Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  Yet the administration refused to state its worries publicly, for fear of undermining public confidence in American prestige in the Philippines—and for fear of running into a foursquare conflict with Douglas MacArthur. He was still a popular figure back in the United States, with considerable pull in the conservative Republican press and with anyone who remembered America’s long-standing pledge to protect “our little brown brothers” in the far-off Philippines. A running public battle with the administration on one side and MacArthur on the other over the possibility that the islands might have to be abandoned in a war, especially a war against an increasingly unpopular Japan, was a fight neither Roosevelt nor Stimson nor the army or navy leaders wanted.

  So they elected to pursue a policy of calculated hypocrisy that would last for more than six years. As for MacArthur, it’s hard in retrospect to blame him for pressing his belief that the Philippines could be defended, and would be defended by Uncle Sam, even if help didn’t come right away. It’s also hard in retrospect not to blame him for failing to realize that if a Japanese invasion did come, more likely than not he’d be on his own.

  Still, as 1936 dawned, the first training camps were being built and the prospect looked hopeful. The same was true of his personal life.

  —

  Jean Faircloth had taken rooms at Manila’s Bayview Hotel at the MacArthur party’s suggestion, and had even received a ticket for President Quezon’s inauguration. It was the general’s car that picked up her and Ike and Captain Davis and Major Ord to take them to the big party afterward at the Malacañan Palace, where the general’s father had presided over the country and which was now the presidential residence. As the crowds swept into the ballroom and glasses of champagne appeared on silver trays, Tommy Davis came up to her side.

  “The general,” he said softly, “is waiting for you on the terrace.”26

  There she found him in his white tuxedo, talking to President and Madame Quezon, as well as Governor-General Frank Murphy. If she was expecting to be led away for a more intimate conversation—under the trees in the garden, for example—she was mistaken. After MacArthur introduced her to his friends and Murphy, the conversation veered away to official topics, and she drifted back to the house, where she spent most of the evening talking to Dwight Eisenhower.

  But after his mother died and Jean moved into the Manila Hotel for the winter, MacArthur found that she was becoming a natural part of his inner circle—she and Ike had lunch almost every day and she played bridge and golf with the rest of the entourage. Eventually, MacArthur began asking her out, first to movies or the theater, and then to dinner.

  “Ready, Jean?” He would say promptly at 8:45 when the heat of the day and the sun had faded, and then they would head off. MacArthur insisted in sitting in the first row of the loge—Manila theaters were still segregated in those years, with Americans sitting in the balcony and Filipinos on the main floor—and he often fell asleep during the showing. But together they sat through one Hollywood classic after another, from A Tale of Two Cities to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, virtually six nights a week.27

  The routine became so firmly established that one night Jean threatened to break it by throwing a cocktail party in her hotel room. MacArthur couldn’t attend, but her plan was to end the party by 8:30 so they could make their movie date. To her dismay, the guests were having such a good time they weren’t leaving. Jean turned to Sid Huff, a U.S. Navy officer stationed in the Philippines.

  “What do I do?” she asked in a whisper, then explained the situation.

  “Just go ahead and leave,” was Huff’s advice.

  “I couldn’t leave my guests! Or could I?”

  “Certainly,” Huff said. “It’s an old Manila custom.”

  As he watched her surreptitiously slip out the door and join the general in his car waiting at the curb, Huff realized that the relationship between the two had solidified into something significant.28

  It wasn’t difficult to see what she saw in Douglas MacArthur. In addition to being the biggest celebrity figure in Manila, except for President Quezon himself, as well as the most powerful, he was a man who prided himself on his gallantry and considerable charm, especially with the ladies. He also gave “clean cut” a new level of meaning. He was fastidious in his dress and manners, almost to the point of obsession. He could spend an hour in front of a mirror examining himself for flaws or a stray hair or whisker. The big wardrobe in the penthouse held twenty-three uniforms and suits, which he changed three times a day. Tall and slim—one observer said he carried his paunch like a “military secret”—with clear skin and hair that was still dark brown, he looked more like a man in his midforties than someone approaching sixty.29

  He was also a man of moderate drinking habits—“I’ll have a gimlet,” he would invariably say at a cocktail party, and by the time he left, the drink had barely been touched. He ate moderately as well. It’s likely that the indigestion problems and reflux esophagitis that would plague him during his years in Korea had already started.30 His pipe smoking, which became iconic later on, was supplemented during a workday by a procession of lit cigarettes and slim brown Manila cigars that he would take from a box at one end of his desk, offering one to a visitor before lighting one himself. Yet no one described him as a chain smoker; more often than not, after a puff or two the cigar or cigarette would remain in the ashtray as MacArthur paced and talked, gesticulating energetically as the flow of words swept over the subject at hand, pausing now and again, with the only sounds breaking the silence being the whir of punkah fans overhead and the clatter of typewriters in the outer room.31

  For all his power and prestige, however, he was, as his friend William Ganoe once observed, “the loneliest man in the world,” even before his mother’s death. “When a man gets to be a general officer, he has no friends,” he once confided to his aide at West Point.32 So it also wasn’t difficult to see what he saw in Miss Jean Faircloth. She bore no physical resemblance to Pinky or to his first wife, Louise Brooks, but she combined the vivacity of the latter with the strong moral character of the former, together with the same willingness to devote her time and energies to his needs. He no doubt sensed that here was a woman who could fill the spiritual void left by his mother, but without the dominating, sometimes dogmatic tone—or the unspoken comparisons to his absent father.33 A companion he could treasure, perhaps for life; certainly one he needed as the world around him grew more complicated and shadows began to fall over the project he had taken on with such expectations of success.

