Eisenhower: The White House Years

by Jim Newton

  Of Eisenhower’s military mentors, none would occupy such a complicated place in his life as General Douglas MacArthur. Like Conner, MacArthur was incisive. Like Patton, he was theatrical. But MacArthur’s explosions of brilliance, his undeniable daring, reinforced a profound arrogance that made him not just arresting but dangerous. Conner was the mentor who enlightened young Eisenhower; MacArthur was the one who warned him, by example.

  MacArthur was a gigantic personality, a renowned alumnus of West Point, overbearing, and commandingly self-assured. He had a stunning memory—Ike recalled that MacArthur could look over a speech or memorandum and immediately recite large portions of it from memory. MacArthur often spoke of himself in the third person and insisted that his headquarters, wherever they were located, bear his name.

  MacArthur displayed his ego early in Ike’s time with him. The occasion was an infamous confrontation, the Bonus March of 1932. With the Depression deepening and broadening that year, veterans of World War I demanded bonuses that had been promised them for their service. The terms of that bonus, approved by Congress in 1924 over the veto of President Coolidge, allowed payments to veterans of the war but deferred the full bonus until 1945, a condition that seemed punitive to those veterans cast out of work by the Depression. In protest, they descended on Washington that May, their gathering mass a source of fear and threat to the Hoover administration, which moved ambivalently: Hoover tried to protect the rights of the marchers and even secretly slipped them supplies, but he also resisted their entreaties for aid. As thousands of bedraggled men set up tents in and just outside of Washington, clashes with police produced a few casualties and, among those inclined to imagine anarchy, raised the specter of an ominous challenge to order.

  After the Washington, D.C., police department forcibly evicted the protesters from an abandoned set of Washington office buildings, Hoover ordered the Army to push the marchers away from the Capitol but to refrain from following them across the river, where more were camped. Eisenhower urged MacArthur to delegate the matter—it was, Ike thought, unseemly for the chief of staff to move on ragged marchers. MacArthur ignored him. Instead, he donned his uniform and ordered Eisenhower to do so as well—Ike had to scurry home to get it.

  The troops under MacArthur’s command pushed the marchers out of the buildings and toward the bridges leading away from Washington. As they approached, an order arrived from the White House reiterating Hoover’s message of restraint: “Don’t allow any of our troops to go across the Anacostia bridge.” Eisenhower hailed MacArthur, but the general refused to listen. “I don’t want to hear them, and I don’t want to see them,” he said of the orders the messenger carried. “Get him away.” Instead, MacArthur ordered his troops to follow the veterans across the bridge, and on the other side the encampments burst into flame. “It was a very pitiful scene,” Eisenhower recalled, “these ragged, discouraged people burning their own little things.” Eisenhower, having advised MacArthur not to lead the troops himself and having been ignored, now advised MacArthur to decline comment. He was ignored again. MacArthur met with the press and sealed his place as the symbol of the attack on the marchers.

  “That mob was a very angry looking one,” he told reporters that evening. “It was animated by the essence of revolution.” The elimination of the marchers was necessary, he added, because “they came to the conclusion that they were about to take over in some way either direct control or indirect control of the Government.” That was absurd: twenty thousand ratty veterans, even with a few radicals among them, stood no chance of overthrowing the U.S. government, even in 1932. But it accurately captured MacArthur’s megalomania and his paranoia. MacArthur saw radicals in those shabby shanties on either side of the Potomac River. Eisenhower saw desperate men, veterans who had served their country and wanted promised compensation for it. In New York, the ambitious young governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, listened to the radio reports of the rout and came to his own conclusion: Hoover, FDR decided, had just lost the 1932 election.

  Many of the nation’s newspapers defended MacArthur, not just in big cities, but in small towns across the country. The Indianapolis News predicted it would instill “a new pride in [the] federal structure,” and the Santa Cruz Sentinel faulted authorities only for waiting so long. Ike was not deceived, and press coverage gradually soured as details of the rout were revealed. Eisenhower knew better than to break publicly with his commanding officer, but he had seen what he had seen.

