In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  MacArthur learned to ride and shoot before he could read or write. He and his older brother, barefoot and naked to the waist, mounted on spotted Navajo ponies, would ride off into open country to shoot rabbits. He became an expert horseman and a crack shot.

  The sounds as well as the scenes of his life in isolated frontier forts were different from those with which boys his age growing up on the farms of the Middle West or the cities of the East were familiar. The hours of MacArthur’s waking day were punctuated by hoofbeats, gunfire, and the barking of drill sergeants, while sleep at night was sometimes disturbed by the drumbeat of tom-toms. The commands that accompany such military ceremonies, as the inspection of uniforms and equipment, or the furling and unfurling of banners, became a part of his basic vocabulary. Bugle calls—taps and reveille, retreat and advance—signaled orders and ordered time.

  Young though he was, MacArthur was where some of the great dramas of America’s West were being played out. Before the MacArthurs, who had moved from Fort Selden to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, left Leavenworth in 1889, soldiers of their unit were involved in one of the rites of passage in the growth of the United States. They stood guard to preserve order while, at a prearranged signal of gunshots, 100,000 Americans rushed to stake claims to nearly 2 million acres of formerly Indian lands in Oklahoma, leading the federal census superintendent to report the following year that the frontier was now closed: the era of land rushes had come to an end.

  AS HIS FAMILY LEFT LEAVENWORTH in 1889, Douglas’s father, Arthur MacArthur—who bore a striking physical resemblance to TR—began to come into his own professionally. In 1890 he finally was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for one of the great acts of courage in the Civil War: twenty-seven years earlier, as an eighteen-year-old at the battle of Missionary Ridge, he had seized the standard of his home state of Wisconsin and led what seemed a suicidal charge uphill against 45,000 Confederate troops entrenched on the heights above him, driving them from the ridge.

  Now, decades later, he finally was achieving recognition and also moving upward, first in the peacetime army, and then in wartime. When the United States fought Spain in 1898, he had the luck to be sent to the Philippines. By 1900 he was the general in overall command of American forces in the Philippines and was governor of the islands as well—until he clashed with William Howard Taft, who had been made civilian administrator of the islands by President McKinley, in a showdown that foreshadowed that of another General MacArthur and a civilian chief executive a half-century later. Arthur MacArthur was relieved of his Philippine command but promoted to lieutenant general, the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Army—and remained the adored lifetime idol of his son, Douglas, as much as TR was of his young cousin Franklin.

  EXTERNALLY, THE CIRCUMSTANCES of Douglas MacArthur’s childhood were unlike those of Franklin Roosevelt’s, but the inner lives of the two flowed in similar channels. Roosevelt modeled himself on his famous cousin; MacArthur, on his famous father. Both young men were dominated and shaped by mothers who burned with ambition for them, though the ambitions differed: Mary MacArthur’s aim was for her son to win life’s battles, while Sara Roosevelt’s was for her son to rise above them.

  Like Roosevelt, MacArthur attended a new school for boys founded by an Episcopal clergyman—the West Texas Military Academy (later named the Texas Military Institute)—which was operated by the church. MacArthur was required to supply not only his uniform, napkins, and napkin ring, but also his own Bible, prayer book, and hymnal. Much the same values and faith were instilled in MacArthur at West Texas as were imparted at Groton. But unlike Roosevelt, Harriman, and Acheson, mediocre students all, MacArthur was not only an all-around success at athletics but an outstanding scholar, winning awards, citations, and medals, and described by a teacher as “the most promising student that I have ever had.”

  On graduation Douglas moved with his mother to the MacArthur hometown, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where they lived in the Plankinton House Hotel in the city’s center while he attended courses at West Division High School, was specially tutored, and studied for competitive examinations to enter the U.S. Military Academy. Nauseous with nervousness, as he always was to be in the tense moments in life, but exhorted by his mother to “believe in yourself,” he succeeded brilliantly. “HE WILL GO TO WEST POINT,” headlined the Milwaukee Journal, June 7, 1898, over a story that reported, “Young MacArthur is a remarkably bright, clever and determined boy. His standing was 93⅓ percent against the next man’s 77.9 percent.”

