The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (5 page)

In the midst of his battle with Roosevelt over the army budget, MacArthur carelessly alienated the one man, General John Pershing, whose support he needed—and who had praised him for standing up to the president on the army pension issue. The dustup occurred over the promotion of Colonel George Marshall, a Pershing favorite but in MacArthur’s eyes a suspect member of Pershing’s World War One command mafia, “the Chaumont crowd.” After doing good work with the CCC, Marshall expected and deserved a promotion and a chance at commanding American soldiers. Instead, MacArthur ordered his transfer to Chicago as an instructor with the Illinois National Guard—sidelining him and choking off his chance for promotion. Pershing was enraged by MacArthur’s decision. He admired Marshall, believing he would one day be among MacArthur’s successors as chief of staff. General Charles Dawes, the former vice president under Calvin Coolidge, agreed. He heard of MacArthur’s decision and weighed in
with his own views. “What! He can’t do that,” he told Pershing. “Hell no! Not George Marshall. He’s too big a man for this job. In fact he’s the best goddamned officer in the U.S. Army.”

Backed by Dawes and other senior officers, Pershing intervened with MacArthur, pleading Marshall’s case. Pershing’s appeal was unusual: Retired senior officers rarely lobbied serving officers on the subject of promotions, but Pershing still had considerable influence in Washington and was anxious that Marshall’s talents be recognized. But MacArthur would not be moved; he viewed Marshall’s Chicago assignment as temporary, he told Pershing, until the coveted chief of infantry command became available. But when Marshall’s name did not appear on the next army promotion list, Pershing appealed to Roosevelt, who wrote a note to George Dern. “General Pershing asks very strongly that Colonel George C. Marshall (Infantry) be promoted to General,” Roosevelt wrote. “Can we put him on the list of next promotions?” Dern denied the request; he had spoken to MacArthur, he told Roosevelt, and Marshall would have to wait. MacArthur pleaded his innocence: While Marshall was not on the current list, he explained, the colonel would be on the
next
list, and MacArthur hinted of big plans for him. Marshall wasn’t convinced. At fifty-five, Marshall felt that his time was running out. “I have possessed myself in patience, but I’m fast getting too old to have any future importance in the Army,” he wrote to Pershing.

MacArthur’s plea of innocence wasn’t convincing to Marshall, and it wasn’t convincing to Pershing. The former commander of the American Expeditionary Forces admired MacArthur’s record in the Great War, but he had less regard for the army chief’s personality. Then too, MacArthur was a follower of former chief of staff Peyton March, an outspoken Pershing competitor and critic. The two had clashed repeatedly during the Great War, as Pershing exerted his independence from War Department control—and from Peyton March. Put simply, March envied Pershing his fame, believing he, March, should get as much credit as Pershing received for winning the war. When, in 1932, Pershing’s memoirs were published to great acclaim (he won that year’s Pulitzer Prize), March decided to respond by writing his own memoirs. This was innocent enough, but MacArthur took the extraordinary step of allowing March the use of a War Department office and its staff to help him in his
research. Pershing seethed. He had disliked MacArthur before, but had acceded to MacArthur’s appointment as chief of staff at Hoover’s insistence. Now, in the wake of the Marshall and March incidents, Pershing had become a MacArthur enemy.

While the Pershing flap had repercussions for MacArthur’s standing among Pershing’s friends, it did little to undercut his status as chief of staff, and it certainly didn’t convince Roosevelt that he should be replaced. But this didn’t mean the people around Roosevelt had abandoned their views that the president should get rid of him, either by directly relieving him or by forcing his resignation. Finally, in mid-May 1934, they got their chance. That month, MacArthur filed a libel suit against muckraking reporters Drew Pearson and Robert Allen (Eisenhower described them as “two newspapermen of the lower order”), who were the authors of the gossipy “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column. The lawsuit involved claims that the writers made about MacArthur and that were based on a series of interviews they had conducted with Louise Brooks, who had been linked amorously to Pershing and was MacArthur’s former wife. Brooks fed Pearson and Allen all the gossip she could think of about MacArthur, including his private views on Hoover and Roosevelt. Her depiction showed MacArthur as narrow-minded, opinionated, vain, egotistical, and dismissive of civilian authority.

