MacArthur was worried that the sound of gunfire might have scared his other two companions away, but they and the handcar were waiting, and soon they were whizzing away at top speed in a driving mist.
The trip home soon got eventful. At Pietra they ran into a party of fifteen mounted gunmen, who blazed away at the handcar as it sped by. MacArthur blazed back, hitting four of them while one of his Mexicans took a bullet in the shoulder. Still they sped on, pumping and pumping away as the miles clicked by. Then outside Laguna three more mounted men sprang up out of the predawn darkness, yelling and shooting and chasing the car on horseback. One of them, “unusually well mounted,” managed to pass the car and straddle the track, then raised his gun and fired directly at the American.
MacArthur felt the first bullet tear at his shirt, but it passed through without touching him. Two more whizzed past his head as the cart screeched to a halt, then MacArthur aimed and fired again, killing both the man and his horse. It took some time to get the horse’s carcass off the tracks, but the harried quartet finally managed it and they were soon under way again, not stopping until they reached Paso del Toro.
MacArthur and his engineer waved goodbye to their companions and the handcar, and managed to find the ponies they had left behind. They rode back to Boca del Rio, where—according to MacArthur—they left the animals at the shack where they had found them and set off on foot for the river.
They also found the boat they had used to cross the Jamapa, but this time it struck a snag and sank in midstream. Fortunately the river at that point was barely five feet deep, “for in our exhausted physical condition I do not believe we would have been capable of swimming.”22
The first light of day was breaking as they reached the bank. They found the first handcar where they had left it and set off for the final stretch of the journey to the American lines, where MacArthur arrived exhausted but exultant just as the sun came up.
Mission accomplished—and his penchant for heroism under fire proved once and for all.
Still, it had been a harrowing twelve hours and when Cordier found him, “he still showed signs of the tremendous nervous strain he had been under.” His shirt showed no less than four separate bullet holes, although MacArthur was unhurt. As it was, Cordier wrote, “knowing the outlying conditions as well as I do it is a mystery to me that any of the party escaped.”23 But knowing MacArthur “is the type that will never open his mouth with regard to himself”—not something many people would later say of Douglas MacArthur—Cordier composed a letter to General Wood urging that MacArthur be nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor “for heroism displayed, for dangers braved, and for difficulties overcome.”
The Medal of Honor.
In Douglas’s mind it was still his father’s medal, although he did not learn about Cordier’s recommendation until later that summer. In the meantime, it turned out the locomotives were not needed after all. The crisis of war receded; Wilson canceled plans for invasion; Funston’s brigade in Veracruz settled down to a routine of garrison duty; and MacArthur was reassigned as assistant engineer officer to Funston’s staff. After a few weeks, his duties shifted from getting the Fifth Brigade ready for action to preparing for withdrawal.
Working in Veracruz in the summer heat, with temperatures soaring above 100 degrees and surrounded by flies, stray dogs, and vultures was a dismal contrast with staff life in Washington. It must have been with considerable relief that MacArthur learned he would be returning to the United States to rejoin Wood’s staff. And so on August 29, 1914, in the sweltering humidity of Mexico’s Gulf coast, he set out for home.24
It was a momentous time to be alive, let alone in uniform. On the other side of the Atlantic full-scale war had broken out among the European powers. Yet no Americans in late August 1914 could foresee that the fighting raging in Europe would ever involve their own country. On the contrary, the focus was on issues closer to home, from votes for women and the first telephone line between New York and San Francisco to the ongoing fighting in Mexico, where President Wilson would order the withdrawal of American forces on September 15 and Pancho Villa would declare war on Huerta’s successor, General Carranza.
In Mexico, MacArthur had shown coolness under fire, an instinct for instant decision under desperate stress, and a willingness to take the initiative and risk his own life to accomplish a dangerous mission—all key ingredients of leadership. All the same, as he smoked a cigarette and draped himself over the rail on the voyage home, young Captain MacArthur could not have imagined that soon he and two million other Americans would march off to battle in France—or that in the process he would become an army legend rivaling his father.
—
Instead, he quietly came back to a Washington paralyzed by late-summer heat, wrote up his final report for General Wood on the last day of September, and waited.
The wheels of military bureaucracy moved slowly. It was not until the last week of November that General Leonard Wood, after rereading Cordier’s letter and MacArthur’s understated but still sensational report, recommended to the War Department that his young aide be awarded the Medal of Honor. The adjutant general duly forwarded all three pieces of paper to General Funston for comment, who finally pulled himself away from his duties in Veracruz to pen a reply.
Funston had been devoted to Douglas’s father. Nonetheless, the reports came to him as an unwelcome surprise. “Captain MacArthur was not a member of my command at the time,” he wrote in reply, “and as I had no knowledge of it until many months later, I am at a loss to know how I can properly make official recommendation on the subject.” The truth was, Funston hadn’t known about MacArthur’s mission to Alvarado—indeed hadn’t wanted to know, in case it went awry and he needed to preserve his own deniability.
