Their friendship had deepened during MacArthur’s earlier three years in the Philippines. Douglas was a frequent guest at the Quezon home, where the two men would sit on the veranda and discuss the major trends sweeping across Asia: the growing power of nationalist movements challenging the white man’s colonial rule and “the growing threat of Japanese expansion,” as MacArthur later put it, particularly in the Philippines.
“Thousands of Japanese [immigrants] were pouring into Davao, in the great southern island of Mindanao,” where they were becoming an important commercial colony—but also, MacArthur worried, a growing possible security threat. Quezon felt otherwise; he tended to see the Japanese as a boost to the Philippines’ economic fortunes.2 But both agreed that Japan’s imperial ambitions in the Pacific posed a danger to peace and stability—and that Asia’s European colonial powers would soon find themselves overwhelmed not only by nationalist challengers like Mohandas Gandhi in India and Chiang Kai-shek in China, but by an upsurgent Japan, as well.
“The stage was being set for a vast political and social upheaval, vitally affecting every land and race in East Asia,” MacArthur remembered. Both he and Quezon saw “the possibility that the Philippines could easily be caught in the struggle for power” that would engulf the entire Pacific. Yet Americans remained woefully ignorant about the growing threat, and the pitiful lack of preparation for it in the Philippine Department.3
During his previous assignment in the Philippines, MacArthur had experienced firsthand the apathy emanating from Washington, and the difficulties in trying to overcome its destructive inertia. This time, from the moment he arrived in Manila in October 1928, MacArthur strove to pull the department’s resources up to working speed himself. He was delighted to get the War Department to finally give the Philippine Scouts their pay increase and pensions after thirty years’ service, which triggered a marked increase in morale and efficiency in that elite force. It also reinforced MacArthur’s reputation among Filipinos, both military and civilian, which would steadily grow. The seeds of the MacArthur who would become a Philippine national hero were planted in these crucial years.4
Otherwise, the situation looked bleak. When one of his predecessors, Fred Sladen (ironically, the man who succeeded MacArthur as superintendent of West Point), was asked by his successor what the War Department’s plan for the Philippines was, Sladen had told the man bluntly, “There isn’t any plan, and you won’t get any money, so go to it and do the best you can.”5
In 1928 the Joint Board (predecessor of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) estimated that the Japanese could land 300,000 troops in the Philippines a month after a war started. To face them MacArthur would have 11,000 Regular troops and Scouts, 6,000 Constabulary, and an air force of exactly nine obsolete bombers and eleven fighters.6 No wonder the board had shrunk the department’s mission from conducting offensive-defensive operations on Luzon to keep the Japanese at bay to simply defending Manila Bay, especially Corregidor, in hopes that these paltry forces could hold out with the help of the Asiatic Naval Detachment—although recent cuts in the number of American warships made that support look shaky as well.
The main culprit, in both MacArthur’s eyes and the eyes of the U.S. Navy, was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1921–22, also called the Five-Power Treaty. Crafted at the behest of American secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes, the treaty had limited the future construction of naval ships by the five victorious powers in the Great War, including the United States and Japan. In order to meet the 5-5-3 ratio of U.S. and British capital ships compared to their Japanese counterparts the treaty’s terms imposed, however, the navy had had to scrap twenty-eight battleships and cruisers, while agreeing not to build more beyond a certain size. The restrictions also included a ban on new fortifications in the Philippines. The treaty’s goal was to prevent an international arms race. Its real effect was to make defense of the Philippines almost impossible, and to seriously weaken the U.S. Navy, as even Japan’s navy was free to build and build.