  Accompanied by his mother, MacArthur attended the military academy, graduating first in his class in 1903 with a 98.14 academic record, the highest since Robert E. Lee (98.33) in the class of 1829. A year after graduating, he found himself assigned to the Philippine Islands, where his father had won fame and glory as a general several years before.

  As an army officer in 1905, he was appointed aide-de-camp to his father, and with his father and mother toured Asia: Japan, China, Hong Kong, Siam, Indochina, India, Burma, Ceylon, and Singapore. As Roosevelt, much of whose childhood and youth were spent on the Continent, felt about Europe, MacArthur came to feel about Asia. Much later he was to write that his Asian tour “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.” He had now, therefore, acquired a view of America’s mission that complemented his view of his own: he and his country had a rendezvous with greatness in the East.

  AMIABLE, IF SOMEWHAT LETHARGIC, William Howard Taft, who weighed more than 300 pounds, was not cut out to be a hero. His firmness in facing down MacArthur’s father in the Philippines was out of character. Usually he dealt with troubles by eating more: in times of crisis, his weight could go up to 320. And when TR broke with him, he retired to his Pullman car and cried.

  To his firstborn son, however, he was a hero. Robert Alphonso Taft modeled his career and opinions on his father’s as much as Douglas MacArthur did on his. Taft came from a well-to-do family of lawyers, judges, and politicians, and he set his sights on following his father to the top. His goal in life was to become chief justice of the United States. His views on the sanctity of laws, contracts, and customary rules derived consciously from his father’s.

  He was born September 8, 1889, in sooty Cincinnati, then the principal manufacturing town in Ohio. It was a largely German-American city of 300,000 that had become a magnet for immigrants: nearly two-thirds of the population was of foreign parentage. In the beer taverns of the slums, customers breathed the air of the old country; but the Tafts lived in East End, the fashionable district where native-born Americans resided.

  Both parents emphasized the values of hard work and discipline; and Taft, instructed at times by private tutors, was scholarly by nature. The American occupation of the Philippines affected his life, as it did that of others of his generation; as a ten-year-old in 1900, he followed his father to the East. For years he traveled in Asia and Europe before returning in 1903 to enroll in the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, founded and run by his uncle, and designed, like Groton and West Texas, to teach the virtues of service.

  Taft excelled at studies—he was to graduate at the top of his class from Yale in 1910 and Harvard Law School in 1913—but not at sports. He shied away from the limelight. (When his father was President, a girl asked, “What does your father do?” and Taft replied, “He has a government job.”) On graduating from law school, he was offered a clerkship by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—the most prestigious and exciting job a young attorney could be offered—and turned it down in favor of returning to Cincinnati to set up in practice.

  Six feet tall and unbending, he was also unsmiling and undemonstrative. He did not give himself to intimacy or camaraderie; he was notoriously unwilling to let himself go. Dry and passionless, he nonetheless found himself involved in a romantic triangle as he returned to Cincinnati: h
e wanted to marry a woman his best friend also wanted to marry. She was Martha Bowers, the daughter of one of his father’s oldest friends and colleagues; a pretty, witty, talkative young woman who demonstrated considerable diplomatic skills in dealing with her rival suitors. She resolved matters with a minimum of awkwardness, marrying Taft in October 1914 in a ceremony in which his best friend was the best man.

  Marriage had also been proposed to Martha Bowers by John Foster Dulles, the young international lawyer who, in his law school days, had frequented the Taft household in Washington. It was a glamorous life that Dulles had been able to offer her, and far from the prosaic law practice of a Cincinnati attorney. He was embarking upon an international career not open to American attorneys until the end of the nineteenth century, and invented in part by his grandfather.

