He was excited by the prospect, and one of the reasons was financial. In addition to his salary as a major general on the active list, he would receive $33,000 a year from the commonwealth in pay and allowances. As 1935 dragged on, however, an even more enticing possibility presented itself. The ranking American in the Philippines was still the governor-general. Taft had been the first to hold the position; Frank Murphy was now the incumbent. But once the Philippines had adopted its commonwealth constitution, the top American would be called the high commissioner. Some members of the administration wanted Murphy to remain, changing hats, so to speak. MacArthur felt that MacArthur was better qualified, and FDR was seriously considering appointing him. On June 1 the General wrote Quezon, telling him this, but reassuring him: “I realize fully the high glamour and potential political possibilities in the office of High Commissioner as compared with the relative obscurity of a professional military position but in this instance there is nothing that could tempt me from our agreement. . . . If I am approached upon the matter, which I do not anticipate, I will . . . not commit myself until after conferring with you.”3
That was devious of MacArthur. He was actively canvassing support for the job, disparaging Murphy and pulling every string he could to secure the office. The day after Labor Day he dined alone with Roosevelt at Hyde Park, and was rewarded with a presidential promise to name him. Then a snag developed; under the law, he could not be nominated until he had resigned from the army. On September 9 he wrote Roosevelt that he was “somewhat dismayed and nonplussed” by this, and suggested that another piece of special legislation could remove the obstacle. The President was contemplating that when word of MacArthur’s defamation campaign reached Murphy, who protested to the White House. Throwing up his hands, FDR decided to leave things as they were; Murphy would become high commissioner and MacArthur Quezon’s military adviser.4
One problem remained: the General’s mother. Pinky was eighty-four now, and genuinely ill. The General refused to leave her, but she, game to the last, said she would sail with him. Her daughter-in-law Mary would accompany them. The party which boarded the President Harding in San Francisco that October included three majors: Howard J. Hutter, an army physician who would attend Pinky; Eisenhower, who would serve as MacArthur’s chief aide in the Philippines; and James B. Ord. Eisenhower hadn’t wanted to go. He felt that “General MacArthur lowered the boom on me, so to speak. . . . I was in no position to argue with the Chief of Staff.” As consolation, the General had allowed Ike to pick Ord, an old friend, as his fellow aide. Mamie Eisenhower would remain in Washington until their son John finished the eighth grade; then they would join him in Manila.5
During the voyage the General’s mother was confined to her cabin. Mary and Dr. Hutter watched over her while MacArthur spent much of his time breakfasting with, or walking the deck with, a fellow passenger, Jean Marie Faircloth of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Tiny (five-foot-two, one hundred pounds), lively, hazel-eyed, thirty-seven, and unmarried, Jean Faircloth had met the General at a ship party honoring Mayor James Curley of Boston. Having just inherited $200,000 from her stepfather, she planned to spend some time with English friends named Slack in Shanghai and continue on a world cruise. She loved soldiers—“every time Jean Marie heard a Fourth of July firecracker go off,” a Murfreesboro friend said, “she jumped to attention”—and she was a member of both the DAR and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The second of these was more important to her. One of her grandfathers, Richard Beard, had been a Confederate captain; he had, in fact, fought against Arthur MacArthur at Missionary Ridge. Like Pinky before her, Jean did not allow her Southern partiality to impede her friendship with a MacArthur. Indeed, at Mary’s suggestion Jean cut short her Shanghai visit, continued the voyage to Manila, and witnessed Quezon’s inaugural on November 15.6
MacArthur and Eisenhower (third from left) arrive in the Philippines to take up new duties, 1935
Meanwhile Pinky’s condition was worsening. By the time they reached Hong Kong she was so sick that MacArthur scrubbed a meeting with a British general. Arriving in the Philippines, he moved her into the Manila Hotel suite adjacent to his own, but it was hopeless; she was afflicted with a cerebral thrombosis. A month later, even as medication was being flown out from California on the China Clipper, she sank into a coma and died. The Manila press mourned her as “el primero soldato,” the commonwealth’s first soldier. She was interred there; her son would bring her home for reburial in Arlington National Cemetery on his next trip back to the States. On his orders, her suite was locked and unoccupied for the next year. Eisenhower noted that her passing “affected the General’s spirit for many months.”7