But while Louise, now rotund and fighting alcoholism, was willing to make claims to Pearson and Allen in private, she was terrified of having to talk under oath. When MacArthur filed suit for personal damages (of $1.75 million), she panicked and said she couldn’t testify. With their star witness gone, Pearson and Allen scrambled, searching for a way to pressure MacArthur to drop his suit, which could ruin them. They found it in the person of a young and beautiful Filipino woman whom (in the wake of his failed marriage to Louise) MacArthur had brought to Washington as his mistress. Pearson and Allen got wind of this liaison, but they had little to go on. Then, as fate would have it, they were able to track her down. “You know, MacArthur’s been keeping a girl in the Chastleton Apartments on 16th Street,” one of the residents of the building told them. The information was solid, the source impeccable—it was that “Mississippi cracker,” congressman Ross Collins.

The “girl in the Chastleton Apartments,” whom Ross Collins had referred to, was Isabella Rosario Cooper, and she was beautiful. A former Shanghai showgirl and Philippine film star, Cooper had met MacArthur in Manila, then followed him to America when Hoover named him army chief of staff. But while she was thirty-four years younger than MacArthur, Cooper wasn’t naive. A 1926 Christmas card shows her smiling coyly at her Manila film fans, who flocked to watch her in
Ang Tatlong Hambog
(The three beggars), in which she received the first Philippine on-screen kiss. The card is signed “Dimples.” The two were often seen together in Manila, but that wasn’t the case in Washington, where MacArthur rented Cooper a spacious suite at the Chastleton Apartments, bought her an expensive wardrobe, and provided her with a poodle to keep her company when he wasn’t around. He visited her nearly every day at the Chastleton, taking several hours at lunch to do so. Knowledge of this dalliance was kept from his mother, who remained a looming figure in his life and a resident at his official quarters at Fort Myer.

While the presence of mistresses in Washington wasn’t unusual, the army chief’s relationship with Cooper was potentially embarrassing,
particularly for a public figure who aspired to higher office. So Isabella was kept firmly under control and was instructed by MacArthur to stay at home where he could visit her at his leisure. But Cooper had something different in mind when she came to Washington, dreaming that her life in America would follow the course it had in the Philippines, albeit on a much larger stage. She wanted to go to Hollywood. She wanted to be a star. So, predictably, she chafed at her imprisonment, and by early 1934, she and MacArthur were arguing. MacArthur responded to her entreaties by plying her with money and sending her on vacation to Havana; he then suggested she return to the Philippines. She refused. Finally, discovering that she was engaged in a relationship with a Georgetown University law student, MacArthur sent her a brusque note: “Apply to your father or brother for any future help.” That is when, with the help of Ross Collins, Drew Pearson and Robert Allen discovered her. It was as if she had been sent from heaven.

Pearson and Allen visited the Chastleton, but Cooper had already left. She wasn’t hard to find, however; there were few young Eurasian women living in Washington, and the two reporters located her, finally, in a simpler apartment in another part of the city. Cooper provided Pearson and Allen with a windfall of information on MacArthur, but unlike the anecdotes provided by Louise, Cooper’s information was politically explosive—she claimed that MacArthur told her that he, and not George Dern, ran the War Department (“Dern is a sleepy old fool,” MacArthur said), that he was the power behind Herbert Hoover (he was “a weakling,” MacArthur bragged), and that he referred to Roosevelt as “that cripple in the White House.” She also provided Pearson and Allen with a fistful of love letters from MacArthur and said she was prepared to testify in court to everything he had told her.

Pearson and Allen provided this information to their lawyer, who told MacArthur’s counsel that during the upcoming trial he would call Cooper as his first witness. The information had the desired effect. Not only was MacArthur horrified at the prospect of having his affair made public, but he also knew that his private comments about Dern and the president would prove particularly damning. He dispatched Dwight Eisenhower to look for Cooper, but she wasn’t at the Chastleton or even at the apartment where Pearson and Allen had found her.
The two columnists had wisely bundled her off to Baltimore, where she lived under the watchful eye of Pearson’s brother. Fortunately for MacArthur, this sordid scandal had a reasonable ending: He agreed to drop the lawsuit and silenced Cooper with fifteen thousand dollars. She used the money to set herself up in business as a hairdresser in the Midwest and as seed money for a trip to Hollywood, where she scouted out film opportunities.

