Douglas MacArthur Read online

  On returning to Bangkok they became virtual pet visitors of the king, especially Pinky, who with her usual combination of charm and audacity could be heard saying to the all-powerful monarch, “Oh! Your Majesty, you’re a darling!” and “Oh! I should like to see you on your throne!”—which he agreed to do, while she stood before him doing a series of mock bows, all to the horror of his courtiers. At one point she even took the king’s arm as they walked through the palace, an unheard-of liberty, but to Pinky as natural as anything in the world.22

  For Douglas, the highlight of the Bangkok visit was a ceremonial banquet during which the electric lights suddenly went out, plunging the entire court in darkness. “I had noticed a fuse box near where I was seated,” he later recalled, “and promptly replaced the burned-out fuse.” A grateful king offered to present the young lieutenant with a medal there and then. “Happily, I had the common sense to decline”—the first and last time Douglas MacArthur ever refused a decoration.23

  From Bangkok the MacArthurs set out for Saigon, capital of French Indochina and cockpit of a future American land war; and then to Canton, which was their introduction to the tragic reality of China.

  Humiliated by a series of treaties imposed on the imperial government by Europeans, crushed and broken by the defeat of the recent Boxer Rebellion, what was once the most sophisticated civilization in the world was now a shambling, moribund empire in the process of being pulled apart by stronger, more ruthless hands, including Japan, and teetering on national disaster. The Emperor’s Mandate of Heaven that had ruled China for three thousand years had only five years left of life before it collapsed. Revolution and chaos would soon sweep the entire country. Eventually it would engulf the rest of Asia. Yet walking the streets of Shanghai with its large modern European buildings and Western-style shops and conveniences, and then gazing on the imperial capital of Peking with its elaborate fortifications and magnificent Forbidden Palace, not even a prescient observer like Arthur MacArthur could guess that the coming Chinese revolution would shake every nation involved in the continent, including the United States, and ultimately trigger a war that would propel his own son into the front lines.

  But earthshaking news of a different kind was waiting for them when they returned to Japan. A great earthquake had hit San Francisco on April 18, making the MacArthurs anxious for news about Douglas’s sister-in-law Mary and her son Arthur IV (Commander Arthur MacArthur had been at sea when the quake happened).24 The mother and son were safe, but when the general and his wife returned to San Francisco on August 2, they came back to a shattered city. He would soon set aside his report on the Asian tour and plunge headlong into coordinating the army’s effort to help rebuild.

  But he had reasons to be satisfied. His Asian tour had been a huge personal and professional success. He was barely back a month before he received news that he had been promoted to lieutenant general, the army’s highest rank, with a raise in salary from $7,500 to $11,000 a year (roughly $250,000 today). He had two and a half years to go before retirement, and he had every reason to assume that those years would be rounded out by appointment to the army’s highest post, that of chief of staff.

  Still, there were aspects to his Asian trip that had disquieted him. As he sat in his office in San Francisco, working on the report for the War Department that he would never finish, he saw looming before him and before America what he termed “the problem of the Pacific.” He had witnessed firsthand the rise of Japan to great-power status, an advance that the Roosevelt administration had welcomed as a counterweight to Russia. But MacArthur realized that Japan’s rise posed a potential threat not only to the stability of the region but to the survival of Western colonial empires, which, it seemed, were inclined to underestimate the challenge that Japan represented.25

  The other country threatened by Japan’s rise, he believed, was the Philippines. Those islands were still very much on his mind. After his tour of India, the Dutch East Indies, and Malaya, as well as Burma and the Chinese ports under European treaty, he had to concede “the general good administration apparent in certain colonial territories” but he went on to say that “self-supporting, germinal ideas, have not been introduced into any sphere of influence in the East, excepting in the Philippines,” especially the idea of self-governing independence.

  Then he pulled out his own crystal ball and predicted that this failure to expand Western-style opportunities for the Asian masses would fatally weaken “these ostentatious colonial governments…in the final struggle with the Orient,” including possibly Japan. This would leave the United States as the one remaining Western power of significance, with the Philippines as its vital outpost and its closest Asian ally.

  His one wish now was that the Philippines would continue as the living embodiment of the idea that “the imperishable ideas upon which free institutions are based,” life, liberty, the rule of law, and the pursuit of happiness, can succeed with nonwhite populations in Asia. His own dream was that America would be both inspiration and protector of that precious ideal.

  Both were audacious hopes. Certainly as a forecast of the rise of Japan signaling the twilight of Europe’s colonial empires, General MacArthur was breathtakingly prescient. So was his prediction that America would be the great benefactor, but also beneficiary, of the new Asia that took their place. This in fact would be the great MacArthur family compact, embracing both father and son. Together they would support the proposition that the Philippines would light the lamp of America’s Pacific destiny: not as a seaborne empire, like Great Britain’s, or even a commercial power as Albert Beveridge and others hoped, but as the carrier of the ideal of human liberty to Asia.

