CHAPTER TWO

West Point to the Philippines

Douglas MacArthur always made it seem as if General John J. Pershing was one of his biggest supporters. Pinky’s missives on her son’s behalf notwithstanding, MacArthur wrote gushy letters to Pershing, praising him despite evidence that the general and his staff were less than enamored with the flamboyant brigadier. It’s possible that Pershing was a true MacArthur fan and that the hints of coolness that whiff across their relationship are a result of Pershing’s own austere personality. But as MacArthur returned from France in the spring of 1919, it was chief of staff Peyton C. March, always the loyal Arthur MacArthur protégé, who remained Douglas’s greatest champion and ordered his assignment to West Point.¹

Reporting to Washington, MacArthur professed surprise with his new post, telling March, “I am not an educator. I am a field soldier. Besides there are so many of my old professors there. I can’t do it.” March assured MacArthur that he not only could do it but also would do it. March’s orders were simple and direct: revitalize the academy and bring it into the twentieth century.²

In truth, March was doing MacArthur a huge favor on two fronts: first, despite the dispirited state in which World War I had left West Point, its superintendency remained a plum assignment, and in that position March could make MacArthur’s temporary rank of brigadier general permanent, giving him a decided leg up on his contemporaries. As for his professors, MacArthur indeed would be one of the youngest superintendents in West Point history, but his age would be the least of his problems in convincing the old guard that changes were necessary.3

The old guard wanted less exposure to the real world, but, having seen that world up close, MacArthur believed there should be much more exposure to it. Calling West Point “cloistered almost to a monastic extent,” MacArthur instituted weekend leaves for upperclassmen, started a cadet newspaper, formed a cadet honor committee to enact and enforce a code of ethics, allowed the entire corps to attend away football games, and issued each cadet an allowance of five dollars per month to spend as he pleased.⁴

If he found anything that didn’t fit his concept of military life as he had experienced it in France, MacArthur changed it. He ordered the corps to Camp Dix, in New Jersey, to receive training in weapons and tactics from tough regular army sergeants, many of whom had been with MacArthur in the trenches in France. On the curriculum side, MacArthur broadened exposure to the humanities, particularly history, English, composition, and speech, telling critics that part of being an effective leader was the ability to communicate articulately. He urged less emphasis on the age-old technique of rote recitation and placed more emphasis on discussion.⁵

MacArthur also became a champion of athletics, both for the physical conditioning and the esprit de corps it promoted, and he required every cadet to take part in an intramural sport. He wrote the words that he ordered chiseled into the stone of West Point’s gymnasium: “Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, upon other fields, on other days, will bear the fruits of victory.” Still, at the intercollegiate level, despite his sideline cheering and gift of tickets to General Pershing, MacArthur endured three straight years of Army football losses to Navy at the Polo Grounds in New York City: 6–0, 7–0, and 7–0.⁶

Two things, however, didn’t change at West Point. The first was MacArthur’s flair for exhibiting his personal taste in fashion, and the second was Pinky. The superintendent still removed the wire brace from his cap, carried a well-worn riding crop, and wore a short overcoat despite the full-length models then prescribed. And, as she had done when he was an underclassman, Pinky moved with him to West Point. This time, however, instead of the dismal Craney’s Hotel, she occupied the two-story superintendent’s house and served as his official hostess.7

As usual, the widow of General Arthur MacArthur did not shy away from asserting command. On one occasion Douglas happened to engage several plebes in conversation as they passed his residence while returning to their quarters with a carton of ice cream—thanks to his practice of providing allowances. Pinky opened an upstairs window and called out, “Douglas! You must stop talking to those boys and let them go. Don’t you see that their ice cream is beginning to melt?”⁸

MacArthur’s responsibilities included testifying before congressional committees about West Point’s reforms and budget needs. He wasn’t always successful. He asked for an expansion of the cadet corps from 1,300 to 2,500 men and proposed a vigorous capital construction program. Congress, fully embracing the country’s postwar isolationism and budget constraints, granted neither, although it reestablished the academy’s four-year program, which had been shortened during the war.⁹