The Ords and their two children took a house in the city, but the white concrete, red-roofed hotel on Dewey Boulevard was home for the rest of the mission. When Eisenhower’s family arrived, they moved into its new wing, and General MacArthur occupied the six-room, air-conditioned penthouse. He received visitors in a large formal drawing room known as the Gold Room, with red drapes and many French mirrors. His father’s books were housed in a library paneled with Philippine mahogany and furnished with maroon leather chairs; a fifteen-foot nara table in the center of the room supported silver-framed, inscribed photographs of Foch, Pershing, and other military celebrities. There were two dramatic balconies overlooking the city and the lovely curve of the bay. The General’s favorite balcony opened off the dining room and afforded a spectacular view of Bataan and Corregidor. During the “blue hour,” as the cocktail hour was known in prewar Manila, he liked to pace back and forth on it, wearing his blue-and-gold West Point dressing gown and swinging a cane, gazing out at the bright water, the spectacular sunsets, the lush greenery of the jungle, and the brown thatched roofs of the native huts.8
He was always a tremendous pacer. Except for morning calisthenics, he hadn’t participated in sports since his days as a Fort Leavenworth captain, and, as Jean Faircloth had discovered on the Harding, he didn’t even dance. But he walked miles every day on the balconies and in his old office at No. 1 Calle Victoria. Visitors observed that if a conversation lasted longer than a minute he would rise and start striding around the various objects in the room: the huge Chippendale desk bearing framed photographs of his parents and paternal grandparents, flag standards, a beautiful Chinese screen, and inlaid Oriental cabinets dating back to the Spanish occupation. Unlike the penthouse, his office was not air-conditioned. Overhead fans churned the air lazily, and his guests would soon start dabbing at their brows, but the General remained dry and starched. This was part of his charisma, and he knew it and augmented it by frequent changes of clothes. Major General Lewis H. Brereton of the Air Corps commented in his diary on “General MacArthur’s immaculate appearance. He is one of the best-dressed soldiers in the world. Even in the hot tropical climate of Manila, where we wore cotton shirts and trousers which for most people became wet and wilted in an hour, I have never seen him looking otherwise than if he had just put on a fresh uniform.” Had Brereton but known it, that was literally true. MacArthur’s wardrobe contained twenty-three uniforms and suits—in mufti he usually wore a gray-checked tropical suit, and silk shirt, white-and-tan shoes, and a bow tie—all of them custom-made by a Chinese tailor. He wore three a day, changing for lunch and dinner.9
Like others, Brereton noted that the General “cannot talk sitting down.” He added: “It seems to be that the more clearly he enunciates his ideas, the more vigorous his walking becomes. He is one of the most beautiful talkers I have ever heard and, while his manner might be considered a bit on the theatrical side, it is just part of his personality and an expression of his character. There is never any doubt as to what he means and what he wants.” James Gavin, then serving in the Philippines, remembers MacArthur’s “visiting us at Fort McKinley on Luzon to watch some test firings of a new 81-millimeter mortar. We were observing mortar fire from high ground when he strode up in a rather imperious way. There was an aura about him that seemed to keep us junio
r officers at some distance. He was impressive, and in his own way inspired great confidence and tremendous respect. We knew him by reputation to be a man of great physical courage and by professional behavior to be a man of vision, intelligence, and great moral courage.”10
Sidney L. Huff, then a naval lieutenant and MacArthur’s naval adviser, met him in October 1935. He recalls how the General lighted “a cigarette—this was before his pipe-smoking days—and immediately put it down on his desk and started walking back and forth across the room. . . . He stuck his hands in his hip pockets as he paced, his jaw jutted out a little and he began talking in that deep, resonant voice—thinking out loud. From time to time he paused beside the wide mahogany desk to push the cigarette neatly into line with the edge of the ash tray, and to glance over at me. ‘Do you follow me, Sid?’ he asked, swinging into his pacing stride again. Or sometimes he would stop at the desk to line up a dozen pencils that were already in a neat pattern—or to turn them around and push the points carefully into line. But always he went back to pacing and to thinking out loud.” Other callers remember the chest of slim Manila cigars which occupied one corner of his desk. He would flip it open, offer one to his visitor, and light another for himself. Then, resuming his big stride, he would halt only to tap a long gray ash into the tray. Everyone recalls how he absolutely dominated the room. If he paused to frame a sentence, the only sounds would be those of the whirring punkahs above and the khaki-clad Filipino clerks pecking their typewriters in the next room. Nobody interrupted MacArthur. Unlike Roosevelt, he had to have the whip hand in any conversation.11