It was also true that Funston was troubled by MacArthur’s impulsive decision to take action without informing him beforehand. “I do not consider this the occasion to enter into a discussion of the advisability of this enterprise,” he wrote archly, especially when MacArthur knew “that without specific instructions nothing was to be done that might lead to a resumption of hostilities,” like venturing alone into enemy territory. The truth was, Funston was sore about what had happened, all without his authorization, regardless of any special orders from General Wood (which didn’t include stealing locomotives and shooting up the countryside). Although Funston didn’t think his old friend’s son should lose the award due to any “error of judgment,” his wasn’t a ringing endorsement, either.25
So there it was. No good deed, and certainly no unauthorized one, goes unpunished, especially in the army. That lack of official authorization troubled members of the board meeting to consider the Medal of Honor award as well. They were also bothered by the fact that every recommendation for the Medal of Honor required two signed statements by eyewitnesses. That wasn’t possible in these circumstances, they realized. They had only the letter from Cordier confirming certain important details, and a letter from Captain Ball, MacArthur’s official contact in Veracruz, stating that “this officer clearly earned a Medal of Honor. I believe a grave injustice will be done if such action is not taken.” Strong stuff—but not exactly the tone that was bound to move a wavering committee to embrace MacArthur’s case.
In the end, the board decided against awarding the Medal of Honor. They ruled on the extraordinary grounds that “to bestow the award recommended might encourage any other staff officer, under similar conditions, to ignore the local commander, possibly interfering with reference to the enemy”—a clear disincentive for any officer to take the initiative no matter how important the cause.26
When he heard the news, MacArthur exploded. He drew up the kind of fiery letter of protest that his father would have sent, and with the same degree of ill consideration. He raged that he was “incensed” by the “rigid narrowmindedness and lack of information” on the part of the board (its chairman had been commandant of cadets during MacArthur’s last two years at the Point)
, and shot copies off to Chief of Staff Scott and the secretary of war.27
There is no doubt that the letter did him no good in important circles. Certainly it made older and wiser heads shake in disbelief at his temerity and ill temper. Definitely his father’s son, they might have said; the same hurt sense of pride, the same wounded pleading, with the same ineffectual results.
Others raised more serious questions, such as whether MacArthur’s daring little adventure constituted military “action” in the proper sense required by the Medal of Honor rules. That doubt in turn led some MacArthur detractors to wonder later if the whole story was true at all or if he made the whole thing up.
In fact, there is no reason to suppose that he did, despite the lack of any physical evidence supporting his story. Captain Cordier himself confirmed what details he could by talking to the engineer and the Mexican firemen. Whether MacArthur could actually see how many bandits he had shot in the dark is really anyone’s guess. Yet no one at the time ever doubted the veracity of MacArthur’s story. His efficiency reports from Chief of Staff Scott, General Wood, and everyone else heaped high praise on him, almost in spite of his adventure with the locomotives, and that December 1914 he was promoted to major.28
Yet the entire enterprise, not excluding the incendiary letters to his superiors, far from helping his reputation, probably hurt him. It made him look like a potentially reckless gambler who, when the wheel runs against him, turns into a special pleader. But if he imagined that his one chance to win a Medal of Honor had passed him by forever, he was wrong. Events were on the move that would offer him many more opportunities to prove his valor on the battlefield—more, in fact, than any one American officer could expect to see and live.
—
On June 3, 1916, Woodrow Wilson stood before Congress and signed the National Defense Act. It was a momentous event, signaling a growing and dismal sense that America could no longer stay out of the war that was raging in Europe. It also reflected a major change of heart on the part of President Wilson—and about America’s emerging role in the world.
A titanic clash was unfolding in Europe. German and Austrian armies battled imperial Russia for control of vast regions on the eastern front, while along a three-hundred-mile line of trenches from the Swiss border to the English Channel, German, French, and British forces were locked in a deadly embrace. Hundreds of thousands were dead already; mammoth clashes at Verdun and the Somme that year would claim many more. New and terrifying weapons of war—heavy artillery, massed machine guns, airplanes, flamethrowers, and poison gas—were turning armed conflict between nations into a charnel house that even Arthur MacArthur, with his tours of the battlefields of Manchuria, could only dimly imagine.
At the same time, fleets of warships and submarines roamed the world’s oceans at will, hunting and killing one another as well as sinking neutral shipping with the goal of starving the enemy into submission and surrender. By 1915 German submarines were attacking American vessels without warning, and without mercy.
Wilson wanted to stay out of war. He had distractions enough, starting with the disintegrating situation in Mexico. When he learned that his General Staff was drawing up plans for a possible war with Germany, his first reaction was to have the entire staff fired.29 But the possibility that America might be drawn into conflict in Europe through Germany’s increasingly reckless submarine warfare could not be discounted. MacArthur’s mentor Leonard Wood had led the way, declaring that the nation had to be prepared for the possibility of war. Backed by luminaries like Teddy Roosevelt, the voices for national preparedness gathered momentum, becoming especially urgent after the events of a May evening in 1915.
The British ocean liner Lusitania was loaded with American passengers, even though the German embassy had issued a warning to Americans not to sail in her because she was subject to being attacked once at sea. On the night of May 7, the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine off the southern coast of Ireland. One hundred and twenty-eight Americans were among the dead.
