To make matters worse, when McKinley was assassinated the following year, the new president, Theodore Roosevelt, appointed Taft as secretary of war. It did not bode well for Arthur MacArthur’s future career.17
He spent the next ten years in a variety of menial duties beneath his rank and qualifications. There was only one assignment that paid off well for everyone, not least the military and the nation, and that was in 1905 following the Russo-Japanese War when General MacArthur was assigned to complete a nine-month “reconnaissance” of the Far East that included a grand tour of Japan, India, Singapore, Burma, Ceylon, French Indochina (Vietnam), Malaya, and Siam (Thailand) and ended up with several months in China. His reports on the political, social, and military situations in these nations became helpful to intelligence officers of the time and even later when America was on the verge of war in the Pacific and no one ever really knew it.
Upon the return of Arthur MacArthur—who remained a hero to the press and the nation—Congress bestowed upon him the four stars of a full general. But with Taft still running the War Department, MacArthur was passed over for chief of staff, which, as the army’s senior general, should have been his. He was much offended by the slight, and when Taft won the presidential election of 1908 and moved into the White House MacArthur knew it was time to quit. He did so, formally, at the age of sixty-four, on June 9, 1909.
Three years later he was dead in the most prophetic fashion, as he had often expressed to friends that he sometimes dreamed of dying at the head of his old Civil War regiment, the 24th Wisconsin. On September 5, 1912, against the advice of his doctors and despite Pinky’s admonitions, Arthur agreed to deliver the keynote address to the survivors of the 24th at their fiftieth anniversary banquet in Milwaukee.
He began by saying, “Comrades, I could not stay away on the great anniversary of our starting to war. Little did we think a half century ago that so many of us would be permitted to gather in this way.” Then he “crumpled up upon the table in front of him.” The regimental surgeon who had patched up the wounded so long ago rushed to him and after a brief examination said to the boys—now old men—whom Arthur had led up Missionary Ridge: “Comrades, the general is dying.” Someone began saying the Lord’s Prayer and they all kneeled and took it up. He was buried in Milwaukee, not Arlington, in a plain suit of clothes instead of his uniform, and as was his wish his funeral was “utterly devoid of military display,” save an American flag on the casket. Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur II was dead at the age of sixty-seven.18
DOUGLAS MACARTHUR ARRIVED at West Point in June of 1899, accompanied by his mother, Pinky, who, because her husband was off fighting in the Philippines, had decided to take a suite at Craney’s Hotel, just off campus, to be near her son.
Plebe year was rough in those times, perhaps more so than at any time in the history of the academy, because of the merciless hazing that the upperclassmen inflicted. Because of his father’s fame and public stature, Douglas was singled out by sadistic “yearlings,” or third classmen (sophomores), who ran the so-called summer camp for plebes before the academic year began. The summer camp was ostensibly designed to shape the plebes up for the coming year by teaching them the rules and customs of the academy and close order drill. In reality, it was more of an excuse to absorb the plebes in a brutal orgy of cruelty—as only nineteen- and twenty-year-old men who have just endured it themselves can conjure.
A man named Barry (later dismissed) had it in for MacArthur, and not long after he arrived in summer camp Douglas was called before Barry. He and several other plebes were given the choice of “taking exercise” (hazing) or being called out by every member of the sophomore boxing team, one at a time. MacArthur was a fair boxer himself but the thought of his mother having to see him with all those cuts and bruises caused him to accept the “exercise.”
It began innocently enough; he was told to stand at attention for one hour. Then the insults and the brutality began: “eagling,” doing squats (deep knee bends) over jagged broken bottles with the arms flapping to the side like a bird’s. He did fifty, then a hundred. He was then told to “hang by a stretcher”—hanging off of a tent pole; then more eagling; dipping (push-ups) fifty, then a hundred. In between these torments they mockingly made him recite his father’s Civil War record, or his exploits in the Philippines, accompanied by an unrelenting torment of screaming in his face until he was covered with spittle, and then more eagling.