Even when he wasn’t successful before Congress, MacArthur had plenty of cover on his flanks as long as Newton Baker was secretary of war and Peyton March was chief of staff, but with the Harding administration’s arrival in March of 1921, that changed. John W. Weeks became secretary of war, and John J. Pershing succeeded March as chief of staff. It was no secret that MacArthur had zealously supported his old commander, Leonard Wood, for the Republican presidential nomination, and between the old guard at West Point criticizing his reforms—including a group of alumni that MacArthur’s adjutant dubbed DOGS, for “disgruntled old grads”—and Pershing’s staff, which remained largely the same as the clique from Chaumont, MacArthur’s position was soon exposed.¹⁰

MacArthur had expected to serve a four-year tour at West Point, but in November of 1921 he received a letter from Pershing notifying him of a War Department policy that made foreign service mandatory for the entire officer corps. MacArthur’s name, Pershing warned, was “high up for this,” and his successor at West Point would be named soon so that the new superintendent could relieve MacArthur “immediately after graduation in June, 1922.”¹¹

This may well have been a simple matter of postwar shuffling, but then an event occurred that carried personal overtones and whetted the appetites of gossips far and wide: General MacArthur heard wedding bells.

Henrietta Louise Cromwell Brooks—she detested her given first name and was known by her middle name, Louise, for most of her life—was ten years Douglas MacArthur’s junior, recently divorced, the mother of two young children, fabulously wealthy, and by all accounts the epitome of a liberated Roaring Twenties woman racing at breakneck speed to embrace far more rights than those granted by the recently ratified Nineteenth Amendment.12

Petite, dark-eyed, with a stylish bob of hair, Louise exuded a sensual sexuality that drew MacArthur to her like a moth to a flame. But she was equally attracted to him. “I had never before met so vivid, so captivating, so magnetic a man,” newspaperman William Allen White wrote of MacArthur after interviewing him in France at the close of the war. “He stood six feet, had a clean-shaven face, a clean-cut mouth, nose, and chin, lots of brown hair, good eyes with a ‘come hither’ in them that must have played the devil with the girls.”¹³ If that was how a veteran no-nonsense Kansas newspaper publisher felt, then it was no wonder that Louise was smitten.

For her part, Pinky was aghast, but her boy was charging harder than his father had up Missionary Ridge. Having met in the fall of 1921, Louise and Douglas announced their engagement in the New York Times on January 15, 1922, and they were married a month later, on Valentine’s Day, in Palm Beach, at El Mirasol, the Spanish-style villa of Louise’s stepfather. MacArthur wore his uniform bedecked with medals and stood before an altar flanked by the flags of the Rainbow Division and West Point. Louise’s colors—she was trying very hard at this point—were red, white, and blue. Pinky, perhaps recalling her own wedding and following the family custom of disapproval, stayed away, and even Douglas’s best man was from the bride’s side—Louise’s brother James.¹⁴

In the interim, however, a tantalizing rumor circulated that General Pershing had exiled MacArthur to foreign duty in the Philippines because the chief of staff was upset over the dashing bachelor’s sudden interest in Mrs. Brooks. Whether the sixty-two-year-old Pershing had his own designs on her or was merely promoting a relationship between Louise and one of his closest aides in a fatherly way is not entirely clear.

Pershing called the story “all damn poppycock without the slightest foundation.” There were even rumors that MacArthur would resign to avoid the Philippines assignment. Pershing said he did not believe such rumors and went out of his way to call MacArthur “one of the most splendid types of soldiers I have ever met.”15

This made a gossipy story in print, and it may have had a whiff of truth to it, but a more likely reason behind MacArthur’s Philippines assignment was the appointment of one of the old guard who eschewed MacArthur’s reforms to succeed him as West Point superintendent. “I fancy it means a reversal of many of the progressive policies which we inaugurated,” MacArthur told his adjutant—and it was. Among the casualties were MacArthur’s summer training camp and expanded privileges for upperclassmen.¹⁶

