When his effort to create an air force that was coequal with the army and navy failed, Mitchell had grown more outspoken and bitter. Finally he was demoted to colonel and shipped off to Hawaii. Instead of fading from the scene, however, he wrote and published Winged Defense, predicting that someday bombers would find a way to launch a surprise attack on the Hawaiian Islands, unless the navy and the army recognized the potential value and also the potential threat, of airpower. Both organizations ignored it, although both agreed that the wayward colonel was a painful thorn in their side that they wanted removed.
It was his reaction to the crash of the navy airship Shenandoah, however, that finally brought the accumulated rage down on his head. Mitchell told anyone who would listen, including reporters, that the accident, and a similar crash of seaplanes off Hawaii, was “the direct result of the incompetency, criminal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the national defense….As a patriotic American citizen, I can stand by no longer and see these disgusting performances by the Navy and War Departments.”28
That did it. With President Coolidge’s approval, the army ordered Mitchell court-martialed for bringing “discredit upon the military service” and “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline”—some even thought his inflammatory comments were an invitation to mutiny by members of the newly formed Air Corps. So Mitchell found himself summoned to Washington in late October 1925 to face the charges before a panel of senior officers who would act as both judge and jury.
One of them was to be Douglas MacArthur.
It put MacArthur in an almost unbearable position. He had virtually grown up with Mitchell in Milwaukee. Mitchell had served under his father in the Philippines, and both served together on the western front. Although Mitchell usually detested West Pointers as narrow-minded stuffed shirts, he had made a big exception in MacArthur’s case, while MacArthur sensed that Mitchell’s advocacy of the importance of airpower, if overstated, was largely right. “Neither ground nor sea forces can operate safely,” he had said publicly, “unless the air over them is controlled by our own air power.”29
MacArthur even invited him to speak at West Point on the topic. Then Mitchell came out to the Philippines on a visit, where he pointed out inadequacies of air defenses, as he often did when he visited any military installation, and even gave old Aguinaldo a ride in his plane over the jungle.30 Certainly MacArthur was one of the judges Mitchell assumed he could count on for the most support.
But MacArthur was the youngest on the panel and only one of eight judges. The rest of the panel included Pershing favorite Frank McCoy and the new superintendent of West Point, Fred Sladen, both of whom were deeply hostile to Mitchell and his ideas. So was the president of the court, MacArthur’s old corps commander from the Rainbow days, General Charles Summerall. MacArthur probably realized at this juncture of his career that he would gain nothing by pushing Mitchell’s case; it could only cost him the future support of his superiors and peers.
On the other hand, he had nothing to lose by remaining as neutral as possible, to the point of complete self-effacement—no easy task for the Fighting Dude and hero of the Côte de Châtillon. Throughout the trial MacArthur never spoke or made a motion or even questioned a witness. He sat, Mitchell later remembered, with “his features as cold as carved stone.”31
The one emotion he showed was a smile when Louise showed up every day with a bunch of fresh flowers.
Meanwhile, Mitchell’s defense lawyers ran circles around the prosecutors. They even got Summerall removed for bias, with Major General Robert Lee Howze taking his place.32 Louise herself sat next to Betty, Mitchell’s sister, and during the breaks chatted amiably enough. Even old Mrs. MacArthur herself, cane in hand, came to hear his final summation. Everything suggested that MacArthur was in Mitchell’s corner, along with, the airman figured, three other judges. In his mind, and in the minds of the public following the trial’s headlines, it seemed certain that this case and the cause of airpower would be vindicated for good.
On Thursday, December 17, the last solemn arguments were heard and the jury of generals left the court to deliberate. At 6:35 P.M. the jury door swung open and the generals walked back into the court after four grueling hours. MacArthur, according to witnesses, looked wan and exhausted. To Mitchell, “he looked as if he had been dragged through a knothole.”33
While Mitchell stood at attention, the verdict was read. It stunned everyone. He had been found guilty on all specifications, by two-thirds of the jury—enough to convict. Mitchell stood motionless as the court adjourned, his face a mask. “Why, these men are my friends,” a reporter overheard him saying. He was thinking certainly of MacArthur.
So how did MacArthur vote? Mitchell never learned how any of the generals voted, and to this day no one knows. Mitchell’s sister was never convinced that MacArthur voted not guilty; although Mitchell himself later told a disciple, “Some day people will realize how good a friend of mine he was back there in 1925.”34
MacArthur himself always insisted that his had been the sole not guilty vote, and even persuaded the others not to dismiss Mitchell from the service but let him earn his pension and retirement after a five-year lapse—and since that’s what happened, MacArthur’s account might be true. One bit of physical evidence did surface that backed his story. Seventeen years later, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who had testified at the trial, told a Mitchell biographer that a reporter rummaging through a wastebasket in the jury room found a slip of paper with the vote of not guilty.
