One of Arthur’s first questions, when he heard about the army’s point system for demobilizing GIs—so many points were awarded for each month overseas, so many for battles and decorations, and so on—was, “Do I have enough points to go home?” The boy was picking up a British accent from Phyllis Gibbons—the General worried about that—but no, he was told, he didn’t have enough points. “We’ve been too close, through too many things, for any of us to go alone,” Jean told Nora Wain. “I couldn’t send Arthur. I couldn’t go without the General. When we go, we must go together. We three are one.” MacArthur told his wife that he believed his reformation of Japan would take about five years. Then, he said, he expected to tell her, “It’s time to mount up, Jeannie.” In the meantime, his son would “be allowed to grow up normally.”119
It became an article of faith among his men and members of the household staff that this was happening—that he was being raised like any child in Peoria or Dubuque. “He’s such a nice youngster,” Gibby would say. “He’s very nice.” He played with family pets, idolized John Wayne, was an eager Cub Scout, read “Joe Palooka,” and drank Coke and ate B-29burgers in the PX. His mother and Ah Cheu took him to museums, parks, the zoo. On one of MacArthur’s birthdays, Arthur gave his father bookends he had carved; on another, a handmade pipe rack; and on a third, a tiny Japanese clay pipe from Kyoto, though he told the General, “If the pipe’s too small for you, I’ll put it in my collection,” and SCAP, taking the hint, left it on Arthur’s whatnot. MacArthur tried to shelter the boy from excessive publicity, permitting cameramen to approach him only when he appeared in public with his mother on ceremonial occasions. Officers in the Dai Ichi scarcely saw him. They believed that the son of SCAP was just another army brat, living much as his father had lived in the isolated frontier forts of the 1880s. “Arthur MacArthur,” Kenney said, “is just another normal, healthy, attractive American boy.”120
He was indeed healthy, if somewhat delicate, and attractive, favoring his mother more than his father. But it was absurd to call him normal. That was impossible. His life had swung back and forth between the extremes of intense excitement and sheltered calm. At his first birthday party in Tokyo he played musical chairs with a dozen grizzled colonels and generals—twelve beribboned commanders kicking each other in the shins, struggling for seats, and, of course, making sure that the eight-year-old “Sergeant” won the game. Similarly, he regularly trounced adults in tiddlywinks and croquet. “Hi, Champ!” his father would cry on returning home after such matches. What Arthur needed was to lose, and lose badly, to others his age. But there was a shortage of small boys in the diplomatic community. Once his mother was elated to hear that a new envoy had brought a little son with him. By evening she was dejected. “Unfortunately,” she told MacArthur, “Arthur can’t speak Afghanistanese, or whatever you call it.” Eventually Egeberg went home and was replaced by another army physician, Lieutenant Colonel C. C. Canada, whose boy was just Arthur’s age. The Canada child was followed by three others, and soon Arthur had one or two houseguests sleeping over every weekend. But he still spent hours playing cops and robbers with the servants, or paddling around the reflecting pool in a red, white, and blue rowboat, with Bataan neatly painted on the bow. It was rather sad.121
His mother and Gibby stood up to him. The governess insisted that he improve his spelling, which was dreadful, and she disciplined his musical talent. With her help, he composed two piano pieces. After seeing the movie The Third Man — theoretically he was only allowed to stay up for Saturday films, but he often sneaked down for others—he was given a zither. He immediately picked out the movie’s theme. It was a modest achievement and deserved modest recognition. The General told his staff that he had sired a genius. When the boy painted a watercolor for his Dai Ichi office, MacArthur proudly showed it to the press. He called it “better than a Rembrandt.”122
