Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  For three-year-old Douglas, the loss of the brother who had been his constant playmate must have been equally devastating, as well as frightening. As historian Carol Petillo, who has delved deeply into the MacArthur childhood, concluded, he suddenly found himself abandoned by his best friend, without understanding why.2

  It was Pinky MacArthur for whom the death caused the greatest change, coming so soon after her mother’s death, and in the same house. “His loss was a terrible blow to my mother,” Douglas later admitted in his memoirs.3 Her grief became at times overwhelming, as well as life-transforming. “Sometimes I nearly go crazy over my loss,” she wrote to her sister Elizabeth, who had recently lost her husband. But she could take comfort that little Malcolm and Elizabeth’s husband were now “before Jesus…pleading for us.” It was a sad party that returned to Fort Wingate for that summer, fall, and winter. Only the news that Captain MacArthur had been reassigned to Fort Selden in far southern New Mexico, close to the Rio Grande—his first independent command—broke the routine of grief, silence, and collective misery.4

  The three-hundred-mile trip to Selden involved considerable danger—Geronimo’s band of Apaches was preparing one last breakout from their reservation near the MacArthurs’ route—and hardship. But for three-year-old Douglas, it was filled with excitement, as well. In his memoirs, he records it as his first conscious memory. To him, the world of Fort Selden seemed like a Wild West story come to life. “It was here I learned to ride and shoot even before I could read or write,” he remembered later, “indeed, almost before I could walk and talk.” While his mother used to dress him in skirts and full blouses, and to curl his hair, which hung down to his shoulders, life at Fort Selden now introduced him to the world of masculine skills and duties and the romance of the West. It was “a land bright with promise scarred only by wind and weather—a land with unknown mountains to be climbed, alluring trails to be ridden, streams to be navigated by the strong and vigorous” and all of it guarded by strong men in blue, who marched out every day with their rifles on their shoulders into the blazing sun of summer or the freezing cold of winter and returned every night while “we would stand at attention as the bugle sounded the lowering of the flag.”

  There was even one comic moment when they were out riding and their horses and mules panicked at a strange smell. Then something suddenly loomed on the horizon, “a shaggy ghost out of the page of wonderful.” It was an Egyptian camel, the pitiful survivor of the herd that Secretary of War Jeff Davis had bought for the army in 1855 as pack animals in the American desert—a clever experiment in cross-cultural exchange that never caught on.5

  The memories of Fort Selden would become increasingly precious to Douglas MacArthur. They would contain the last distant echoes of an American frontier way of life that was vanishing even then, as his father had predicted. “Life was vivid and exciting for me,” he later wrote of those days, and his missing playmate, Malcolm, was soon all but forgotten.

  But one person did not forget Malcolm. That was Pinky, who continued to nurse her grief and now directed all her love and attention on the one person who mattered most to her, her youngest son. After her husband left for work and her oldest son for school, she and Douglas would be alone for the entire day. Just as Arthur, the eldest, was increasingly a part of her husband’s orbit and his clear favorite, so Douglas now became the center of her life.

  She also did something extraordinary for her time and place. As she wrote to her sister from Fort Selden, “Arthur is in command and I can do just as I want.” On one of her frequent trips east she had herself fitted with an early birth-control device called a pessary. The message to her husband was clear: there will be no more children. The four of them were now the only family they would have, and the emotional bond that her own mother had had to share with fourteen children, Pinky would focus on one in particular, her youngest son, Douglas.6

  Until her death in 1935, she would be the single most important woman—indeed the most important person—in his life. When he was a boy she would be there to extricate him from dangers and build his self-confidence. When he was a man, she would reassure him at times of challenge and crisis, advise him at critical turning points in his military career, comfort him during times of loss, and share in moments of triumph. Nearly every day for the next fifty-two years, his mother would be his daily guide, support, and protector—and propel him forward to heights of accomplishment and fame that her husband, serving in the same profession, could only imagine.

  —

  The death of his brother Malcolm in 1883 was the first major turning point in Douglas MacArthur’s life. The second came six years later when his father finally won the promotion to major that he had sought for so long, and moved the family to Washington, D.C.—and Douglas finally got to know his grandfather.

  The tousled black hair had turned white, and there was now a decided paunch around the judge’s middle. But the sparkling wit and beguiling charm that had won the hearts of three wives, won him a seat on the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia for seventeen years, and turned him from a down-at-the-heels Scottish immigrant into one of the most influential men in the nation’s capital was still there. For the boys, used to their stern, subdued father, their grandfather was like a deep draught of a life-giving elixir.

