American Caesar

  Contracting malaria, he was transferred back to Manila, and there, in March 1904, he took his examinations for the rank of first lieutenant. One quiz was oral. A colonel described a hypothetical problem: the candidate was asked how he would defend a harbor with a given number of troops. After he had answered, the examiner changed the question. What would he do, he was asked, if all the troops were withdrawn? MacArthur replied: “First, I’d round up all the signpainters in the community and put them to work making signs reading: BEWARE—THIS HARBOR is MINED. These signs I’d float out in the mouth of the harbor. After that I’d get down on my knees and pray. Then I’d go out and fight like hell.” Apparently this reply was convincing; the following month he put up silver bars. Remaining in the capital, he served as disbursing officer and assistant to the chief engineer officer of the Philippine Division. Upon recovering from his fever he was ordered to survey Mariveles, the tip of Bataan—he concluded that Aguinaldo had been wise to make his last stand on the tangled peninsula—and back in Manila he dined at the Army-Navy Club one evening with Captain James G. Harbord, who introduced him to two young Filipinos, Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña.50

  In October MacArthur returned to San Francisco aboard the transport Thomas, and there, for the first time since his tangle with the West Point mathematics instructor, he ran afoul of a superior officer. There were extenuating circumstances. Suffering a malarial relapse, he was on his back for two months and unsteady for some time thereafter. More important, his father was in Manchuria watching the windup of Russo-Japanese hostilities, and his mother was making exorbitant demands on his time. The officer, one Major William W. Harts, directed him to supervise excavations in a nearby California valley. “Lieutenant MacArthur,” the major reported to the chief of engineers, “. . . stated that his departure for so long a time would be impossible owing to his father’s absence and the necessity he was under of tending to some of his father’s affairs.” Harts observed that while the lieutenant was “usually prompt in complying with orders,” it was impossible to foresee “with what enthusiasm he would carry out work assigned to him.” But enthusiastic or otherwise, any task he tackled was exemplarily done. The major’s reservations notwithstanding, in July 1905 MacArthur was appointed acting chief engineer of the Division of the Pacific. It seems unlikely that his father’s position was a factor in this mandate, though that was not true of a directive which reached San Francisco three months later:

  Special Order No. 222

  War Department

  Washington, D.C.

  October 3, 1905

  First Lieutenant Douglas MacArthur, corps of engineers, is relieved from present duties, and will proceed to Tokyo, Japan, and report in person to Major General Arthur MacArthur, U.S.A., for appointment as aide-de-camp on his staff.

  By Order Secretary of War

  J. C. BATES,

  Major Genera,

  Acting Chief of Staff51

  Arthur was about to leave on his grand inspection of the Orient, and he wanted his wife and younger son to accompany him. It was a matchless opportunity for the youth. On a rainy Sunday, October 29, he joined his parents in Yokohama’s Oriental Palace Hotel; on Wednesday they were off. First they toured Japanese military bases at Nagasaki, Kobe, and Kyoto; then they sailed for Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Java. Christmas found them in Singapore; New Year’s Day, in Burma. On January 14, 1906, they docked in Calcutta. Two months of India followed, a tour of the chief attractions of the Edwardian Raj at flood tide: Madras, Tuticorin, Quetta, Karachi, the Northwest Frontier, the Khyber Pass, Darjeeling. By April they were in Bangkok, attending a dinner given in their honor by King Rama V. Then they headed for Saigon and a journey through China which touched at Canton, Tsingtao, Peking, Tientsin, Hankow, and, once again, Shanghai. Late in June they returned to Japan.52