  This was why Arthur MacArthur was able to assert that the American occupation of the Philippines was the most important “event recorded in the annals of mankind since the discovery of this continent,” meaning America itself, and why he believed that the essential mission for America was to strengthen the defenses of the Philippines before the coming storm, “in order to prevent its strategic position from becoming a liability rather than an asset to the United States.”26

  It would be left to his son to carry out the mission that the father outlined to his superiors in Washington three decades earlier.

  As for Lieutenant Douglas MacArthur, the tour had certainly been an eye-opening experience. “The true historic significance and the sense of destiny that these lands of the western Pacific and Indian Ocean now assumed became part of me,” he would write.

  “Here lived almost half the population of the world, and probably more than half of the raw products to sustain future generations. Here was western civilization’s last earth frontier. 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”—most particularly the Philippines. His father would be the first to wholeheartedly agree—and the first to reproach him if he ever let the mission down.27

  —

  When he returned to the United States that August, Douglas MacArthur was twenty-six years old and a rising star. He was West Point’s most stellar graduate and the son of the army’s most prominent general. He had seen things, and met people, that most officers in the U.S. Army barely dreamed of. A vigorous life and a promising career stretched out before him. His assignment that autumn to the elite engineering school at the Washington Barracks (now Fort McNair) clearly confirmed that. So did appointment in December as aide-de-camp to President Theodore Roosevelt himself.

  Still, the mundane duties of an engineering classroom and standing at attention at social functions and shuffling papers, even if they were for the president of the United States, must have been a letdown after what he had seen and done in Asia. For the first and only time in his life, Douglas MacArthur became a slouch—and his efficiency reports showed it.

  “I am sorry to report that during this time Lieutenant MacArthur seemed to take but little interest in his course at the school,” read one evaluation
written by the engineering school’s commandant. “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 showed him capable of.”28

  Teddy Roosevelt certainly enjoyed his conversations with the young lieutenant and “was greatly interested in my views on the Far East and talked with me long and often,” MacArthur later recalled.29 But it was the efficiency reports that mattered, and they got worse when he was dispatched on “special duty” to Milwaukee in August 1907 to work on plans to refurbish several harbors on Lake Michigan. On the one hand, returning to Milwaukee also meant being reunited with his family (his father was serving out his last two years there on detached duty and had rented a large house at 575 Marshall Street).

  On the other, his dissatisfaction with what seemed to him tedious duties that wasted his talents led to a direct conflict with his commanding officer, Major William V. Judson, and to reports like this:

  “[Lieutenant MacArthur] exhibited less interest in and put in less time upon the drafting room, the plans and specifications for work and the works themselves than seemed consistent with my instructions…he was absent from the office during office hours more than I thought proper.” When Judson tried to give him a different assignment he thought the lieutenant might profit from, MacArthur “remonstrated and argued verbally at length against assignment to this duty, which would take him away from Milwaukee for a considerable portion of the time,” which meant away from his mother.30

  Judson’s efficiency report concluded, “Lieutenant MacArthur, while on duty under my immediate orders, did not conduct himself in a way to meet commendation….his duties were not performed in a satisfactory manner.” When MacArthur learned of the damning document, the result was an unholy row. He was already furious that he had been turned down for a teaching appointment at West Point; he also knew the Judson report would be a permanent part of his record. He fired off an angry letter to the brigadier chief of engineers, protesting “the ineradicable blemish Major Judson has seen fit to place on my military record” and trying to justify his frequent absences on the grounds that there didn’t seem to be a lot to do and he wouldn’t be missed.

  What he got back was a stern rebuke from the brigadier, who reminded him that an officer’s job was to obey orders and that MacArthur’s special pleading was “itself justification of Major Judson’s statement, in view of Mr. MacArthur’s evident inclination to avoid work.”31 This led to a stormy family scene, with Pinky urging her son to think about resigning. She even sent a letter to his father’s railroad baron friend E. H. Harriman, wondering if he might have some suitable position for her twenty-nine-year-old son.

  When Douglas learned of her scheme, he was even more furious. He told Harriman’s talent scout he had absolutely no plans to get out of the army; if he did, it certainly wouldn’t be in the railroad. But the fact was he was bored. He couldn’t help it if he came across like a spoiled brat; he was waiting for his next big career break, and it wasn’t coming.

  So like lots of bored young men, he fell in love.

  Her name was Fanniebelle Stuart. She was from Milwaukee, and for the first time Douglas MacArthur thought seriously about getting married.32

  What Miss Stuart thought we do not know; none of her letters survive. But what does survive is a series of romantic poems that Douglas composed for her, the earliest a twenty-six-page epic in rhyming couplets that tells us much more about Douglas’s view on war, his profession, and his relationship with his father than it does about young love.

  Although it starts conventionally enough with references to “songs of the birds and the hum of the bees,” it soon shifts to a tragic narrative of a young soldier leaving his wife, Fan, to go to war. He goes “for home, and for children, for freedom, for bread

  For the house of our God—for the graves of our dead”

  And she responds dutifully like a true Spartan wife:

  “I grudge you not, Douglas—die rather than yield,

  And, like the old heroes, come home on your shield.”

