Soon she and MacArthur could be seen all over Manila riding in his chauffeured limousine, which would stop outside her home on Herron Street in the Paco district of Manila.25 MacArthur would come up to share a cigarette and talk and drink a concoction of Spanish brandy, squeezed mango, and crushed ice that she christened “the Douglas.”
She was as unlike Louise as any woman could be. Small, soft-spoken, beautiful, Dimples was charming yet self-effacing—and darkly exotic. Louise had been two years older than he; Isabel was not even eighteen. But when he was recalled to Washington in the fall of 1930, he was determined that she join him when he got settled. He bought her a jade-and-diamond ring as well as a ticket for the States, and the day he sailed, he watched her waving from the dock in her bright green dress until she faded from sight.26
Whatever else she was, Isabel triggered something in MacArthur akin to a frantic passion. His letters back to her (at one point he was writing two a day) were filled with his plans for their reunion. In fact, given her flourishing career in the Philippines and her wide circle of admirers, he was pathetically worried that she might not follow him to America. The language of the letters bordered on the erotic, not to say pornographic, as he described how “I kiss your dear lips and press your soft body to my own.” His memory of her kept him awake at night, as he found himself “groping for you…seeking for you to soothe my fever” and “all the passion of my starving panting body.”27
It was not until early December that “Darling One” and “My Baby Girl” arrived in the States and took up residence at the Chastleton. It’s not entirely clear what Isabel saw in him beyond a handsome and powerful sugar daddy and protector. He did buy her a fur coat, a chauffeur-driven car, a French poodle, and a large collection of French lingerie. MacArthur even provided her an allowance. On the other hand, it may have been that she found his devotion touching, not to say stimulating. Having one of the most powerful and respected men in the United States literally at her feet—even if he was thirty-four years her senior—must have been gratifying to the teenager from Manila.
Certainly she did want something more than clandestine meetings. She began using the name Mrs. Isabel Cooper—a clear hint. But MacArthur would have none of it; indeed, he could not. Quite apart from the absurdity of contemplating marriage to a barely legal girl whom a race-conscious government and army would see as a half-caste, he knew that the revelation of their relationship would become a juicy Washington scandal—especially given his reputation as more marble monument than man.
Then there was his mother. Frail, dressed in widow’s black twenty years after Arthur MacArthur’s death, and wearing black sunglasses to protect her failing eyesight, she was still a formidable presence in her son’s life. When she arrived at Quarters Number One, she had announced she would receive no visitors. But her son was still the center of her life, and the story went out that she checked the weather every day to choose his coat or umbrella for him before he set off for the office. On one wintry day someone saw her standing on the porch as MacArthur boarded his car, and heard her calling plaintively, “Dougee—did you remember to take your overshoes?”28
She would have found Isabel entirely unsuitable, either as wife or as female associate. And so although MacArthur recognized that the relationship had no future, there was also no way out. Instead, he did his best to keep it a deep secret.
That didn’t last for long. And the one responsible was his ex-wife, Louise.
—
Gross, overweight, addicted to drink, and deeply bitter over the breakup with her husband, the once-elegant Louise was prime fodder for anyone looking for information to discredit an army chief of staff who was largely hated in liberal and New Deal circles.
In the spring of 1934 she met liberal columnists Drew Pearson and Roger Allen, authors of the widely read “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column. They were determined to skewer MacArthur, the evil mastermind of the Bonus Army debacle, any way they could. They were therefore delighted to find in his ex-wife a seemingly bottomless fount of scandalous stories, including—as she would drunkenly wag her little finger—that MacArthur was impotent. “This is Douglas’s penis,” she would say and giggle. “He thinks it’s just for peeing with!”29
The impotence story stayed under wraps. But when their column appeared in mid-May flaying MacArthur’s supposed “dictatorial, insubordinate, disloyal, mutinous and disrespectful” behavior during the Bonus Army days, MacArthur exploded. He brought a $1.75 million lawsuit for libel, citing seven examples with a $250,000 price tag on each.
None of them, however, involved Isabel. That information came to Pearson and Allen not from Louise—she was terrified into silence by the lawsuit and told the columnists she would never testify under oath—but from MacArthur’s old nemesis Congressman Ross Collins, whom they approached for any damaging information they could use to bolster their defense. Collins said (according to Pearson), “You know, MacArthur’s been keeping a girl in the Chastleton Apartments.” And so the secret was out.
How Collins got the information—whether through private detectives or ordinary War Department scuttlebutt—didn’t matter. The irony was that the affair was already over. In 1933 Isabel had met a young law student, her interest in MacArthur steadily faded, and when he found out in the spring of 1934, there had been an ugly scene and they parted ways. That July MacArthur had bought her a steamship ticket to send her back to the Philippines. Instead, short on funds now that her allowance was gone, she cashed in the ticket, moved out of the Chastleton, and went looking for a cheaper place to live—and she demanded more money. Finally, MacArthur sent her a note saying “From the Humane Society. Apply to your Father or Brother for any future help.” He also sent her the “Help—Women” classifieds from the Washington Times. If anything was calculated to turn Isabel into a spurned lover seething for revenge, that was it.30
That was the person Pearson found when he finally located her, and she happily handed over whatever physical evidence she had of their affair—including the bundle of torrid letters.
