On November 21, 1930, Douglas MacArthur succeeded Charles Summerall as the Army’s chief of staff, and a wave of change swept through the War Department. George Moseley became MacArthur’s deputy chief of staff, and within a year all of the principal general staff officers had been replaced.24 MacArthur had come to the War Department from the Philippines, and his first impression was that the Army’s staff divisions were “entirely too self-contained.”25 To remedy that he established a general council of the general staff and appointed Moseley as president. As MacArthur’s deputy, Moseley presided over the Army general staff and coordinated its functions. And Eisenhower came with him. Fifteen months earlier Ike had been tromping across overgrown battlefields in France, far from the military mainstream. Now he was at the center of the Army’s command structure.
When Moseley’s appointment as deputy chief of staff was announced, Assistant Secretary Payne insisted he wanted Eisenhower to replace him as his principal adviser, and that Ike be promoted immediately to brigadier general should that be required. Moseley explained it was absolutely impossible to catapult Eisenhower from major to brigadier general,c but he noted Payne’s desire on Ike’s efficiency report and then invited Eisenhower to his home to explain what he had done.26
Shortly before MacArthur became chief of staff, Congress passed a joint resolution creating a War Policies Commission “to study and consider amending the Constitution, so that, should there be a war, its burden would fall equally on everyone and it would be profitable for no one.”27 The commission was a response to the growing popular conviction that the United States had been duped into World War I by a consortium of powerful industrialists (“merchants of death”) who profited from American involvement. The commission was chaired by the secretary of war, Patrick J. Hurley, and included five additional cabinet officers, four senators, and four members of the House of Representatives.28 Eisenhower was assigned to work with the commission. He described his duties as “sort of a ‘working’ Secretary but with no official title or authority,” although he became, in effect, the commission’s executive secretary.29
The commission held hearings through May 1931. Eisenhower prepped many of the witnesses before they testified, and prepared the official War Department statement delivered by General MacArthur on May 13. “I worked for 10 days (and nights) getting it ready,” Ike recorded in his diary. “Everything went off splendidly. Gen. MacA. said the paper was ‘masterly’—and it seemed to make a great hit. We summarized it in a press release—and Gen. MacA. is to make a short movie-tone synopsis.”30
Afterward MacArthur sent Ike a letter of commendation, which Mamie had framed.
My dear Major,
I desire to place on official record this special commendation for excellent work of a highly important nature which you have just completed under my personal direction. You not only accepted this assignment willingly—an assignment which involved much hard work—performing it in addition to your regular duties in the office of The Assistant Secretary of War, but you gave me a most acceptable solution within a minimum of time.
This is not the first occasion when you have been called upon to perform a special task of this nature. In each case you have registered successful accomplishment in the highest degree.
I write you this special commendation so that you may fully realize that your outstanding talents and your ability to perform these highly important missions are fully appreciated.
Sincerely yours,
DOUGLAS MACARTHUR,
General,
Chief of Staff.31
The commission rendered its report to President Hoover on March 5, 1932. The final version, which was also written by Eisenhower, recommended a constitutional amendment clarifying Congress’s authority “to prevent profiteering and to stabilize prices in time of war.”32 Pending adoption of such an amendment, Congress should empower a wartime president to stabilize prices, eliminate cost-plus defense contracts, and tax excess profits at the rate of 95 percent.d Public response was overwhelmingly favorable, and the Hoover administration announced its support for the report, although President Hoover personally disapproved of the commission’s work and did nothing to put the recommendations into effect. “It came back from one of his staff,” Eisenhower remembered, “saying the President was far too busy to read such drivel: ‘that the Government is not thinking of a future war and has no intention of doing so.’ ”33 Using the notes he had taken as executive secretary, Eisenhower published an article in the Cavalry Journal detailing the commission’s work.34 The article summarized the testimony given and provided readers with an overview of the Army’s mobilization plans.