Yet the problems went beyond the Washington Treaty. MacArthur had to ask: if keeping the Philippines as an American base in the Pacific was important, where was the commitment of resources to do it? He still believed the Philippines could be “a military asset,” but that would entail both more money and a change in the attitude toward the Filipinos, especially on the issue of independence. Here he found a sympathetic ear in the new governor-general, Henry Stimson, whose view on the future of the Philippines differed markedly from that of his predecessor Leonard Wood. Stimson too believed in the white man’s burden and the American mission in the Philippines, but he also believed it was possible to evolve a relationship like that of Great Britain with its Commonwealth nations such as Australia and Canada.7
This was some distance from MacArthur’s belief that independence was the best route to secure the islands’ future alliance with the United States—and to dispel growing anti-Americanism among Filipino nationalists. But the two men formed a warm working relationship in the short time Stimson was there (he had come in March 1928 to fill in after General Wood’s sudden death) that would serve them both well during World War Two.
With Stimson’s departure in 1929, it crossed MacArthur’s mind that he himself might be a good candidate for the next governor-general. In addition to a major advance for his career, it would empower him to shape more of U.S. policy toward the Philippines. He even managed to plant that idea with The New York Times, which published a story in April saying that “according to highly reliable information, the latest active candidate for the Governor Generalship is Gen. MacArthur, commanding the Philippine Army of the American Army.”
The reliable source was, of course, MacArthur himself.8
President Herbert Hoover named Dwight Davis, former secretary of war, instead. But since coming into office that March, Hoover had had his eye on MacArthur. Indeed, forces were in motion back in Washington that would land him the job that had eluded his father—a disappointment that had certainly contributed to Arthur MacArthur’s death.
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In the summer of 1930 Army Chief of Staff Charles Summerall was set to retire. As the issue of who would replace him loomed, his mind turned to the former battalion commander from the Rainbow Division whom he had seen in action more than a decade ago, and who was now struggling to complete the fortification of Corregidor in Manila Harbor some 12,000 miles away.
Looking over the list of active officers, Summerall could see that there was a seniority issue. MacArthur ranked only seventh among the active major generals, but none of those in front of him had more than two years before mandatory retirement at sixty-four, and the typical term for a chief of staff was four years. The others included two other major generals appointed the same year as MacArthur, in 1925. One was Pershing’s former operations chief General Fox Conner; the other was the brilliant Major General William Connor, head of the Army War College. But neither of them had MacArthur’s wartime record or General Staff service, let alone experience of being in charge of an army corps area at home or a department overseas. And neither was as familiar a name on Capitol Hill as MacArthur, thanks to his service as superintendent of West Point and, one could add, on the U.S. Olympic Committee.9
Yet when Summerall proposed MacArthur’s name to Hoover’s secretary of war, Patrick Hurley, Hurley was unconvinced. Hurley had served in the World War in the Judge Advocate General’s Office and the field artillery, and won his own Silver Star for bravery. No doubt he had heard a lot about the Fighting Dude during his time in France; much of it may not have been very complimentary. In any case, Hurley decided he would travel out to Omaha, Nebraska, to talk to Johnson Hagood, commander of the VII Corps Area and a former aide to Leonard Wood, and ask him about MacArthur.
He half expected Hagood to present his own case for being made chief of staff. Instead, Hagood sang MacArthur’s praises. Hurley listened with a skeptical ear.
“Isn’t he vain?” he insisted. “Isn’t he pompous? Intolerant of h
is superiors’ wishes and overbearing toward civilians?”
Hagood shook his head. MacArthur was “the ablest man and the best soldier” in the army. He was the perfect choice for chief of staff.10
Hoover, meanwhile, was hearing from two heavyweights who were also keen on MacArthur. One was Peyton March; the other was publisher Roy Howard of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, a stronger political supporter of Hoover but also of General MacArthur—whom he secretly saw as possible presidential timber in the future.
One heavyweight came out strongly against MacArthur: Black Jack Pershing. He wanted his protégé Frank McCoy instead and after an unsatisfactory interview with Hurley, who was still convinced that MacArthur was the right choice, the American victor of World War One demanded one last interview with the president himself.