Unlike Louise, she was more than willing to testify in court, including testifying to hearing MacArthur say, “Hoover was a weakling, but I finally put some backbone into him” and refer to Roosevelt as “that cripple in the White House.”
This was interesting, if only because the person who had been advising MacArthur in the lawsuit was Roosevelt himself. He had even advised him as to the exact amount of the suit—$1.75 million—and told his cabinet that he had “authorized” MacArthur to sue that “chronic liar” Pearson, hoping the result would be the end of Pearson’s career, even though Pearson was one of the most loyal supporters of his administration.
But now the stakes had changed. Pearson offered a straightforward blackmail deal: call off the lawsuit or I’ll make the affair and the letters public. It seems MacArthur sent off his aide Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower to try to talk to Isabel, but she had disappeared (Pearson had her living in hiding with his brother in Baltimore).
So finally he reluctantly agreed to drop the suit and pay his former mistress $15,000 to get his letters back—even though Pearson kept copies of several just in case.
Some wondered why he had caved. Admiral Leahy, who was working as FDR’s naval advisor and had gotten wind of the scandal, guessed the reason was “that old woman he lived with in Fort Myer,” namely, Pinky, and he was probably right. MacArthur must have known that the revelation of the scandal would have broken his mother’s heart—and very likely might have destroyed her already fragile health.31
But it’s also possible that his own heart had suffered as well—although he was too proud to admit it. Love’s young dream had been exposed as a lie; and his private passion, which had seemed so romantic at the time, had come within an ace of being exposed in a crowded courtroom to scorn and ridicule.
So he paid up to make the scandal go away. And it did; Pearson kept his promise not to use the letters during the general’s lifetime. Even MacArthur’s mos
t thorough biographer, D. Clayton James, never learned the full details.
It was also the end of Isabel. With her cash in hand and her former law student in tow, she headed for Hollywood, where she struggled unsuccessfully to establish a movie career—and struggled unsuccessfully to kick a growing addiction to barbiturates. In 1960 an overdose took her life.
Her last years had been deeply unhappy ones. Some said she spent them trying to convince people that she had once been Douglas MacArthur’s teenage mistress. Everyone had simply laughed at the idea.32
—
In January 1935 MacArthur sat in full dress uniform with brightly polished boots in front of the assembled members of the House Subcommittee on Military Appropriations. His personal life might be a mess; the sordid Cooper scandal may have hurt the regard with which some Washington insiders held him, the president included. But that afternoon MacArthur could be happy and confident. The War Department had just announced that in fiscal year 1936 it intended to increase the army’s enlisted strength from 119,000 to 165,000—its biggest peacetime strength in fifteen years—and its officer corps from 12,000 to 14,000. At the same time it was looking to increase the West Point corps from 1,374 to 1,960 cadets—again, the biggest peacetime gain in years.33 All the plan needed was a War Department budget increase to $331,800,000—and what made the army’s chief of staff happy was that this time he believed he could get it.
The president’s Bureau of the Budget had hacked away $30 million from that figure and eliminated the increase in the enlisted ranks. But this time, instead of accepting the best of a bad deal, MacArthur was going on the counterattack. He urged the appropriations subcommittee to repudiate the bureau’s decision. It was one “I think so fundamental and so basic that its application unbalances the bill from the standpoint of reasonable policy,” MacArthur intoned, “and may jeopardize the prospect in the case of major operations.”
The subcommittee’s chairman, and MacArthur’s old nemesis, Ross Collins, rebuffed his arguments, but to MacArthur’s delight the rest of the subcommittee backed him up. They restored $7 million to the Bureau of the Budget’s numbers and empowered the president to raise the enlisted level to 165,000 men. The downside was that the army’s request for more officers lost out. For MacArthur, however, it was still a big victory, and when the final appropriations came out of the Senate in late March 1935, where MacArthur’s strength was greater, the army’s budget was just $6 million short of the department’s request; and the increase to 165,000 men was now a matter of law.
The press proclaimed that Congress had “voted MacArthur virtually everything he wanted,” and admitted, “General MacArthur has a way with Congressional committees.” Even the administration’s decision to sequester $9 million of that increase couldn’t dampen his sense of triumph, and The New York Times had to concede that Mac had won his case not just through personal persuasion but because of the growing talk of war on this side of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Indeed, public opinion in 1935 for the first time showed support for increased appropriations—although Congress still leaned completely the other way.34
MacArthur’s annual report for 1935 was a deeply satisfying one.
“For the first time since 1922,” he wrote, “the Army enters a new fiscal year with a reasonable prospect of developing itself into a defense establishment commensurate in size and efficiency. This year definitely marks the beginning of a long-deferred resumption of military preparation on a scale demanded by the most casual regard for the Nation’s safety and security”—and, he might have added, a casual glance at the headlines.
Mussolini was invading Ethiopia; Japan was occupying northern China. Adolf Hitler had taken over the Saar territory on the border with France and was instituting mass conscription in Germany. Mussolini was doing the same in Italy, with the goal of one million men under arms by the end of the year.