Eisenhower was now wearing three hats. He was officially assigned to the office of the assistant secretary but was working directly for Moseley and occasionally for MacArthur. The strain began to show. “Lots of trouble with my insides lately,” Ike wrote in his diary in the spring of 1931. “Have been bothered for 5–6 years with something that seems to border upon dysentery. Doctors have come to the conclusion that it is a result of nervousness, lack of exercise, etc. Am taking some medicine at the moment that for a day or so seemed to be exactly right—but now am apparently no different from usual.”35
A month later he wrote, “Doctors report, after long X-ray exam, that they can find nothing wrong with my insides.”36 Eisenhower continued to be bothered by health problems throughout the 1930s: acute gastroenteritis, chronic colitis, hemorrhoids, mild arthritis, and, worst of all, severe back pain. Orthopedic surgeons at Walter Reed Army Medical Center noted mild lumbar arthritis, but no evidence of herniated disc or leg atrophy. For his back pain, Ike was instructed to sleep on a hard bed, undergo diathermy, massage, hyperextension exercises, and to take salicylates.37 Tension from overwork in a demanding job appears to have been the culprit. Ike worked six days a week, often until eight or nine in the evening, and occasionally on Sunday as well. Payne and Moseley relied on him for every writing task that came their way, and MacArthur had begun to do the same.
At the end of 1931, Eisenhower laid plans for his next assignment. His normal three-year tour in Washington would conclude the next summer and he was long overdue for troop duty. At Mamie’s urging, he requested the chief of infantry to send him back to the 19th Infantry at Fort Sam Houston. “Made up my mind to do so only after a long struggle as I hate the heat,” Ike confided to his diary on December 20. “Family so insistent thought it the best thing to do. Mamie is concerned chiefly with getting a post where servants are good—cheap—plentiful. I’d like a place that offers some interesting outdoor work. Dad, Mother [John and Elivera Doud], and Mamie have talked about San Antonio until it’s apparent that they’re going to be all down in the mouth with any other selection. So I asked for it.”38
Other offers came Eisenhower’s way. General William D. Connor, who commanded the Army War College, had been appointed superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy and asked Ike if he wanted to accompany him as West Point’s athletic director. This was not a trifling proposition in the peacetime Army. Major Philip B. Fleming, whom Ike was to replace, would become Harry Hopkins’s deputy in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and later succeeded Hopkins as director when Hopkins became secretary of commerce. Another offer came from General Stuart Heintzelman, who was leaving Washington to become commandant of the Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth. He suggested that Ike join the faculty at CGSS and assume command of the infantry battalion stationed there.
Before Eisenhower could decide, MacArthur intervened. Neither he nor Moseley was eager to see Ike leave. “On Saturday Gen. MacArthur called me to his office for a short conference relative to my prospective transfer,” Ike recorded.
He called attention to the fact that though I would be due for duty with troops this summer I will not have completed a 4-year detail in this city until September 1933. He suggested that I … stay here for 4 years. Gave me until today [February 15, 1932] to think it over—and also informed me that at the end of 4 y
ear detail he would give me Fort Washington [home of the 12th Infantry] to command.
Gen. MacA. was very nice to me—and after all I know of no greater compliment the bosses can give you than I want you hanging around.39
Eisenhower discussed MacArthur’s proposal with Mamie and General Moseley, and had little difficulty accepting. “To say that we were surprised is putting it mildly,” Ike wrote John Doud in Denver.
We had no prior hint that such a thing was even considered. Of course we were flattered that he liked my work well enough to want to keep us, and had interested himself personally in seeing how it could be done.… All in all there was nothing else to do. It is an opportunity that comes rarely, and when Gen. Moseley, the adjutant general, and Gen. MacA.’s aide all told me that they knew he really wanted us to stay—why I just marched back in to his office and said, “O.K. General.”40
MacArthur moved quickly to take advantage of Eisenhower’s talent. Ike was installed in an office between Moseley and the chief of staff, with direct access to both. He remained on the Army’s rolls as an assistant to Secretary Payne, but for all practical purposes he became MacArthur’s military secretary. When Payne left the government in March 1933, Eisenhower was officially transferred to the chief of staff’s office, but was never given a job title. His efficiency reports simply identify him as “On duty in Office [of the] Chief of Staff.” MacArthur, who was fifty-two at the time, had been a general officer for the past fourteen years. Ike, who was forty-two, had been a major almost as long.