On September 5, 1922, MacArthur, Louise, and her two children sailed from San Francisco for the Philippines. By all accounts, the general was relaxed and pleased. He truly felt at home amid the archipelago’s laid-back atmosphere and friendly people, and he appeared relieved to leave the fast pace of Louise’s flamboyant lifestyle. But for exactly that reason, Louise viewed the assignment as one of exile—whatever Pershing’s motives. She sought solace in the small cadre of Manila’s American officials, while MacArthur socialized with rising Filipino leaders such as Manuel Quezon, who had become president of the Philippine Senate.¹⁷

Barely had they settled into Manila, however, when word came that Pinky, who was living with Arthur III’s family, in Washington, DC, in Douglas’s absence, was critically ill. Pinky’s health had a tendency to fluctuate depending on its value as either an excuse to help her younger son or a lever she could use to attract his attention. “Mother critically ill—come home at once,” read the cable from his sister-in-law that sent Douglas, Louise, and the children hurrying home by the next steamer. Pinky recovered, but the visit was the last time Douglas saw his brother, by then a navy captain, as Arthur III died of appendicitis the following December.18

In this instance, Pinky and Louise were unwitting allies. While Louise’s first wish was that Douglas take advantage of her wealth and become a stockbroker on Wall Street, her more realistic quest—since he adamantly refused to leave the army—was to arrange for Rainbow Division veterans to lobby Secretary Weeks to make him a major general. Pinky wholeheartedly concurred and took her campaign to Pershing, who, she believed, had “never failed” her yet.

Telling Pershing, who was completing his chief of staff tour, that it was “a real joy to see you on Saturday looking still so young and wonderfully handsome,” Pinky pleaded with him to be “the ‘Dear Old Jack’ of long ago” and give her some assurance that he would approve her son’s “well earned promotion” before Pershing left the army. As Douglas had done on occasion in his letters to both Pershing and Leonard Wood, she ended her missive asserting that if it were in her power, she would “crown your valuable life by taking you to the White House.”¹⁹

This lobbying by both mother and wife probably had little effect, but in January of 1925—a few months after Pershing’s retirement—MacArthur received his second star and became the youngest major general in the American army. Louise’s Philippine exile ended, and MacArthur returned to the United States, first to a short stint in Atlanta in command of the IV Corps and then to III Corps territory, around Washington, DC. They settled into Louise’s estate of Brookfield—quickly renamed Rainbow Hill—near Baltimore, conveniently close to the powers in Washington, including his mother.²⁰

It should have been a fully celebratory time, but the powers soon gave him what MacArthur later called “one of the most distasteful orders I ever received.” He was appointed to the board of judges for the court-martial of Billy Mitchell. In his crusade for airpower, Mitchell had become increasingly critical of his military and civilian superiors in the War Department, going as far as to charge them with negligence. For this he was charged with insubordination. As Louise watched from the audience, MacArthur kept an uncharacteristically low profile during the seven-week trial. Hindsight might suggest that he agreed with Mitchell’s advocacy even as he admitted that Mitchell was “wrong in the violence of his language.” But at the time, he was likely being careful not to make waves that might affect his own future.

No record remains of MacArthur’s vote—inferences vary with whoever is telling the story. MacArthur himself was unusually circumspect, saying only, “I did what I could in his behalf and I helped save him from dismissal.” But that refers to Mitchell’s punishment—a five-year suspension without pay—rather than the guilty verdict. Many years later, after he had long practiced speaking his own mind, MacArthur wrote in his memoirs: “It is part of my military philosophy that a senior officer should not be silenced for being at variance with his superiors.…”21

If the Mitchell court-martial was the most disagreeable professional incident of his years at Rainbow Hill, the most pleasant occurred when MacArthur, while still on active duty, was permitted to serve as head of the American Olympic Association after the unexpected death of its president. The general brought the same vigor and concept of total victory to international athletics as he had to war. “We are here to represent the greatest country on earth,” he told the American track team during the 1928 summer games in Amsterdam. “We did not come here to lose gracefully. We came here to win… and win decisively.” The United States finished first in gold medals and in total medal count. Germany was a distant second and Finland third.²²