  “I could listen to his anecdotes for hours,” Douglas later recalled. In their grandfather’s study amid the books and leather-bound chairs, Arthur and Douglas would sit spellbound for hours as the judge wove stories about famous law cases together with tales about Scotland and the MacArthur clan, a branch of Clan Campbell that claimed to trace its roots back to King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table.

  Through their grandfather’s words they could visualize the MacArthur clan marching off to battle in the mists of the Highlands, wearing their tartans of green, black, and gold, and he could hear the clan motto, which the judge would repeat in his thickest Scottish burr:

  Tis Green for the sheen o’ the pines

  And Black for the gloom o’ of th’ glen

  Tis Gold for the gleam of th’ gorse

  The MacArtair tartan, ye ken.

  Above all, Judge MacArthur told the boys about the battlefield exploits of their father. He recited for them by the hour the record of Arthur MacArthur’s heroism on Missionary Ridge and at the Battle of Franklin and on Kennesaw Mountain. Douglas had rarely heard his father say anything about the Civil War, except in a self-deprecating way. It was his grandfather who turned a rather stuffy and unapproachable father into a figure of heroic, even epic proportions. Certainly the description in MacArthur’s own autobiography of his father’s charge up Missionary Ridge—“Gasping breath from tortured lungs!…The charge is losing momentum! They falter!…And then suddenly, on the crest the flag!”—conveys some flavor of what those exciting afternoons in his grandfather’s study must have been like.7

  Meanwhile, from his desk at the adjutant general’s office at the War Department, Major MacArthur was busy in securing the Medal of Honor that he believed was rightfully his, for his actions on Missionary Ridge almost thirty years earlier. For years he, like other officers, had been told that the newly created Congressional Medal of Honor was reserved for enlisted men, not officers. But in April 1890, he discovered that Congress had amended the law in 1863 to allow commissioned officers to receive the medal. The War Department had ignored the change, but three commissioned officers had received medals after the war, and one of them—Captain John C. Burke—had won it for conspicuous bravery at the Battle of Murfreesboro: the very same battle in which MacArthur had distinguished himself for the first time.

  So Major MacArthur submitted an application for his own Medal of Honor, complete with testimonials from the generals who had commanded him at Murfreesboro, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain, and the Battle of Franklin, and even from fellow officers who had been eyewitnesses to the fighting.8 The board was impressed, and on June 30, 1890, awarded him the Medal of Honor for conspicuous b
ravery at Missionary Ridge. They figured he deserved it equally well for his actions at Murfreesboro and Franklin, but Missionary Ridge was such a prominent example that it became the basis of the citation.

  Persistence pays. Don’t let the bureaucrats keep you down. Keep asking the same question until you get the answer you want. These were the lessons Douglas MacArthur would learn from his father’s experience with the Medal of Honor. Indeed, winning the nation’s highest military award for himself would become his own obsession as a soldier—one that would cause him considerable turmoil and generate controversy more than once.

  —

  The next turning point in Douglas’s life was the move to San Antonio, Texas, when his father was assigned as assistant adjutant general to the military district there.

  It was actually a happy time for the MacArthur family. His mother enjoyed the social life of San Antonio and the fort, where her husband was able to hire her a maid. She and other army wives were able to spend leisurely afternoons visiting the town’s shops and restaurants—a far cry from life at Fort Selden. The major himself settled into the Fort Houston routine, knowing that he was the master of his chosen work—“every duty assigned to you, you have performed thoroughly and conscientiously,” his commanding officer, General Kelton, wrote. “I regard your assignment to duty…a most fortunate circumstance for [this] office and the army”—and that he could count on new promotions as time went on.9

  Douglas’s brother, meanwhile, had accepted a commission at the U.S. Naval Academy and with Arthur III now out of the picture and safely ensconced at Annapolis, Pinky could concentrate all her attention on her youngest son’s scholastic attainments.

