Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  Douglas and his mother moved into Plankinton House in October 1897. They had seven months before the competitive exam in May the following year. The schedule of study was unrelenting. In addition to his own course of reading under his mother’s care, Douglas attended classes at Milwaukee’s West Side High School to brush up on history, mathematics, English, and other topics covered in the exam, while the school’s principal and its most popular history teacher, Miss Gertrude Hull, agreed to tutor the eighteen-year-old on whatever subjects posed the most difficult challenges.19

  Monday through Friday Douglas went through the same grinding routine of walking the two miles to West Side to get there ahead of other students so he was already in class by the time they arrived, then returning home for more reading and study. On the weekends, however, there was time for church (he had been confirmed into the Episcopal Church while he was at West Texas) and for relaxation with his new Milwaukee friends. One was Frank McCutcheon, the assistant desk clerk at the Plankinton, with whom Douglas would sit and talk for hours, mostly about his dreams of a military career and joining the cavalry.20

  Another was far more momentous for the future. The Mitchells, including Senator John L. Mitchell, had been MacArthur friends for decades. The senator had even served with Arthur MacArthur in the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin. Douglas soon struck up an acquaintance with John Mitchell’s son William, as well as his sister. In fact, the sister was the object of Douglas’s first teenage crush, and of the first lines of MacArthur poetry that survive. They are everything one would expect:

  Fair Western girl with life awhirl

  of love and fancy free,

  Tis thee I love

  All things above

  Why wilt thou not love me?

  Even after she read these lines, it seems she never did.21

  Douglas and William Mitchell never became close. Indeed, Douglas must have looked up to the twentysomething William, who was something of a local hero and who in 1898 had already embarked on the military career that Douglas coveted for himself. But after service in the Spanish-American War, William “Billy” Mitchell would choose military aviation as his field. He was destined to become the country’s outspoken, if controversial, prophet of a new strategy for winning wars decisively: airpower. Then in 1928 he would be the subject of the most famous and significant court-martial in American history—one that would nearly doom America’s ability to prepare for World War Two.

  And on the opposite side of the court-martial table would be his old friend from Milwaukee, General Douglas MacArthur.

  —

  As February 1898 dawned and Milwaukee braced itself for one last bout of winter before the spring thaw, Douglas MacArthur and his mother were in the final stages of preparing him for the May competitive exam that would determine which prospective cadet got Congressman Otjen’s nomination for West Point. Then one day the headlines of the Milwaukee papers were filled with news from the Spanish colony of Cuba that would turn the MacArthurs’ lives, and the country, upside down.

  On the night of February 15, a massive explosion ripped through the bowels of the battleship USS Maine as it was moored in Havana Harbor. It had been sent there to reassure American citizens in Cuba, who were caught in the bloody war between the Spanish colonial government and Cuban nationalist guerrillas. Instead, the ship became the watery grave of 260 Americans. To this day no one knows exactly what caused the Maine’s five tons of powder charges to explode, blowing away the entire front third of the battleship.22 A hastily assembled American court of inquiry, however, decided it was a Spanish naval mine, perhaps deliberately set to deter the United States from intervening in the ongoing guerrilla war on the island. Spain’s increasingly brutal counterinsurgent tactics, including confining thousands of Cubans in barbed-wire-lined detention camps, had offended Americans’ sense of fairness and decency. Many reading the sensational articles about Cuba in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Hearst’s New York Journal had wondered aloud what the Monroe Doctrine was for, except to prevent a European imperial power from committing atrocities on a New World nation yearning to be free.

  In March, as the death toll from the Maine disaster grew, the cry went up across America: “Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!” There was a pro-war march through Milwaukee, which Douglas no doubt watched and may even have joined. The calls for retaliation echoed not only in the streets of Milwaukee but in the halls of government and Congress as well. There, America’s leading exponents of the expansionist foreign policy that Arthur MacArthur had prophesied sixteen years earlier had been waiting for an opportunity like this one. They were led by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt as well as Secretary of State John Hay, and two senators from Massachusetts, Albert Beveridge and Henry Cabot Lodge.