  In 1935, as MacArthur concluded his tenure as chief of staff, Eisenhower looked forward to leaving the Pentagon and receiving a command of his own, a return to leading troops rather than aiding a great man. MacArthur, however, was invited to command the construction of the army for the newly independent Philippines. He accepted and insisted that Ike join him. Twenty years after requesting the Philippines upon graduation from West Point, Eisenhower now received the belated assignment. Reluctantly, he went.

  By the time Eisenhower shipped out to the Philippines in the final days of 1935, he recognized that he was entering the higher ranks of history. He began to keep a journal, and though his attention to it was sporadic, it marks the first evidence of an emerging self-awareness, of a sense that his was a story worth recording. It also supplies a convincing counterargument to the later contention that Eisenhower was clumsy with words. It is a direct and graceful document, not exactly introspective, but self-critical and occasionally deep. It records his admiration for MacArthur’s ability alongside his increasing skepticism of MacArthur’s integrity. In May 1936, Ike remarked on a decision made “quite suddenly” with unexpected effects on their mission. A few months later, Eisenhower noted MacArthur’s vacillation over the acceptance of a Filipino military title and observed the general’s reaction to the offer: “He is tickled pink—and feels he’s made a lot of ‘face’ locally.” By the fall of 1936, bemusement had grown to outright critique, as Eisenhower complained of a “bawling out” over a difference of opinion with MacArthur regarding the coming presidential election, in which MacArthur had become convinced that Alf Landon was a shoo-in to defeat Roosevelt. When Ike and a colleague disagreed, MacArthur responded with an “almost hysterical condemnation of our stupidity.” Eisenhower’s diary entry for that day concludes with the universal lament of the subordinate in the service of an unworthy boss: “Oh hell.”

  The relationship between Eisenhower and MacArthur stretched over decades and defies glib synopsis. Their correspondence is a study in guardedness, with Eisenhower frequently writing to flatter his former boss and complain that reporters had fabricated enmity between them. Invariably, MacArthur shrugged off the suggestions of discord or jealousy as his former subordinate claimed an ever more prominent role in the life of the nation. No matter how much Ike disavowed those reports, however, they captured his essential view of MacArthur: he was, in Eisenhower’s estimation, startlingly vain and alarmingly contemptuous of command. Eisenhower similarly was flabbergasted at MacArthur’s willingness to casually blame his subordinates for his own mistakes. “He had an obsession that a high commander must protect his public image at all costs and must never admit his wrongs,” Eisenhower said in 1967.

  The Eisenhowers weathered the Philippine years together. John spent much of his youth in the islands. He was a successful Boy Scout and shared the unair-conditioned hotel suite with his parents, absorbing military culture and eventually finding his steps within his father’s. Thus, by the time Washington summoned Ike home, he was a proud father and a seasoned senior officer. It was with his son that Eisenhower shared his most considered thoughts on leadership, those acquired from the likes of Conner, Patton, and MacArthur.

  “The best leadership and the finest relationship with associates, superior[s] and subordinates does not demand theatrics,” he wrote to John decades later, and one hears “MacArthur,” though his name is unmentioned. “On the contrary, honest straight-forward bearing of responsibility both for self and for subordinate, complete self-control in spite of any
circumstances that put a strain on moral or physical stamina, and a human or even humorous relationship with men—are the qualities on which an enduring value and reputation are founded.”

  MacArthur processed their time together somewhat differently. Asked years later what he thought of Ike, MacArthur replied: “Best clerk I ever had.”

  It was December 1941. Ike and Mamie had just returned from a few days’ vacation in a cabin near Brownsville, Texas. They had enjoyed highballs, dancing, and Mexican food at a club in Matamoros, just across the border. They returned to the base in San Antonio relaxed and looking ahead to the holidays. They thus were home when, on a quiet Sunday that no American of that generation would ever forget, men and women, boys and girls, reeled at the news from Pearl Harbor.

