On March 16, 1919, Pershing reviewed the Rainbow on a plain near Remagen and pinned the DSM on MacArthur, who for once was wearing a steel helmet. Two weeks later forward elements of the division began embarking for home. There were reports that the commander of the 84th Brigade would be staying behind, and when word of this reached the United States, Pinky was afflicted with one of her illnesses. MacArthur wired the adjutant general of the AEF: “Rumor here that request is made for my detail as member of machine-gun board in France. Am intensely desirous of returning to U.S. with my brigade, half of which has already sailed and remainder booked to leave within 36 hours. My mother’s health is critical and I fear consequences my failure to return as scheduled. Appreciate greatly your help.” The army, ever solicitous of Mrs. Arthur MacArthur’s constitution—she was now not only the widow of one gallant soldier, but also the mother of another—reacted promptly. On April 14, in a rainstorm, her son the brigadier boarded the Leviathan in Brest, bound for New York and the welcomingarms of the sixty-six-year-old woman who had become known to her family as “the old lady.”56
Aboard ship, as MacArthur wrote one of his former aides on May 13, “I gracefully occupied a $5,000.00 suite consisting of four rooms and three baths. It filled me with excitement to change my bed and bath each evening.” Arrival was another matter. The Leviathan docked on April 25, and the first man down the gangplank was Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, wearing over his tunic a huge raccoon coat and a new scarf knitted by the old lady. The only spectator on the pier, an urchin, inquired who the troops were. “We are the famous 42nd,” the brigadier boomed. Looking bored, the boy asked whether they had been in France. MacArthur wrote the aide: “Amid a silence that hurt—with no one, not even the children, to see us—we marched off the dock, to be scattered to the four winds—a sad, gloomy end to the Rainbow. There was no welcome for fighting men . . . no one even seemed to have heard of the war. And profiteers! Ye gods, the profiteers! He who has no Rolls Royce is certainly ye piker. And expensive living! Paris is certainly a cheap little place after all.” He judged “that clothes are very, very high,” because the girls he saw seemed “absolutely unable to wear any.” He added prophetically: “We are wondering here what is to happen with reference to the peace terms. They look drastic and seem to me more like a treaty of perpetual war than of perpetual peace. I feel sorry for our friends at Sinzig who must have been hard hit.”57
General Pershing decorating Brigadier General MacArthur with the Distinguished Service Medal
In the Rhineland the 42nd’s doughboys had voted against a Fifth Avenue parade, but on the evening of the day they landed in New York there was a ball in MacArthur’s honor at the Waldorf Astoria. “I was in full uniform,” he told an aide in Japan thirty years later, “and in those days full uniform meant spurs and the works. I was dancing and the maitre d’hôtel came over to me. He said it was against the rules to wear spurs on the dance floor. I said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ He said, ‘Yes, General.’ And I took my lady and we walked off the dance floor, and I never set foot in that place again.”58
All his life he was given to superlatives, and facts usually modified them. He would wind up living his last years in New York, and he may have exaggerated Manhattan’s indifference to the 42nd Division. Certainly the experience did not modify his own enthusiasm for the outfit he had christened and the men he had led. Veterans who had worn the division’s shoulder patch could always count on a warm greeting when they came calling on him. If they were penniless he would slip them a five-dollar bill, and once he forgave one of them for threatening his life. In the early 1920s his chauffeur was driving him along the west bank of the Hudson when a man with a flashlight stepped into the road and waved them to a stop. Producing a pistol, he demanded the brigadier’s wallet. “You don’t get it as easy as that,” MacArthur said. “I’ve got around forty dollars, but you’ll have to whip me to get it. I’m coming out of this car, and I’ll fight you for it.” The thug threatened to kill him. MacArthur said, “Sure, you can shoot me, but if you do they’ll run you down and you’ll fry in the big house. Put down that gun, and I’ll come out and fight you fair and square for my money. My name is MacArthur, and I live—”
The man lowered his gun. He said, “My God, why didn’t you tell me that in the first place? Why, I was in the Rainbow. I was a sergeant in Wild Bill Donovan’s outfit. My God, General, I’m sorry. I apologize.”