  In their minds, it was time for the United States, the world’s fastest-growing industrial power, to seize its rightful place on the world stage. They were more than willing to ride the outcry over the Maine to force a reluctant President McKinley to summon the nation to war—a war they were confident they could win. To this day, many historians, including most of MacArthur’s biographers, have treated the rush to war in 1898 as a form of war hysteria “whipped up by a jingoistic press and fanned into flame by irresponsible politicians.”23

  In fact, motives for going to war were more complicated. They were a buoyant mixture of moral crusade and a belief in Manifest Destiny, weighed down by an additional calculation of Realpolitik. If the United States didn’t use this chance to grab off portions of a moribund Spanish empire in the New World as well as the Pacific, went the reasoning, some other European power, such as Germany, likely would.

  Besides, “have we no mission to perform, no duty to discharge to our fellow-man,” Albert Beveridge proclaimed, unconsciously echoing Arthur MacArthur’s words of a decade and a half earlier. “Shall America continue its march toward commercial supremacy over the world? Shall free institutions broaden their reign as the children of liberty wax in strength, until the empire of our principles shall be established over the hearts of all mankind?”24

  Despite the wave of moral fervor in the media and in influential circles, it took almost two months for war to be declared. When it came, on April 20, Arthur MacArthur immediately got in touch with his friend Major General Henry Clark Corbin, the army’s adjutant general, to ask for a combat command—his first since the Civil War twenty-seven years before. He knew that an army that had barely numbered 30,000 troops when the Maine was sunk would now have 125,000 volunteers to train and equip, a number that would swell to a quarter million the next year. The army was going to need every experienced field commander it could muster, and MacArthur was determined to be at the head of the line.

  Corbin gave him what he wanted. Colonel Arthur MacArthur was ordered to report to Camp Thomas at Chickamauga, Georgia—ironically, the scene of the old Twenty-fourth Wisconsin’s bloodiest fight—to assemble and train a brigade of volunteers as part of III Corps’ invasion of Cuba while taking the rank of brigadier general.25

  But then events on the other side of the world intervened. The first shots in the war with Spain were fired not in Cuba but across the Pacific, in the old Spanish colony of the Philippines. Theodore Roosevelt’s plan for mobilizing the navy for war had included dispatching the U.S. Asiatic Fleet under Admiral George Dewey to Manila to attack the Spanish fleet there. On May 1, Dewey’s fleet struck with devastating and decisive force, sinking all but one of Spain’s older, undergunned warships. Total U.S. casualties came to nine wounded and one dead, from heatstroke.26

  In the course of a single day, the way had opened for an American incursion into another Spanish colony, the Philippines. As it happened, like Cuba, the islands were home to another anti-Spanish insurgency. This one was led by a twenty-seven-year-old former provincial mayor named Emilio Aguinaldo, who had been in exile in Hong Kong when he learned the news of Dewey’s stunning victory. Aguinaldo immediately set out to return home, where he soon upset
all of America’s plans for the Philippines.

  Meanwhile, III Corps had set sail for Cuba in June. MacArthur, however, was not with them. Instead, he had been assigned to San Francisco to take command of the First Brigade, First Division, under the overall command of General Wesley Merritt, as they embarked for the Philippines on August 4. He was not the only MacArthur caught up in the war. The newly minted brigadier general had learned that his son Arthur was on his way to Cuba as part of the naval expedition that would eventually sink another Spanish fleet at Santiago, on July 3.27

  But that was not all. General MacArthur had also received a letter from his wife informing him, to his pride and delight, that their other son, Douglas, was on his way to West Point.

  —

  Douglas was making final preparations for the all-important West Point exam when war broke out in April. Still, he and his friend Frank McCutcheon thought seriously of volunteering to join the fight. But in the end he did not dare. He and his mother and father had invested too much in passing the exam in May, and so he was forced to follow the course of the war in the newspapers until he finished the final round of study, closed the last book, and waited for the exam the next day at Milwaukee’s city hall.