Pershing was adamant, almost desperate. Appoint anyone as chief of staff, he pleaded, as long as it’s not MacArthur. Hoover was half inclined to agree. He was miffed that MacArthur had turned down the chief of engineers appointment that Hoover had offered him in July—an appointment that MacArthur refused in part because he sensed the chief of staff job might be coming. No president likes to hear someone say no; it’s a privilege he entirely reserves for himself.
So afterward Hoover turned to Hurley. Maybe it’s time to find a compromise candidate, he told his secretary of war; maybe MacArthur was just too controversial.
Now it was Hurley’s turn to be adamant. He refused to budge on MacArthur, and Hoover reluctantly went along.11 The president put the best face on things, saying, “I searched the Army for younger blood, and I finally determined upon General Douglas MacArthur. His brilliant abilities and his sterling character need no exposition from me.” So did Pershing: “[H]e is one of my boys. I have nothing more to say.” Indeed, he didn’t.12
The radiogram went out to Manila from the acting chief of staff on August 5: “President has just announced your detail as Chief of Staff to succeed General Summerall. My heartiest congratulations.”
The news came as no shock to MacArthur. He had known of Summerall’s imminent departure for months, and cultivated his relations with Hurley since the spring.13 The only surprise may have been that it was coming sooner than he would have expected. He was only fifty, the third youngest ever. “I had been in military service for thirty-one years,” he wrote long afterward, “years of receiving orders and following policies I had not promulgated…Now the responsibility of making decisions and giving the orders was mine.”14 And he was taking responsibility when America, and the world, were on the verge of extraordinary turmoil.
Just eight months earlier had come Black Tuesday and the great Wall Street crash. The last French troops were leaving the Rhineland, the last remaining buffer between their country and Germany. Mohandas Gandhi was starting his Salt March, which would shake British rule in India to its foundations. Josef Stalin’s bloody purges of the Soviet Communist Party were poised to begin, and in China the civil war between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong was taking a new and violent turn in the country’s northern provinces.
MacArthur was even planning an official tour of China, Japan, and Korea, much as he and his father had done in 1904–05, including Manchuria, where there was growing tension between the native Chinese and their Japanese occupiers. Now he had to cancel his plan.15 But it was clear to him that this growing arc of crisis, which included Soviet territory in Asia, would inevitably have a direct impact on American interests in the region, including the Philippines.
But for now it was a moment for celebration, and also reflection.
There was a series of banquets in his honor, attended by Quezon, Manuel Roxas, and other Filipino politicians thanking him for his service and devotion to the Philippine people. The biggest was at the Manila Hotel, where one speaker after another praised MacArthur and wished him luck in his new position. He rose to his feet and, according to a reporter, gave “a more or less extemporaneous address” that lasted some forty minutes.
“Leaving the Philippines is severing the threads of connection that have linked me with this country for thirty years,” he said. In that time “the world has changed more rapidly than in any other period,” particularly “the shift of the center of interest from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
He continued, “You in this hall are engaged in a momentous task. The Asiatic continent is at present undergoing an adjustment of its Oriental background to an Occidental point of view.” The rhetoric may have been old-fashioned, but MacArthur had put his finger on the problem that would haunt Asia for the rest of the twentieth century, and beyond.
“Can this problem be solved?” MacArthur believed it could. Bringing together Asia and the West, including Western economies and technology, would require courage, intelligence, and a sense of balance, “a sense of proportion and relative importance of things” between the energies of the West and the values of the East.
But above all, he said, it would demand a sense of tolerance.
History teaches us that, when two races are brought by the working of an inscrutable Providence to live together, tolerance, a sympathetic understanding of each other’s desires, hopes, and aspirations, is the inescapable necessity….It raises to sublimity him who extends it, and him who by accepting it, shows his readiness to return it in kind.16
It was a principle—MacArthur would argue a biblical principle—that he would invoke to guide his policy not only in the Philippines but also, some sixteen years later, in a conquered and defeated Japan.
