of-bounds to him and his son. The principle having been adopted, she later insisted that it be observed in all their subsequent homes. This time the General kept his word, though the boomity-boom birthday custom continued long after Arthur had Outgrown it.82

  Among friends Jean tried to be philosophical about the impact of the war on their son. “If he were older he’d be frightened,” she said, “and if he were younger it might affect him forever.” She said nothing of its impact on herself. Millions of women, separated from their husbands for the duration, would have been happy to change places with her, and she knew it. But she faced trials which they were spared. Toward the end on Corregidor her frantic relatives hadn’t known for nearly a month whether she was alive or dead, and they were still apprehensive. Then there was her unique situation at the hotel. One night when MacArthur was in Port Moresby two very drunk and very brave American sailors brought her a wilted nosegay and told her they craved affection. Her greatest anxieties, however, were over her son. Despite her pretense that danger and hardship had not touched Arthur, they clearly had, and she was determined to diminish his feelings of insecurity by letting him out of her sight as seldom as possible. She left him but once, to christen the Bataan, and she made that absence as short as possible. (Her husband said: “Jeannie, all you have to do is to break a bottle of champagne on the bow and say, ‘I christen thee Bataan and may God bless you.’ That’s enough of a speech. ‘ The shipyard manager handed her a typescript and asked her to read it. She handed it right back and said: “I’m going to say just what the General told me to say,” and she did.) During their years in Lennon’s Arthur was out of Brisbane just one day, when she took him to Coolangatta Beach, about sixty miles south of the city, while the General was in Port Moresby. She had planned to be at the shore overnight, but the boy caught cold again. Besides, she kept thinking that her husband might want to reach her.83

  He told her everything about the war: strategy, codes, estimates of Japanese strength and intentions, his problems with subordinates, his conflicts with Washington. She was a good listener, but she needed a confidant, and she turned to Huff. She phoned him each morning, and eventually he learned to tell, from the tone of her voice, whether the news from the front was good or bad. As their friendship grew, they took a daily two-mile walk to the banks of the Brisbane River and across the Gray Street Bridge. There, far from other ears, she poured out everything to him. His chief memory of these talks would be, not the secrets she revealed, but her abiding respect for her husband. She always spoke of him as “the General” and was completely realistic about him, though not always about herself. Once, leaning over the bridge rail, she said after a long silence: “Y’know, ah realize ah’ve lost mah accent entarly.”84

  She pined for prewar Manila, and periodically she would unpack and repack footlockers against the day of their return. Her yearning was infectious; Arthur began telling both parents that he wanted to be back in the penthouse again, always adding that he hoped “we don’t have to go by PT-boat.” At his age, of course, he had very few memories of the Philippines. The only life he really knew was the one he was leading now, and he appeared to be thriving on it. Mornings were spent in kindergarten or, later, with a gentle tutor, interrupted only for an orange juice from a silver cup which had survived the submarine Swordfish’s last voyage from Corregidor; engraved ARTHUR MACARTHUR FUNSTON / FROM ARTHUR MAC-ARTHUR / 1902, it had been a long-ago present from his grandfather to Frederick Funston’s little boy. Afternoons were spent on a new tricycle, or building tunnels and forts in a sandpile under a jacaranda tree across the street, or playing hide-and-seek with Neil in the long halls and courtrooms of the nearby Supreme Court Building. Sometimes his mother would give him a penny for a weighing machine on the corner, and he would discover that he weighed three stone, six pounds—forty-eight pounds. When his father was in Brisbane he was usually allowed to wait up for him; otherwise he and Old Friend were tucked in early.85

  Jean and Arthur IV

  Arthur IV gets a haircut in Australia

  If Jean hadn’t lost her accent, Arthur had picked one up, a curious blend of her drawl, Ah Cheu’s pidgin, and Australian twang. MacArthur began to notice it when they sang together. Perhaps as a consequence of his morning duets with his father, the four-year-old boy was developing a lively interest in music. At Sunday school, where he was an indifferent scholar in some respects—told that God made everything, he asked, “Why did he make Japs?”—he delighted his teacher with a soprano solo of “Jesus Loves Me.” Returning with his mother from a concert where he had heard “Hom
e on the Range,” he sat down at the flat’s piano and rippled right through it, even adding, said a friend of the family who was there, “a kind of boogie-woogie bass.” Soon he was playing Gilbert and Sullivan pieces by ear. He was an impressionable child. After watching a ballet performance, he told Ah Cheu he wanted to become a ballerina. She made him a costume with danseuse’s pumps. He danced in it for weeks. There were many wartime weddings in Brisbane then, and his mother took him to several. After one, he told his governess that he wanted to become a bride. Out came his amah’s needle again, and when MacArthur returned to Lennon’s that evening, his son greeted him gowned, veiled, and trailing satin. He tossed his father a bouquet of daisies. The General caught it and laughed.86

  Port Moresby is about as far north of Brisbane as Havana is south of Philadelphia, with corresponding differences in climate. Life was more primitive there, but it was also vastly more exotic. Though there was no privacy for most of the officers, who lived in Quonset prefabs, the Supreme Commander’s isolation was almost total. During evenings at Lennon’s, Kenney always felt free to ride up two floors and spend an hour or two chatting with the MacArthur’. In Papua, being a general officer, he was quartered in the same building as his chief; nevertheless, he never approached his door without a summons. In New Guinea it suited the General to cloak himself in mystery.87

  Waited upon by barefoot natives in white, skirtlike ramis decorated with blue stars and red stripes, MacArthur lived like a nineteenth-century pukka sahib in Government House, which he inevitably rechristened “Bataan.” The former residence of Australia’s colonial administrator, the building stood on a little knoll overlooking the coral reef and landlocked harbor of Moresby Bay. Correspondents trying to ingratiate themselves with Diller described the structure as a “hut,” but actually it was a huge, white, rambling bungalow with fine tropical furniture, hardwood floors, wide screened verandas, a corrugated iron roof, and a separate latrine for the General. Native policemen in red-blanket sarongs diverted jeeps and trucks that dared to approach it. The garden, where MacArthur did much of his pacing, seemed to suit him. It was a tropical riot of flame trees, hibiscus, scarlet poinciana, palms, pink frangipani, and flushes of bougainvillea that had crept up among the eaves. Thus surrounded by heady scents, he munched lettuce, studied maps, and plotted offensives which would smash the Japanese on the beaches of Oceania.88