MacArthur was the antithesis of Eisenhower—much like the difference between Winfield Scott (“Old Fuss and Feathers”) and Zachary Taylor (“Old Rough and Ready”) during the Mexican War. Scott, in Ulysses Grant’s words, “wore all the uniform the law allowed,” affected a rhetorical style designed for the benefit of future historians, and often referred to himself in the third person.41 Taylor, by contrast, preferred blue denim trousers and a cotton duster, mingled easily with the troops under his command, and expressed himself “in the fewest well-chosen words rather than high-sounding sentences.”42 Both Scott and Taylor were brilliant practitioners of the military profession and both were eminently successful in battle. But their manner and style could not have been more different.
Like Scott, Douglas MacArthur was a military aristocrat. His father, Arthur MacArthur, won the Congressional Medal of Honor leading the 24th Wisconsin (“On, Wisconsin”) at Missionary Ridge during the Civil War; fought brilliantly in the Philippines; served as military governor during the occupation; and in 1906 became the Army’s ranking general officer, though he was never appointed chief of staff. Douglas often said he grew up to the sound of bugle calls. He graduated first in his class at West Point in 1903, where, like Robert E. Lee and John J. Pershing, he became first captain of the corps of cadets. Three years after graduation he was appointed aide-de-camp to President Theodore Roosevelt. During World War I he commanded the 42nd (Rainbow) Division in combat, was wounded and gassed, and was decorated nine times for heroism. After the war he served as a reform-minded superintendent of West Point, married the exceedingly wealthy Louise Cromwell Brooks in 1922, and was exiled by Pershing to the Philippines as a consequence. (Pershing, a widower, had been very fond of Louise Brooks.)43
As chief of staff, MacArthur initially kept a low profile, avoided the cocktail and dinner circuit, and was seldom mentioned in the society pages of the Washington press. Yet his vanity was common knowledge. He installed a fifteen-foot-high mirror behind his chair to heighten his image, and often sat at his desk wearing a Japanese ceremonial kimono. Eisenhower, very much in awe, called him “essentially a romantic figure. He is impulsive—able, even brilliant—quick—tenacious in his views and extremely self-confident. [He] has assured me that as long as he stays in the Army I am one of the people earmarked as his ‘gang.’ ”44
Ike thought MacArthur had no political ambitions. “His interests are almost exclusively military. He has a reserved dignity—but is most animated in conversations on subjects interesting him. I do not expect to see him ever prominently mentioned for office outside the War Department.”45
Those were the words of an impressionable forty-two-year-old major. With the benefit of hindsight, Eisenhower altered that assessment. Writing his memoirs thirty-five years later, Ike said, “Most of the senior officers I had known always drew a clean-cut line between the military and the political. But if General MacArthur ever recognized the existence of that line, he usually chose to ignore it.”e
I called myself his good man Friday. My office was next to his; only a slatted door separated us. He called me to his office by raising his voice. On any subject he chose to discuss, his knowledge poured out in a great torrent of words. “Discuss” is hardly the correct word; discussion suggests dialogue and the General’s conversations were usually monologues.46
Because General MacArthur kept unusual hours, including luncheons from two to four hours [MacArthur habitually returned to Quarters One at Fort Myer for lunch with his mother] and then stayed on in his office until 8:00, my hours became picturesque. But if occasion came up for me to take a week’s leave, all I had to do was tell him I was going away for a few days and he would make no objection.47
Eisenhower had returned from Paris to Washington just after the stock market crash in 1929. It was now three years later and the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. One-third of the nation was unemployed. The stock market had lost 90 percent of its pre-1929 value. In Iowa, a bushel of corn was selling for less than a package of chewing gum. Forty-six percent of the nation’s farms faced foreclosure. An even larger number of urban home owners could not make their mortgage payments, and new home construction was at a standstill. Factories were idle, businesses were closing their doors, and the banking system teetered on the brink of collapse.