  And so he goes—but soon returns gravely wounded after a battle that clearly takes place in the Civil War, and so after a long convalescence at home, he returns to the fight to find the hero’s ultimate reward as Douglas merges into his father’s image on Missionary Ridge:

  Our cavalry bore themselves splendidly—far

  In front of his line galloped Colonel MacAr;

  Erect in his stirrups, his sword flashing high,

  and the look of a patriot kindling his eye…

  “Remember Wisconsin! Remember your wives!

  And on to your duty, boys!—on—with your lives!”

  He turned, and he paused, as he uttered the call

  Then reeled in his seat, and fell—pierced by a ball.

  The stanza ends with the hero Douglas having but one final wish: “to look on his wife.”33

  But his true wish was clearly for a chance to lead troops gallantly in battle like his father had, and to be the great hero.

  That opportunity wasn’t forthcoming, however, and so after a few more months of passionate love letters and poems, when Fanniebelle moved to New York City—“Fair Gotham girl with life awhirl of dance and fancy free; Tis thee I love All things above. Why canst thou not love me?”—the romance died of its own accord.

  Love is at best a tragic joke

  Begun in flames it ends in smoke.

  But even as he was writing his last letter to her, wishing her “good luck and good luck,” a friend of his father’s had come to his rescue.

  Major General J. Franklin Bell, the chief of staff, arranged for the wayward lieutenant to get a posting to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to train a company of new volunteers. Kansas looked bleak after Milwaukee, let alone Peking and Tokyo. The company, K Company, was the last on the list of twenty-six companies getting training at the post.

  But this was what Lieutenant Douglas MacArthur had been waiting for: leading men, if not exactly into battle, at least into the rigors of a soldier’s life, marching twenty-five miles a day, building pontoon bridges at record speed, learning marksmanship, horsemanship, and demolition. He fell in love with command at once. “I couldn’t have been happier,” he wrote, “if they had made me a general.” He wrote a field manual on demolition, took over as the post’s quartermaster, commissary officer, engineer officer, and disbursing officer, and managed the baseball team.34 He turned his efficiency reports around. “A most excellent and efficient officer,” the next one read. One day on the parade ground, he heard a veteran sergeant major tell his men, “Boys, there goes a soldier.” It was a tribute that, MacArthur remembered almost sixty years later, “I prize more than any other.”35

  Others remembered him too. One was a Lieutenant Robert Eichelberger, who recalled seeing him in front of a drugstore one evening, “standing a bit aloof from the rest of us and looking off in the distance” with an expression that Eichelberger could only describe as Napoleonic. Another lieutenant at Leavenworth who regarded him with awe was Walter Krueger—thirty years later, the commander of MacArthur’s Sixth Army. One lieutenant who didn’t was a hard-faced, gravelly graduate from Virginia Military Institute named George Catlett Marshall. Their lack of love for each other would reach new heights during the Second World War, while both Krueger and Eichelberger would command armies for MacArthur in New Guinea and the Philippines.36

  These were good days for MacArthur for another reason. In February 1911 his promotion came through to captain. He was finally going places in his career after eight years of struggle; he had the respect of the men serving under him and the officers serving with him.

  Most who served with MacArthur at Leavenworth remembered him as a gregarious companion who drank little but loved long sessions at the poker table wreathed in cigar smoke. They remembered stag parties with MacArthur, Eichelberger, and the other officers draped around the piano while someone banged on the jan
gling keys and all sang one of the popular songs of the day, “Old Soldiers Never Die.”

  * * *

  * His father had been King Mongkut, made famous by the book Anna and the King of Siam and the musical The King and I.

  CHAPTER 5

  COUNTDOWN TO WAR

  Every head swiveled as Arthur MacArthur entered the room.

  It was September 5, 1912, a warm Thursday. Across the Atlantic in Vienna, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was meeting with his father, Emperor Franz Josef, to decide what to do about troublesome Serbian nationalists in the Austrian province of Bosnia. Across the Pacific in Tokyo, courtiers and officials were preparing the ceremonial funeral for Emperor Mutsuhito, who had died in July. In a few days the proclamation would come of his successor, Emperor Taisho, and the next Crown Prince, Taisho’s eleven-year-old son, Hirohito.

  But here in Milwaukee the sixty-four remaining veterans of the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin were holding their fiftieth reunion. All day the Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce had held celebrations, a parade, and now there was a banquet at Wolcott Hall in their honor—and to honor their famous commander, who was to be the guest speaker.

  The Arthur MacArthur who climbed the rostrum with difficulty was a changed man from the tough, confident Teddy Roosevelt look-alike who had triumphantly completed his tour of Asia, let alone the curly-haired eighteen-year-old who had charged up Missionary Ridge almost sixty years before. That summer his kidneys had begun to give out and high blood pressure to set in. His stomach gave him constant problems with hyperacidity (a problem that would also plague his son in later years), and walking had become a growing challenge. But even worse, since he had returned from Asia his professional life had been one of constant disappointment.1