American Caesar

by William Manchester

  Jean, who was serving as her husband’s deputy, graciously extended his regrets at being unable to tear himself away from Port Moresby. Still, his absence was conspicuous, and much remarked upon. It did not help when, at a luncheon, an Australian diplomat’s wife undiplomatically blurted out, “Isn’t it grand? I hear that General MacArthur is going to run for President of the United States.” Jean later told Colonel Earl H. “Red” Blaik that she “actually trembled,” but that “Mrs. Roosevelt, an experienced trooper, never said a word and continued the conversation as though she had not heard the remark.” Had MacArthur been there, he could have shielded his wife from such embarrassment. In later life he said lamely: “I was at the front, and detached General Eichelberger in Australia to attend Mrs. Roosevelt. She wished to come to New Guinea, but I thought it too dangerous. We were old friends and she took my refusal in good part.” That was applesauce. By then Moresby was no more dangerous than Brisbane. The likeliest explanation—indeed, the only one which makes sense—is that the General did not wish to be photographed with her because there was an excellent chance that next year his name might be on the ballot with her husband’s.161

  Georges Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger, a French general of the 1880s who aspired to political power, always appeared in public astride a magnificent stallion. Although he never realized his ambitions, he left the expression “man on horseback” to describe an officer who wishes to seize control of a civil government. Since MacArthur never dreamed of circumventing the electoral process, applying the phrase to him would be both unfair and inaccurate, but like Boulanger he was a popular hero, with a solid record of military achievement, who wanted to lead his nation. Like the Frenchman he was also a poor politician. It should be added that he was unlucky in his supporters. The wrong people backed him, for the wrong reasons.

  There was nothing wrong with Vandenberg, his first champion. In those days the senator was a great figure on Capitol Hill, a genuine conservative who, until the war, had been a presidential contender in his own right. Before Pearl Harbor he had been a vehement isolationist, however, and he knew he could never beat Roosevelt. So he was on the lookout for someone who could. He had begun to give serious consideration to the General as a GOP standard-bearer when a New York Republican congressman, Hamilton Fish, denounced a War Department rule forbidding army officers to run for public office. Vandenberg told a reporter he believed the regulation was meant to keep MacArthur “out of the next presidential campaign.” It was one of those little digs opposition leaders take” at an administration. He hadn’t given the matter much thought, and had nearly forgotten it when he received a letter from the General saying, “I am most grateful to you for your complete attitude of friendship. I only hope I can some day reciprocate. There is much more that I would like to say to you which circumstances prevent. “ He added, significantly: “In the meantime I want you to know the absolute confidence I would feel in your experienced and wise mentorship.”162

  In short, Barkis was willing. The senator recognized the symptoms of Potomac fever, and he set to work. In June 1943 he dined with Willoughby, who was in Washington to confer with the Pentagon, and Willoughby put him in touch with Sutherland, Lehrbas, and two new members of the Moresby staff, Lieutenant Colonel Philip LaFollette, of the Wisconsin political family, and Colonel Courtney Whitney, who had been a Manila lawyer in the late 1930s. The senator wrote an article for Collier’s, “Why I Am for MacArthur,” and lined up a phalanx of GOP leaders who appreciated the General’s political potential—Robert Wood, John D. M. Hamilton, Kyle Palmer, Roy Howard, Joseph N. Pew, Jr., Frank Gannett, William Randolph Hearst, Bertie McCormick, and Cissie and Joseph M. Patterson. Representative Fish was recruiting fellow congressmen. The General’s most obvious constituency was among prewar neutralists in the farm belt who detested Europe, particularly Britain, and regarded the Japanese as more dangerous than the Germans. They had been ardent members of Wood’s America First movement and were impressed by his advocacy of the MacArthur candidacy. As Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., have perceptively observed, “Among oceans, the Pacific has always been the favorite of American isolationists: this is true partly for the simple reason that the Pacific is not the Atlantic. . . . The Pacific has become in this century the Republican ocean; the Atlantic, the Democratic ocean.”163

