The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (7 page)

Writing in the
London Times
, military theorist B. H. Liddell Hart reflected on the MacArthur report. There is an almost palpable sense of relief in Hart’s words: Someone in America had finally noticed that a war was coming, and was thinking about how to fight it. Citing MacArthur’s reputation as a combat commander, Hart focused on the general’s new
thinking: “In the war he [MacArthur] made his reputation as a commander in the historic tradition: one who pushed right forward himself in order to keep his finger on the pulse of the battle and seize opportunities. General MacArthur’s present report shows that in the field of military theory he is no less forward in ideas. No more progressive summary of modern military conditions, and the changes now developing, has appeared from the authoritative quarters of any army.” This was high praise, though MacArthur was not alone in seeing the outlines of the next conflict. Fox Conner, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall saw it, as did George Patton, Benny Foulois, and Frank Andrews. So too did Franklin Roosevelt.

A
s Douglas MacArthur was struggling to find a new strategy for the American army, Franklin Roosevelt continued his battle against the Great Depression. The battle was not going well: In mid-May 1934, a two-day storm in the Great Plains had inaugurated the nation’s Dust Bowl era, displacing tens of thousands of farmers and taking millions of acres out of agricultural production. Soil from as far away as Kansas was deposited on the streets of Chicago, as a long drought settled in from Texas to South Dakota. Unemployment still hovered at just over 21 percent, tens of thousands of businesses were still closed, and productive capacity remained at a standstill. But while 1934 is remembered as one of America’s darker years, it also marks an unrecognized turning point in history. In early 1934, Japan annexed Manchuria, which the Japanese had conquered in 1931, and renamed it Manchukuo. On May 1, Austria became a fascist state, and one month later, the new German government opened its first concentration camp. In August, Adolf Hitler was named führer of Germany. And during the waning months of 1934, Franklin Roosevelt allowed Dern and MacArthur to submit to Congress an increase in army spending for 1936. In so doing, Roosevelt began America’s slow but certain pivot to war. MacArthur was surprised by Roosevelt’s decision, but he prepared himself for what he knew would come next: an attempt by officials in the Bureau of the Budget to cut by $30 million the president’s $361 million proposal. But Roosevelt’s silence on the issue was a clear signal to MacArthur that if the army chief could
sell the proposed increases to Congress, the president was willing to go along.

Even with Roosevelt on the sidelines, MacArthur had to tread carefully. Ross Collins was still in charge of the House Subcommittee on Military Appropriations and still intent on giving the chief of staff his comeuppance. But MacArthur had his own card to play; he was willing to allow officer billets to remain at their current levels, he told Collins, as long as the army gained a significant increase in enlisted strength. MacArthur’s proposal would increase the size of the army from 119,000 to 165,000 men, and like a number of MacArthur’s previous initiatives, it had the support of veterans’ groups. This was not news to Collins, who had learned that playing the Bonus March card had its limitations. Consequently, the Mississippi Democrat offered a compromise, telling MacArthur that he would agree to the increase if it were left to the discretion of the president. MacArthur turned him down. He didn’t want the anti-MacArthur lobby in the administration to press the president on the issue, and neither did he want to give the Bureau of the Budget another chance to sideline Roosevelt’s own recommendations. So he told Collins that he didn’t think it was necessary to “burden” Roosevelt with the issue. Surprisingly, Collins yielded, undoubtedly calculating that as MacArthur had shown a willingness to accede on the question of officer billets, Collins could give something back. The final bill gave MacArthur his victory—it wasn’t the $361 million he had counted on, but at $355.5 million, it was close enough.

MacArthur celebrated the victory as well as the press commentary that greeted it. Congress, one reporter wrote, “voted MacArthur virtually everything he wanted.” The
New York Times
, however, was closer to the mark when it noted that the increases in military spending were a reflection of events in Europe and “prevalent war talk.” But even with much of the world preparing for conflict, the real reason for the increase in the military budget was MacArthur’s new status as Roosevelt’s choice to continue as chief of staff.