Now nearly sixty, he looked twenty years younger, and with his receding dark hair, his piercing eyes, and his tall, spare figure—he carried his paunch, one correspondent wrote, “like a military secret”—he became a figure of awe on the broad green boulevards of Manila. Lacking the open, democratic approach of Eisenhower, he was less popular with the American community, but the Filipinos loved him. His very aloofness and inscrutability inspired respect in them. He talked to them, not in military jargon, but in spiritual terms, equating patriotism with morality, freedom, and Christianity. Above all he was to them a cherished, enigmatic father figure who never played cards or swapped jokes, and who rarely drank. “Believe I’ll have a gimlet,” he would say at social functions, but he never finished one. Like his father before him, he became a Mason; he was inducted into Manila’s Nile Temple on August 10, 1936. This threw him more and more with upperclass Filipinos. Like many of them, he became a director of the Manila Hotel, and while later rumors of extensive MacArthur investments elsewhere in the capital were unfounded, it is quite true that his closest relationships in the city were with Filipino men of property.12
Everything he prized, he still believed, was threatened by Communists, liberals, and pacifists, all of them cut from the same bolt of cloth. (Murphy, who repeatedly tried to persuade Roosevelt to recall him, was a liberal and a pacifist.) The General realized, however, that totalitarianism was then the greater threat, and his success in preventing his simplistic political views from clouding his military judgment in his new post is a tribute to his professionalism. As a commander he was always a model officer. It is a remarkable fact that MacArthur’s critics never included men who worked with him. In later years much was made of the rivalry between him and Eisenhower for Quezon’s favor. “Best clerk I ever had,” the General said of his chief of staff, while Ike, asked by a woman whether he had ever met MacArthur, replied, “Not only have I met him, mam; I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four years in the Philippines.” Nevertheless, to the end of his life Eisenhower praised his former chiefs soldierly qualities.13
More and more frequently during 1936 the General arrived at social functions escorting Miss Faircloth, who had become one of the permanent American residents in the hotel. The most colorful affairs were those held at Malacañan Palace. Colored lights and Japanese lanterns were hung in trees, and during heat waves a dance floor, erected on the bank of the Pasig River, was approached by a sixty-yard path lined with shoulder-high blocks of ice. At exactly 8:45 P.M. MacArthur would murmur, “Ready, Jean?” and lead her to his car and chauffeur. They would be off to the movies. Indeed, reception or no reception, they went to movies six evenings a week. Managers at the Ideal, the Lyric, and the Metropolitan theaters on the Escolta—Manila’s main street—learned to anticipate their 8:50 arrival. All Manila theaters were segregated in the 1930s, with Filipinos sitting on the main floor and Americans in the balcony loges. The General and his lady always sat in the first loge, he with his head leaning on his hand. They saw The Great Ziegfeld, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Naughty Marietta, A Tale of Two Cities, and much that was inferior, but they only walked out once or twice. MacArthur particularly enjoyed plots with clear-cut heroes and villains, perhaps because they confirmed his view of life. Occasionally he fell asleep in the loge. It didn’t matter; he always emerged refreshed and serene.14
One evening Jean gave a cocktail party at the hotel. In her invitations she made it clear that the affair would start at 7:00 P.M. and end at 8:30. The General couldn’t come, but they had their regular film date just the same. The party was a success—so much so that most of the guests were lingering when it was time for them to go. The hostess began sneaking anxious glances at the clock. She whispered to Huff, “Sid, what am I going to do? The General said he’d come by at 8:45 to go to a movie, and people are still here.” Huff said, “Go ahead and leave.” She said, “I couldn’t leave my guests! Or could I?” He said, “Certainly, it’s an old Manila custom.” She slipped out and into MacArthur’s waiting limousine. Later Huff said, “There wasn’t much doubt in my mind by then that the friendship between the General and Jean had become important to both of them.”15
Huff was important to MacArthur in another capacity. Part of the General’s plan for turning the Philippines into “a Pacific Switzerland,” as he called it, depended on the acquisition of a fleet of fifty sixty-five-foot PT boats, or, to use his term, “Q-boats.” He said: “A relatively small fleet of such vessels, manned by crews thoroughly familiar with every foot of the coast line and surrounding waters, and carrying, in the torpedo, a definite threat against large ships, will have distinct effect in compelling any hostile force to approach cautiously and by small detachments.” Washington’s admirals thought this ludicrous—the 7,083 volcanic islands in the archipelago had more coastline than the United States, the Japanese had more destroyers than MacArthur would have PTs, and Japanese fishermen were as familiar with Philippine waters as any Filipino. Nevertheless, these speedboats were the heart of his defense plan, and he told Huff: “I want a Filipino navy of motor torpedo boats. If I get you the money, how many can you build in ten years?”16