Arthur’s only real peer was Crown Prince Akihito. They were introduced and photographed together, making Arthur the only MacArthur in those years to meet any member of the royal family except Hirohito. (Jean was never introduced to the emperor, the empress, or their son.) Like Akihito, Arthur was treated with excessive deference by almost everyone. Tony Story took him to the airport, put him in the cockpit of the General’s plane, and let him handle the controls. Japanese policemen saluted him. When he took up horseback riding, his mount was an imperial thoroughbred. His tennis coach was a Japanese Davis Cup winner. At Tojo’s trial he was given a front seat and earphones. There was a small ceremony on the day MacArthur was made a permanent five-star general. Press photographers moved in and then were waved aside so Arthur, with a new camera, could get the first picture.123
Sebald recalls the General as “a fond, but perhaps indulgent father.” There was no perhaps about it. His son broke his arm skating. It was a simple fracture, with no complications, but his father, an aide recalls, “went crazy.” The hospital was in a turmoil. MacArthur visited the boy’s bedside three times, followed each time by an entourage of bone specialists. He demanded dozens of X-rays when one would have been enough and ruled that Arthur would never be permitted to skate again. “An officer’s first duty is to stay fit,” he told Bowers. He recalled his own difficulties in passing the U.S. Military Academy physical examination and wanted no recurrence of them. There was, of course, no doubt in his mind that his son would eventually join the Long Gray Line. He wrote the corps of cadets: “I hope that God will let me live to see the day when young Arthur MacArthur is sworn in on The Plain as a plebe at West Point.”124
Arthur was the last person MacArthur saw before retiring with Jean and the first to greet him each morning. At 7:00 A.M. the boy would rush into the General’s bedroom and pummel him. Simultaneously, a Japanese servant would open a door and hiss a signal to four dogs sitting expectantly in a row at the foot of the hill behind the Big House—Blackie, a cocker; Uki, a white Akita; Brownie, a Shiba terrier; and Koko, the Huffs’ spaniel. Barking joyously, the four pets would race up and into the bedroom, where the Supreme Commander, his son, and the dogs would chase each other about, MacArthur shouting exultantly, Arthur shrieking, and the spaniels and terriers yelping and wagging their tails in frenzy.125
Another servant would place four small dishes of egg and milk on the dining room floor, near the breakfast table. After the dogs had licked them clean they would gather around the General’s table. Slipping into his old gray West Point bathrobe with the black “A” over the heart, he would feed them scraps while he ate his most substantial meal of the day: fruit, cereal, eggs, toast, and coffee without cream but with plenty of sugar. Jean sat at the other end of the table, sipping coffee and chatting; Arthur watched his father adoringly, and the dogs patiently awaited the next part of the morning rites, MacArthur’s shave. He and Arthur sang their duets while his straight razor whipped back and forth. Then came the General’s calisthenics. He never golfed, fished, hunted, cycled, jogged, or even used the embassy swimming pool, but these setting-up exercises were vigorous workouts. The dogs knew which was the last one, and they bounded up to nuzzle him when he had finished it. Uki was Arthur’s favorite—he liked to dress her up in outlandish costumes and tie hats on her head—but his father preferred Blackie. The other three pets left while he dressed, but Blackie was permitted to stay and watch. One morning Jean walked in and found him in an upholstered chair. “Oh, General!” she said disapprovingly. “Look at Blackie ruining that chair! I simply will not let the dogs sit on my chairs.” MacArthur replied firmly, “Jeannie, that is my chair and Blackie can get into it any time he wants to. ”
At eight o’clock the family gathered for prayers, the General’s substitute for formal church attendance. Gibby read the service from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and MacArthur followed with a short passage from the Bible. At eight-thirty Gibby rang a large brass school bell relentlessly until Arthur joined her for his first lesson of the day. Meanwhile the General had begun scanning dispatches, telling Jean which calls he wanted her to
make and grumblingly placing a few himself when instant decisions were needed. Two or three times a week he told her, before leaving for the office, to expect luncheon guests. He disliked entertaining—it usually meant he would miss his siesta—but as he told Bowers, “It can’t be helped. Now that the war’s over, every Tom, Dick and his cat’s coming over. I don’t want a fuss. Can’t have them hoping for a visit and then leaving saying I wouldn’t see them.”