Years later, Admiral William Leahy, who served as Roosevelt’s military advisor and would later be the titular head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, heard of the scandal and was surprised that MacArthur had agreed to drop the lawsuit. “He was a bachelor at the time,” Leahy said. “All he had to do was say ‘so what?’” Leahy suspected that the real reason MacArthur was so anxious to rid himself of Cooper was that he feared what his mother “Pinky” would say. “It was that old woman he lived with in Fort Myer,” he explained. But if that was true, it was only partly so. MacArthur also had Roosevelt—“that cripple in the White House”—to worry about, as well as the coterie of New Dealers who continued to lobby for his removal. But although MacArthur intended to keep his relationship with Cooper secret, numerous administration officials knew of it. Among these were Steve Early and Harold Ickes. Ickes even kept a running account of the MacArthur scandal in his diary. And Early and Ickes weren’t the only ones who knew about Isabella Cooper—Roosevelt also knew about her.

What is extraordinary about the Cooper incident is not Roosevelt’s reaction to it, but the steps he took to defend his chief of staff. In writing his memoirs, Pearson revealed that Roosevelt not only recommended that MacArthur sue the reporters, but also named the price the army chief should exact: precisely $1.75 million. Roosevelt then went further. In mid-May 1934, after Pearson and Allen published a column on MacArthur’s “dictatorial, insubordinate, disloyal, mutinous and disrespectful” behavior during the Bonus March, Roosevelt told his cabinet that he thought Pearson was a “chronic liar,” that he had “authorized” MacArthur to sue them, and that he wanted them “out of business.” Roosevelt couldn’t have made his wishes any clearer: He supported MacArthur and expected his cabinet to do the same. Pearson was shocked. “Two members of the Cabinet, who felt this to be a
most unethical way to suppress journalistic enterprise, promptly told me about it,” he wrote. “Frankly it gave
me
a jolt to learn that the President of the United States would encourage a libel suit against two newspapermen who had supported the chief goals of his administration.”

But Franklin Roosevelt didn’t need two newspapermen to support “the chief goals of his administration”—he needed Douglas MacArthur to support them. And by May 1934, the president had him. MacArthur had not only collaborated with Roosevelt in supporting one his most cherished programs, but also kept private his doubts about the president’s economic programs. While MacArthur had quietly lobbied Congress for increases in the army budget, he never publicly denounced Roosevelt or called into question the president’s views. Roosevelt, for his part, reciprocated by keeping MacArthur on as chief of staff and remaining silent when MacArthur won congressional victories that restored the planned cuts to the officer corps. In fact, the more Roosevelt’s political allies insisted that MacArthur leave, the more Roosevelt insisted that he stay. This was Roosevelt at his most masterful: Relieving MacArthur would have pleased Roosevelt confidante Josephus Daniels, as well as Harold Ickes and Ross Collins, but it would have thrown down the gauntlet to the Republicans, igniting an ugly partisan fight that Roosevelt didn’t want. In retrospect it’s not at all surprising that Roosevelt made these calculations; what’s surprising is that his supporters didn’t understand them.

D
espite his work on the CCC and the president’s support for him in the cabinet, the scandal over Cooper subdued the army chief of staff. His confrontations with Ickes and Collins and his continuing, if sotto voce, disagreements over the army budget might not have driven him away from Roosevelt, but the president’s defense of him did little to close the rift between MacArthur and the president’s team. In fact, nothing had changed since the day Roosevelt had become president: MacArthur was viewed with suspicion by Roosevelt’s closest aides and was greeted at administration events as an interloper. He was “a lonely figure,” one journalist noted. “No one spoke his language. No one wanted to speak it. At the Army-Navy reception at the White House he would arrive just in time to lead the officers in the President’s receiving
line, pay his respects to the First Lady, for he is the spirit of chivalry, and go back to work.”

The degree of MacArthur’s isolation from the administration became obvious in February 1934, when Roosevelt sent White House troubleshooter James Farley to ask army air corps head Benjamin Foulois whether the army’s planes could carry the nation’s airmail. Farley’s inquiry was the result of a Senate investigation that showed that the postmaster general had awarded contracts to commercial aviation companies without competitive bidding. When the investigation uncovered widespread fraud, the contracts with the commercial carriers were canceled. But someone had to carry the mail, and Foulois told Farley that his pilots could do it. Roosevelt was reassured, but over the next eight days, the army air corps suffered eight separate crashes—the result, Foulois claimed, of unpredictable weather and navigation errors. Eight pilots died in February, and three more in March. Embarrassed by the crashes, Roosevelt called MacArthur and Foulois to the White House. “General,” he asked Foulois, “when are those airmail killings going to stop?” The answer enraged Roosevelt: “Only when airplanes stop flying,” Foulois said. Although the crashes ended, the air corps was saddled with carrying the mail until May, when new contracts were signed with commercial carriers. It was a harrowing four months for the corps, and at the end of it, Foulois was targeted by Congress for the handling of his pilots.

