He had hoped to be appointed chief of staff, but in January 1907 the post went instead to J. Franklin Bell, the youngest major general in the army. MacArthur, the most senior lieutenant general in the army, bitterly protested being passed over for its youngest major general. President Roosevelt explained that they needed a man who would serve out the full four-year term as chief of staff, not one slated to retire in two years.
MacArthur was furious. He refused to accept the other commands they offered, including the Department of the East, headquartered in New York City, as unbefitting an officer of his rank. In the end, he angrily proposed that they send him home to Milwaukee on “detached duty” until retirement finally came in June 1909.2
“I’m glad to be back home,” he told a newspaper reporter.3 He had continued to read voraciously, had led long discussions on military history, economics, and geopolitics with Douglas, and had started work on his memoirs as he relived the campaigns that had made him a state and national hero, the greatest soldier Wisconsin had ever produced.
But the bitterness of personal defeat was written on his face, and it began to rack his body. That August his doctors had even put him to bed and advised him not to go to the fiftieth celebration on one of the hottest days of the year. But Arthur MacArthur was determined to meet his old comrades and speak to them one last time.
It was approaching ten o’clock before MacArthur was finally introduced by an old friend who had been with him in the famous charge up Missionary Ridge, former captain Ed Parsons. His fellow soldiers were now white-haired and bent with age, but they stood and cheered for six to seven minutes before he could begin to speak.
“Comrades,” he began, “little did we imagine fifty years ago, that [we would ever] gather in this way. Little did we think that on that march to Atlanta so many of us would be spared to see Wisconsin again.”4
He spoke of the joys and misery of those days, one participant recalled, and the valor they had all shown in the midst of the country’s bloodiest conflict.
“Your indomitable regiment…”
Then Arthur MacArthur froze. He staggered slightly and grew pale.
“Comrades,” he gasped, “I cannot go on. I am too weak. I must sit down.”
There was a hushed gasp as he suddenly clutched at his heart, slumped in his chair, and closed his eyes. Then his head fell forward and every man in the room rushed to the podium.
Already his face “had assumed the pallor of death,” one eyewitness said, “and he lay back in his chair breathing easily.” They moved him to a couch, where two veterans who were also doctors tended to their old commanding officer.
Suddenly one of them grasped the general’s wrist, laid his head on the man’s breast, and then straightened up.
“Comrades,” he said in a soft voice, “our commander has gone to his last rest.” It had been a sudden aneurysm at the base of the brain. Death was almost instantaneous.
Heartbroken and with heads bowed, the surviving veterans of the Twenty-fourth began reciting the Lord’s Prayer, led by one old soldier who could barely speak through his sobs. Another took up the flag they had brought with them from the state capitol, the same torn and begrimed flag that MacArthur had carried up Missionary Ridge, and draped it over his body.
Others gathered around Ed Parsons, who was devastated by the death of his old friend.
“We’ve been so long together,” he kept saying in between bursts of tears. Then suddenly he grasped at his head and slumped to the floor. Dr. Cronyn sprang to the side of his second patient in as many minutes. Ed Parsons had suffered a massive stroke (he later recovered). Some carried him out of the room, while others gathered around the body of their fallen commander and continued to pray.5
So it was not Parsons but another old friend, Charlie King, who had to break the news to Pinky. Dr. Cronyn had called her at the Marshall Street house but could not bring himself to tell her that her husband was dead. He told her only that he had taken seriously ill. So King and two others who had attended the reunion walked to Marshall Street, where they found Pinky waiting on the steps.
“Is the general dead?” It was the first thing she said.
They sadly answered, “Yes.” She went back into the house and was barely able to speak for the next four days.6
—
But she did have the strength to send the news to Douglas by telegram out at Leavenworth.