Huff was dumbfounded. He had never even seen a torpedo boat. After investigation, however, he decided that the British Thornycroft model was “the best torpedo boat for our purposes, considering the money available.” It was hardly Huff’s fault that his British shipbuilders would have to cancel the bulk of the order when England was plunged into war with Hitler, so that only three vessels would be ready on December 7, 1941. These, together with six American PTs, were to be the craft at MacArthur’s disposal when war came, other PTs which had been earmarked for the Pacific having been sent to England as part of the Lend-Lease program. Thus his naval theory was never put to the test. Neither was the rest of his program, with its 1946 target date. If it seems to have been inadequate to the coming challenge, as it does, the responsibility must be divided between him, the Quezon administration, and Washington.17
Clare Boothe Luce, visiting him in Manila, asked him his formula for offensive warfare. He said, “Did you ever hear the baseball expression, ‘Hit ’em where they ain’t’? That’s my formula.” Then she asked his formula for defensive war, and he answered with one grim word: “Defeat.” That was why he liked hard-hitting boats and objected to the Orange plan, the strategic withdrawal into Bataan and Corregidor. Though he liked
to describe Corregidor as “the strongest single fortified point in the world,” and believed it to be impregnable, he was convinced that the key island of Luzon—where half the Filipinos lived—could be held by waging “a war of relentless attrition” with the PT boats, a force of 250 aircraft, and a semiguerrilla army of 400,000 Filipinos, to be created over a decade by conscripting all men between twenty-one and fifty and providing five and a half months’ training each year for 40,000 conscripts. These draftees were to be organized into forty divisions, built around a small cadre of regulars—930 officers and 10,000 enlisted men—and led by graduates of a military academy modeled on West Point at Baguio, the Philippines’ summer capital. Before MacArthur’s arrival as his military adviser, Quezon had told a Shanghai audience that the archipelago would have to “rely on world good will” to shield it safely until the Filipinos could build an adequate defense, which he thought would take at least fifty years. MacArthur persuaded him that the 410,930 defenders, making maximum use of the islands’ mountains and jungles, would make the cost of invasion prohibitive—that it would take the Japanese 500,000 men, three years, and five billion dollars to subdue the Philippines, and that they wouldn’t be willing to pay that price.18
Their “principal enemy,” Eisenhower later said, was “money, or its lack.” Ike and Ord drew up a $25 million defense budget. Quezon and MacArthur told them to cut it to $8 million, and subsequent annual budgets were further reduced until, in the year before Pearl Harbor, they were down to $1 million. “Though we worked doggedly,” said Eisenhower, “ours was a hopeless venture, in a sense. The Philippine government simply could not afford to build real security from attack.” Funding wasn’t the only problem, however. Although Quezon’s defense bill was the first measure he sent to his legislature, and although it was passed on December 21, 1935, the first twenty thousand draftees did not arrive in training camps until early 1937, whereupon it developed that they spoke eight distinct languages and eighty-seven different dialects, and that over 20 percent of them, including many first sergeants and company clerks, were illiterate. MacArthur cannot be held responsible for the natives’ backwardness (though he ought to have taken it into account), but he certainly should have given more consideration to the archipelago’s vulnerability to attack from the sea. In the early years of their mission both he and Eisenhower thought a Japanese attack was unlikely for two reasons: first, as the General put it, possession of the islands would “introduce an element of extraordinary weakness in the Japanese empire” by splitting it “militarily into two parts”; second, they thought Britain’s Gallipoli campaign of 1915 (“that abortive undertaking,‘” as MacArthur called it) had demonstrated that amphibious exercises were too hazardous to risk. Actually, of course, both MacArthur and Eisenhower were destined to mount countless amphibious attacks, all of them successful, which would make Gallipoli look like very small potatoes. Moreover, as Brigadier Albert M. Jones was to point out on the eve of war, Luzon “included 250 miles of possible landing beaches” and because of the monsoon factor Jones excluded the Lamon Bay area, where one of the main enemy landings would nevertheless be made.19