  We picture Douglas in a topee and white linen suit, a Charles Dana Gibson poster of what a young officer in mufti should look like, gazing at stirring Asia with the eyes of an impressionable American patrician. As aide to his father, he keeps the party’s travel vouchers, calculating that during the first twenty weeks they have covered 19,949 miles. During the Bangkok dinner the lights suddenly go out; his alacrity in replacing a fuse so impresses the Siamese king that His Majesty proposes to decorate him for conspicuous gallantry; to his mother’s consternation, the youth modestly declines the honor. He is impressed by the “warm professional hospitality” extended to the MacArthur’ by Britain’s pukka sahibs, but notes that the masses of Asia are less interested in their colonial overlords than in getting enough food to ward off starvation, enough clothing to protect them from the weather, and large enough huts to shelter their families. Before leaving California he has read Senator Albert J. Beveridge’s celebrated 1900 speech—“The power that rules the Pacific . . . is the power that rules the world”—and his own observations confirm it. Much later he will write that the trip “was without doubt the most important factor of preparation in my entire life . . . . It was crystal clear to me that the future and, indeed, the very existence of America, were irrevocably entwined with Asia and its island outposts. It was to be sixteen years before I returned to the Far East, but always was its mystic hold upon me.”53

  Before sailing home on July 17, father and son talked to Japanese generals and summed up their impressions of the new world power. Arthur MacArthur believed that Nippon’s imperialistic ambitions posed the central “problem of the Pacific”; he warned the secretary of war of the need for stronger Philippine defenses to prevent the archipelago’s “strategic position from becoming a liability rather than an asset to the United States.” Lieutenant MacArthur, while “deeply impressed” by “the thrift, courtesy, and friendliness of the ordinary citizen” of Japan, also distrusted the “feudalistic samurai.” He noted “the boldness and courage” of the Nipponese soldiers and the “iron character and unshakable purpose” of their commanders.54

  He noted something else. Cholera was thinning the ranks of the Japanese army. A puzzled Japanese general told the American lieutenant that each man had been given a supply of large capsules and told to take one every four hours, but that the medicine didn’t seem to be working. Douglas MacArthur burst into laughter. The angry general demanded an explanation.55

  “I intended no offense,” MacArthur replied. “I was just thinking what American soldiers would do if they were given capsules to take every four hours.”

  “What would they do?”

  “Well, they would throw the capsules in the first ditch they came to and forget the whole thing.”

  “My soldiers will not do that!” the general said. “You wait and see! My orders will be carried out!”

  A few days later the boxes of medication bore a label: “The Emperor requests that each soldier take one capsule every four hours.” And that was the end of the problem. The cholera epidemic was over. MacArthur drew the obvious conclusion: the emperor’s instructions, however absurd they seemed to the men in the ranks, would be blindly obeyed.56

  At the time, the implications of the MacArthur’’ observations seemed remote, but Douglas was reminded of them in 1909, when an American named Homer Lea published a curious book of prophesy, The Valor of Ignorance. Lea wrote: “As the conquest of Cuba was accomplished by landing forces distant from any fortified port, so will the Philippines fall. Lingayen Gulf on the north coast of Luzon, or Polillo Bight on the east coast, will form the Guantanamo Bays of the Japanese . . . . If the American forces should remain behind their lines at Manila, they would, in two weeks after the declaration of war, be surrounded by overwhelming numbers.” The lieutenant scored his copy of the volume heavily and set it aside for future reference.57

  First Lieutenant MacArthur in 1906

  First Lieutenant MacArthur (second from right, front row) and fellow officers in full dress, 1909

  Nausea would continue to afflict MacArthur at critical moments in his career, and in the two years which followed his tour of the Orient he had several bouts of it. On
the surface everything looked splendid. In the autumn of 1906 he was selected to attend an elite engineering school at Washington Barracks, now renamed Fort McNair. On December 4 he was also appointed aide-de-camp to Theodore Roosevelt, who solicited his views on the Far East—heady wine for a junior officer. He was not always successful as a White House social arbiter. (“Mr. Speaker, the President will receive you now,” he murmured to Joe Cannon, touching him on the sleeve. “The hell he will,” Cannon barked, blowing a cloud of smoke in MacArthur’s face.) Nevertheless he graduated from the school and, on August 10, 1907, was assigned to river and harbor duties at the engineering office in Milwaukee. There he lived with his parents in a comfortable three-story mansion at 575 North Marshall Street. He wasn’t a captain yet, but promotion seemed to be only a matter of time. His military star appeared to be rising.58

