The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (4 page)

MacArthur’s lobbying succeeded; he was able to restore some $30 million to the army budget, but he’d had to enlist conservative pressure groups, veterans organizations (including some veterans who, as a result of the Bonus March, were his most outspoken critics), and newspaper editorialists to win his fight. When the battle was won (a half victory, MacArthur thought, but better than no victory at all), the army’s senior leadership praised him for his triumph—as did retired and ailing General John Pershing, whose own pension had been saved. Pershing even sent MacArthur a note of thanks.

MacArthur’s victory on the furlough and officer pensions had kept Congress from eating the seed corn, as MacArthur might have phrased it, but the budget crisis didn’t go away. A new round of cuts was scheduled for 1934. To help stop them, MacArthur turned to Secretary of War George Dern. Although Dern had once been mentioned as a potential Roosevelt running mate, the former mining magnate and governor of Utah was viewed as too conservative by Roosevelt’s brain trust, who convinced the new president to shuttle him off to the War Department, where he could do the least damage. There was nothing happening there, they argued.

But Dern proved to be more forceful than Roosevelt’s young New Dealers anticipated. When he arrived at the War Department, he unveiled a new set of modern business practices that included stringent savings measures and a streamlined budget process. In addition, Dern was an admitted MacArthur admirer and a student of MacArthur’s campaigns in the Great War—and was a surprisingly adept military thinker, setting in motion a five-year plan to improve military munitions and
weapons. His accomplishments sparked MacArthur’s admiration, and his loyalty. “He was in thorough agreement with army plans and was a pillar of support for the military,” MacArthur later said. “My esteem for him grew daily.” In fact, MacArthur needed Dern as a front man for his own views, which he had to sell to the White House and Congress. It was nearly unprecedented for a senior military officer to lobby against a budget promoted by his commander in chief—which is what MacArthur was intent on doing—but it was a lot easier to do so with Dern present.

Dern proved a valuable voice for MacArthur in Congress, for while the army chief of staff had strong allies on Capitol Hill, Congressman Ross Collins remained an outspoken and powerful enemy. For Collins, the fight with MacArthur was personal. Not only was Collins still angered by MacArthur’s victory in retaining monies for officers in the Hoover budget, but the lawmaker also wanted revenge on the army chief for describing Collins as “a Mississippi cracker.” Dern intervened, attempting to mollify the congressman while urging MacArthur to end their feud. But Dern had little success in mollifying MacArthur or his staff, which lined up squarely behind the chief.

Only months after MacArthur’s victory on officer pensions, a reporter asked the War Department for biographical information on Collins for an article. MacArthur aide Dwight Eisenhower brushed off the inquiry, saying that perhaps the reporter should ask for the information from Collins himself: “He is a publicity seeker and would be highly pleased to find his name in print.”

Despite these obstacles, MacArthur and Dern actually succeeded in saving millions of dollars from the ax of New Deal and congressional budget cutters—the result of both MacArthur’s cooperation on the CCC and his willingness to spend long hours at the White House in late 1933 talking with Roosevelt about the dangers of Japanese militarism and the rise of European fascism. While it’s not clear just how much MacArthur was able to salvage in his budget as a result of these informal talks, his quiet dinners with Roosevelt (noted by Roosevelt campaign mastermind James Farley, who spied MacArthur sneaking in the back door of the White House one evening) helped to ease the mistrust that existed between the two. The quiet discussions served the purposes of
both men: Roosevelt could test out his political ideas on a core conservative, while MacArthur could personally lobby for more money for the army.