Foulois was a controversial figure. Taught to fly by the Wright brothers, he had quarreled with Billy Mitchell in France during World War One and was replaced by him. Even so, Foulois was an outspoken advocate of air power and rose to head the air corps during MacArthur’s tenure as chief of staff. Foulois and MacArthur had become friendly in 1911, when a plane Foulois was piloting at Fort Sam Houston in Texas lost power and just missed plowing through a row of tents, including MacArthur’s. Foulois’s plane just grazed MacArthur’s quarters, hitting a military buggy whose horses then galloped away in terror. Standing unharmed near the wreckage of his plane, Foulois turned to see MacArthur headed toward him. “Benny, what’s going on over there?” MacArthur asked. Dusting himself off, Foulois explained that he had the choice of crashing into the buggy or into MacArthur’s tent. MacArthur surveyed the scene: “Benny, speaking as a disinterested bystander, I’d say
you made the right decision.” Over the next twenty-five years, Foulois retailed this story as “the day I saved Doug MacArthur’s life.”

So it was no surprise that when the Senate committee investigating the crashes blamed both MacArthur and Foulois, the air corps head came to MacArthur’s defense. Foulois pointed out that Roosevelt hadn’t even bothered to inform MacArthur of the plan to use the air corps to handle the airmail. MacArthur then mounted a deft defense of Foulois and the air corps, confirming that he, MacArthur, had learned about Roosevelt’s decision from the newspapers. “The Executive Order of the President was made before you knew of it?” a senator asked. “Yes sir,” MacArthur answered. The response embarrassed Roosevelt, but it was the truth. While MacArthur didn’t criticize Roosevelt for issuing the order, the army chief was chagrined at having to admit that the White House hadn’t bothered to consult with him. Although Foulois was dismissed as a result of the February accidents, MacArthur’s defense of him and his fliers transformed Foulois from a MacArthur friend into a MacArthur admirer. “MacArthur was the kind of man you either deeply respected or hated with a passion,” Foulois said later. “I not only respected him. I believed him to be possessed of almost godlike qualities.”

No one in the White House quite believed this appraisal, but MacArthur’s defense of Foulois did reinforce the chief’s following among a dedicated cadre of senior officers at the War Department. Among these was his military assistant, Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower remained enraged by MacArthur’s actions at Anacostia Flats, found the scandal over Isabella Cooper distasteful, was offended by his chief’s eccentricities (MacArthur sometimes wore a Japanese kimono over his uniform, preening before a full-length mirror), and despised MacArthur’s casual discourtesies. But Eisenhower was drawn to MacArthur, admiring both his defense of the army budget and his support of Foulois. Years later, when he was America’s most celebrated soldier, Eisenhower would swap MacArthur stories with a bemused group of reporters before bringing them up short. “If he were to walk through that door right now and say ‘Eisenhower, follow me,’ I’d stand up and do it,” he said. Eisenhower provides us with a powerful portrait of MacArthur during the Roosevelt years in the pages of his diary: “Fifty-two years old. Essentially a romantic figure. I have done considerable personal work
for him, but have seen far less of him than of other seniors now in the dept. Very appreciative of good work, positive in his convictions—a genius at giving concise and clear instructions. Consideration of the principle incidents of his career leads to the conclusion that his interests [are] almost exclusively military. He is impulsive—able, even brilliant—quick—tenacious of his views and extremely self-confident.”

If Eisenhower grudgingly admired his superior, MacArthur had good reason to appreciate Eisenhower. Texas born and Kansas bred, “Ike” was a graduate of the West Point class of 1915 but had missed the Great War, serving in army backwaters instead. Hardworking and ambitious, Eisenhower was one of the army’s few intellectuals, which is how he built his reputation. His papers on industrial mobilization, written when he was a student at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, laid out a plan for organizing the nation’s industrial assets should war come. MacArthur was impressed by Eisenhower’s work, listened closely to his ideas on industrial mobilization, and planted Eisenhower in his outer office as his personal assistant. In effect, Eisenhower served as a high-level secretary, coordinating the work of MacArthur’s office and putting the chief of staff’s views onto paper. There wasn’t anything that MacArthur saw or signed that Eisenhower didn’t see first. “My office was next to his; only a slatted door separated us,” Eisenhower later remembered. “He called me to his office by raising his voice.”