After twenty minutes and more than two hundred eagles he collapsed in a convulsive faint and was taken to his tent where his tentmate Frederick Cunningham caught him at the flap and laid him on the floor. MacArthur’s legs suffered uncontrollable spasms and he asked Cunningham to put a blanket under them so the upperclassmen would not hear the noise. If he began to cry out, he asked Cunningham to stuff a blanket in his mouth.c,19
Strangely, MacArthur’s stoic performance during the hazing earned him the respect of his tormentors and, according to Cunningham, he was given a “bootlick,” which was basically a free pass from further hazing at West Point. Afterward MacArthur privately vowed never to haze a fellow cadet, and if it was ever possible he intended to put an end to the practice.
During his days at the Point, MacArthur ran neck-and-neck for the top spots with Ulysses S. Grant III, grandson of the former general and president. Grant’s mother, Mrs. Frederick Dent Grant, like Pinky, resided in Craney’s Hotel and the two cadets, Douglas and Grant III, would spend what time they had consulting with their mothers after dinner on Flirtation Walk, or in some cases sneak into the hotel itself for a treat from the dining room. His yearling year, MacArthur was second corporal to Grant’s first, but that would be the only time. He arced across his West Point years like a shooting star, setting records some of which remain unmatched today.
He lettered in baseball, and in 1901 he scored the winning run in West Point’s 4–3 first-ever victory over the Midshipmen of Annapolis. When first captain honors were announced it was Douglas MacArthur who was chosen, and he also held the top academic record his senior year. To his practice of rigid self-discipline, MacArthur added an almost uncanny intuitiveness that left even his instructors and tactical officers in awe. “He had style,” a fellow classmate said many years afterward. “There was never another cadet quite like him.”
At graduation, he led the ninety-three remaining cadets of the class of 1903 to their seats before the platform where Secretary of War Elihu Root left these words ringing in their ears: “Before you leave the army, according to all precedents in our history, you will be engaged in another war. It is bound to come. It will come. Prepare your country for that war.”20
THE YEAR 1903 WAS FILLED with weighty portent, marked by the Wright brothers’ first heavier-than-air flight; the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Madame Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, for their work with radium; the first wireless transmission; and the first appearance of the Crayola. It also saw Second Lieutenant Douglas MacArthur’s acceptance into the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers, the most elite branch of that service, and his transoceanic voyage to the U.S. Philippines Territory where guerrilla war still raged on some of the outlying islands.
His initial duty consisted of parochial construction work—the building of wharves and docks on the island of Leyte, for instance—but soon turned deadly in November 1903, when he led a party into the jungle looking for logs for pilings. MacArthur was aware that the jungle was dangerous, and that some previous patrols had been ambushed, but the fact was he had been directed to build the piers and needed the timber. His detail hadn’t gone far when trouble sought them out.
Two insurrectos waylaid the patrol, one on each side of the narrow jungle trail, and the one to the right raised a rifle and fired into MacArthur’s face. The slug tore through the crown of his campaign hat before slashing a small sapling tree behind him. MacArthur, an expert pistol shot from his childhood days on the frontier, whipped out his .38 revolver and “dropped them both dead in their tracks.”21
/> His foreman, a regular army sergeant, rushed up and examined the dead men slumped on the ground, then noticed the still-smoking hole in MacArthur’s campaign hat.
“Begging thu Loo’tenant’s paddon,” said the sergeant in his rich Irish brogue, “but all the rest of the Loo’tenant’s life is pure velvut!”22
One day a captain who headed the Philippine constabulary invited MacArthur to the Army-Navy Club in Manila to meet two promising young Filipino law graduates. They were Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña, both of whom would go on to be presidents of the Philippine Commonwealth.
In April 1904, less than a year after he’d entered the army as a commissioned officer, MacArthur was promoted to first lieutenant, and soon afterward he sailed for San Francisco. It might be recalled that it took George Patton seven years to get his silver first lieutenant’s bars.