“My whole world changed that night,” Douglas remembered. “Never have I been able to heal the wound in my heart.”7
The man he revered as a hero and role model was gone. Indeed, for two weeks after his father’s death Douglas suffered a prolonged bout of insomnia serious enough to alarm the doctors at Leavenworth. But even worse, the man whom his mother had relied on for emotional and financial support was gone, leaving her without the most important person in her life. For some sons, the loss of a larger-than-life, overbearing father might be liberating. Instead, it thrust Douglas deeper into emotional dependence on his mother, whose health began to deteriorate almost the same day her husband died. After the funeral (flags across Milwaukee flew at half-mast for four days, while tributes from soldiers, politicians, and foreign dignitaries poured in with every post), Douglas had to make arrangements for his mother’s future. Despite the fact that her older son’s wife and young family would have been happy to take her in, Pinky chose to rely on Douglas.8
Taking her to Leavenworth was out of the question. Instead, he began seeking a post in the nation’s capital, since “Washington, on account of its proximity to Johns Hopkins Hospital, would offer more of advantage to Mrs. MacArthur than any other possible station,” he told his commanding officer.9 Of course, a posting to Washington wouldn’t hurt his own career chances either.
It was another old friend of his father, General Leonard Wood, who came through this time. He caught a glimpse of Douglas’s application for a transfer and passed it along to the new secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, who, “in view of the distinguished service of General Arthur MacArthur,” agreed to the transfer in the office of General Wood on the Engineering Board.10
He left Leavenworth in December 1912. He was embarking on what would be the next dramatic phase of his life, but without his father as teacher and mentor. He did have his mother’s advice and unshakable support, as well as help from his father’s protégés, like Bell and Wood. In normal times that would have been more than enough for an ambitious and gifted young officer.
But these were not normal times. Their world, and his, was about to explode in the greatest conflagration in history.
—
The Douglas MacArthur who appeared in Washington in 1913 was a slim and handsome bachelor of thirty-two years of age, the sort of elegant young man one would expect to meet in an ad for Arrow shirts of the day.
His was certainly an existence anyone could have envied, in or out of the army. He lived in a fashionable apartment building in Northwest Washington, the Hadleigh, with his ever-present mother. A black chauffeur drove him daily from Sixteenth Street to his equally enviable office job, first as aide to the popular and powerful General Wood, then starting in April 1913 as superintendent of the State, War, and Navy Building, which still stands on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue and is known as the Old Executive Office Building.
Besides his mother, his brother Arthur and his family had moved to Washington as well. In addition, Douglas was surrounded by senior officers who were his father’s friends, including Wood, an army hero like his father who had helped capture Geronimo and who as commander in chief in Cuba supervised Captain Walter Reed’s work to find a vaccine for yellow fever—and who, it seems, singled out Captain MacArthur as his favorite aide.
Even more important, the relationship with Wood brought him permanently onto the General Staff—the brains of the army—that September. He was the junior member of a staff of thirty-eight engaged in key strategic and operational planning; he was able to learn how important decisions wer
e made in the army without yet assuming that responsibility himself. Douglas felt so comfortably ensconced that he turned down an offer from the new Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, to become a presidential aide.
“The work was long and confining” at the General Staff, he wrote many years later, “and left me little time for relaxation, but it was rewarding.” It was also preparing his way for a brilliant staff career.11
But there were still two things missing. One was the experience he had had at Leavenworth for too short a time: that of true leadership and command, even if it was only one company at a time. The other was something his father had known and lived for, but he still did not: the experience of battle.
Then out of nowhere the following spring, he got it, in Mexico.
—
On April 9, 1914, a detachment of sailors from the gunboat USS Dolphin went ashore at the Mexican port of Tampico to pick up a delivery of oil for their engines. It was no ordinary visit.
Mexico was in the throes of a civil war pitting followers of a monocled Mexican general named Huerta against the followers of Mexico’s previous president, Madero, who were besieging Huerta’s troops in Tampico. The soldiers on guard in Tampico were justifiably jumpy. When the American sailors arrived, wearing unfamiliar uniforms and unable to speak a word of Spanish, they were immediately arrested and taken down to division headquarters.