  Sleep was impossible that night. The expectations of the entire MacArthur family—father, mother, older brother, the memory of his grandfather—seemed to weigh him down as he tossed and turned in bed. The next day, on the way to the city hall, he felt tired, haggard, and half defeated. He was also deeply nauseous, he writes in his memoirs, a nervous reaction that would haunt him in later moments of stress and indecision as well.

  It was his mother, he remembered, who turned him around. “Doug,” she said, tugging on his sleeve, “you’ll win if you don’t lose your nerve. You must believe in yourself, my son, or no one else will believe in you.”

  Her final words of advice before he entered the exam room were, “Be self-confident, self-reliant, and even if you don’t make it”—Douglas must have drawn a sharp breath as she said it—“you will know you have done your best. Now, go to it.”28

  He did. When he left the examination room, he had scored 93.3 out of a possible 100—16 points ahead of the next applicant. When the results were announced in June, Douglas had won the congressional appointment.

  “It was a lesson I never forgot,” he wrote. “Preparedness is the key to success and victory.” It also taught him that whatever his doubts and insecurities, and however distant his father seemed in both emotional and physical terms, his mother would be his pillar and rock, the one who would stand by him no matter what—and would believe in him when others did not.

  It’s no wonder then that when he finally stepped off the coach of the West Shore Railroad at the stop for West Point, New York, in early June 1899, and saw the cold gray granite buildings of the U.S. Military Academy for the first time, his mother was with him—and that she would be with him every single day for the next two years at the academy.29

  —

  She did not, of course, live on the grounds of the academy or in the dorm where Cadet Douglas MacArthur was housed. She took a room at the West Point Hotel, a broken-down boardinghouse on the northern edge of the West Point Plain. Pinky did not mind the shoddy rooms or the dirty facilities. She would be only a couple of hundred yards away from her son as he embarked on what was so far the greatest adventure of his life.

  Physically he was more than prepared for what was coming. He was now nineteen years and four months old. His slight spinal curvature had been cured. He stood five feet ten inches tall and weighed 133 pounds. His physical report the day he registered pronounced him “Normal.”30 A member of his class, Cadet Hugh Johnson (later head of the National Recovery Administration under Franklin Roosevelt), called him “the handsomest young man I have ever seen.”31

  Mentally and spiritually, though, there were serious challenges ahead.

  One was that West Point was a closed world in more ways than one. A member of the cadet corps was allowed off the post exactly twice a year—once for the Army-Navy game and once for summer furlough at the end of the term year. Christmas never interrupted the regular routine of the Corps, let alone Thanksgiving.32 A cadet who left sight of the Academy buildings was not allowed to dismount until he returned. He was not even allowed to handle money. Winston Churchill, who served with the Fourth Hussars cavalry regiment (no slouch in discipline), noted that West Point cadets were “cloistered almost to a monastic degree.” Hence the academy’s nickname—“Monastery on the Hudson.”

  A new cadet was also plunged into a world with its own language—a demerit was a “quill,” because long ago a goose feather quill had been used to record them; a reprimand that required walking post was a “slug”; milk in the mess hall was “cow” and cream was “calf”; a plebe assigned to carve meat for upperclassmen was a “gunner.” First-year cadets like MacArthur were “plebes,” sophomores were “yearlings,” and juniors were “second classmen.” A senior was a “first classmen,” and his female date a “drag,” and roommates at the academy were “wives.”

  The physical conditions in which plebes lived were grim. Not much had changed since the institution had opened almost one hundred years before.33 The plumbing and standard of sanitation was ancient; the food was meant to sustain, not satisfy; and lights-out at night was at ten o’clock. But the real test, starting in July and August in what was known as “Beast Barracks,” was the hazing.