  Actually it was in danger of vanishing. Fascinated by the pomp of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he had been so cavalier in his attitude toward the courses at Washington Barracks that the school commandant, Major E. Eveleth Winslow, wrote the chief of engineers on August 7, 1908: “I am sorry to report that during this time Lieutenant MacArthur seemed to take but little interest in his course at the school and that the character of the work done by him was generally not equal to that of most of the other student officers and barely exceeded the minimum which would have been permitted. . . . Indeed, throughout the time Lieutenant MacArthur was under my observation, he displayed, on the whole, but little professional zeal and his work was far inferior to that which his West Point record shows him to be capable of.”59

  This black mark went on his record. But worse was to follow. In Milwaukee, where he was subject to the orders of Major William V. Judson, he encountered conflicting orders from his parents. His father, now without duties of his own, wanted to spend long hours with his son discussing the subtleties of Filipino politics, the mysteries of the Orient, the iniquities of William Howard Taft. Pinky was equally determined to have Douglas beside her during Milwaukee social functions. The lieutenant resolved virtually every conflict in his family’s favor. Judson fumed. Several times he spoke to MacArthur about his protracted absences from the drafting room and from field trips. At the end of three months the major entrusted him with the reconstruction of a Lake Michigan harbor sixty miles to the north. The lieutenant, Judson reported to Washington, “remonstrated and argued verbally and at length against assignment to this duty, which would take him away from Milwaukee for a considerable portion of time.” MacArthur said he “wished to be undisturbed for about eight months.”

  Complaining bitterly, he spent a month in the north. Then cold weather shut down the reconstruction. He was in Milwaukee until spring, letting his work slide and, in the major’s words, communicating “by word and manner his dissatisfaction” at the thought of returning to the harbor after the thaw. Clearly he was unhappy at this post. He was railing at his superior officer, but it seems likely that he felt repressed hostility toward his parents, for he was trying to escape them too; when he was rejected for a teaching vacancy at West Point, he made representations to his father’s old friends in the War Department, begging duty away from Wisconsin. Meanwhile Judson was framing a scathing efficiency report which concluded: “I am of the opinion that Lieutenant MacArthur, while on duty under my immediate orders, did not conduct himself in a way to meet commendation, and that his duties were not performed in a satisfactory manner.” MacArthur, receiving a copy of this, wrote out an angry denial, protesting “the ineradicable blemish Major Judson has seen fit to place upon my military record” and arguing that since “a large part of my time was unemployed I fell into the view that my presence in the office was not regarded as a matter of much practical importance.” He sent this piece of impertinence directly to the brigadier serving as chief of engineers, bypassing the major. The inevitable result was a rebuke from the brigadier, who icily observed that the lieutenant’s retort was “in itself justification of Major Judson’s statement, in view of Mr. MacArthur’s evident inclination to avoid work assigned to him elsewhere.” All officers, he added pointedly, were expected to display “promptness and alacrity in obeying orders, and faithful performance of duties assigned them.”60

  This reprimand silenced the lieutenant, but the lieutenant’s mother was enraged. Her wrath is the most plausible explanation for her bizarre attempt, in the spring of 1909, to get Douglas out of uniform and into a lucrative civilian job. On April 17 she wrote to E. H. Harriman, the railroad magnate:

  My dear Mr. Harriman:

  At Ambassador Griscom’s in Tokio [sic] some three years ago, I had the good fortune to be seated next to you at luncheon. The amiable manner in which you then, listened to my talk, in behalf of a possible future for my son Douglas MacArthur outside the Army, encourages me now, to address you now in that connection; and more especially as I recall that first class men are always in demand, and that you frequently have occasion to seek them.