MacArthur told his driver to proceed, and when he reached West Point he made no attempt to notify the police.59
MacArthur in raccoon coat in his way home, 1919
THREE
Call to Quarters
1919-1935
Wars are hard on West Point. The Civil War split the corps, with nearly a quarter of the cadets heading south. During the Spanish-American War and its aftermath, when MacArthur joined the Long Gray Line, the curriculum was in a state of upheaval, and the end of World War I found the academy in chaos. In 1917 first and second classmen had been graduated immediately after the declaration of war on Germany. The rest of the corps had been commissioned in 1918, but the chief of engineers refused to accept officers with so little training, so after the Armistice the most recent graduates were brought back, issued campaign hats banded in yellow, and christened “Orioles.” Under these circumstances academy morale plummeted. Then, on New Year’s Day, 1919, a plebe who had been subjected to severe hazing shot himself. Congress, aroused, demanded reforms.1
In Washington the army Chief of Staff was an acerbic, thin-lipped intellectual named Peyton C. March who had served under Arthur MacArthur in the Philippines and feuded bitterly with Pershing during the war in France. In the spring of 1919 General March decided that West Point would have to be “revitalized.” He wanted hazing suppressed, courses updated, and military instruction modernized. He said he needed a new superintendent, a bright, charismatic officer “with an intimate understanding of his fellows, a comprehensive grasp of world and national affairs, and a liberalization of conception which amounts to a change in the psychology of command.” Because of his antipathy toward Pershing he preferred one not identified with Chaumont. Remembering his old commanding officer, he summoned Douglas MacArthur, whose 84th Brigade had been demobilized at Camp Dodge on May 12, and ordered him to assume the superintendency the following month.2
“West Point is forty years behind the times,” said March, neglecting to mention that his own decision to graduate classes precipitously was responsible for much of the turmoil on the Hudson. MacArthur protested: “I am not an educator. I am a field soldier . . . . I can’t do it.” He pointed out that his age was against him; five of the academy’s professors had been on the faculty when he was a plebe, and the current superintendent, whom he would be relieving, was seventy-two. But March insisted, “Yes . . . you can do it,” and it is doubtful that MacArthur argued hard. He loved West Point. More important, the appointment was one of the most prestigious in the army. If he agreed to it, he would be confirmed as a brigadier general in the regular army; if he refused, he would revert to his prewar rank of major. He accepted, and on June 12 he and his mother moved into the superintendent’s mansion of brick and iron grille. The next morning cadets saw a lonely, remote figure strolling carelessly along Diagonal Walk wearing a grommetless cap, a tunic bereft of ribbons, and leather puttees whose leather straps were curled with age. Under his arm he carried a riding crop. According to Major William A. Ganoe, the post adjutant, “He was just neat enough to pass inspection.”3
The reaction at the West Point Officers’ Club was negative. “Fantastic,” said one man. “Looks like another effort to wreck the Academy. Who in hell has it in for this place?” Ganoe was at his desk in the gray medieval pile of the administration building when he heard a brisk step on the terra-cotta-tiled corridor floor. The door swung open, and a moment later he was swept up in a warm MacArthur greeting, half handshake and, with his left hand, half embrace. The brigadier glanced down, saw a letter of resignation which Ganoe
had just completed, and genially tore it up. Next he disconnected the buzzer which the previous superintendent had used to summon Ganoe. “An adjutant,” said MacArthur, “is not a servant.” In fact, the title “adjutant” was insufficiently grand for MacArthur’s assistant. “Chief of staff” would be better. Henceforth he would call Ganoe “Chief.”4
The adjutant asked him when he would like to review the corps of cadets. MacArthur’s eyebrows shot up. He asked: “For what purpose, Chief?” Ganoe said: “To greet and honor the new superintendent.” The new superintendent said: “If memory serves me, we didn’t lack for ceremonies as cadets. There was a constant excuse for turning out the corps for a show. What possible benefit can be found in an extra one for me? They’ll see me soon and often enough. There are occasions when ceremony is harassment. I saw too much of that overseas.” Earl H. Blaik, who was a cadet at the time, recalls: “We soon learned he was not one to soiree the corps with unnecessary pomp and ceremony.”5