The one person who might truly have been in her element alongside MacArthur in Amsterdam was not in Europe that summer. Things had not been going well for the MacArthurs on the domestic front. The year before, Louise had moved with her children from Rainbow Hill to the entire twenty-sixth floor of a mid-Manhattan hotel and thrown herself full tilt into the “roaring” part of the 1920s. Upon his return from the Amsterdam games, MacArthur was ordered back to the Philippines to fill the top post of department commander. Once again he sailed for Manila, but this time he went alone.²³

Douglas MacArthur’s third arrival in the Philippines, in the fall of 1928, was bittersweet. He seems to have truly missed Louise’s children, and perhaps he even missed the better points of Louise herself. But once again, the Philippines took him in and gave him respite. And once again, MacArthur sought close association with a potential champion. Henry L. Stimson was already a veteran American politician, having served William Howard Taft as his secretary of war. In 1928, Stimson was completing a brief stint as governor-general of the Philippines. According to MacArthur, the two “became fast friends.”24

But as with General Pershing, warm accolades of friendship flowed more freely from MacArthur’s side than they did from Stimson’s. When President Herbert Hoover appointed Stimson secretary of state in 1929, MacArthur used the occasion to congratulate Stimson and—as was his mother’s custom when dealing with men of power—express his hope that the position was “but a stepping stone to that last and highest call of America, the Presidency.”²⁵

MacArthur’s own name was mentioned as a possible successor to Stimson’s in the Philippines. His most vocal supporter, aside from himself, appears to have been Manuel Quezon: the two were becoming friends and mutual allies in the frequently painful process of moving the Philippines toward independence. In a cable to the New York Times that was datelined Manila, “certain high circles here, which cannot be named now,” reported that the governor-generalship was MacArthur’s “if he really wants it.” The cable—which seems unlikely to have originated without the acquiescence of those high circles—went on to quote “close friends” of MacArthur who said that the general had “his eyes on the White House… eight or twelve years hence,” after four years as governor-general and “four years in a Cabinet post, either as Secretary of State or Secretary of War.”²⁶ It was all a bit premature but nonetheless indicative of MacArthur’s ambitions.

Perhaps Louise might have paid attention to MacArthur’s name being linked to the White House—however remotely—but she was soon in Reno, where on June 18, 1929, she was granted a divorce on the grounds of MacArthur’s failure to provide for her support. Louise would be quoted—and likely misquoted—on the subject of their relationship over the ensuing years, but MacArthur always remained tight-lipped and stoic about it, as he usually did about all personal matters. Years later, in his memoirs, he addressed his seven years with Louise in a single sentence: “In February 1922 I entered into matrimony, but it was not successful, and ended in divorce years later for mutual incompatibility.”27

Shortly after receiving news of the divorce, MacArthur learned that President Hoover wanted to appoint him chief of engineers so that he could oversee the flood-control system being planned throughout the Mississippi Valley in response to the horrendous 1927 floods. MacArthur was dubious, claiming he lacked engineering skill but also worrying that the post might deny him the chance to become chief of staff. On the other hand, refusing a proffered presidential appointment might in itself be a professional misstep. MacArthur gambled and declined the post to remain in the Philippines.²⁸

But that didn’t mean that MacArthur wasn’t thinking about Washington, particularly as chief of staff Charles Summerall’s term was due to expire in the fall of 1930. In the time-honored method of army seniority, Peyton March’s early appointment of MacArthur to the rank of permanent brigadier general was about to pay huge dividends. At the age of fifty, MacArthur stood seventh on the list of eligible major generals, but none of the six ranking above him had the time remaining before mandatory retirement at age sixty-four to serve a full four-year term. On the other hand, there were ten other major generals junior to MacArthur (several by a matter of days and months) with at least four years left to serve, including Pershing’s reported favorite, Fox Conner.²⁹

Pershing, however, was occupied in France with a war monuments commission. Summerall, still grateful for the Rainbow’s response to his plea of “give me Châtillon,” favored MacArthur. Secretary of war Patrick J. Hurley was in receipt of an ingratiating letter from MacArthur profusely praising—almost to the point of embarrassment—Hurley’s grasp of Philippine policy. And President Hoover had already recognized MacArthur’s talents.