  It was an ancient ritual, harking back to militaristic societies like the Spartans and revered by every cadet who experienced it and survived to mete it out to others. Those living outside “the Monastery on the Hudson” saw it as brutal bullying, pure and simple. Cadets, alumni, and even professors understood it to be a necessary ritual for shaping a common esprit de corps—and weeding out the unsuitable.

  By the time Douglas arrived, however, the hazing rituals had reached new levels of absurdity, even lethality—and he would become a principal target.

  By West Point standards, it was easy to see why. Having his mother on hand did not help. The grandson of another army legend, U. S. Grant, was a member of the same West Point class and his mother, too, kept rooms at the West Point Hotel. Word quickly spread that both were “mama’s boys,” which brought the same malignant attention to Ulysses III from other cadets that Douglas had to endure.

  But Douglas’s problems also stemmed from his father. That summer Arthur MacArthur was fast becoming an army legend, not just for his Civil War exploits—Southern upperclassmen enjoyed making plebe MacArthur recite every detail of his father’s campaigns—but for his growing success in the fighting in the Philippines.

  CHAPTER 3

  GLORY DAYS

  The planting of liberty—not money—is what we seek. The human race has propagated its highest ideals in a succession of waves, and now its waves are passing beyond the Pacific.

  —ARTHUR MACARTHUR, 1899

  As Arthur MacArthur and the five transports carrying the men of his First Brigade steamed into Manila Harbor on the morning of July 31, 1898, a strange sight greeted them. It was a long and dismal row of smokestacks sticking up from the water outside Cavite, the old Spanish naval base. It was all that remained of the Spanish fleet Admiral Dewey had sent to the bottom of the harbor on May 1, in the stunning victory that had left the Philippines open to the Americans—along with everyone else.

  As the transports approached Manila, MacArthur and his men realized the Americans were far from alone. Fifty warships of four other nations—Britain, France, Germany, and Russia—filled the harbor, a veritable forest of masts and smokestacks, while Admiral Dewey’s flagship Olympia and the other vessels of the American fleet watched them warily.1

  For MacArthur the message was clear. If the Americans failed to fill the vacuum left by the defeat of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines, others would fill it for them. Admiral George Dewey, meanwhile, had other problems on his mind. Following his smashing victory at Manila Bay, he had arranged for th
e young leader of the Filipino rebels, Aguinaldo, to leave his exile in Hong Kong and come to Manila. They had met on May 19, and to this day no one can agree on what they said to each other. Aguinaldo would later insist that Dewey supported his nation’s claim for independence. Dewey would insist just as strongly he had said nothing of the sort.2 In his mind his task was still to defeat the Spanish; what happened to the country afterward was none of his business, including its possible independence.

  There was a huge problem, however. Although Dewey had told MacArthur and General Merritt, the overall commander, to “take no notice of the insurgents” as the Americans prepared to take Manila, the insurgents now controlled virtually all of the Philippines except Manila. In fact, on June 12—the very day MacArthur had left for San Francisco to join his command—Aguinaldo stole a march on Dewey and everyone else by formally declaring his country’s independence.

  Indeed, forces were unfolding in the Philippines that first MacArthur and then, more than thirty years later, his son would try to cajole, nudge, and bring into the American camp. It would be the same problem that would bedevil American policymakers in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: how to unlock a people’s desire to be free by force without having them turn back on their liberators.

  The Filipino rebels were at first welcoming of their American liberators. The 15,000 men in the Spanish garrison in Manila were far more willing to surrender to the Americans than to the Filipinos, who could be expected to seek revenge for Spanish atrocities during the years of insurgency. After some light resistance, American troops entered Manila to accept the Spanish commander’s surrender on August 13, 1898. MacArthur and his men breathed a sigh of relief. The streets of the old city, known as the Intramuros, wound themselves into a labyrinth of alleys and passages, many of which were so narrow that a man had to hug the stone walls to let another person pass. If the Spaniards had decided to fight house to house there, it could have taken days, even weeks, to winkle them out. The result would have been massive American casualties—as his son Douglas would discover almost half a century later.3