The next morning the Mexican soldiers turned them loose with an apology from General Huerta himself, but the commander of American naval forces in the region, Admiral Henry Mayo, was outraged. He demanded nothing less than a twenty-one-gun salute to the American flag to compensate for the arrests, and he let President Wilson know what he was doing.12
Wilson, as it happened, detested General Huerta. Huerta was a shameless freebooter who had assassinated his way into the Mexican presidency and shattered the country’s fragile democracy. When Huerta, who detested Wilson with equal venom, refused Mayo’s terms, Wilson decided it was time to act.
On April 20 he held a meeting with his top advisors and ordered Arthur MacArthur’s former protégé Frederick Funston, now Major General Funston, down to Galveston, Texas. His orders were nothing less than to prepare an invasion of Mexico. The next day news reached Wilson that Huerta was receiving a massive shipment of arms from imperial Germany at the port of Veracruz—a blatant violation of the arms embargo against Mexico that Wilson had imposed two years earlier.
That was the last straw. Without waiting for Congress, Wilson ordered an immediate dispatch of navy ships and marines to take Veracruz. After a fierce battle that cost 500 casualties on both sides, the marines took the city as ordered. On April 30 Funston and his brigade of 7,000 soldiers arrived to occupy and hold Veracruz against Huerta’s men.13
The next day a tall, spare figure in a battered campaign hat with two gold bars on his collar and a corncob pipe clenched between his teeth could be seen walking through the debris-strewn streets of Veracruz, dodging the stray dogs and vultures feasting on the dead animals and offal.
He was Captain Douglas MacArthur, in Mexico on personal orders from General Wood himself.
Just a week earlier he had been flat on his back recovering from acute tonsillitis when a message arrived at the Hadleigh from General Wood, to get down to the office at once. With his mother’s help he had gotten dressed and headed to the War Department building, where he found Wood surrounded by stacks of paper and fresh from a meeting with Secretary of War Lindley Garrison.
Wood told him the president had ordered him to prepare and lead an expeditionary force into Mexico. He had intended to put MacArthur on his staff, but had decided instead to send his young aide out to Veracruz first under Wood’s personal orders, to make an assessment of the situation.
“How soon can you leave?” Wood wanted to know.
“I can be off in an hour,” MacArthur replied.14
Less than twelve hours later he was on board the battleship Nebraska sailing from New York, with a letter from Wood in his pocket ordering him “to obtain through reconnaissance and other means consistent with the existing situation, all possible information which would be of value in connection with possible operations.”15
He was in effect Wood’s personal secret agent, operating independently of General Funston or any other American authority in Veracruz—just the kind of daring assignment Captain MacArthur had dreamed of. It was the chance at last not just to use his own judgment free of interference from his superiors—an opportunity that not many junior staff officers receive—but also to use it to affect the outcome of a future military campaign, perhaps even shape the difference between victory and defeat.
The truth was, the American situation in Veracruz was desperate. Funston’s troops were hemmed in on all sides by a Mexican force that outnumbered them almost three to two—shades of the senior MacArthur’s predicament during the siege of Manila. If the Mexicans got any wind of Wilson’s plans for a full-scale invasion of Mexico, they could make things very hot for Funston and his men, and for Captain MacArthur.
What Funston needed, he explained to Wood’s young emissary, were two things. The first was transport, but there was none to be had in Veracruz. In the event of war, his orders would be to move forward and seize the town of Jalapa as a forward base for Wood’s impending invasion, but without horses or mules or wagons his brigade was stuck fast. There were, however, plenty of railway wagons in Veracruz, Mac’s friend Captain Constant Cordier of the Fourth Infantry Regiment, told MacArthur. But they had no railroad engines to move them.16
The other requirement was intelligence on what the Mexicans were up to, but Funston was leery of sending out anyone to do reconnoitering. One American had already been killed in a firefight near the town of Tejar south of the city, and Funston had no desire to trigger any more shooting incidents.