In the end, even though the New York Times wished there had been a closer scrutiny of other candidates, it was an easy decision. “It gives me great pleasure,” Hoover announced on August 5, 1930, “to promote so brilliant a soldier.” He had “searched the Army for younger blood,” Hoover recalled years later, “and finally determined on General Douglas MacArthur. His brilliant abilities and his sterling character need no exposition from me.”³⁰

Rather disingenuously, MacArthur wrote in his memoirs, “I did not want to return to Washington, even though it meant the four stars of a general, and my first inclination was to try and beg off.” MacArthur claimed that his mother persuaded him otherwise, saying that his father “would be ashamed if [he] showed timidity.”31 It makes a humble story, but it is ridiculous. MacArthur aspired to be chief of staff at least from his cadet days at West Point, especially after his father had been denied the post. Now he had the prize that had eluded his father. He certainly would not refuse it.

About to reach the zenith of an enviable military career, Douglas MacArthur nonetheless made an egregious error in personal judgment. Returning to Washington to take up residence with his mother in Quarters One at Fort Myer—the official residence of army chiefs of staff since 1908—the general also arranged for a young Filipina, Isabel Rosario Cooper, who had been his mistress for around a year in Manila, to follow him and surreptitiously take up residence at his expense in a Washington apartment.

On November 21, 1930, Douglas MacArthur was sworn in as chief of staff of the United States Army. Given the military demobilization since the end of World War I, he commanded a peacetime force of only twelve thousand officers and 125,000 enlisted men with an overall budget of approximately $300 million. On two trips to Europe during the following two years, MacArthur would be feted for the American effort in the recent war, but on a global scale the United States Army ranked behind those of Portugal and Greece.³²

The 1920s had ceased to roar, and the country was rapidly descending into the depths of the Great Depression. Its collective mood—in part because of the domestic gloom—was decidedly isolationist, so much so that senior military officers stationed in Washington dressed in civilian clothes so as not to attract unwelcome attention.

Central to MacArthur’s years as chief of staff were monetary battles with a Congress trying to drastically reduce the federal budget. The allocation of limited funds within the army appropriation became heated and put MacArthur in the middle between traditional manpower requirements and the need to develop new weapons systems, particularly aircraft and tanks. Airpower advocates lumped him among those who had cashiered Billy Mitchell, but his first priority was to protect the officer corps. Even so, headquarters staffs were reduced and minor posts closed, along with the army’s experimental armored unit.

Already there was talk of creating a separate air force then combining all three services—army, air force, and navy—into one department of national defense. Proponents cited economies of scale and command and control efficiencies, but MacArthur clung to the army tradition he had known since childhood. He called the status quo “the strongest possible organization for war.” Tampering with it, he warned, would be “inefficient, uneconomical, and uselessly cumbersome.”33

Not only did MacArthur want to keep the army as independent as possible, but faced with budget cutbacks, he also wanted to shackle the growth of the air corps, a sentiment shared by a number of his contemporaries. MacArthur went so far as to tell the head of the American delegation to the 1932 World Disarmament Conference in Geneva that its “ultimate aim should be to obtain an agreement… to give up military and naval aviation in their entirety and not to subsidize directly or indirectly civilian aviation.”³⁴

Between the army and navy, however, MacArthur wanted the army to be the dominant service in the air. After MacArthur and the chief of naval operations, Admiral William V. Pratt, agreed that airborne coastal defenses would be the responsibility of the army and naval aviation would content itself with training and scouting operations, MacArthur learned that the navy was developing torpedo planes. Because they delivered a type of bomb, he demanded that the army have its share of the planes. Ultimately, MacArthur’s insistence on controlling coastal defenses backfired and undermined his tight rein on air corps spending, because advocates of airpower used the air corps’ mission of coastal defense to argue for the development of a long-range bomber. In 1935, Boeing introduced the first experimental model of an airplane that MacArthur would come to know well—the B-17.³⁵

MacArthur’s role as army chief of staff was considerably different from that of his navy counterpart. MacArthur’s responsibilities and concomitant authority ran to all army operations in the field as well as the air corps, training programs, and matters of materiel and supply, although in practice certain specialized areas, such as the Corps of Engineers, were given wide latitude in their operations. But on the navy side, the chief of naval operations operated as a “first among equals” in coordinating the activities of eight independent bureaus, including ordnance and aeronautics. Fleet operations were separate and under the command of the commander in chief of the United States Fleet. If the United States went to war, MacArthur—short of a presidential decision otherwise—would command the army, while the navy chain of command would be split.36