  —

  On August 24, 1936, came the moment MacArthur had been waiting for, his installation as Field Marshal of the Philippine Army.

  There was a solemn ceremony at the Malacañan Palace attended by virtually every important personage in Manila, both American and Filipino. MacArthur walked to the podium dressed in a uniform of black sharkskin trousers and a white coat covered with gold braid, stars, and his American army decorations. There President Quezon presented him with a gold-handled marshal’s baton, as the crowd politely applauded.

  Dwight Eisenhower watched with a deeply skeptical eye. He considered the whole occasion “rather fantastic” and something of a joke considering that Field Marshal MacArthur still didn’t have an army to command.34 The uniform also drew considerable comment from the American press, most of it unfavorable; later the story would circulate that MacArthur had designed the uniform himself. If anything was needed to confirm the view of MacArthur as a man with dictatorial aspirations, a would-be “man on a white horse,” the whole event served perfectly.35

  It was not true that MacArthur had designed the uniform, although he, not Quezon, had selected the title of Field Marshal. There was also some method to this madness. MacArthur was firmly convinced that this traditional rank of supreme command in European armies would enable him to be treated with the same precedence and protocol as a Field Marshal Foch of France or a Field Marshal Hindenburg of Germany, including gaining him additional lev
erage in Washington for getting the supplies and munitions he would need to create a genuine army.

  In this he was mistaken. Washington began rebuffing nearly every request he and his staff presented for arming the Philippine trainees who would soon be full-fledged soldiers.

  In a July entry in his diary Ike noted they had been sending urgent messages to the War Department recommending that it ship Enfield rifles, Lewis machine guns, Stokes mortars, and 75 mm field guns from its surplus warehouses to bolster the existing stock of Filipino war supplies. “From the standpoint of the American army all this equipment is obsolete or obsolescent,” he wrote.36 Yet the War Department refused to budge.

  MacArthur himself took up the fight over the rifles, offering to buy 400,000 of the elderly firearms (older even than the ’03 Springfield, which was still the standard shoulder arm for the American soldier) at two dollars apiece. A straight answer was not forthcoming; a decision on the arms was postponed, then postponed again. Part of the problem, as it turned out, was that Commissioner Murphy, a committed pacifist, didn’t believe in MacArthur’s scheme to create a Philippine army under any circumstances. He passed news of MacArthur’s war materiel requests on to his colleague in the Roosevelt cabinet, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who led a one-man, three-year campaign to keep MacArthur from being able to arm the Filipinos with any weapons, let alone modern ones.37

  The new field marshal did have an ally in Major General Lucius Holbrook, commander of the army’s Philippine Department, who saw the value in what MacArthur was trying to do—including creating a Philippine army that could help his own forces if the islands faced invasion. But Holbrook himself had no resources to spare. He had 10,000 men in the Thirty-first Infantry Regiment, the two regiments of Philippine Scouts, two regiments of Filipino artillery under American command—and precious little else. No airplanes, no tanks or armored cars, and a total of 20,000 men to protect a country covering a thousand separate islands.38 He was also alarmed as MacArthur kept raiding his staff to build up his own, until the Philippine Army GHQ consisted of thirty officers, all Americans, and fifteen enlisted men. Holbrook finally prevailed upon the War Department to require MacArthur to ask approval before he carried out any further shifts of personnel.39

  But MacArthur found himself in a tough predicament. On the one hand, Washington recognized that he would be making all key decisions in defending the islands from attack, and gave him all the leeway he needed to make those decisions. His instructions in September 1935 called on him to “use your own judgement” and to feel free to call on the War Department for anything he needed. “Your mission must be accomplished—ways and means are left to you.” On the other hand, the War Department was doing all it could to withhold those means—while the only reliable troops for defending the island were not under his direct command.

  Yet MacArthur refused to be discouraged—or, despite the charges of later critics, overly optimistic. His speech after his installation as field marshal, one observer noted, “was a powerful piece of realism” on defending the Philippines. He said his plan was to build up a Philippine army that would “give pause even to the most ruthless and powerful,” while admitting that if war came the country would have to be held through “the furthermost retreat left available.” No place, he affirmed later, was indefensible. “Any place can be defended, any place can be taken, provided superior forces can be assembled.” He later told a Collier’s magazine correspondent, “We’re going to make it so very expensive for any nation to attack these islands that no nation will try it.”40 But until he had the resources, such statements were meant more to intimidate eavesdroppers in Tokyo than to express the arrogant overconfidence that critics later accused him of showing.