Ganoe became his first convert, and he was swiftly followed by Commandant Robert M. Danford and Captain Louis E. Hibbs, the superintendent’s aide. The adjutant, who came to idolize him, took elaborate notes on his appearance and behavior. Since MacArthur was a clean-desk man—every decision was made immediately, every letter or memorandum answered before the day was over—his files for 1919-1922 are, from the biographer’s point of view, maddeningly thin. The Ganoe recollections are the best record we have of those years.6
West Point Superintendent MacArthur
Through his adjutant’s eyes we see MacArthur as a highly unorthodox commanding officer who would perch on his subordinates’ desks or sit with his stocking feet on his own desk, casually reminding them of his war experience by using the French bon as an all-purpose pause word, and invite cadets to “have a pill” from his gold cigarette box despite the academy’s traditional disapproval of undergraduate smoking. (“He clung,” says Ganoe, “to his principle that rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.”) Letters of reprimand, or even telephoned rebukes, were anathema to him: “His contacts were face to face.” All visitors were treated alike, whether sergeants or major generals. “He had a way of touching your elbow or shoulder, upping his chin with a slight jerk and crowding into his eye such a warmth of blessing, he made you feel you’d contributed a boon to the whole human race.” But he did not encourage reciprocal familiarity: “Whereas you had no fear to let down your hair before him, you wouldn’t think of slapping him on the back.”7
Of all his traits, Ganoe believes “the one which made the greatest impression was his unwavering aplomb, his astonishing self-mastery. I had seen men who were so placid or stolid they were emotionless. But MacArthur was anything but that. His every tone, look or movement was the extreme of intense vivacity. . . . As he talked, so he walked jauntily, without swagger. His gait and expression were carefree without being careless.” Ganoe believes that he possessed “a gifted leadership, a leadership that kept you at a respectful distance, yet at the same time took you in as an esteemed member of his team, and very quickly had you working harder than you had ever worked before in your life, just because of the loyalty, admiration and respect in which you held him. Obedience is something a leader can command, but loyalty is something, an indefinable something, that he is obliged to win. MacArthur knew instinctively how to win it.” He was, the adjutant concludes, “all contradiction. He commanded without commanding. He was both a patrician and plebeian. I could close my eyes and see him in his toga, imperiously mounting his chariot, and the next minute clad in homespun, sitting on the narrow sidewalk of Pompeii and chatting informally with a slave.”8
But the toga fitted him best. “To him the word ‘gentleman’ held a religious meaning. It was sacredly higher than any title, station, or act of Congress. It was an attitude of life to be cherished in every gesture and spoken word. It comprehended and excused no letdown in its execution. . . . Flying off the handle, berating or bawling out were cardinal sins, which I not once saw him give way to. In times of stress or stinging irritation, his voice grew low, falling to a deep bass and intoning, with a control so strong, it held motionless everyone within its sound.” When crossed, he refused to make a scene. “With all his high-strung impulses he held himself in check. . . . And in about ten words he summed up a deserved and consummate loathing. Even in reproof and rebuff, he kept the lofty manners of a gentleman.”9
Ganoe was impressed, as were others on the staff, with the quickness of MacArthur’s mind. He would ask a question, and “as I answered, another came so fast I could hardly collect myself. Then they accelerated so much that they overlapped my answers. By the light of his eye, I could see he understood before I had finished.” Having received a caller in his office, and offered him a cigarette, he would characteristically pace back and forth from one wall to the other while the visitor stated his business. Then, with an occasional interrogative “Bon?” he would recite what he had just heard. Having observed this ritual several times, the adjutant stationed his best stenographer in an adjacent room, out of the superintendent’s sight. “The visitor told approximately a five-minute story. The general, in his strides, repeated it,” word for word, “almost as if he had heard a prepared speech.” After a few clinching questions he put his hand on the man’s shoulder, issued his instructions, and concluded with a jocular, “Hop to it, my boy!”10