Throughout his career, MacArthur had long displayed his conservative stripes. That inclination wasn’t unique for a military officer, and it was one of the reasons why Hoover had shown an interest in promoting him to the Corps of Engineers post. MacArthur definitely stood out, however, in the public manner in which he espoused his political beliefs. Most senior officers religiously recognized the clear line between the military and the political, but, as MacArthur’s soon-to-be aide, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, recalled, “if General MacArthur ever recognized the existence of that line, he usually chose to ignore it.”³⁷

Increasingly, in the spring of 1932, MacArthur confronted the waves of domestic unrest sweeping the country, particularly among its labor force. When the University of Pittsburgh invited the chief of staff to speak at its commencement and receive an honorary degree that June, liberals among the faculty and student body protested loudly. MacArthur took up the challenge and managed to deride “pacifism and its bedfellow, Communism,” while asserting, “Any nation that would keep its self-respect must be prepared to defend itself.”³⁸

A few weeks after the Pittsburgh speech, MacArthur faced what he called his “most poignant episode during my role as Chief of Staff.”³⁹ At issue was the extra compensation, or bonus, Congress had promised World War I veterans. Passed during the boom of the 1920s, the provision was in many respects a harbinger of Social Security. Individual amounts were prorated according to service but averaged around one thousand dollars—a significant sum as the Depression deepened and unemployment soared. Initially, these bonuses were to be redeemable in 1945, but faced with economic ruin, veterans demanded them in 1932. Despite legislation allotting one-half of each bonus early, many recipients were still not satisfied.40

An army of veterans, many with their families, descended on Washington and made camp in abandoned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol and in a larger encampment to the south, across the Anacostia River. On July 28, 1932, President Hoover directed the army to assist District of Columbia police in maintaining order and ultimately ejecting the Bonus Marchers, as they were known, from their encampment. Amid clouds of tear gas and lines of fixed bayonets, MacArthur insisted on taking the field in person to supervise the operation.

His chief aide at the time, Major Eisenhower, strongly advised MacArthur against appearing in person, telling him it was “highly inappropriate for the Chief of Staff of the Army to be involved in anything like a local or street-corner embroilment.” MacArthur ignored this advice, as well as Eisenhower’s later caution against talking to the press about what Eisenhower thought should be cast as a political rather than a military matter.⁴¹

Taking to the streets of Washington against former comrades in arms was an uncharacteristic thing for MacArthur to do. His experiences with the Rainbow Division in France suggest that, if anything, he should have marched down to the Anacostia camp alone and talked his way around the fires of the veterans gathered there. The chief factor in his personal involvement and subsequent actions was that MacArthur believed that most of those gathered in and around Washington were not veterans at all but Communist-inspired insurgents who hoped, in MacArthur’s words, “to incite revolutionary action.” MacArthur believed that “the movement was actually far deeper and more dangerous than an effort to secure funds from a nearly depleted federal treasury.”⁴²

Most evidence suggests otherwise. By one Veterans Administration survey, it was estimated that out of perhaps as many as twenty-five thousand Bonus Marchers, 94 percent had army or navy records and two-thirds had served overseas. Around one-fifth were disabled as a result of their service. Of this entire number, less than two hundred were active Communists, and while they indeed might have hoped to foment a clash, their influence was relatively small.43

Believing otherwise, MacArthur showed a definite defiance and aloofness that he had not exhibited with the rank and file in the trenches of France or, subsequently, with the cadets at West Point. Once the veterans had been dispersed, the Bonus March incident became not only a black mark on MacArthur’s career but also evidence in the minds of his friends and foes alike of a certain detachment on his part.