  The son referred to is 29 years old. . . .61

  Pinky suggested that Harriman find a position for him somewhere in “your vast enterprises,” explaining that she felt she owed it “to maternal solicitude to make every possible effort in behalf of what I conceive to be his future welfare.” She did not, however, feel obliged to inform her son of her scheme, and when Harriman sent a Union Pacific agent to interview MacArthur—who by then had been transferred to Fort Leavenworth—Douglas was nonplussed. The agent reported that “Lieutenant MacArthur knew nothing whatever of any plans to get him into railroad service. Was much surprised and a little annoyed to think that we had been put to the trouble of coming down here. It is evidently a case where the mother wants to get her son out of the army, and not where the son is figuring on getting out himself, and you can say that Lieut. MacArthur, according to his own statement, is not desirous of making a change to any position that he feels we would be justified in offering him.”62

  It had been a comrade of Arthur’s, Major General J. Franklin Bell, who had posted Douglas to Kansas. If wire-pulling is ever justified, this was such an instance; Judson was rid of an insubordinate assistant and MacArthur, in command of troops for the first time, discovered his true vocation. Assigned command of Company K, the lowest ranked of the twenty-one companies on the post, he hiked his men twenty-five miles a day, showed them how to break speed records in building pontoon bridges, and taught them marksmanship, horsemanship, and the use of explosives. At the next general inspection they led all the other companies. “I could not have been happier,” he said later, “if they had made me a general.” Now he erupted in a paroxysm of activity, writing a demolitions field manual, teaching, and serving as the post’s quartermaster, commissary officer, engineer officer, and disbursing officer. His next efficiency report praised him as “a most excellent and efficient officer.” Watching him cross the parade ground, one Sergeant Major Corbett told his men: “Boys, there goes a soldier.”63

  Lieutenant Robert L. Eichelberger was impressed. Like Lieutenants Walter Krueger and George C. Marshall, Eichelberger was a fellow officer of MacArthur’s at Leavenworth. Later he vividly recalled him posing in front of a drugstore one evening, “standing a bit aloof from the rest of us and looking off in the distance with what I have always considered in other people to be a Napoleonic stance.” The only officer to stay at arm’s length from MacArthur was Marshall; even then the two future five-star generals rubbed each other the wrong way. Eichelberger thought the dandy from Milwaukee “a fine-looking, upstanding officer,’ with a reputation as a coming leader. Others remember him as a gregarious poker player and an enthusiastic performer on the post’s polo and baseball teams (although he still couldn’t hit, he was elected player-manager), one who was sufficiently active in barracks horseplay to turn up at sick call one morning with what the post doctor described as a fracture of the left hand “accidentally incurred while wrestling in quarters,” and who gloried in stag dinners, where, although he drank little, he loved to lead choruses of the ballad “Old S
oldiers Never Die. “ Another future general, John C. H. Lee, whose quarters adjoined his, recalls MacArthur’s ingenious stratagems for defeating Leavenworth’s arch rivals in baseball, the Kansas City Country Club. Once he set a lavish feast before the visitors, who gorged themselves and then lost. Another time he introduced two strapping players as recent West Point stars. Actually they were Texas professionals he had hired for twenty dollars. The Kansas City team was trounced.64

  MacArthur remained at Leavenworth four years, but after his promotion to captain on February 11, 1911—he had been a first lieutenant nearly seven years—the army sent him off on various three-to-six-month tours of duty. One of these took him to Panama, where, as the guest of Robert E. Wood, he studied the engineering, supply, and sanitation problems of the Canal Zone. In mid-1911 he and Eichelberger joined soldiers participating in Texas maneuvers. After they had pitched tents outside San Antonio, MacArthur hurried to the West Texas Military Academy, hoping to recapture his youth. But the cadets mocked his campaign hat, the crown of which, under new regulations, was gathered in a pyramid rather than creased cowboy fashion. “Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that hat?” they chanted until he fled. That evening he returned to see his old home. It was, in his words, “a glorious night of moonshine, with the haunting melody of guitar and mandolin floating in the air, lending a tingle to the blood.” Then a blonde came out and accosted him. “What are you doing here?” she demanded sharply. “I believe you’re drunk. Get out or I’ll call the guard.” Again the captain retreated, and although he remained under canvas there for four more months, he never approached the campus again: “I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.”65