  On June 13, 1943, Eichelberger wrote in his diary, “My Chief talked of the Republican nomination—I can see that he expects to get it and I sort of think so too.” Meanwhile, in Washington, Admiral Leahy was noting worriedly that “if General MacArthur should get the nomination he would be a very dangerous antagonist for anybody, including Roosevelt.” Yet though it was still a small bandwagon, a lot of people were trying to crowd upon it, and some of them were peculiar. As Arthur Krock was telling readers of the New York Times, an endorsement by McCormick’s Chicago Tribune was a liability outside Illinois. Ernest K. Lindley wrote in Newsweek that “MacArthur has become the rallying point for extreme reactionary and isolationist or supernationalist leaders in the Republican party,” and John McCarten observed in the American Mercury that “it may not be his fault but it is surely his misfortune that the worst elements on the political Right, including its most blatant lunatic fringe, are whooping it up for MacArthur.”164

  Of course, as Time pointed out, there was also a lunatic fringe of the Left. Its spokesmen were attacking the General as a “fascist” and a “tool of extremist ultra-racist bitter-enders,” who was somehow linked with sweatshops, child labor, Franco, and the German-American Bund. Many members of the intellectual community saw him as a genuine threat. The Mercury article precipitated a storm. Eichelberger wrote Miss Em that the General said he had “never read such lies and misstatements,” that he regarded it “as a type of cross” which was “necessary for him to bear.” Then Vandenberg discovered that some ill-advised bureaucrat in the army’s library service had recommended the McCarten piece for reading by the troops. The senator excoriated the War Department for endorsing a “smear” of one of its greatest leaders, and MacArthur himself demanded that the magazine be withheld from soldiers. Thereupon the Pentagon swung to the other extreme, and a thoughtful analysis of the MacArthur candidacy in Harper’s magazine by Walter Lucas of the London Daily Express was suppressed by the army’s library service on the grounds of “security.”165

  Roosevelt watched all this with his usual ironical detachment. Those around him reported that every bookstore had its little altar of worshipful MacArthur biographies, that the ban on politicking by officers was unpopular—FDR instantly lifted it—and that the pollsters were finding that the voters were now of two minds about MacArthur; in Elmo Roper’s words, “Most people admired him as a great General, but only a small segment had faith in his abilities as a civilian leader.” Since these were the President’s own conclusions, he was gratified. Besides, he told an assistant, he no longer considered MacArthur dangerous to the country. Still, he could scarcely ignore him. If the General won the nomination, he predicted, he would run on a Pacific-first platform. Therefore Roosevelt instructed his naval aide to make several copies of a MacArthur report, submitted a few days before the outbreak of war, in which the General reaffirmed his conviction that he could hold the Philippines in the event of a Japanese attack, adding that his appraisal was based on the “inability of our enemy to launch his air attacks on our islands.”166

  Since such ammunition was being stockpiled by both sides, a Roosevelt-MacArthur campaign would have been rough and probably dirty. But the President felt sure that it wouldn’t come to that. Sitting in his wheelchair, he read the minds of his visitors with his usual precision. George Kenney arrived, hoping for some indication of the direction in which the prevailing political winds were blowing. Instead, FDR, knowing of the airman’s loyalty to the General, gave him a lecture on the geography of the Pacific—Kenney found it to be astonishingly accurate—and then inquired about MacArthur’s health. The flier noted: “He certainly seemed to admire what the Gene
ral was doing and said so emphatically several times during the conversation.” More presidential stroking of MacArthur followed, in a White House order to increase supply shipments to the Southwest Pacific, and still more when Curtin came calling. The Australian prime minister said, “Mr. President, certainly it’s none of my business and probably I shouldn’t say this, but I can assure you in utter honesty . . . that General MacArthur has no more idea of running against you for the Presidency than I have. He has told me that a dozen times.” FDR whirled around, scattering papers as he cried, “Steve! Steve!” Steve Early hurried in, and the President asked Curtin to repeat what he had just said. Back in Australia, the prime minister told MacArthur, “I’m sure that every night when he turned in, the President had been looking under the bed to make dead sure you weren’t there.”167

