Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  “It was a momentous day,” one of MacArthur’s staffers later recalled. “That night, instead of a stray light here and there the War Department’s windows were ablaze. The big machine was rolling….The Army was under test, but what a grand opportunity the task offered.”9 The army passed the test. Until the CCC was disbanded at the onset of war in 1942, it proved to be one of the New Deal’s most popular programs. The army’s involvement also inoculated it from further budget cuts—part of MacArthur’s strategy all along. His own contribution was to decentralize the effort, giving local corps area commanders as much latitude as possible in administering CCC efforts in their districts—much as he would with subordinates later.*1

  But above all, he had found a way for a peacetime army headed for the budget chopping block to keep itself busy and valued, and its officers gainfully employed (the mobilization and logistics of CCC were exactly what MacArthur anticipated would happen in an outbreak of war). As the War Department’s representative on the program put it, “mobilization of the CCC…has been the most valuable experience the Army has had since the World War.”10 It was such a success that MacArthur began to worry that it was drawing on his officers’ time too much, and in 1935 he shifted command over to officers of the Organized Reserve—in terms of future mobilization plans, the next best thing. At one point he even wondered aloud whether CCC recruits might benefit from a basic course in military instruction, but when that idea met with almost universal dislike, he backed down.

  Still, an admiring Dwight Eisenhower was able to write in June 1933, as budget talks loomed again, “We will lose no officers or men (at least this time) and this concession was won because of the great numbers we are using on the Civilian Conservation Corps work and of Gen. MacArthur’s skill and determination.”11

  Robert Fechner felt a similar gratitude for MacArthur’s help at a critical moment in the CCC’s birth. “Your personal interest and constant willingness to talk over all problems that have arisen has been of the greatest value to me,” he wrote. “I know that your sympathetic interest was the main spring in the work that the Army has performed.”

  MacArthur wrote back that his connection with the CCC had been “a real inspiration” rather than a burden. “It is the type of human reconstruction that has appealed to me more than I sometimes admit….I think all concerned in this splendid effort have cause for rejoicing in the results it is producing.” Like the Olympic Committee that he had supervised five years before, this “human reconstruction” involving civilians taking on the discipline and dedication of mind and body that usually fell to the military was in his mind representative of the “greatest nation in the world.”12

  In any case, MacArthur was able to breathe a brief sigh of relief. He had restored the reputation of the army, at least with New Dealers. Now maybe Roosevelt and his team would think twice about further slashing of the War Department budget. Getting more money was too much to expect, but now he had a standing chance to halt more cuts.

  He was wrong. The much-needed money for the army’s work with CCC would stay in, but on the rest Roosevelt would double-cross him with a budget that would make the cuts of the last decade look like the fat years in the Bible.

  —

  Even after a succession of brutally lean appropriations, the defense budget for 1934—Hoover’s last—had been a heartbreaker. It had come to only $277,700,000—$43 million less than what the War Department had asked for.13 Congress hacked off another half million or so when it passed the appropriations bill for 1934, but the real deathblow came three weeks later. FDR’s budget director, Lewis Douglas, had decided that no less than $80 million would have to come out of the nation’s military expenditures in order to reach the president’s goal of a balanced budget. The army’s budget would be cut by more than half, or 51 percent, the National Guard by a quarter, and the Organized Reserves and ROTC by a third each.14

  On top of that, Congress passed a 15 percent reduction in all federal and military salaries, including veterans’ benefits, and offered to give the president power to furlough army officers (3,000 to 4,000 of them) on half pay. Roosevelt said publicly that he would do just that.

  MacArthur was enraged. His first reaction was to dub the Roosevelt budget “a stunning blow to national defense,” and he personally rushed to the Hill to lobby his allies to halt it in its tracks. He testified to Congress on the folly of the furlough idea: “The foundation of our National Defense system is the Regular Army,” he insisted, “and the foundation of the Regular Army is the officer. He is the soul of the system.” Reduce his numbers below 12,000, MacArthur patiently explained, and the United States could never turn an army of civilian draftees into an effective fighting force in the event of war.