  General George Catlett Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, summoned to Washington officers who “will solve their own problems and not bring them all to me.” One of those to whom he turned was Mark Wayne Clark. Marshall asked Clark for the names of ten capable brigadier generals who might be able to serve as chief of war plans. Clark replied with the name of an old West Point schoolmate a few years older than himself: “I’ll give you one name and nine dittos: Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

  Ike got the call on December 12, placed to him by Walter Bedell Smith, who, like Clark, was to become a central player in Eisenhower’s war and beyond. “The Chief,” Smith told Eisenhower, “said you get on a plane and get up here.” Ike alerted his troops and hustled around the base preparing to leave. He returned home that evening. To settle his nerves, he cooked. He made vegetable soup.

  Eisenhower arrived in Washington two days later. His brother Milton met his train at Union Station and offered to take him home to freshen up. Ike asked instead for a ride to the War Department, then housed in Washington’s Munitions Building. He entered, was directed to Marshall’s office, and was quickly ushered inside. (Mamie followed a few weeks after that, stopping to visit John at West Point and then arriving in Washington to supervise the family’s hunt for a place to live.)

  Ike and Marshall had met twice before. After graduating first in his class from the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Eisenhower was offered the chance to help compose a guide to World War I battle monuments, a post without much inherent appeal but for one thing: it was supervised by the revered general John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, America’s most worshipped military leader of his generation. Ike accepted the job, which also offered him and Mamie their first tour of Europe, a luxurious and romantic period in their marriage and in young John’s life. In those treasured months of 1928 and 1929, Ike and John would rise together, John bathing while his father shaved; Ike took his boy to school. Mamie studied French. They traveled to Italy, sunbathed at the beach, and played cards with friends while John napped in the afternoon. They were, Mamie wrote to her parents, “spoiled rotten.”

  Late in his association with Pershing, Ike was asked to review a section of the old general’s war diaries in preparation for their publication as a memoir. Eisenhower immersed himself in the notes and reported back to Pershing that he believed sections dealing with the war’s crucial battles would be best written narratively, departing from the diary form, which he felt distracted from the story. Pershing seemed to appreciate the suggestion but said he wanted to confer with a trusted aide, Colonel George Marshall. Marshall, the same colonel who had helped Eisenhower land his spot on Conner’s staff, read the passages and preferred Pershing’s original approach. Eisenhower was so surprised that he nursed the insult for years and insisted that friends often told him they found Pershing’s version hard to decipher. (Others disagreed. Pershing’s memoir won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.) What mattered most about the literary squabble between Eisenhower and Pershing, though, was that even in resolving it in Pershing’s favor, Marshall recognized the talent behind Ike’s work. As with Conner years earlier, a brilliant Army leader had just spotted the flash of excellence in a promising officer.

  Their other encounter was passing, but Ike remembered it well. Eisenhower had just returned from the Philippines, and the two were observing military exercises on the West Coast. Remarking on Ike’s recent posting, Marshall remembered the ease of life in the Philippines, where he too had served and where servants were supplied to senior officers in abundance. Now that he was back in the United States, Marshall asked Ike, was he relearning to tie his shoes? Eisenhower’s reply: “Yes, sir.”

  So while it was not a complete stranger who greeted Eisenhower that morning in 1941, nor was it someone he knew well, other than by reputation. And yet what a reputation it was. George Marshall was terse, taciturn, exquisitely restrained. He was absentminded, often confusing the names of subordinates, but deeply dignified. Rarely did Marshall ever issue an order. Instead, he suggested and selected. His work ethic was legendary, and his disapproval was feared. Once, when an officer apologized for having to delay his departure to Europe because his wife was out of town and their home needed to be packed, Marshall replied: “I’m sorry, too, but you will be retired tomorrow.”