In San Francisco, MacArthur languished as an officer of engineers with duties that ranged from repairing yards and docks to supervising the cleanup of the environmental mess left in California’s mountains and rivers following the Great Gold Rush of 1849 and its aftermath. In September 1905, to MacArthur’s surprise and delight, he received orders to report to his father in Yokohama, Japan, to accompany him as aide-de-camp during his reconnaissance tour of the Orient. Douglas arrived in Japan at the end of October and together father and son sailed for Singapore where the British were erecting the greatest military fortress in the Far East—if not the world.
From there they traveled to Burma, Calcutta, and Siam, where Douglas saved the evening for the king (who would become the model for the best-selling book Anna and the King of Siam, which begat the hit musical and movie The King and I) by changing a fuse in a lighting panel when the dinner party he was hosting went dark. The king was so grateful that he proposed to decorate Douglas for “conspicuous gallantry,” an honor Lieutenant MacArthur politely declined.23
When the eight-month tour ended, Douglas had gained an immeasurably deep grasp of the Far East and its relationship with the United States—namely that from that time forth the Oriental world would be inextricably connected with the Americas and, more darkly, that at some point in time a conflict between the two would be inevitable. He also noted that while the British colonial system in India, Burma, Malaya, and elsewhere brought law, order, wages, religion, and other civilizing benefits, it also stifled the newfound aspirations of the colonized people, breeding resentment, apathy, and in some cases outright hatred. He concluded that, as in the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, colonial rule must be benevolent and temporary, as his father also believed.
In the following years Douglas MacArthur began climbing the ladder of military achievement with the air of a man who knew where he was going. Unlike some who struggled up it rung by greasy rung, MacArthur sauntered into Washington to attend the army’s elite engineering school. Just before the new year of 1907 he was appointed aide to the dynamic and glamorous President Theodore Roosevelt who frequently sought MacArthur’s views on the Far East while the dashing young lieutenant hobnobbed with senators, congressmen, cabinet members, and high-ranking military officers, each a potential stepping-stone for his brilliant career. MacArthur certainly seemed on his way to an early captaincy when, as it will, disaster struck—he fell in love.
He had gone on temporary assignment to his hometown of Milwaukee. The lady in question was Fanniebelle Van Dyke Stuart of New York, daughter of a millionaire, who had come to Milwaukee for a visit at the same time. MacArthur was immediately smitten, or “bewitched,” as one of his biographers notes, and asked her to marry him. She declined.24
At West Point MacArthur had always been a sort of ladies’ man and was said to have set some sort of record at one point by becoming “engaged” to eight different women at the same time. Doubtless there was a discrepancy of expression in the lingua franca of the day, and most probably what was meant was that MacArthur was dating eight different women at the same time; still, it was an astonishing accomplishment.
He began bombarding Fanniebelle with a kind of maudlin poetry that nevertheless registered a certain flair for the language of Romanticism.d
I live in a little house of dreams
In the land that cannot be
The country of the fair desire
That I shall never see.
He once wrote her an epic poem twenty-seven pages long in which he, himself, stars as a soldier doomed to be slain, but she continued to rebuff his advances, prompting him to pen mawkishly:
Fair Gotham Girl
With Life awhirl
Of dance and fancy free
Tis Thee I love
All things above.
Why cans’t thou not love me?25
Beyond the love lost, the worst thing the failed romance did was cause MacArthur to slip in his work. A superior officer during this period gave him a damning military efficiency report: “lacking in zeal,” “absent from the office,” “duties not performed satisfactorily” it read. Worse, the commandant of the engineer school placed in his file a letter stating that MacArthur “seemed to take but little interest in the work,” and that he did only the “bare minimum needed to avoid failing the course.”26
These are the sorts of evaluations that cause an officer to remain a lieutenant for years, if not forever, as MacArthur was well aware. He seems to have pulled himself together after this, however, and wrote an exceptional pamphlet entitled “Military Demolitions Illustrated,” which was famously incorporated for use in all the service schools by the commandant of Fort Leavenworth, where he was soon to be assigned.