It’s possible to exaggerate the impact of these informal meetings, for they did little to convince either man to shift his political views. Roosevelt was an unshakable and dedicated progressive, while MacArthur retained his deep contacts with conservative Republicans. Nor, as it soon became clear to MacArthur, was a personal plea likely to result in anything more than a marginal increase in his budget—if that. A photograph from this era reflects this fundamental truth: It shows MacArthur, Dern, and Roosevelt laughing together, with Roosevelt’s head back and his eyes firmly on MacArthur. Dern is the odd man out in the picture, with MacArthur and Roosevelt’s eyes locked together in competitive camaraderie. So too it must have seemed to both of them during their informal meetings. The two smiled and laughed and exchanged views, but they remained locked together in a personal struggle, with neither giving ground. “Why is it, Mr. President, that you frequently inquire my opinion regarding the social reforms under consideration,” MacArthur asked Roosevelt during one of these dinners, “but pay little attention to my views on the military?” Roosevelt gave a blunt retort: “Douglas, I don’t bring these questions up for your advice but for your reactions. To me, you are the symbol of the conscience of the American people.” MacArthur was chagrined. “This took all the wind out of my sails,” he would later write. Roosevelt was plumbing his political views—testing out his ideas on a conservative audience. But as far as the budget was concerned, the president hadn’t even been listening. The confrontation was yet to come.

I
n early March 1934, Douglas MacArthur and George Dern were shown the proposed cuts in army funding for 1935. Both men were shocked. They had received no prior notice of the cuts and had not been consulted on them. Nor had Roosevelt given MacArthur any indication of the future budget plans during their dinners together. Roosevelt based his decision on a report from the Bureau of the Budget, which recommended cuts to the army budget of some 51 percent, a drawdown that, both MacArthur and Dern believed, could fatally erode military readiness.
Dern told MacArthur that he would ask for a meeting with Roosevelt to present his views, and that MacArthur should accompany him. MacArthur agreed, hoping that Dern’s voice, when added to his own, would prove persuasive. One week later, the two met the president in the Oval Office. In what became a legendary face-off, MacArthur and Roosevelt got involved in a heated exchange that led to a near break between the two—one of the worst confrontations between a senior military officer and a president in the country’s history.

The Oval Office meeting began cordially, with Dern reviewing the threats the United States faced. Roosevelt listened politely, but as Dern continued to talk, the president grew irritated. There was something in Dern’s voice that grated on Roosevelt. Suddenly, his irritation got the best of him—and he turned on his secretary of war, berating him and, in MacArthur’s words, “using the biting diction” he usually reserved for his political enemies. “Under his lashing tongue, the Secretary grew white and silent,” MacArthur later remembered. MacArthur weighed in, hoping to ease the confrontation. The country’s safety was at stake, he told Roosevelt. But the president turned on him as suddenly as he had turned on Dern. Roosevelt’s face was ashen with contempt. “He was a scorcher when aroused,” MacArthur later wrote. “The tension began to boil over.” It was at this point, MacArthur later confessed, that he “spoke recklessly” and “said something to the general effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt.” MacArthur’s words hung in the air. Roosevelt could hardly believe what he’d heard. He wheeled on MacArthur and bellowed his response: “You must not talk that way to the President!”

MacArthur, suddenly realizing what he’d said, backtracked. “He was, of course, right,” he later wrote, “and I knew it almost before the words had left my mouth. I said that I was sorry and apologized. But I felt my army career was at an end. I told him he had my resignation as Chief of Staff.” With that, MacArthur turned to leave the room. But even before he reached the door, Roosevelt mastered his anger (“his voice came with that cool detachment which so reflected his extraordinary control,” MacArthur remembered) and dampened the confrontation. “Don’t be
foolish, Douglas,” he said, “you and the budget must get together on this.” MacArthur left the room quickly, then waited on the White House porch for Dern to appear. When he did, he was beaming, as if the confrontation had not occurred. “You’ve saved the Army,” Dern said. But MacArthur felt defeated and, without warning, was suddenly overcome by nausea. He looked at Dern and then, leaning over, vomited on the White House steps.

While neither Roosevelt nor MacArthur ever mentioned their White House confrontation to one another in the years ahead, relations between the two remained strained, and while MacArthur later claimed that after their Oval Office confrontation the president “was on our side,” his judgment is overdrawn. The army budget remained under attack. As a salve to MacArthur, Roosevelt directed the White House budget director to make certain the army received funds from the Public Works Administration. A reprise of the model that MacArthur had used in adopting the CCC program, the PWA funding was intended to meet immediate army needs. The PWA was the brainchild of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. But the disbursement of PWA money was in the hands of Ickes, a Chicago Republican in the Teddy Roosevelt mold: He was a deeply committed progressive and critic of corporate corruption. Not only was Ickes no friend of the military, but he also despised MacArthur.