Sitting in his office in Albany, the governor of New York and Democratic presidential nominee, Franklin D. Roosevelt, hung up after a ranting call from Louisiana’s firebrand former governor and then US senator, Huey P. Long, and admonished his aides “to remember all the time that [Long] really is one of the two most dangerous men in the country.” Asked if the other was the conservative radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, Roosevelt shook his head. “Oh, no,” he answered. “The other is Douglas MacArthur.”⁴⁴

Recorded by Rexford Tugwell, a member of the New Deal intelligentsia, this quotation has been repeated in numerous accounts of the Roosevelt-MacArthur relationship without much scrutiny of its historical or editorial context. According to Tugwell, Roosevelt went on to express concern that many people mired in the Great Depression wanted strong military leadership bordering on totalitarianism and were “willing to trade liberty for it.” Roosevelt stopped short, however, of suggesting that Americans were ready to embrace MacArthur as the man on horseback and charge the barricades behind him.

If Roosevelt indeed considered MacArthur “one of the two most dangerous men in the country,” he offered that view while still a Washington outsider. Nominated but not yet elected, he as yet had no experience working with MacArthur as chief of staff. Besides, it was the highly charged summer of the Bonus March—hardly the shining moment of MacArthur’s career by any standard.

There must also be some scrutiny of Rexford Tugwell as the sole source for this characterization. Tugwell was a self-appointed guardian of the New Deal legacy. MacArthur, particularly in the shadow of the Bonus March, was a handy symbol—“well endowed with charm, tradition, and majestic appearance,” as Tugwell characterized him—for those stoking fears of military dictatorship prior to Roosevelt’s own aggressive leadership. Nonetheless, the “dangerous men” quotation is repeated in many secondary sources at face value. If indeed Roosevelt said it, it wasn’t indicative of their total relationship. That was to prove far more complex.45

If the dismal state of the nation’s economy had not already done so, the dispassionate routing of the Bonus March destroyed any remaining hope for Herbert Hoover’s reelection. In March of 1933, with the retired hero Pershing ailing and unable to do the honors, Douglas MacArthur led Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural parade down the same Pennsylvania Avenue from which he had ousted the Bonus Marchers.

The general’s relationship with the president-elect went back to their pre–World War I days, when MacArthur was a junior officer on the General Staff and Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy.⁴⁶ Poles apart politically, they were uncannily alike in other areas: both had protective and domineering mothers, were masters of the theatrical moment, and carried an unwavering sense of destiny for themselves and the country.

It seems clear from both sides’ later telling that FDR usually addressed MacArthur as Douglas, a familiarity that did not exist between the president and some of his other military subordinates, most notably George C. Marshall, who bristled the one reported time Roosevelt called him George instead of General. MacArthur was enough of a soldier—as well as a politician—to address his superior as Mr. President.⁴⁷

Budget battles were still at the forefront. Within days of Roosevelt’s inauguration, Congress passed the army’s appropriations bill for 1934. Totaling $277 million, it was less than what was proposed by the outgoing Hoover administration, but then Roosevelt ordered another $80 million trimmed. MacArthur went ballistic, calling the proposal “a stunning blow to national defense.” Next came 15 percent pay cuts for all federal workers, cuts to veterans benefits, and a proposed House of Representatives measure to furlough members of the armed forces at Roosevelt’s discretion.⁴⁸

MacArthur repeatedly appeared before congressional committees and at the White House to oppose these actions. He graphically recalled in his memoirs one of the most heated exchanges with Roosevelt early in FDR’s first one hundred days. Arguing that “the country’s safety was at stake” because of Roosevelt’s proposed cuts, MacArthur remembered that he told the president “something to the general effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt.”

FDR responded with equal passion before MacArthur offered his resignation as chief of staff and stormed toward the door. “Don’t be foolish, Douglas,” Roosevelt said, declining to accept it as he smoothly tried to defuse the moment. “You and the budget must get together on this.” But MacArthur kept on going. By the time he reached the steps at the North Portico, secretary of war George Dern caught up with him and asserted that the general had “saved the Army”—FDR would indeed slightly reduce some of his cuts in 1934. MacArthur, however, was feeling differently. A paralyzing nausea gripped him, and he vomited on the steps of the White House.49

Given such exchanges, one might assume that Roosevelt would gladly have seen MacArthur’s term as chief of staff come to an end on schedule in the fall of 1934. But Roosevelt was first and foremost a political animal not above using his opponents to his advantage. MacArthur’s apparent choice to succeed him was his former war plans chief and then head of the Army War College, George S. Simonds. Roosevelt was reportedly partial to IX Corps commander Malin Craig. There was a political solution: if Roosevelt stalled for a year in replacing MacArthur, four years hence would take Simonds into retirement and thus remove any competition to the president’s choice of Craig.