“Trouble is,” Funston explained to his diary on May 3, “we, not being permitted to scout beyond outposts, cannot discover a concentration [of Mexican troops] close thereto.” But one man might be able to, the man under secret orders, namely, Captain Douglas MacArthur.17
And here Cordier had an idea. He had met a Mexican rail engineer, he told MacArthur, who had informed him that there were locomotives down Alvarado way, forty miles southeast of Veracruz.
The man was a bit of drunkard, Cordier warned MacArthur, and since Cordier was under Funston’s orders he couldn’t go with him. But if MacArthur could somehow convince the man to show him where the locomotives were, and do some freelance reconnaissance at the same time, he just might be able to pull the Fifth Brigade out of its predicament.18
MacArthur eagerly agreed. He found the engineer at a sleazy Veracruz bar, got him sobered up, and told him in the Spanish he had learned in the Philippines that he would pay $150 in gold if he could take him to Alvarado and show him the locomotives. The engineer readily agreed, and made arrangements for the American captain to meet him at a railroad siding, where he would have a handcar waiting. He would also have two other Mexicans waiting farther down the line with another handcar, to take them all the way to Alvarado.
MacArthur agreed but was adamant that only when he and the engineer returned to Veracruz would the Mexicans get their $150—and not before. The engineer eagerly ducked his head in agreement. The deal was done.
MacArthur departed and went back to his rooms. He decided to take nothing except his .45 pistol, his dog tags, and a small Bible. He wasn’t even traveling in uniform, though that meant that if he was caught he could be shot as a spy.19
Then as dusk settled and thunder rumbled in the distance (it was the beginning of the rainy season), Douglas MacArthur set off alone for the edge of the American lines near the Veracruz wireless station. There he disappeared into the darkness, not knowing whether he would ever come back alive.
—
He followed the railway line in the gloom until he found his engineer companion, waiting by the handcar.
The young American captain pointed his pistol and had the Me
xican raise his hands while he frisked him and the man complained volubly. MacArthur took away the man’s revolver and a small dirk and then had the Mexican search him, “so that he might better realize that there being nothing of value on me my death would afford him no monetary return,” as MacArthur wrote later in his report to General Wood.20
They set off on the handcar and got as far as Boca del Rio, where MacArthur discovered that the railroad bridge across the Jamapa River was down. They abandoned the car, crossed the river with a small boat they found on the bank, then wandered along until they discovered two ponies tied up next to a shack. No one inside noticed as they surreptitiously slipped the tethers, mounted up, and after several detours found themselves back on the line to Alvarado, which soon led them to their two companions with the second handcar. After a quick search of those two stalwarts, MacArthur and the engineer mounted up and they were off.
“Mile after mile we covered with no sign of the engines,” MacArthur wrote. Once he had to threaten the men at gunpoint to get them to cross one of the rail bridges—no one knew when they might be fired upon by sentries or even if the bridge itself might collapse—but after that, he reported laconically, they took orders in stride and “after getting into the spirit of the thing their conduct was most admirable.” MacArthur’s having the only two guns in the party probably helped, as well.21
It was after one o’clock in the morning when they finally reached Alvarado, thirty-five miles from Funston’s outposts. There the engineer led MacArthur to the siding where the locomotives were parked, five of them. Two, he saw, were only switch engines, useless for moving cars over a distance. But “the other three were just what we needed,” MacArthur decided, “fine big road pullers in excellent condition” except for some spare parts that could be easily replaced.
He glanced at his watch. Time to go back. He and his companion had crept along as far as Salinas undetected, when suddenly five armed men loomed out of the darkness. They weren’t wearing uniforms; MacArthur decided they were probably bandits, of which there were hundreds infesting the countryside. MacArthur and the engineer made a run for it, as the armed men opened fire and began chasing them. The pair managed to outdistance all except two, when “in order to save our lives” the young American turned and fired back, dropping one and then the other.
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