  “If you had to discharge every soldier,” he pleaded, “if you had to do away with everything else, I would still professionally advise you to keep those 12,000 officers” as “the mainspring of the whole mechanism”; otherwise, there would be no mechanism at all, no army to defend America.15

  MacArthur managed to win the furlough fight in the Senate, but Roosevelt was stubbornly committed to his other budget cuts. In his blacker moments MacArthur felt he was locked in a losing battle over the entire future of the U.S. Army. At stake was whether it could temporarily get along as the seventeenth-largest fighting force in the world, smaller than those of Greece or Portugal, but still have the resources to resurrect itself if and when war came—or whether it would lose its effectiveness as a fighting force forever in a misguided effort to balance the federal budget, even while CCC was going to cost $143 million just in its first three months.16

  In June he gave the graduation address at West Point. In front of rows of seated cadets and their families he spelled out the danger ahead and threw down the gauntlet to the president and Congress. “As the necessity of national defense is sacrificed in the name of economy, the United States presents a tempting spectacle. It is a spectacle that may ultimately lead to an alignment of the nations, which may lead to another World War….It is my conviction that at this moment the Army’s strength in personnel and materiel and its readiness for deployment are below the danger line.”

  He warned the cadets, “History has proved that nations once great, that neglected their national defense, are dust and ashes.” Reversing America’s decline from greatness was now MacArthur’s crusade in his last months as army chief of staff.17

  Fortunately, MacArthur discovered that he had an unexpected ally in the Roosevelt camp. He was George Dern, secretary of war and former businessman and governor of Utah, who had fought to streamline the department budget but who also understood, as a smart businessman would, how important it was to preserve the foundation for an American military when real trouble came its way. He was also a MacArthur admirer. “He was in thorough agreement with army plans,” MacArthur remembered later, “and a pillar of support for the military. My esteem for him grew daily”—not least because Dern was able to intervene with Ross Collins, who had learned about the indiscreet “Mississippi cracker” comment and wanted MacArthur’s head until Dern convinced him to ease off.18

  But could Dern move the president? MacArthur was going to find out, when the pair of them made a trip to the White House in late March 1934. They needed to make the insouciant Roosevelt realize the gravity of the 51 percent cut he had proposed. In his usual quiet, deliberate way Dern led the discussion with a long dissertation on why it would be “a fatal error” to insist on balancing the budget on the back of the army and the National Guard, especially when Nazi Germany was rearming and Japan acting more aggressively in the Pacific.

  Roosevelt, growing impatient at being challenged, began to strike back. He replied in harsh, bitter words until, as MacArthur later remembered, “the Secretary grew white and silent.” It was a bad moment. MacArthur began to feel it was a moment when America’s defense would hang in the balance unless he spoke up.

  “I felt it was my duty to take up the cudgels,” he wrote almost thirty years
later. “The country’s safety [was] at stake and I said [so] bluntly.”

  In retrospect, it’s not difficult to reconstruct the scene. Three powerful public men were clustered together in the Oval Office. One of them, Franklin Roosevelt, was clearly irritated at being bearded in his throne room on an issue he considered irrelevant to the nation’s immediate future. Another, George Dern, had been reduced to an angry silence by the president’s gift for biting sarcasm and “lashing tongue.”

  Then there was MacArthur himself, resolved that this moment was as important to the nation, and to his own pride as a soldier, as any since the Civil War, and that he now had to be as forceful as he was eloquent.

  It was not a good strategy. “The President turned the full vials of his sarcasm upon me,” MacArthur remembered. “He was a scorcher when aroused.” The discussion turned warm and intense. “For the third and last time in my life,” MacArthur confessed, “that paralyzing nausea began to creep over me”—the nausea that had overwhelmed him at West Point and then after the tongue-lashing by Pershing during the World War.