The Hoover administration watched from the sidelines, convinced that natural forces would set things straight. “If we depart from the principles of local responsibility and self-help,” Hoover told the nation, “we have struck at the roots of self-government.”48 With no relief in sight, desperate men selling apples appeared on urban street corners, bread lines stretched block after block, and “Hoovervilles”—little settlements of tin shacks, abandoned autos, and discarded packing crates—sprang up in city dumps and railroad yards across the country. Children went hungry in every corner of the land. In the coal-mining areas of West Virginia and Kentucky, more than 90 percent of the inhabitants suffered from malnutrition.49
Throughout the spring and summer of 1932 unemployed veterans of World War I flocked to Washington to protest the government’s inaction and demand payment of wartime bonuses that were not due until 1945. Few groups were better organized or politically more potent than America’s veterans. Roughly one-quarter of the federal budget in 1932 was devoted to an elaborate array of entitlements that had been enacted for veterans since World War I, and none of those entitlements aroused greater fervor than the so-called bonuses that were intended to correct the wartime disparity between civilian income and the pay that America’s soldiers and sailors had received.50
In 1924, Congress enacted legislation providing “adjusted compensation” for the 3.3 million servicemen of World War I.51 Under the act, each veteran was authorized an additional $1.00 for each day of home service, and $1.25 a day for overseas service. Payment was made in the form of a twenty-one-year endowment life insurance policy that was payable at death or in 1945, whichever came first. The policies would earn 4 percent interest, and the average payout totaled about $1,000 (roughly $13,000 in current dollars).
It was evident from the outset that these were life insurance policies, but as the nation sank deeper into depression that understanding became clouded. The policies were a bonus for wartime service, and for many unemployed veterans it was the only asset they possessed. By 1930 veterans were agitating for prepayment of their “bonuses,” and by 1932 legislation to that effect was pending in Congress.52 Introduced by Represen
tative Wright Patman of Texas, a two-term populist firebrand from one of the poorest districts in the nation (Time magazine reported that less than 1 percent of his constituents made enough money to pay income taxes),53 and a former veteran himself, Patman’s bill provided for the immediate cash payment of the face value of each insurance policy, to be financed by the government borrowing the $3.3 billion that would be required.54 Patman’s bill was pigeonholed in the House Ways and Means Committee, and veterans organizations across the country urged a march on Washington to lobby for its passage.
The first contingents, known as the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF), or simply the Bonus Army, arrived in late May. They set up a shantytown on the banks of the Anacostia River in southeast Washington and, when space there ran out, occupied several vacant government buildings scheduled for demolition on Pennsylvania Avenue. By mid-June, the BEF numbered more than twenty thousand men.55 Washington officials coped as best they could. Police chief Pelham Glassford did his utmost to provide tents and bedding for the veterans, furnished medicine, and assisted with food and sanitation. Maintaining order was never a problem. The men were camped illegally, but Glassford (who was a year behind MacArthur at West Point and who had been the youngest brigadier general in the AEF) chose to treat them simply as old soldiers who had fallen on hard times.56
The War Department saw it differently. For Secretary Hurley, MacArthur, and George Moseley, the Bonus Army was a ragtag assortment of radicals, aliens, criminals, and social misfits led by a Bolshevik cadre intent on storming the American equivalent of the Winter Palace. For the Army’s high command, overthrow of the government lay just around the corner.57
Eisenhower in War and Peace Page 12