The nation was as much shocked as outraged (few knew that despite a New York Times headline saying the Lusitania had been unarmed, she had actually been carrying 4.2 million rounds of ammunition plus thousands of empty shell cases and nonexplosive fuses destined for the British army). After manifestly trying to stay out of the war, Americans found themselves the inadvertent victims of it.30
In the face of American uproar, the Germans called off their unrestricted submarine warfare—for the time being. But it signaled a tide of events that no single president could control. America might soon find itself at war with a European great power for the first time since 1812.
That conflict had been a disaster. It was to prevent another that Wilson began to move in the direction of those, like General Wood, who were calling for a massive national effort at preparedness and rearmament. A sign of the change was that Wilson named a new secretary of war, Newton Baker, and then signed the National Defense Act. Prepared by the General Staff, it created America’s first large standing army since the Civil War, consisting of 175,000 regular troops and 450,000 National Guard troops. The act also set up the nation’s first Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, to train a generation of young college students and graduates in the art of military command.
MacArthur had been in the thick of staff meetings drawing up the National Defense Act. He had been assigned to work with industry groups like the American Automobile Association to discuss building trucks for motor transport, as well as coordinating mobilization plans with the navy. In fact, the navy staff liked him so much they asked Wood to send MacArthur to them more often. One of those who took a particular liking to the young major was Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. In those meetings they struck up an acquaintance that seemed to promise a lifelong friendship, although neither man could possibly guess what momentous events their relations would eventually trigger.
Roosevelt was not the only MacArthur fan. An Admiral Scott admired MacArthur’s combination of impeccable manners and outgoing charm with an insatiable appetite for hard work. He’s peculiarly “well fitted for positions requiring diplomacy and high grade intelligence,” Scott remarked. Wood inwardly beamed. Clearly MacArthur seemed destined for a career as God’s gift to staff work.31
Yet there was also trouble in General Staff paradise. Newton Baker’s arrival at the Army and Navy Building had set off shock waves around the War Department. The former mayor of Cleveland, the prim, bespectacled Baker had the reputation of being not only a die-hard progressive but, incredibly for a secretary of war, a pacifist. “I’m so much a pacifist,” he liked to quip, “I’m willing to fight for it.” Many in and out of uniform shook their heads. This was the man who was supposed to get the nation ready for fighting a modern war?
They needn’t have worried. Baker threw himself into his new job, and in looking to build the most dynamic and professional staff he could, he took an immediate shine to young Major MacArthur.
As for MacArthur’s view of Baker, “I found him diminutive in size, but large in heart, with a clear, brilliant mind, and a fine ability to make instant and positive decisions”—especially when he listened to the advice of Major MacArthur. Later MacArthur branded Baker one of our greatest war secretaries, and “as an organizer of America’s war resources he had no superior—perhaps no equal.”32
With the National Defense Act already passed, preparing for war now had the support of the president and Congress. As a former mayor, Baker had the sense to realize that the challenge now was to get the rest of the nation on board as well. By May 1916 the bond of trust he had developed with MacArthur was such that he had asked MacArthur to head the department’s Bureau of Information—in effect, its propaganda wing—and then act as official press censor. So that summer Mac exchanged his uniform and Sam Browne belt for a suit and straw boater, and became in effect the army’s first public relations officer. His year at the Bureau of Information would leave a permanent stamp o
n the U.S. Army, and would be an enduring part of his own education.
For example, he learned how to deal with journalists, and how to be informal and relaxed with them without letting himself be caught off guard. He learned how to plant stories without making reporters feel manipulated by finding items that would catch their interest but also justified a policy—as when Woodrow Wilson surprised everyone by ordering General Pershing to set off after Pancho Villa in Mexico—or to shape a general narrative, as when the War Department decided that its public theme for the summer and autumn of 1916 would be the Necessity of Preparedness.33
MacArthur learned how to facilitate interviews with generals and officials, and he learned how to use his natural charm to head off the embarrassing stories and focus attention on the ones that put the army, and preparation for war, in a positive light.
His biggest test, however, and the most successful, was the draft.
Selective Service came into existence on May 18, 1917. Nothing like it had been seen since the Civil War, when the draft caused massive riots and became associated in people’s minds with iniquitous practices like rich men’s sons paying for substitutes. But by working closely with the two men who drew up the plan, Judge Advocate General Enoch Crowder (who had served under MacArthur’s father in the Philippines) and fellow West Point classmate Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Johnson, MacArthur helped to craft a system that would be as fair as it was efficient—or at least it would seem so to the public.
They set aside the original plan for army-controlled conscription and replaced it with civilian draft boards for virtually every community in the country. This gave the appearance of local input into deciding who would qualify for the draft board and who would not; it even conveyed the impression of local control. The response from the media and Congress was overwhelmingly positive. Young men about to be drafted felt more comfortable sitting across the table from the president of the local bank or the local doctor or dentist rather than a row of expressionless men in khaki uniforms and Sam Browne belts. MacArthur had turned what could have been a public relations disaster into a national ritual accepted by all, and praised by many.
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