The handwriting was MacArthur’s.35
True or not, years later MacArthur’s opinion on the Mitchell case was crystal clear. “It is part of my military philosophy that a senior officer should not be silenced for being at variance with his superiors in rank and with accepted doctrine….When a ranking officer, out of purely patriotic motives, risk[s] his own personal future in such opposition, he should not be summarily suppressed. Superior authority can, of course, do so if it wishes, but the one thing in this world that cannot be stopped is a sound idea. The individual may be martyred, but his thoughts live on [italics are mine].”36
MacArthur wrote these words twelve years after his own harrowing experience in Korea. He knew the subject of that last sentence might have been himself.
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Adding to the pain of those years in Baltimore was the fact that his marriage was falling apart.
Douglas MacArthur tried to adjust to the affluent suburban lifestyle that Louise loved, a lifestyle out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald or John O’Hara novel. The house on Rainbow Hill became the setting for rounds of Jazz Age parties and dinners. MacArthur joined the Green Spring Valley Country Club, spent many hours riding to hounds after the foxes of rural Maryland and attending hunt balls, as well as dutifully discussing investments with the husbands of Louise’s friends.
MacArthur was no fool about money; he had married into it. He resisted attempts to draw him and Louise into the current Florida real estate boom, which he correctly predicted was going to end badly. He also resisted calls from his wife and her family to retire from the Army and join a swank law firm like the one owned by her family, the Cromwells of Sullivan & Cromwell. Years before, his mother had tried to tempt him with a lucrative position with E. H. Harriman’s Union Pacific Railroad, but she failed. Louise failed as well.
Certainly this marriage was not going as she had planned. Louise had endured the Philippines, almost the way Pinky had endured New Mexico and Texas. She had tried to make the the best of it, even there. Now Louise became disillusioned with a husband stuck in what she saw as a dead-end profession. She was also distressed that the husband she contemptuously referred to in private as “Sir Galahad” was fast losing interest in sex with a woman whose feminine allure was now lost under a layer of middle-aged fat. “The general,” she would say years later after a round of drinks, “is a buck private in bed.”
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Yet despite her pleas, MacArthur was adamant about not leavi
ng the army. But there must have been moments when, at age forty-five and seated at his desk surrounded by meaningless reports and bound to a rigid routine of inspections and meetings, he wondered if he had gone as far in his profession as he could—and whether serving in this peacetime army was really worth the effort. His first tour of III Corps Area found motor transport “in poor condition,” with trucks and vehicles built during the world war worn out beyond repair. “Harbor Defenses of the Potomac have been abandoned,” he reported, while “Air Corps activities have been devoted almost entirely to the training of the National Guard and Organized Reserves.” Meanwhile, “reduction in personnel of the troops under current allotments renders it impossible to supply demonstration units for National Guard camps,” while parents were reluctant to send their sons to Corps Military Training camps even for a single month. And the army’s own training schedule was impossible to draw up because no one knew whether the funds would be there. The army’s budget had been cut to less than $380 million, with fewer than 135,000 men under arms—even as pacifist groups were growing in number, as were the demands for making war “illegal.”37
A deeply frustrated MacArthur had the opportunity to strike back, at least in a minor way, when he was asked to speak at the Sailors and Soldiers Club banquet at the Ritz-Carlton in New York on April 7, 1927. He chose as his theme the calls across the nation for disarmament, on the very day after French foreign minister Aristide Briand issued a public letter to the American people urging them to support an international treaty outlawing war. MacArthur was determined to disagree.
“Total disarmament is unthinkable,” he told his audience. “No one takes seriously the equally illogical plan of disbanding our fire department to stop fires or disbanding our police departments to stop crime. Our country insists upon respect for its rights, and gives due recognition to the rights of all others. But so long as humanity is governed by motives not in accord with Christianity, we are in danger of an attack directed by unworthy impulses. We should be prepared against brutal attack….
“Our nation has shrunk from enforced military service,” he continued. “But between the two extremes has been evolved the conception of citizen soldiery,” who are called up in a national emergency and trained to fight by a cadre of regular professional officers, commissioned and noncommissioned.
“Upon the successful solution of this problem—the citizen soldier—will depend the very life of our nation,” MacArthur emphasized. “And when the bloody test comes, some American chief, on the day of victory, is going to thank God for what this nation is now building up in its citizen soldiery.”38
Unfortunately, right then there didn’t seem to be much building up—it was mostly tearing down. That included his marriage. That summer Louise left him and moved to New York City. So it was with a sense of deep relief as well as expectation, that he asked for and accepted the post of president of the U.S. Olympic Committee.
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If the Douglas MacArthur of the 1920s was the father of the modern West Point, one could also argue he was the father of modern American Olympic sports.