  As the feeling of discomfort grew, he grew more reckless. “When we lose the next war,” he finally intoned, speaking in the voice usually reserved for biblical prophets, “and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spits out his last curse, I want the name to be Roosevelt, not MacArthur!”

  Roosevelt’s face turned beet red. The color of George Dern’s face is not recorded.

  “You must not talk that way to the President of the United States!” Roosevelt roared.

  MacArthur, to his credit, realized that FDR was right. He had done the unforgivable: he had reamed out an American president to his face. “I felt my Army career was at an end,” he recalled later. Stiffly he offered his resignation as chief of staff and rose to go to the door.

  The air in the room, if anything, grew more stifling. Then Roosevelt tried to dispel it all by saying, “Don’t be foolish, Douglas: you and the budget must get together on this.” He said it “with that cool detachment which so reflected his extraordinary self-control,” and that earned MacArthur’s respect, if not his love, from that moment on.

  MacArthur stepped out the door. At his elbow was a jubilant George Dern, who had followed him out.

  “You’ve saved the Army,” Dern chortled. But MacArthur felt no such triumph. He felt instead a sense of shame that he had not known since West Point days—or probably never. “I just vomited on the steps of the White House” was the way he described it many years later.19

  Whatever MacArthur’s misgivings, his dramatic intervention had worked. Begrudgingly Roosevelt agreed to restore the full schedule of training for the National Guard and let the Reserve Officers Association representatives who visited with him at the White House persuade him to allocate additional funds for field training.20 In the end, he even gave way somewhat on the budget numbers, deciding that the $80 million he had demanded would be only $51 million instead.

  Still, the fight over the 1934 budget was a moment of no return for both Roosevelt and MacArthur. In Roosevelt’s mind, his showdown with the army’s egotistical power-hungry chief of staff had been essential to demonstrate “that he [i.e., Roosevelt] would be no mere nominal Commander in Chief.” Indeed, it was the kind of exertion of power over his service chiefs that he would demonstrate again and again during the Second World War, to the point of overruling his most trusted military advisors.

  For MacArthur, the episode was his introduction to Franklin Roosevelt in full. This was not the charming, easygoing, rather willowy scion of a patrician dynasty whom he had known during the last war. This was a Roosevelt who “had greatly changed and matured,” he decided. A man who was willful but also open to changing his mind; disingenuous to the point of duplicity but absolutely fearless; a president capable of doing great harm but also great good. It was this Roosevelt with whom he would have to contend for the next decade, until the day in April 1945 when an Army caisson would carry Roosevelt’s body down Pennsylvania Avenue before a grieving nation and a new president, one less tested and less trusted, took Roosevelt’s place.21

  —

  Together Dern and MacArthur had saved the army from a permanent starvation diet. Congress’s appropriation for fiscal 1935 was still dismal in the War Department’s eyes: barely $280 million. MacArthur explained in his annual report in mid-1934 that the army and the National Guard were “at considerably less than half the strength contemplated” by the law that Congress itself had passed, the National Defense Act of 1920, and its equipment was “inadequate even for limited forces…and manifestly obsolete.” The Reserve Officers’ Corps was still “inadequately supported.” Even more shockingly, “we have no enlisted Reserve.”22

  But the era of draconian cuts was over. In 1934 a new mood was sweeping over Congress and public opinion now that the worst of the Depression had passed, and people were becoming aware that all was not well with the outside world. In Germany Adolf Hitler was firmly in power, and taking concrete steps to not only rearm Germany but also pull out of the League of Nations. Japan was already out, and later that year announced that it would also be pulling out of the Five-Power Washington Naval Treaty—the treaty that had been the anchor of America’s mistaken belief that reducing its navy and army would have no consequences, since other powers, including Japan, were formally committed to limiting theirs or even doing the same. And far off in Africa, Italy’s Benito Mussolini was preparing for his boldest overseas venture yet, with an invasion of Abyssinia from Italian Somalia.