The visitors would begin to arrive shortly before two o’clock. Jean, Huff, and sometimes Bowers would greet them in the huge drawing room. Often she was the only woman at the noon meal, and sometimes the only civilian; because SCAP had ruled that military officers took precedence over diplomats, many nations’ representatives in Tokyo were generals and admirals. Those expecting cocktails were disappointed. If they hinted that they were thirsty, Jean would turn to Bowers and say vaguely, “We have a little sherry, I believe, don’t we, Major?” Moving quickly among them, she would deftly elicit from each why he was here and what he wanted. After a half-hour’s wait, the Cadillac would purr up the drive. “The General is coming!” she would say breathlessly, and then, as he entered the room, she would sing out, “Why, it’s the General! Hi, General!” Ignoring the others, he would stride quickly to her, kiss her, and then pivot toward his visitors. Having welcomed all, he would turn toward the dining room, beckon the guest of honor to his side, and rumble, “You must be hungry. I know I am.”126
He wasn’t at all hungry. His noon and evening meals were identical and frugal: soup, salad, and coffee. But valuing his time, he wanted to get through lunch and back to his desk. He was always quietly amused at the polite jockeying for position as the visitors approached the table. Sebald recalls that SCAP’s residence was the only establishment of the occupation which lacked protocol. “MacArthur protocol,” as the General called it, meant that he sat at one end of the table and Jean at the other, with everyone else except the guest of honor, at his right, left to fend for themselves. Often this meant that senior officials would end up in the middle, with more vigorous juniors close to the Supreme Commander. It didn’t matter; Jean would catch SCAP’s eye and adroitly mention that so-and-so wanted to talk to him about such-and-such. He would break off whatever he was saying, explaining with heavy humor, “Any husband will tell you that the wife really rules the family.” In this fashion everyone had a word with the host.127
Over coffee he would dominate conversation in his euphonious way, analyzing the world situation and predicting what the future would bring. Then he and Jean would rise together. Often he would let her escort the guests out while he slipped away through another door. This offended some. They thought he felt himself too important for conviviality. Few suspected that this Olympian figure was painfully shy in intimate social situations, wretched in the easy give-and-take of idle conversation, jollity, and good-fellowship. He vastly preferred his quiet luncheons with his wife, listening for the 3:00 P.M. news over a portable radio on the table, and then lying down for his hour of rest. He could hold listeners spellbound with his visions for Japan, but the kind of verbal fencing at which Franklin Roosevelt excelled—the art that all great politicians must master—was beyond MacArthur. His definition of a good meal was a quick meal. Jean had his supper on the table when he reached home, and within twenty minutes he would rise from it and enter the pantry outside the dining room, where a hole had been cut through the wall and a large motion-picture screen erected. There, sitting in his red rocker, he would subject a cigar to its ritualistic circumcision, light up, and puff happily away.
During the show Jean sat on his left, Huff on his right. About fifty folding chairs would be set up, because all staff officers, servants, and even the embassy’s honor guard had standing invitations to attend. Though most enlisted men continued to mock his lordly air, his stock was high with those who saw him every day. The Big House sentries had chipped in to give him an ashtray table, which stood beside the rocker, and an English tweed jacket, which on cool evenings he would slip on before the lights were dimmed for the short subjects. MacArthur watching a newsreel, according to Norman Thompson, his projectionist of those Tokyo years, was a spectacle in itself. If an Army-Navy game was shown, he would cheer the Black Knights hoarsely, even though he had known the final score for weeks. Joseph Stalin on the screen would bring him to the edge of the rocker, tense with concentration, watching Stalin’s every gesture. Scenes of natural disasters would evoke muttered stratagems for outflanking the elements, cutting off their rear, mopping them up.128
He liked light comedies, musicals, Westerns; any action film, in fact, particularly if Arthur was there to share it with him. On Sundays, when there were no movies, he sprawled on a divan in the Big House’s small library, his smoking corncob jutting up like a listing periscope. All his life he had enjoyed reading books, particularly history, before bedtime. Now he preferred talking to Jean and listening to phonograph records. Bing Crosby was his favorite crooner. One evening she put on a new Crosby hit, “Now Is the Hour,” and asked him if he could identify it. “Of course I can,” he said. “It’s an old Maori song.” Humming, he would ascend the stairs and, like Roosevelt, fall asleep the instant his head touched the pillow. That, he told a friend, was one of the three reasons for his superb physical condition. The other two were abstemiousness—he never drank more than an occasional glass of wine during his Japanese years—and his naps.129