It’s hard to remember that when MacArthur left West Point the modern Olympic Games were barely a quarter century old. A big question remained about how much time and money the United States should divert—or waste, some thought—to the Olympic effort. When the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee died suddenly, with the 1928 games in the Netherlands less than a year away, MacArthur’s name came up as a replacement. It was a natural choice. He was already famous for his advocacy of sports at West Point and amateur sports generally; the previous year he had organized a football game between the Army and the Marine Corps, in which MacArthur’s team trounced the leathernecks, much to the delight of his old chief General Charles Summerall.39
MacArthur accepted the post with enthusiasm, and threw himself into the task as if he were planning a military campaign. Everything about it suited him, from meeting with coaches, giving inspiring speeches to athletes, and sponsoring committees, to planning the travel and workout schedule. He even took pleasure in contemptuously dismissing sports reporters and other naysayers who questioned his decisions, such as allowing the legendary sprinter Charley Paddock—“the World’s Fastest Human”—to play in the games even though Paddock was under investigation for accepting money, which threatened his amateur status. “We won’t stand for sniping from the rear,” he wrote in a furious telegram to critics—and that, as far as MacArthur was concerned, was that.40
When the team arrived in Holland, “the outlook was not bright for our entrants,” MacArthur wrote later, “but I was determined that the United States should win at Amsterdam.”41 He became in effect the coach-in-chief, attending every practice he could and meeting with athletes to evaluate their performance and motivate them to a higher level. MacArthur admitted that he rode them hard: “I stormed and pleaded and cajoled.” He constantly reiterated the link between American sports and American exceptionalism. He told them that since America was the greatest nation in the world, it deserved to have the greatest Olympic team—and he meant to deliver on that proposition. “We have not come 3,000 miles just to lose gracefully,” he thundered. “We are here to win, and win decisively.”
When the U.S. boxing team’s coach threatened to withdraw the team from further competition after a blatantly unfair decision, MacArthur barked, “Americans never quit.”42 Some coaches and athletes grumbled at the constant badgering and micromanagement, but most, as one steeplechaser observed, admired “MacArthur’s earnest efforts and zeal.”
It paid off. By the time the games were over, the United States had won twenty-four gold medals, more than the next two countries, Finland and Germany, put together. The U.S. team had set no less than seventeen Olympic records and seven world records. When they returned to the United States, they were feted and celebrated across the country, while MacArthur wrote up a stirring and dramatic report for President Coolidge on their performance. It began, “To portray adequately the vividness and brilliance of that great spectacle would be worthy even of the pen of Homer himself” and ended by urging that the financing of the Olympic Committee be put on a more regular basis with a $2 million endowment fund, so that more time could be devoted to training and coaching than fundraising.
“ ‘Athletic America’ is a telling phrase,” MacArthur wrote. “It is talismanic. It suggests health and happiness. It arouses national pride and kindles anew the national spirit….Nothing has been more characteristic of the genius of the American people than their genius for athletics”—and the U.S. Olympic team, MacArthur believed, had to be the summing up of that national genius of a “more sturdy, more self-reliant, a more self-helping people.”43
The experience, he said, “has made me proud to be an American.” Another who was proud was his old commander Charles Summerall, who sent MacArthur a letter the day they returned to New York. “You have not only maintained the reputation that Americans do not quit,” it read, “but that Americans know how to win.”44
But perhaps MacArthur’s finest hour came when they were leaving Amsterdam harbor. Two athletes who had failed to make the Olympic team but stowed away anyway to be with the team, found themselves stranded without any money and couldn’t pay for passage back to the United States. The entire team lined the ship’s rails, looking helplessly down on the hapless pair as the ship prepared to sail. Then suddenly MacArthur ambled down the gangway before it pulled away, spoke a few words to a ship’s officer, and then rushed the two men on board. “You should have heard the cheer that went up,” one of them, a University of Michigan athlete, remembered. Once the ship was well clear, MacArthur explained that he had struck a bargain with the officer to let the stowaways work off their passage with a few odd jobs around the ship.
They spent the rest of the voyage across the Atlantic on their hands and knees scraping paint.45
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General Summerall had told MacArthur that he showed the world once again that Americans
know how to win. It was a message of optimism and hope that the public was going to need over the next five years, and none more than the U.S. Army. It was even one that would have been welcome to MacArthur himself, as a man trapped in a ruined marriage and a potentially dead-end career.
Yet the truth was that his career was finally beginning to turn around. At the age of forty-eight he was poised for a series of major breakthroughs as well as disappointments. A series of events would decisively shape his character and his national reputation, both for better and for worse—as well as shape the nation. The Douglas MacArthur who would become an American hero during World War Two emerged over these next years, as would the Douglas MacArthur whom Franklin D. Roosevelt would pronounce “the most dangerous man in America.”
CHAPTER 10
SAVING THE ARMY
From Magna Carta to the present day there is little in our institutions worth having or worth perpetuating that has not been achieved for us by armed men.
—DOUGLAS MACARTHUR, ADDRESS TO THE REUNION OF VETERANS OF THE RAINBOW DIVISION, WASHINGTON, D.C., JULY 14, 1935
The turnaround began almost as soon as MacArthur returned to the United States from the Olympic Games. He learned he was being reassigned back to Manila, but this time as commander of the entire Philippine Department. “No assignment could have pleased me more,” he wrote.1
The last time he had been in the Philippines it had been at the nadir in his career and life. This time he would be going without the encumbrance of Louise; she and her children would remain in the States as their divorce became finalized. He would also be the man who had given America its first major Olympic triumph. More important, this time he would also have some executive power as well as responsibility. Now others would be seeking him out for advice and support—including his friend and now Philippine president Manuel Quezon.
Douglas MacArthur Page 23