  John Watson Foster, Dulles’s maternal grandfather, who had served as U.S. minister to various foreign countries, did not want to return home to the Middle West at the end of his term as secretary of state (1892–93). Instead he stayed on in Washington to represent private interests involved in international transactions: a highly political law practice pioneered by him in Washington and by William Nelson Cromwell of the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell in New York.

  It was at Foster’s home on I Street in Washington that Dulles was born February 25 during the terrible blizzard of 1888 in which 400 people died. His father was a Presbyterian minister in Watertown, in northern New York, just east of Lake Erie. His family was steeped in the Presbyterian ministry, and had destined him for it; but from the first, like his younger brother Allen, who joined the diplomatic service, he was his grandfather Foster’s child. He took time off from Princeton (he was the youngest in his college class) in 1907 to serve as a secretary-clerk at the Second Hague Peace Conference, to which Foster, serving as China’s representative, brought him. In order to live with Foster, he attended law school at George Washington University in Washington, graduating in two years instead of three and achieving the highest grades in the university’s history. Because he had not attended one of the “right” law schools—Harvard or Columbia—he had difficulty finding a job at a New York City law firm, but Foster took a hand in the matter, was in touch with Cromwell, and obtained a position for him with Sullivan and Cromwell.

  Cromwell was a buccaneer thrown up by America’s dynamic plunge into worldwide politically related business at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Retained by French interests who had tried and failed to build a Panama canal, Cromwell helped divert the new U.S.-inspired canal project from Nicaragua to the isthmus, contributing $60,000 to the Republican party in the process, and reaped high rewards for himself and his clients. Dulles, who started work at Sullivan and Cromwell in 1911 at $12.50 a week, was soon roaming the world on behalf of clients.

  Dulles came to the law firm as a person formed by his grandfather—and by another mentor as well. As an undergraduate at Princeton, he had fallen under the influence of the university’s president, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, like Dulles, was the child of generations of Presbyterian clergymen, and, too, had seemed destined for the ministry. After becoming president of Princeton, Wilson, who had been a professor of political science, continued giving lectures. Dulles, who attended them, was impressed. He later recalled that “the major benefit I got from Princeton was participating in Woodrow Wilson’s courses, where I gained my interest in public affairs.”

  GEORGE CATLETT MARSHALL, JR., in his father’s clear-eyed view, was so unlikely to pass a competitive exam to enter West Point that there was no point in trying. So, as members of his family had done for generations, he attended the Virginia Military Institute. His family traced its ancestry to John Marshall, secretary of state, chief justice of the United States, and one of the main architects of American constitutional government.

  A child of the industrializing age, George Marshall was born December 31, 1880, the same year as MacArthur, to a prosperous owner of coalfields and coke ovens in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The town had been a stagecoach stop on the National Road, but by 1880, though its trolleys were still horse-drawn, its streets had been paved and it could boast of gasworks and an electric company. Marshall’s father sold his business and lost the proceeds in a land speculation when the good times of the 1880s gave way to the financial collapses of the 1890s. The lanky boy, fearing rejection and suffering from a sense of his own inadequacies, was now troubled by his unaffectionate, quick-tempered father’s failure as well. He had to learn self-discipline to overcome shyness and launch himself in life.

  After graduating from VMI, he obtained an interview with the President of the United States (for the country was still small enough so that matters were handled in this way) to ask to be allowed to take an examination leading to an army commission. President McKinley said yes, and young George Marshall, passing the exam adequately though not brilliantly, became a second lieutenant, and in 1902 found himself—as so many Americans of his generation did—in the Philippine Islands. The following year he was posted to Fort Reno in the Oklahoma Territory, a relic of the army’s Indian wars, bringing him a taste of the life and surroundings in which Douglas MacArthur had grown up.

  In 1906 Marshall succeeded in winning a posting to the Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. First Lieutenant Douglas MacArthur was on Leavenworth’s permanent staff at the time; although the two men met, they did not become friends. For Marshall, Leavenworth was a first step on the road to the Army War College and high rank. In full command of himself now, Marshall worked hard, and in his first year won promotion to first lieutenant and came in number one in his class. He was on his way.

  THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN of the 1890s, which affected the fortunes of George Marshall’s family, ruined those of young Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg (born March 22, 1884) of Grand Rapids, Michigan. His well-off parents were wiped out in the panic of ’93, and he took all sorts of jobs: carting shoes, operating flower and lemonade stands, selling vegetables, running a stamp-trading business, selling seasickness pills, ushering at a theater, and selling newspapers. Hoping to earn enough money to send himself through college, he took a position as a billing clerk at the Sears Biscuit Company—but lost the job in his passionate admiration for the hero of his generation. “I was an ardent Teddy fan,” as he later recalled; and when TR, campaigning for Vice President in October 1900, stopped in Grand Rapids, Vandenberg, though allowed only twenty minutes for lunch, stayed two hours to see and hear him. Losing his job, he looked for another—and found work at the Grand Rapids Herald. It was the work he was cut out to do. Giving up thoughts of college, he stayed on as a newspaperman, became managing editor of the newspaper, and won himself a name—and a position in Republican politics—with his furious rhetoric.

  OF DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER, an outstanding biographer has written that “his heritage was ordinary, his parents were humble folk, his childhood was typical of thousands of other youngsters growing up around the turn of the century …” and “everything about him appeared to be average.”

  On both sides his family’s distant ancestors were Mennonites of the German Rhineland. In more recent times they had followed their Mennonite sect, the River Brethren, west from the Pennsylvania “Dutch” settlements in Pennsylvania to Abilene, Kansas, where they had found the abundance of farmland that they sought.

  Dwight (“Ike”) was born October 14, 1890, the year that the frontier closed. At the time his family lived in a shack beside the railroad tracks in Denison, Texas. His father, trying to escape from life as a farmer, had opened a store in Abilene and had lost everything in the worst of the agricultural depressions that, like earthquakes or hurricanes, unexpectedly struck the country from time to time. He had come to Texas in search of a new start, but could not find one.

  The year after Ike’s birth, his family trudged back to Abilene, where relatives rallied round. His father, who arrived with net assets of $24, was given a job as mechanic of the Belle Springs Creamery, owned by
the River Brethren and managed by his brother-in-law, at a salary of $50 a month. The family lived in a rented shack, again by the railroad and on the wrong side of the tracks: the south side. Ike and his brothers took turns getting up at 5 a.m. to build a fire in the cookstove.

  In 1898 the family moved to a more spacious home—much needed, for there were a half-dozen brothers—on three acres of land. The house had no running water and no indoor lavatory; four boys had to sleep in one room; and electricity was not installed until seven years later. On the other hand, there was a horse for plow and buggy, two cows for milking, and chickens, ducks, pigs, and rabbits. On the grounds grew fruits—cherries, apples, pears, and grapes—and vegetables. “I have found out in later years,” said Ike in 1952, “that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.”

  Abilene once had been the terminus of the Chisholm Trail, a town of cattlemen, prostitutes, and card sharks; and Wild Bill Hickok, whom MacArthur’s father had known, served at one time as town marshal. But its days of sin and glory were over; the long cattle drives that had ended at Abilene were in decline, and other railheads were taking away its business.

  Now it was a dreary and dusty but hardworking and law-abiding town of about 4,000 people who took life and religion seriously. But Ike, apart from an uncontrollable temper, seems to have been as lighthearted as most children. He distinguished himself in the things that mattered most to schoolboys: fistfighting and athletics. From a middle-aged friend—an illiterate trapper whom Dwight would visit at his camp—he acquired skills in activities he would pursue all his life: hunting, fishing, and playing cards.

  Sports were his passion. He set his heart on going to college so that he could play football and baseball. Though not a gifted student, he worked hard to get the necessary good grades in high school; and he took all sorts of jobs to help pay for a brother’s college expenses and to save for his own. He worked as an iceman, loaded galvanized sheet metal, and became night manager at the creamery. Saving up enough money was a goal that proved elusive, in part because of his losses at card games.