Tasked by Roosevelt to make certain the army received its share of PWA funds, Ickes took great joy in promising financing for army projects and then, at the last minute, changing his mind. Ickes took a kind of twisted pride in his ability to show the former war hero his own power. He would call MacArthur into his office to deliver the bad news and then shared MacArthur’s reaction with his staff afterward: “It gave me a great kick to have him [MacArthur] in and break the news to him.” It was almost as if Ickes thought he was cutting funding for MacArthur, instead of for the army. In one notorious incident, Ickes promised PWA funding to MacArthur in exchange for MacArthur’s promise to close a number of “little old peanut Army posts” (as Ickes described them) around the country. MacArthur felt used, but Ickes controlled a budget that would allocate some $300 million to the army for construction projects,
so the army chief swallowed the insults. Eventually, Roosevelt directed the White House budget director to intervene with Ickes to make sure the army got its money. Even so, Ickes (described by a colleague as having “the mind of a commissar and the soul of a meataxe”) was among those few in the Roosevelt administration to whom MacArthur gave a wide berth, recognizing that officials like Ickes were less susceptible to reason than others.

Although MacArthur was loath to confront New Dealers like Ickes in person, he continued to walk the same fine line that he had walked since Roosevelt’s inauguration. He never spoke out in public against Roosevelt’s budget but continued to issue warnings that the American military was woefully underfunded. His was a delicate dance, though it suited Roosevelt: MacArthur was a hero of the Great War and a conservative face for the New Deal in an era of economic uncertainty—“the conscience of the American people”—and as long as he remained chief of staff, Roosevelt could point to him as a symbol of the administration’s commitment to national security. And Roosevelt realized, even if MacArthur didn’t, that his chief of staff’s complaints about army funding actually buttressed administration claims that it was getting the federal budget under control. So, while MacArthur pointedly continued to speak out about the lack of American military preparedness, appearing before civic groups and veterans’ organizations, Roosevelt just as pointedly refused to rein him in. And at the end of the summer of 1933, when rumors again circulated that Roosevelt was seeking MacArthur’s relief, the president wordlessly extended the chief’s term into the next year, signaling that he intended to keep him as the army’s senior officer until MacArthur had completed his four years as chief of staff. In all of this, MacArthur was a willing participant, allowing his ambition to override his political views. So while Roosevelt was “taming” MacArthur, he had a lot of help. As events in the months ahead would show, MacArthur was also taming himself.

L
ike his father, Douglas MacArthur was an admired soldier and a tough battlefield commander. And like his father, he was his own worst enemy. Both men had a puzzling habit of offending powerful figures who might be counted as potential allies. This had happened
with Arthur MacArthur in the Philippines, in the first years of the century, when he faced off against William Howard Taft, the rotund Ohio lawyer (and future president) appointed by William McKinley to serve as the archipelago’s governor-general. Taft was unpopular with American soldiers, who resented his grating habit of describing the Filipinos as “my little brown brothers.” MacArthur’s soldiers, emerging from a bloody insurrection, also found this patronizing attitude hard to swallow: “He may be a brother of William Howard Taft,” they chanted, “but he ain’t no brother of mine.” But Taft’s unpopularity offered no benefit to Arthur MacArthur, who lost his tussle with the Ohioan for control of Philippine policy, which Taft insisted remain in civilian hands. The battle with Taft was bad enough, but in the process, MacArthur offended nearly every political figure in Washington and, as a result, many of his senior military colleagues. By the time he was relieved in July 1901, few of them came to his defense. Embittered by the experience, he spent the rest of his career in command of army posts in the Pacific Northwest, waiting for orders naming him army chief of staff. The orders never came. In his son’s eyes, Arthur’s acerbic personality was transformed into calm patience. He was a man, as Douglas later wrote, “of great equanimity and modesty of character, rarely aroused, placid, congenial.” In fact, he was anything but. And neither was his son.