  MacArthur’s chief problem was that those resources simply weren’t materializing, either from the United States or from within the Philippines itself. The first wave of inductees for the training camps were a disaster. The 20,000 or so who showed up at the start of 1937 spoke eight different languages and eighty-seven different dialects. Twenty percent were totally illiterate, including men designated as sergeants and company clerks.41 In addition, there was already talk in the Philippine parliament of cutting the defense budget, and using its slender funds for other domestic projects. “Ours was a hopeless venture,” Ike admitted later, “the Philippine government simply couldn’t afford to build real security from attack.”

  As for the American government, Eisenhower began to sense that its resistance to helping the Filipinos arm themselves was less ideological or financial than race-based. To many in Washington, Filipinos were an inferior and dangerous race with a history of rebellion. Giving them modern weapons was a terrifying prospect—and would, many thought, serve only to antagonize the Japanese. In the end, MacArthur was able to persuade the War Department to send along a quarter of the surplus Enfield rifles it had available, but to reach this deal he had to argue that not only were the weapons not a threat to Americans but they were too old to be a threat to anyone—not exactly the kind of statement a military leader wants to make about the forces under his command.42

  Still, Eisenhower wrote later, “General MacArthur’s amazing determination and optimism made us forget these questions at times, [even though] they kept coming back in our minds.”43 MacArthur remained convinced that with the right kind of training and the right equipment, he could create an effective army in spite of the doubters and “defeatists,” as he called them. “The Philippine Army represents one of the most heroic efforts a liberated people has ever made to maintain independence and national integrity,” he told a group of reporters. “It deserves the complete support of public opinion in the United States and wherever freedom is the guiding spirit of men’s lives.”44

  MacArthur’s plea touched on the heart of the matter. In the end his vision for the Philippines depended entirely on support from Washington, and as 1936 ended Eisenhower increasingly urged him to return to the States and try to persuade the powers that be to release the resources he required to adequately defend the Philippines. MacArthur would have to deal directly with Franklin Roosevelt, who had been privately critical of his plans and who had just won reelection in a landslide. On the other hand, Roosevelt’s more secure position might make him more conciliatory, and more willing to confront the gathering threat of Japan by shoring up America’s first line of defense in the Philippines.

  Finally, MacArthur agreed—and decided to bring Quezon along to make their appeal. But before he left, he had one matter he wanted settled once and for all.

  —

  Jean Faircloth was in her hotel room one morning late in 1936 (later she couldn’t recall the exact date or even the month) when the phone rang. It was Dwight Eisenhower. MacArthur wanted to see her, he said. The general was sending around his car to take her to his headquarters.

  It sat high up on the walls of the Intramuros, a great stone building filled with splendid Spanish furniture. A Filipino sergeant who had been with MacArthur since his chief of staff days showed her into his office. Behind his desk was a stand with the flags of every one of his previous commands, from the Forty-second Rainbow Division and superintendent of West Point to army chief of staff and now field marshal of the Philippine Army.45

  They sat together and talked quietly for a while. Then the car whisked her back to the Manila Hotel. Some days later she announced to friends that she was planning to return to the States.

  “But when will you be back?” people kept asking.

  “I have no idea,” she would answer. “I’m just going to Murfreesboro.”

  Sid Huff saw her off as she boarded Pan Am’s China Clipper. He remembered watching her tiny figure in a dark dress and stylish tricorne hat walking up the gangplank. He must have wondered if they would ever see her again.46

  The ship she would be sailing on back to San Francisco was the liner Lurline, and she had to wait in Honolulu several days for its arrival. When it did, a friend gave her a ride out in a navy launch belonging to the
friend’s father, the navy commandant at Pearl.

  The friend dropped the bombshell as they sped across the harbor in a veil of spray.

  “Well, you’ll be seeing your general on board,” she said with a chuckle.

  Jean was shocked. “What do you mean? You’re fooling me!”

  But the friend wasn’t. MacArthur and Quezon had set out from Manila on the Empress Canada days before; but on seeing the Lurline in harbor, they had sought to transfer to the other ocean liner in order to arrive in San Francisco one day earlier.47

  It was sheer coincidence, although Jean guessed that gossip would have it that she had planned the rendezvous all along. She also wondered what MacArthur would think. But he and Quezon were very pleased to see her, and they had a pleasant voyage the rest of the way to California.

  They parted in San Francisco as Quezon and MacArthur prepared for their trip to Washington, and Jean sailed on to Los Angeles to catch the Twentieth Century Limited on her return trip to her home in Murfreesboro—her first visit in a year and a half.

  As she hustled through the Los Angeles train station and down the red carpet to board the Limited, she saw a figure in white standing at the far end of the platform. It was MacArthur, resplendent in a gleaming white tuxedo—the same tuxedo he had worn when they first met.48

  He had driven down from San Francisco alone to surprise her. There was no kissing or hugging. Only the usual bow from MacArthur as he took her arm and helped her up the step to board the Limited. He waved from the platform as the train pulled away; she smiled and waved from the window. She was returning to Tennessee, with a secret she had sworn to tell no one until MacArthur gave her the word. He meanwhile was setting off for Washington, on the visit that both he and Quezon hoped would change the future of the Philippines forever.