Although military glory was in short supply in Washington during the 1930s, MacArthur would have delighted in another four-year term as chief of staff. He was only fifty-four and had no worries about retirement age. If he moved to another army assignment, it would be anticlimactic. Politics was a possibility, or a cabinet appointment, but the latter wasn’t likely to come from Roosevelt.

Throughout the fall of 1934, Roosevelt stalled when the press asked him about the chief of staff position. Finally, on December 12, 1934, the president announced that MacArthur would be retained as chief of staff until his successor was named. This supported his strategy of appointing Craig in due course, but Roosevelt announced that he was doing so “in order to obtain the benefit of General MacArthur’s experience in handling War Department legislation in the coming session.”50

In retaining MacArthur through the 1935 budget negotiations with Congress—during which the 1936 army budget rose to more than $355 million and authorized enlisted strength increased to 165,000 men—Roosevelt was taking his first small steps toward preparing the country for war and covering his own political flanks by having a well-known conservative make his national defense arguments.

MacArthur’s political profile throughout his tenure as chief of staff left him exposed to the sort of media attacks generally reserved for politicians, not military officers. No one came out more aggressively against him than columnist Drew Pearson. Later one of the most widely read political commentators in America, Pearson was then a thirty-eight-year-old still trying to make his name. Beginning with two anonymously coauthored books and continuing with his Washington Merry-Go-Round syndicated column, Pearson caricatured MacArthur’s manner and motives as deplorable examples of the military establishment.

Pearson’s information was fueled at least in part by vengeful tidbits of MacArthur’s personal habits provided by his ex-wife, Louise. She was by then on her third marriage—it was already unhappy—and seemed to relish the role of gossip. Finally, in May of 1934, MacArthur had enough of Pearson’s rants and filed a $1.75 million libel suit against him, charging that the “column gave the impression he was guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer, or held him up to ridicule and contempt.”⁵¹ This only served to bring Pearson more of the notoriety he sought, and it ultimately brought home to roost the poor judgment MacArthur had used in bringing Isabel Rosario Cooper to the United States.

Regular trysts between MacArthur and Isabel had come to an end sometime in the spring of 1934, and MacArthur bought Isabel a return ticket to Manila. She didn’t go. When Louise clammed up on the eve of the libel trial and refused to offer corroborating testimony in Pearson’s defense, Pearson thought he was finished. But another of MacArthur’s bitter enemies, Congressman Ross Collins of Mississippi, a Democrat and chairman of the House subcommittee on military appropriations, came to Pearson’s rescue. Collins lived in the same Washington hotel in which MacArthur had lately kept Isabel, and he found her only too happy to cooperate. Just before the trial, when MacArthur’s attorney asked him why someone named Isabel Rosario Cooper was on Pearson’s witness list, her name hit like an unexpected artillery barrage in the night.

Opposing counsel conferred, and MacArthur agreed to settle the suit for one dollar in damages from Pearson. In exchange for returning her trove of MacArthur’s letters, postcards, and telegrams and promising never again to ask him for money, Isabel received fifteen thousand dollars from MacArthur.

Some were mystified by MacArthur’s prompt retreat. He was a bachelor at the time, and while his conduct was perhaps unseemly, he might have shrugged and said, “So what?” According to Admiral William D. Leahy, who had attended Annapolis with MacArthur’s brother, the reason for MacArthur’s reversal was the other woman in his life. MacArthur simply couldn’t bear to have his mother learn the torrid details of his affair with his mistress.52

Faced with the end of his high-profile tenure as chief of staff and relieved to escape the vengeful women in his life, Douglas MacArthur was only too pleased when Manuel Quezon, about to be inaugurated as the first president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, made him an offer that he couldn’t refuse.