Under these conditions, an American standing army of 166,000 men didn’t seem that warmongering after all.
In addition, there had been vital steps to increase military aviation. Echoing his old friend Billy Mitchell, who had died an alcoholic, broken man the year before, MacArthur stressed that “a blow that can be delivered by a strong air unit is sudden, and depending on the vulnerability of the target, can be peculiarly devastating.” There were also plans for developing a strong mechanized force for the army, including “the possibility of transporting into and even through the vicissitudes of battle itself the infantry of entire divisions.” Indeed, “nothing is more important to the future efficiency of the Army than to multiply its rate of movement.”
All the same, despite the new technologies the army would be harnessing, there was certainly no cause for complacency. The road to transforming the U.S. Army into a modern and efficient force ready to fight modern battles was still a difficult and long one, MacArthur affirmed. But at least “it is now open and unobstructed….I am happy to have had the opportunity through an additional year to continue the struggle to free the Army of shackles tending to chain it to obsolescence and stagnation.” Although much remained to be done, he concluded, “[m]y successor in this office…will have the unswerving support of the whole Army—the most able, loyal, devoted, and unselfish body of public servants that this Nation or any other has ever produced.”35
It was MacArthur’s last address to Congress as chief of staff. By ordinary lights, his reference to a successor would have been a matter for regret, after what he and his successor, General Malin Craig, both believed had been a highly successful tenure. But all the evidence suggests that MacArthur was eager to leave: eager to leave behind the poisonous world of Washington politics and the Washington media, Drew Pearson included, as well as President Roosevelt’s tangled webs of intrigue.
That included Roosevelt’s stringing him, and the army, along on his reappointment for more than a year. His ordinary term had run out in November 1934. The conventional wisdom was that Roosevelt would replace MacArthur, the conservative Republican who was still blamed for the Bonus Army debacle, with someone more in line with the New Deal outlook. But Roosevelt was unhappy with the alternatives. So he startled everyone with an announcement on December 12, 1934: “I have sent a letter to the Secretary of War directing that General Douglas MacArthur be retained as Chief of Staff until his successor has been appointed…I am doing this in order to obtain the benefit of General MacArthur’s experience in handling War Department legislation” in a Congress that was as headstrong as it was unsure of what to do on national defense matters.36
Then the following June Roosevelt extended his term yet again—until October.37
By then, however, MacArthur already had his eye on a new job after chief of staff—one he was eager to take on.
In the summer of 1934, MacArthur had a welcome visitor from the Philippines—Manuel Quezon. His old friend was now head of the Philippines’ largest political party and about to become the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth in November.
It was Quezon’s second trip in two years. He had been in Washington before to lobby hard for Philippine independence; the result had been a bill sponsored by Millard Tydings of Maryland and John McDuffie of Alabama. It was much less than Quezon had hoped for. It offered independence for his country no earlier than 1946, with a gradual shift of governmental responsibility to the Filipinos themselves—more gradual than the political opposition Quezon faced in Manila would have liked. But Quezon put the best face on Tydings-McDuffie, which included provisions for continuing American bases in the islands, and used its passage to win his own election as president.38
Worries kept gnawing at Quezon, however. Japan’s army was on the move in China; Japan’s navy was rapidly expanding. How long would it be before Asia’s budding imperial power cast its gaze in the direction of the defenseless Philippines?
When he raised this issue with Roosevelt and members of Congress, he got little more than vague reassurances. The days when Congress worried about the fate of “our little brown broth
ers” far across the Pacific were long gone; the Depression had focused all attention at home. As for Roosevelt, he “was always too absorbed in other matters to give the Philippines much thought,” as one historian has put it. Meetings at the White House were fruitless.39 Quezon decided to seek out the one person he thought would care about what happened to the Philippines, his friend Doug MacArthur.
The minute they sat down together, Quezon posed the crucial question. “Do you think the Philippines can be defended”—at least once independence was achieved in what seemed to be the far-off date of 1946?
MacArthur’s first answer was, “I don’t think so.” He then added, “Any place can be defended if sufficient men, munitions, and money is available—and there’s sufficient time to raise all three.” The monetary figure he had in mind was $5 million a year for ten years. Obviously the Philippines couldn’t expect to create a modern army, complete with air and mechanized forces, even with that kind of time and money. But MacArthur unveiled the idea he had borrowed from Leonard Wood: that of creating a Swiss-style army of civilian reserves, who could be trained in peacetime and led in war by a small and highly motivated force of professionals.
“No country will dare to attack you,” MacArthur said, almost certainly with a dramatic sweep of his arm that usually accompanied big bold statements of this kind. “The cost of conquest will be more than the expected profit.”40
Quezon digested this for a moment, and then asked his next question.
“Will you undertake the task?”
MacArthur must have been taken aback by the question, but then he gave his answer almost without thinking.
“Yes, I will,” he said, and the two men shook hands.41
It was an extraordinary change of direction for a man who had spent his life in the United States Army, and now held its highest post. Yet for MacArthur it made sense. It would return him to the country where, for most of his life, he had been happiest.
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