MacArthur had been due for retirement at the end of 1934, but in August of that year (as MacArthur was retreating to his library at Fort Myer), Roosevelt began thinking about retaining him in the same position. The president’s reflections would have shocked MacArthur, who
told Eisenhower that his replacement “was a certainty.” Not surprisingly, Roosevelt’s closest advisors again opposed the move. They had weighed in twice against MacArthur before, just after Roosevelt’s inauguration and then again at the end of 1933, but this time their objections were strident. They agreed that it would have been politically difficult to remove MacArthur just after Roosevelt had become president and even more difficult during the first year of his presidency. Still, reappointing MacArthur now would signal that Roosevelt had decided to keep him on for the president’s four-year term.

Worried about Roosevelt’s thinking, an exasperated Josephus Daniels penned yet another anti-MacArthur warning. “Secretary Dern asked me what I would do if I were Secretary of War,” Daniels wrote in a letter to Roosevelt. “I said: ‘Get a whole new Chief of Staff and a whole new set up in the Department just as soon as possible.’” The journalist then revived the argument he had made two years earlier. “MacArthur is a charming man,” he wrote, “but he was put in by your predecessor and thinks he should run the Army.” Daniels repeated that MacArthur was still opposed by veterans for his Anacostia actions: “The appointment of MacArthur would be deeply resented. My earnest advice is ‘
Don’t.’
”

Not surprisingly, given John Pershing’s argument with MacArthur over George Marshall, Pershing then weighed in on the side of Daniels. Pershing argued that Roosevelt should appoint an old friend, Malin Craig, as the new army chief. Craig was the most qualified officer to replace MacArthur, Pershing told Roosevelt. The only other possible MacArthur replacement was George Simonds, a MacArthur protégé.

But Roosevelt wasn’t any more convinced by Daniels’s arguments now than he had been two years earlier. Avoiding a fight with the Republicans was still a necessity, and MacArthur had not proven to be a liability. The president was even less influenced by Pershing, for while Malin Craig was an experienced and respected officer, Craig had used his influence inside the military to convince his fellow officers to vote for Hoover—an action so inappropriate that not even MacArthur had dared trying it. Nor did Roosevelt like General George Simonds, a MacArthur partisan who was commandant of the Army War College. Simonds coveted the chief of staff position and lobbied inside the army to ensure that his name was put forward.

Roosevelt was also influenced by Congress, a number of whose members were suddenly speaking up on MacArthur’s behalf. Their unexpected endorsement was the result of the chief of staff’s careful cultivation of members who appreciated his willingness to keep his disagreement with the New Deal under wraps. Among these was Senator Morris Sheppard, an influential Texas prohibitionist who had been a key ally of Roosevelt in passing child labor and rural credit legislation. Sheppard was perhaps the oddest of all of Roosevelt’s political allies: He was a conservative Southern Democrat who worried about Roosevelt’s progressivism, but supported the president’s programs because the senator couldn’t abide the Republicans. Then too, while Sheppard was a Southern conservative, his career included relentless campaigning on behalf of the women’s vote (that he had three daughters might have had something to do with this), which endeared him to the First Lady, a not inconsiderable ally. Sheppard told Roosevelt in midsummer that he hoped “very much that MacArthur would be retained,” a message repeated by House Majority Leader Joseph Byrnes. In July, Byrnes joined Sheppard in pushing Roosevelt into the MacArthur camp. “It is not necessary for me in this note to you,” Byrnes wrote to Roosevelt, “to say anything more concerning General MacArthur and his ability than that I consider him the best fitted than any in the country for this position.”

Always careful to explain his actions to his allies, particularly his most dedicated New Deal supporters, Roosevelt pocketed these endorsements and kept his silence. Even when pushed to announce whom he had in mind as MacArthur’s replacement, Roosevelt shrugged. His apparent indecision remained through all of October and November as senior army officers maneuvered to put themselves in position to gain Roosevelt’s attention. But on December 12, Roosevelt announced that he had made a decision. “Lots of news to report today,” he told the press. “No. 1, 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 the coming session.” The press was stunned: There had been no intimation of what Roosevelt was contemplating, and nearly everyone knew of the opposition to MacArthur among Roosevelt’s top advisors. But in
making the announcement, Roosevelt conceded that he didn’t think of MacArthur as serving another four-year term, saying only that the general would be retained until the end of the current session of Congress.