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MacArthur arrived in San Francisco and was formally sworn in as army chief of staff on November 21, 1930. He was exhilarated about his new position, which gratified a lifetime’s ambition. Still, there was some trepidation. It was characteristic that before he accepted the job he had summed up his doubts in a telegram to his mother, who wrote back, “[Y]our father would be ashamed if you showed timidity.” Also characteristically, she now joined him in the big red-brick house at Fort Myer, No. 1, that would be his home and headquarters. She was now seventy-eight, frailer and less mobile but personally as formidable as ever. MacArthur had a sunporch built across the back of the second floor and he installed an elevator, both for his mother’s comfort. Then, “I moved into quarters…and prepared to face the music.”17
It would be louder, and more discordant, than even he imagined.
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As the official historian of the Army Chiefs of Staff has noted, “The armed forces of the United States underwent an almost continuous weakening from 1918 onward for a decade and a half.”18
After initial cuts following demobilization after the world war, the actual numbers of officers and men didn’t dwindle much, but there had been a steady decline in funding. This elicited no reaction from a public that had convinced itself that the 1917–18 conflict had been the “war to end all wars,” not so much because there would actually be no more wars (although the Kellogg-Briand Pact signed by dozens of nations in 1928, including the United States, swearing off the use of military force may have persuaded some optimists that humanity was ready for that step), but because they believed America would never participate in them.
Pershing himself had offered some pungent comments on this attitude during his chief of staff tenure in 1925, warning, “Under our very eyes there have been serious reductions made by Congress” that ignored the possibility of future threats to the United States and would make it difficult to fight any modern war. “The politician, himself oftentimes uninformed as to his country’s history, frequently appeals to the ignorant and unthinking on the score of economy…Such demagogues are dangerous.”19
Dangerous or not, the cuts had continued, and the situation was made worse by the 1929 crash. Hoover browbeat Chief of Staff Summerall into more economizing, and the army budget for 1932 shrank to $351 million, $11 million less than the previous year, while the Bureau of the Budget sliced off another $8 million. At the same time money was added to the one service arm bound to rile many fiel
d officers, namely the Army Air Corps. In fact, MacArthur was arriving at Fort Myer just as the battle with Congress over where to spend the army’s dwindling funds, not to mention how much, was on the verge of breaking wide open.
MacArthur’s job was as difficult as any he would ever undertake, in terms of walking the tightrope between political pressures and realities on the ground. He would be forced to preside over a further deterioration of U.S. Army funding and resources during the current wave of Depression-era economizing as well as pacifism and isolationism both in Congress and among the public at large. At the same time, he had to deal with the opposite problem, congressmen who had certain military hobbyhorses that they believed should be top budget priorities. One was Representative Ross Collins of Mississippi, powerful chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Collins was fascinated, obsessed even, with Major Adna Chaffee’s pioneering experimental mechanized force at Fort Meade. Collins believed (rightly) that the tank was the weapon of the future; he also believed (wrongly) that the way to develop an American tank force was to funnel money out of virtually every other branch of the service into Chaffee’s array of armored vehicles that were still in the early and uncertain stages of development. Others pushed for more funding for the Air Corps, out of the same twin convictions.
MacArthur had to say no to both groups, and to their lobbyists inside the army itself. Instead, he established a single clear principle while he was chief of staff. At a time of budget stringency, there would be an even distribution of funding across the branches, so that no one branch, not even the cavalry, would be left wanting—or allowed to hog the bulk of the budget, no matter how promising. It was a decision that many would criticize later, in light of the impending shift toward air-supported mechanized warfare and for which the army was woefully unprepared when war finally came in December 1941. But it’s hard to see how anyone could have made the prescient decisions needed to prepare America for a style of blitzkrieg warfare that caught every other Western democracy off guard a decade later; or how a chief of staff could have maintained harmony inside the army itself by picking favorites, instead of distributing the meager rations equally—which is what MacArthur did.
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