  In this tense atmosphere, MacArthur felt confident enough to ask for an additional appropriations for fiscal 1936, raising the War Department budget to $361 million—the biggest yet since becoming chief of staff.23 It was a pipe dream: everyone still assumed that if the world exploded in war, the United States would not have to take any part in it. Indeed, Congress would pass, and Roosevelt sign, the first Neutrality Act that next year, 1935, precisely on the hope that America could steer clear of any future conflicts by refusing to help arm either side.

  All the same, no one was willing to risk weakening the American military any further, given the increasingly dangerous world. Under MacArthur’s leadership a corner had been turned, and if the army was not yet on the road to recovery, at least it was off the operating table.

  Still, as the summer of 1934 drew to a close, MacArthur told Ike he believed his days as chief of staff were numbered, might even be over in a few months.24

  His position had been made worse by two scandals, the first involving the U.S. mail service. In February, without consulting MacArthur, Roosevelt asked the head of army aviation, General Benjamin Foulois, if the army could take over delivery of U.S. air mail from its commercial carriers, which were being investigated for antitrust corruption. Foulois immediately said yes, thinking it would be great publicity for an Army Air Corps that had barely survived its post–World War One cuts and the Billy Mitchell scandal.

  Instead, it was a disaster. Over the first eight days of the flights, the army suffered eight fatal crashes; and three more in March. Roosevelt was furious: he summoned MacArthur and Foulois to the White House and demanded, “When are those airmail killings going to stop?”

  Foulois’s answer was equally blunt. “Only when airplanes stop flying.” He blamed bad weather and poor navigation for the deaths, but the public—and Congress—blamed Foulois and MacArthur. The chief of staff found himself hauled up in front of a Senate investigating committee, before which Foulois, far from trying to pass the buck, pointed out that MacArthur had never been consulted on what was a major reallocation of army resources.

  The senators were aghast. “The Executive Order of the President was made before you knew of it?” they asked MacArthur.

  “Yes sir,” MacArthur replied coolly. “I knew nothing about carrying the mails until I was told of it by [the] Associated Press.” His testimony let him off the hook for any responsibility for the
tragic crashes, shifting it instead to the White House. But MacArthur was careful to keep himself on the moral high ground. He pointed out that the army always carries out the orders it’s given, and that Foulois and the Air Corps were blameless in the deaths that had taken place.*2 He was also careful not to lay too much blame for the fiasco on Roosevelt himself, which was politically as well as personally astute.

  Because he was going to need Roosevelt’s help in getting through the next scandal, which involved the goings-on in a certain D.C. apartment building called the Chastleton.

  —

  The Chastleton sits on Sixteenth Street north of R Avenue and across from the Scottish Rite Temple belonging to the Masonic Order. Thoroughly renovated today, in 1934 one of the Chastleton’s residents was a beautiful young girl named Isabella Rosario Cooper. She was a Filipino dancer and film star, in fact, who had appeared in the Philippines’ first on-screen kiss, which earned her the nickname Dimples.

  She had lived at the Chastleton since 1930, but never received a single rental bill. That was paid for by Douglas MacArthur, a man thirty-four years her senior who had brought her with him when he had left the Philippines for Washington.

  In the summer of 1934 the army chief of staff’s secret assignation—so secret that his own mother knew nothing about it—was about to go public. In an age when a movie could not show a man and a woman sitting on the same bed unless they were supposed to be married, MacArthur knew he faced public disgrace as great, if not greater than, the problems that had followed the Bonus Army debacle.

  He had met Isabella when he returned to the Philippines in 1928. He was fresh from his divorce from Louise and enjoying the bachelor life in quarters with four other bachelor officers, “a gay and lively group,” he admitted years later, with whom he spent evenings and weekends going to the cinema, polo matches, and boxing matches. It was at one of those boxing matches, at Olympic Stadium in 1929, that an exquisite young woman caught his eye. As if in a scene from an Ernst Lubitsch movie, he had his aide Tommy Davis send her a note.