A journalist asked Dr. Canada if the General was a good patient. “I don’t know,” the physician replied. “He’s never sick.” There was, Martin Sommers reported in the Saturday Evening Post, “not a line on his face.” George Creel of Collier’s wrote: “I first met him in 1917 when he was a young major. He oozed energy, ability and ambition from every pore. Meeting him here in Tokyo 31 years later, it amazed me to see how few changes had been wrought by time. Still arrow-straight, and with the same flash of eye and aquilinity of features, he justified what I had been told by . . . his personal physician. . . . Few members of his staff, even though many years his junior, can match his physical endurance.” So remarkable was his youthful appearance that gossips claimed he wore rouge. He himself said jocularly to Sebald, “Bill, I feel like a one-horse shay. I am the only one on active service from the Military Academy prior to the class of 1909. ”130
An artist commissioned to paint his portrait confided to an acquaintance, “Of course, MacArthur has never known what to do with his hands. It is impossible to paint them because they are never still. That is why he usually stands with his hands behind his back, or otherwise contrives to hide them.” This restless energy, pent up all the more because he denied himself every pleasure outside the home, continued to fuel Japan’s progress year after successful year. Still alert, still ascetic, the General gradually changed from a vigorous advocate of reform to the defender of the transformations he had wrought. Like his old trench coat, which grew dirtier and dirtier as the end of the 1940s approached, and his celebrated, oil-soaked cap—which he finally, and reluctantly, allowed Huff to re-cover with part of an old uniform—the General had become a Nipponese institution. Clearly the Japanese wanted him to remain; equally clearly, he intended to stay. At his direction, fifteen trunks had been filled with documents against the day he wrote his memoirs, but he never even opened them. Remington Rand invited him to serve as chairman of its board “if and when” he retired. He casually acknowledged the proposal; it was, he said, a big if and a bigger when. Orientalists began to believe that Douglas MacArthur was destined to grow to a great old age in Tokyo and die among the conquered Nipponese. There appeared to be only two forces which might alter that future. The first was the possibility, which seemed remote, of a new war in Asia. The second was his undiminished ambition to become President of the United States.131
In the summer of 1946 George Kenney, reading of the tremendous homecoming parades New York had been staging for other victorious U.S. generals, speculated aloud on the number of tons of ticker tape the city would dump on MacArthur.
The General smiled and shook his head. He said he had no intention of returning to Manhattan. When he did fly home, he told Kenney, “I expect to settle down in Milwaukee, and on the way to the house I’m going to stop at a furniture store and buy the biggest red rocker in the shop. I’ll set it up on the porch and alongside it put a good-sized pile of stones. Then I’ll rock.” Kenney asked, “What are the stones for?” The General’s smile broadened. He replied, “To throw at anyone who comes around talking politics.”132
He might have begun by stoning himself. Like most Americans, he assumed that Harry Truman would lose in 1948, and that the Republican nominee, whoever he was, would become President. In 1944 he had been demure. Now he put coyness aside. In uniform, and situated five thousand miles from the White House, he couldn’t seek the office openly, but as early as the autumn of 1947 he let visitors from the United States know that he was engrossed in the coming race. On October 6 Forrestal noted in his diary that Eisenhower had returned from Tokyo to tell the President that he must “face the prospect of MacArthur’s returning here in the spring to launch a campaign for himself,” while SCAP had sent word from the Dai Ichi “warning the President that Eisenhower would be a candidate for the Presidency!”133
The following month, Joseph Choate, a Los Angeles lawyer, wrote the General, urging him to run. MacArthur didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. He replied: “The need is not in the concentration of greater power in the hands of the state, but in the reservation of much more power in the people as intended by constitutional mandate—more leadership and less direction. ” Choate thought that sounded like a GOP rallying cry, and it did. He read it to a Milwaukee meeting of MacArthur-for-President delegates from sixteen states, and they voted to enter a slate of delegates in Wisconsin’s April primary. The New York Times commented: “There can be no doubt that his candidacy would command wide support in a national election.” Colonel MeCormick was still appalled by the General’s socialization of Japan, but William Randolph Hearst hailed him as a world statesman: “We must DRAFT General MacArthur for the Presidency. . . . Beyond any rivalry and any partisanship . . . Douglas MacArthur is the MAN OF THE HOUR.” 134