At his direction, West Point reveille was moved up an hour, but although he rose with the rest of the post, he worked in his mansion through most of the morning to give his staff a head start. Between 10:30 and 11:00 A.M. he came in and disposed of his mail in an hour. On his orders, envelopes were slit only half open, so he alone would read their contents; his answers were scrawled on the back of the envelopes, typed up, and signed. From noon to 1:00 P.M. he kept appointments. The next two hours were spent in the mansion with his mother. Meetings occupied him until 4:30 or 5:00 P.M.; then he watched the cadets at athletic practice, dined, and passed the evening in his study reading history, literature, and military science. Like his father, he chose difficult books. The war had sobered him; Harriet Mitchell, sister of the flier, came to lunch and found him “quite unlike” the boy she had known in Milwaukee, “quite serious and reserved, no longer gay and full of fun,” as he had been when he wrote a sonnet on her dance card in his youth. He also felt isolated by his rank. “When you get to be a general, Louie,” he said to his aide, “you haven’t any friends.”11
But he did have his mother. More than ever she was his confidante, his patroness, his Beatrice. These were years of serenity and happiness for her; she had him back, with a star on his shoulder and a drawer full of decorations which, even if he declined to wear them on any except the most formal of occasions, proclaimed him to be the worthy heir of his father and of that earlier West Point superintendent, Robert E. Lee. As the academy’s official hostess, she was practicing the social skills she had learned in her Virginia girlhood, receiving, among others, President Harding, the Prince of Wales, the King of the Belgians, and Marshal Foch. She was also popular with the cadets. One afternoon a group of upperclassmen sent two plebes out for ice cream. On their way back the fourth classmen passed the superintendent’s house, and MacArthur, who was pacing across his lawn, engaged them in conversation. Suddenly a window shot up overhead and the old lady thrust her head out. “Douglas!” she cried. “You must stop talking to those boys and let them go. Don’t you see that their ice cream is beginning to melt?” Noticing for the first time the dampness on the bottoms of the paper bags they were carrying, he said sheepishly to them, “I guess you’d better hurry along.”12
Cadets could afford ice cream now, because one of MacArthur’s first innovations had been to allow each of them five dollars a month spending money. On weekends they were now granted six-hour passes and, in the summer months, two-day leaves. They could travel as far as New York City on their own. During the football season they were allowed to follow their team of Black Knights t
o Harvard, Yale, and Notre Dame. Their mail was no longer censored. First classmen were permitted to form their own club, to call on officers, and even to play cards with them. Hazing was sharply curtailed, with commissioned officers, not upperclassmen, disciplining new plebes during Beast Barracks. When Danford suggested substituting verbal reprimands for the “skin list”—cadets’ written explanations of delinquencies, originally intended to improve their penmanship—MacArthur instantly replied: “Do it!” Demerits were still awarded by tactical officers (“tacs”), but cadets rated one another in military bearing and leadership. Each of them was required to read two newspapers a day and to be prepared to discuss current events. Learning that in 1916 the corps, on its own, had organized a “vigilance committee” to investigate undergraduates suspected of cheating, the new superintendent officially recognized it, thereby introducing the academy’s honor system, under which the corps is answerable for the honesty of its members.13
Standpat alumni—“Disgruntled Old Grads,” or “DOGS,” as Ganoe calls them—protested that MacArthur was introducing a bacillus of permissiveness which would corrupt West Point. In fact MacArthur was anything but indulgent. When the Bray, a cadet newspaper, lampooned the administration, he suppressed it and relieved the tac responsible for advising the editors. But his experiences with the Rainbow had taught him that citizen-soldiers must be persuaded, not treated like robots. Future officers should learn that, he believed, and should become acquainted with the realities of the twentieth century. Thus he invited Billy Mitchell to lecture on air warfare, encouraged cadet interest in mechanics, replaced diagrams of Civil War battles with those of World War I combat, and—an omen—ordered maps of the Far East to be prominently displayed.14