  The General was pleased, as Roosevelt meant him to be. He never dreamed that he was being manipulated through Curtin, Kenney, and the speedup in Australia-bound cargoes. But even a man less conceited than MacArthur would have been flattered. Here was a busy wartime President anxious about the General’s well-being, determined to provide him with the equipment he needed, and inexpressibly relieved to hear that the General wasn’t after his job. Of course, FDR never believed for a moment that MacArthur didn’t crave the presidency. But he knew nothing would be lost in assuaging his pride while waiting for him, or more likely one of his backers, to stumble and blunder.168

  Vandenberg had advised MacArthur that his wisest course would be to take a let’s-get-on-with-the-war stance. He was doing just that, with considerable success. Curtin really believed he wasn’t interested in the White House. So did Kenney, after one evening in early 1944 at Lennon’s. The airman said he wanted to ride down Tokyo’s main street with the General one day, “instead of wondering what had happened to the man who lost to Roosevelt in 1944,” and MacArthur replied with a smile, “Don’t worry. I have no desire to get mixed up in politics. The first mission that I want to carry out is to liberate the Philippines and fulfill America’s pledge to that people.” Frazier “Spike” Hunt, the correspondent who was closest to him, was convinced that talk of ascending to the presidency was “unsolicited” and “embarrassing” to him. Even his intermediaries with Vandenberg later tried to persuade others, and perhaps themselves, that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding. Whitney wrote that his chief “never took” his cause “seriously,” and Willoughby said that the General cared only about “the soldier’s profession.”169

  In his Reminiscences MacArthur himself merely notes that “about this time I became aware that my name was being bandied about in the United States as a possible candidate for President.” He was franker with Eichelberger, who wrote afterward that “he talked to me a number of times about the Presidency, but would usually confine his desires by saying that if it were not for his hatred, or rather the extent to which he despised FDR, he would not want it.” There are other clues to his real attitude at the time. Raymond Clapper interviewed him and cabled home that the General would accept the GOP nomination if it were offered to him; MacArthur issued no denial. Later, Turner Catledge of the New York Times “detected some jealousy of Roosevelt” in him. The General was carrying on a lively correspondence with every public figure boosting him, and even with small-town Republican clubs. Then there was the strange fate of Dr. Egeberg’s predecessor, Dr. Morhouse. As Sid Huff tells it, “Major Morhouse went back to the United States to see his sick mother. . . . Asked by a newspaperman if MacArthur desired to go to the White House, he answered to this effect, ‘No, he is a soldier and desires to march on to Tokyo.’ Although Morhouse is a grand chap and had been with MacArthur since Corregidor, he was summarily bundled out of that office and connection with MacArthur was severed.” Huff concluded that the presidential “idea wasn’t unpleasant to MacArthur,” and presently he had fresh evidence of it. It was a very small matter. Huff had to take a quick trip home to the States. “While you’re there,” the General said, “keep your ear to the ground.” The aide assumed he meant the presidential boom. On his return he told the General, “One of the things people asked me was this: ‘Why does MacArthur carry that cane around all the time? Is he feeble?’ “ Later Huff observed, “Maybe it was a better job of reporting than I thought then, because the General never carried the stick again.”170

  If he swaggered a little less without it, he retained his other dramatic paraphernalia, particularly his corncob pipes, which grew larger and larger, and his sunglasses, which made him look enigmatic and dashing. Newspaper photographers were encouraged to take his picture; the larger a paper’s circulation, the more amenable he became. Diller and Lehrbas, a former newspaperman, became two of the busiest officers on his staff, setting up press conferences, arranging interviews, and—most controversially—censoring correspondents’ dispatches even more heavily than before. Reporters were encouraged to rely on MacArthur’s communiques, which, as the presidential primaries approached in the United States, became as lush as the New Guinea jungle. Some of them deeply offended the Australians, who noticed that whenever GIs were doing the fighting, the troops were identified as “American,” but when they were diggers they merely became “Allied.” The ripest passages were the subject of much mirth among marines, who composed a parody of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” which began:

  Mine eyes have seen MacArthur with a Bible on his knee,

  He is pounding out communiques for guys like you and me

  And ended:

  And while possibly a rumor now,

  Some day ‘twill be a fact

  That the Lord will hear a deep voice say,

  “Move over, God, it’s Mac.”171

  One day the General told Eichelberger that he couldn’t understand why Eisenhower’s subordinate generals were pictured on the covers of Time and Life, while his own field commanders never were. Eichelberger wrote his wife, “this makes me laugh.” There was, of course, no reason why he and Krueger shouldn’t have been as famous as Bradley and Patton, or why Australia’s Blarney couldn’t have been as familiar to American readers as Britain’s Montgomery. But MacArthur’s communiques, with few exceptions, were all about MacArthur. In a shrewd letter to Miss Em, Eichelberger explained that the General “not only wants to be a great theater commander but he also wants to be known as a great front-line fighting leader. This would be very difficult to put over if any of his particular leaders were publicized.” Thus, he continued, “he leaves the impression with the people back home that he has been the one who has been doing the frontline fighting. This does not mean that he does not appreciate what I have done or that he does not give me a lot of mental credit. He just wants it all for himself. Unless one understands this dual feeling on his part of wanting to be a great strategic . . . and also a frontline leader it will be impossible for anyone to understand the setup here.”172

  “They’re afraid of me, Bob,” MacArthur said to Eichelberger, “because they know I will fight them in the newspapers.” By “they” he meant that mysterious coalition of enemies who, as he saw it, had long been scheming to stab him in the back. Now the plotters had been joined by Thomas E. Dewey, Wendell L. Willkie, and Harold E. Stassen, his principal rivals for the GOP nomination. He believed he was more than their match because he thought of himself as a wizard at managing news. This conviction was largely based on his performance as the army’s popular public-relations man on the eve of World War I. But that had been a wholly different situation. Then he had been selling the draft act to Washington correspondents who wanted to believe in it. Now he was selling himself to war correspondents who resented the heavy-handed tactics of Diller and Lehrbas.173

  Even MacArthur’s admirers were troubled by the censorship. The two aides “adored MacArthur almost to the point of idolatry,” Kenney wrote. “To them unless a news release painted the General with a halo and seated him on the highest pedestal in the universe, it should be killed. No news except favorable news, reflecting complete credit on an infallible Ma
cArthur, had much chance of getting by. . . . They didn’t trust the newspapermen to interpret MacArthur properly.” Eichelberger said he “never understood the public relations policy that either he or his immediate assistants established.” Barbey observed that “there was no place in the Southwest Pacific for two glamorous officers,” that the press was told to concentrate on the commander in chief, to the exclusion of everyone else. Once, when the General made the extraordinary complaint that Roosevelt was acting “as if he were directing head of the Army and Navy,” Halsey commented that MacArthur seemed to be suffering from “illusions [sic] of grandeur,” a flaw which in the admiral’s opinion explained his unhappy relationship with most members of the press.174

  Of course, the attempt to manipulate the reporters didn’t work. “As a general thing,” Kenney notes, “MacArthur’s publicity has not been good,” and Egeberg observes that “MacArthur was a man with a relatively poor press.” The correspondents and their editors refused to be flimflammed; the people sensed the attempt to hoodwink them. It was one thing for the General to rule the Southwest Pacific with an iron will—to the immense good fortune of his country’s cause and the soldiers whose lives he saved by his great skill—but it was something else to inveigle voters. His pretense that the MacArthur-for-President movement was entirely the work of other people, that he wasn’t interested in leaving his command, was bound to be exposed eventually. As James MacGregor Burns has pointed out, everything depended on his supporters’ “retaining control of their boom for the General, keeping his name out of the presidential primaries, and timing developments so that he would be summoned to higher duty by the Republican convention.” This was spoiled by an ad hoc group of amateur MacArthur enthusiasts in Illinois, led by a prominent Chicago attorney who entered his name in the state’s presidential preference primary. Wood, very upset, sent him a certificate, requiring his signature, which would have withdrawn his name. But MacArthur was confident of his popularity among his countrymen. He wouldn’t sign it. So everyone knew that his hat was in the ring, with his approval.175