Once there, MacArthur organized an engineers’ polo team to play against the cavalry, infantry, and other service branches, and he was also the manager/player on the Fort Leavenworth baseball team, which enjoyed immense success owing in part to MacArthur’s peculiar style of gamesmanship. This involved the simple trick of inviting the opposing team to a sumptuous luncheon before the game, at which copious amounts of beer, wine, and spirits were provided. Afterward the thoroughly sober soldiers usually thrashed the inebriated visitors.
After a short stint at Leavenworth, MacArthur was ordered to the nation’s capital where he was taken under the wing of General Leonard Wood, the new army chief of staff, a Harvard-educated surgeon who had made a name for himself without the benefit of a West Point ring. In 1913 MacArthur, now a captain, was appointed to the General Staff. Pinky, his now widowed mother, moved into an apartment building near the War Department to be with her devoted thirty-three-year-old son.
The following year, events conspired to propel MacArthur—still a very junior officer—into the highest echelons of military esteem. The eternal turmoil in Mexico spawned an insult to the American flag in Tampico. It seemed that the government of the Mexican president Victoriano Huerta mistakenly arrested nine U.S. sailors who had gone ashore to get fuel for their gunboat. The commander of the U.S. fleet insisted that the men be returned and that a twenty-one-gun salute be given to the U.S. flag by the Mexican garrison that had been holding the men. The Mexicans released the sailors but were unwilling to salute the American flag, prompting President Woodrow Wilson to order a fleet of battleships and detachment of U.S. Marines to seize the Mexican oil port of Vera Cruz and blockade its harbor.e
On May 1, Captain Douglas MacArthur set foot on the dock at Vera Cruz on orders from General Wood, who was himself preparing to lead an American expeditionary force to the city and make war on Mexico if open hostilities broke out. MacArthur’s role was to “get the lay of the land” and report any useful information to General Wood when he arrived. It was just the kind of thing MacArthur was good at.
AFTER SNOOPING AROUND FOR SEVERAL DAYS, MacArthur noticed that while there were plentiful boxcars and passenger cars in the rail yards, there were no engines to pull them. Nor were there any pack animals to speak of in Vera Cruz, which would put General Wood’s army, if and when it arrived, in a bad way for transportation of its supplies.
MacArthur began searching for inform
ation on the missing railroad engines, when he encountered “a drunken Mexican” from whom he received “an inkling that a number of [train] engines were hidden somewhere on the line between Vera Cruz and Alvarado.” Subsequently, “This man was sobered up and found to be a railroad fireman and engineer on the Vera Cruz and Alvarado Railroad. He consented, after certain financial inducements had been offered, to assist me in accurately locating the engines.”27
This was dangerous business, as MacArthur well knew; a soldier who had recently blundered into Mexican lines had been lined against a wall and executed. But in his head MacArthur had visions of his father, the hero of Missionary Ridge, and while the Vera Cruz dustup wasn’t much of a war, at the time it was the only war they had.
The distance between Vera Cruz and Alvarado was forty-two miles, and numerous Mexican army troops held each of the half dozen towns along the stretch. MacArthur’s plan was to have the drunken Mexican meet him that night on the rail tracks outside the U.S. lines with a handcar, which they would use to take them up the rail line about fifteen miles to Jamapa, where the railroad bridge was down. From there they would find a way across the river and meet up with a second handcar manned by two of the Mexican’s friends, and then pump along the tracks until they found the missing engines. In exchange for this, MacArthur said, the Mexicans would be paid $150 in gold,f once he was returned safely inside U.S. lines.
“The night was squally and overcast,” MacArthur wrote in his official report of the matter. “At dusk I crossed our lines near the wireless station.” He was in his uniform, carrying a small Bible, and armed with the new .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol that had been adopted by the army in 1911. As promised, the Mexican was there with the handcar; MacArthur frisked him, relieving the man of “a .38 caliber pistol and an small dirk knife,” and they pumped off into the gloom. At Jamapa they camouflaged the handcar with bushes, stole a small native boat, and paddled across the river north of the town to escape detection. They discovered two ponies tethered near a shack and, proceeding now on horseback, continued along the tracks until they found the other two Mexicans and their handcar.