The decision had all the hallmarks of a Roosevelt maneuver. The appointment kept a conservative in the administration; sidelined the anti-Roosevelt Craig; marginalized Simonds, who in another year would be too old for the job; and rewarded Roosevelt’s allies in the House and Senate. More crucially, as Roosevelt calculated, keeping MacArthur on for another year not only provided a useful lesson for Pershing, Craig, and Simonds, but also would keep MacArthur front and center during a budget process that called for increased army spending. MacArthur, as both Senator Sheppard and Representative Byrnes had testified, had proven to be an effective lobbyist for the military—something that the progressive Roosevelt was not yet ready to do himself. If MacArthur failed in his quest to buttress military readiness, it would be the general’s failure, not Roosevelt’s, but if MacArthur succeeded, the administration could be credited with responding to the “prevalent war talk.”

It’s hard to believe that MacArthur didn’t know what Roosevelt was up to. The president’s decision to reappoint him chief of staff for the next year was a turnaround so stunning that it left Roosevelt’s allies speechless, yet even more convinced of his political genius. The chief of staff, they now realized, was being used. If there was a downside to this, it was that MacArthur, in a few short years, had restored his good reputation, with the so-called Battle of Anacostia Flats now a fading memory. That is certainly not what Josephus Daniels and Harold Ickes had intended, but it served Roosevelt’s purpose: “General Goober” was now the administration’s chief military lobbyist.

Thus, when the 1936 budget was approved by Congress the next March, four months after his reappointment, MacArthur celebrated while Roosevelt sat silent, if satisfied. “For the first time since 1922,” MacArthur wrote, “the Army enters a new fiscal year with a reasonable prospect of developing itself into a defense establishment commensurate in size and efficiency to the country’s minimum needs.” In truth, the increases were modest, particularly when compared with the breakneck rearming then taking place in both Germany and Japan. But modest or not, the budget increase began to fill out the army’s emaciated
units. In March 1935, MacArthur was a hero. As one journalist wrote, MacArthur could now leave his job as chief of staff “in a blaze of splendid glory.”

B
oth the paeans to his talents and his now publicly acknowledged budget victory were enormously pleasing to the chief of staff, for they vindicated all he had worked for. In the midst of the Great Depression, he had not only saved the army’s officers corps, but also increased the size of the army. Yet, despite these signal victories in MacArthur’s career, none could outweigh the 1934 congressional decision to grant the Philippines commonwealth status, with the stipulation that the archipelago would be granted its full independence in 1946. MacArthur had had a hand in the legislation, insisting to the Senate that the commonwealth act include a provision for the continued stationing of American troops in the country. The defense of the Philippines, he said, was a matter of American honor and had been so since the United States had taken control of the archipelago in the wake of the Spanish-American War. What MacArthur didn’t mention, and didn’t need to mention, were his own ties to the Philippines and his personal loyalties to many of its political figures.

MacArthur had spent years in-country, first as a young officer of the 3rd Engineer Battalion in Iloilo Province (where he survived an ambush by Philippine guerrillas) and then as an aide to his father, in Manila. His familiarity with the Philippines, as well as a ten-month tour of Asia with Arthur that began in 1906, made him one of the army’s premier Far East experts. In this sense, at least, MacArthur was not unlike many other army officers who spent their careers moving from one assignment to another. MacArthur lived a life in transit: rootless, with his bags always packed. Born in Texas and raised in Milwaukee, he never had a true home. Undoubtedly most comfortable at Quarters Number One at Fort Myer when he was army chief of staff, he had nevertheless been happiest in Manila. He knew everyone of importance in the city, from rich lawyers and businessmen to Philippine patriots. His appointment to command the U.S. military’s Philippine Department, in 1928, was as great an honor for him as being named chief of staff one year later. Although he had kept his eye on events in the Philippines while he was
chief of staff, he could do little to influence events there. MacArthur thus viewed his role in congressional approval for Philippine independence as a personal triumph. With the salvation of the officer corps and an increase in the army’s size, Philippine independence formed a trinity of victories.