  Marshall and Eisenhower had grown up differently, Ike in the modesty of his Kansas home, Marshall in the boom-and-bust household supplied by his father, a prosperous coal executive who suffered in the Depression of the 1890s. If anything, young Marshall had been an even more indifferent student than young Ike. Marshall eventually graduated respectably from Virginia Military Institute and secured his commission by passing the examination that West Point alumni were allowed to skip. From that point on, Marshall’s military career bore some resemblance to that of his new aide. Both served in the Philippines; both were graduates of the staff college at Leavenworth (Marshall, too, graduated “One”); both had served under Pershing, though Marshall in wartime and Eisenhower during the peace between the wars; both were well acquainted with Conner, whom they greatly admired. Both were handsome men, Eisenhower an inch or two taller; both possessed striking blue eyes, Marshall’s a shade deeper.

  When Eisenhower entered Marshall’s inner office that morning, the chief of staff barely looked up. Sitting behind his desk, he briefed Eisenhower on the crisis facing the Philippines. MacArthur had inexplicably allowed American planes to sit on their runways in the hours after Pearl Harbor, and as a result Japanese bombing had destroyed much of America’s airpower in the region. An invasion seemed imminent, and the United States was frightfully overmatched. Marshall relayed those facts squarely, speaking for about twenty minutes, then suddenly stopped. “What,” he asked his new aide, “should be our general line of action?”

  Surprised to be asked such a direct question of such immense consequence on such short notice, Eisenhower smartly declined a glib answer. “Give me a couple of hours,” he requested. “Of course,” Marshall replied.

  Eisenhower went to his office and worked. “I have never pondered in my life like I did then,” he said later. He returned to Marshall that afternoon. The defense of the Philippines might prove impossible, Eisenhower acknowledged. If the Japanese were determined to invade, reinforcements might well not arrive in time. The garrison on the islands might be overrun, lives and prestige lost. And yet America must fight anyway, Ike insisted. If not, the world—and especially America’s allies in the region—would lose heart and confidence. “They may excuse failure,” he told Marshall, “but they will not excuse abandonment.” It was “seemingly hopeless [but] we have got to do our best.”

  “I agree with you,” Marshall replied. “Do whatever you can.”

  Eisenhower had grasped the larger strategic context of the question. It was not merely about arms and supplies but also about nations and confidence, the imperatives of leadership, the limitations of democratic governments in conflict with authoritarian regimes. He passed his most crucial test.

  Ike knew he was privileged to land a spot on Marshall’s senior staff, but he still was, in one sense, anxious. Here was his second war, and at its outset it appeared he would fight again from an office, not the field. Conner co
unseled patience and urged Ike to trust Marshall. “Here’s the man who can fight the war because he understands it,” Conner once told Ike. So Ike settled in and went about raising an army.

  Eisenhower was well suited to the task—comfortable with detail, proficient in training, committed to planning but open to improvisation. He had proved himself during a national training exercise in 1941, when Clark had been just one of those impressed by his work. The columnist Drew Pearson remarked on Ike’s “steel trap mind” at the conclusion of those exercises, and Eisenhower’s performance was recognized for his “marked ability and conspicuous success.” Now Eisenhower tended to preparations on a national scale.

  Men who worked for Marshall were expected to devote their lives to the task, and Eisenhower did. On March 10, 1942, Ike received word that his father had died. He recorded the news with two sentences in his diary: “Father died this morning. Nothing I can do but send a wire.” The next day, he allowed himself a few more moments to grieve, confessing, “I loved my Dad,” and adding, “I think my Mother the finest person I’ve ever known.” He quit early that night, leaving at 7:30, and the following day, while his father was buried, Ike closed the door to his office and spent half an hour reflecting. “He was a just man, well liked, well educated, a thinker. He was undemonstrative, quiet, modest, and of exemplary habits—he never used alcohol or tobacco.” Ike admired his father’s reputation in his community and appreciated the lessons of his youth. “My only regret,” he concluded, “is that it was always so difficult to let him know the great depth of my affection for him.” With that, Ike returned to work.