  Up until now they had been pitiful. Later Douglas confessed, “I was only an average student” at the various schools he had attended, including in Washington. Both his father and his mother shook their heads over his mediocre grades and wondered aloud why he couldn’t be more like his brother Arthur, who was not only an excellent scholar but also a brilliant athlete who broke the Annapolis record for the half-mile run.10

  The place they chose for turning Douglas around was San Antonio’s West Texas Military Academy. It had been founded in 1893 by the Right Reverend James Steptoe Johnson, a veteran of the Eleventh Mississippi during the Civil War who fought in twelve engagements with the Army of Northern Virginia and believed that “in a military school a boy most readily acquires the habits of neatness, attention and obedience [and] which tend to make one upright in principles and morals, as well as in bearing.” His other goal was to develop “the Christian character amongst the rising generation,” and to teach them that “character is the only true wealth.”11

  In any case, it was an environment that had an almost miraculous impact on their youngest son’s mind and spirit. “A transformation began to take place in my development,” he recorded seventy years later. “There came a desire to know, a seeking for the reason why, a search for truth.” His first year at West Texas he maintained a 96.3 average out of 100 possible points, which dipped to 95.15 the following year. His third year brought a 97.65 average and a citation for “superior excellence” in scholarship; the boy whose main interest had been sports was given a medal for the highest average in mathematics.12

  What had happened? The impact of a strong, disciplined atmosphere with a healthy competition from other students, many of whom came from the San Antonio area and were, in the words of one graduate, “some of the meanest boys this side of hell,” may have had something to do with it. The presence of strong-minded teachers and administrators like Reverend Johnson and Allen Burleson, the school’s rector, probably helped. So did the hormonal boost of reaching the age when, as Dr. Johnson once said, the mind was most active and most retentive, and intellectual discovery becomes a thrill equal to scoring on the football field or—no doubt for some cadets—discovering girls.

  Another part of it may simply have been the absence of an older brother who was accustomed to excelling and earning the approval of both parents while his younger sibling was forced to sit and listen. Now in the vacuum created by Arthur III’s departure for Annapolis, Douglas finally had the chance to shine. Whatever the cause, he took full advantage of it.

  “Abstruse mathematics began to appear as a challenge,” he remembered later, “dull Latin and Greek seemed a gateway to the moving words of the leaders of the past, laborious historical data led to the nerve-tingling battlefields of the great captains, Biblical lessons began to open the spiritual portals of a growing faith, literature to lay bare the souls of men.” As one of his awed classmates remembered, MacArthur “was doing Conic Sections when the rest of us were struggling with Elementary Algebra,” and another said, “His ability to analyze a problem and arrive at a sound conclusion [is] just out of this world.”13

  At the same time, he was quarterback of the football team, played shortstop for the baseball team, which won seven out of eight games, and won the school’s tennis championship.

  Douglas’s transformation was a matter of family as well as personal pride. His grandfather the judge had authored seven books; his father had built a library of nearly four thousand volumes in everything from Chinese history to political economy. The MacArthur men admired intellectual attainment as much as winning on the battlefield or winning the presidency; and now Arthur MacArthur’s youngest son—Pinky’s darling baby—had earned his place in the same exalted company. At West Texas he learned a lifelong love of books and ideas, and the mind that analyzed conic sections would later devote itself to organizing military operations from assaults on German positions on the Hindenburg Line to the liberation of the Philippines—and contemplating the logistics of nuclear war with Communist China.

  Looking back six decades later, he wrote, “My four years there were the happiest of my life. Texas will always be a second home to me.” Speaking of West Texas Military Academy to other graduates, he would always say, “This is where I started.”14

  On June 8, 1897, his proud parents sat in the pew in the school chapel as Douglas MacArthur, class valedictorian, recited James Jeffrey Roche’s stirring poem “The Fight of the General Armstrong.” Their son had won the school’s highest honor, the Academy Gold Medal, as well as medals in Latin, mathematics, and public speaking. Reverend Burleson told them Douglas was “the most promising student that I have ever had in an experience of over ten years in schools both North and South.”15

  Their lives had changed too. For the second time in his life Arthur MacArthur was made lieutenant colonel. The first promotion had come at the end of the Civil War, when he was about to turn twenty. The second came on June 8, 1896, six days after his fifty-first birthday. That same month Arthur III graduated from Annapolis and set off for San Francisco as a cadet on the USS Philadelphia.

  Then in August, Judge MacArthur died at a health clinic in Atlantic City. The Atlantic City Daily Press, the Atlantic City Daily Union, and the Milwaukee Sentinel all carried the news on their front pages, and his widow had conveyed the judge’s body to be buried at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington.16 Two months later, in October 1896, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur MacArthur (with his father’s death he had dropped the “Jr.” from his signature) was assigned as the new adjutant general of the Department of the Dakotas, with headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota.

  The young graduate from West Texas Military Academy would be headed back north with him, but not to St. Paul. He would be living in Milwaukee, where his father and mother had hatched a plan to get Douglas past the next set of hurdles so he could enter the United States Military Academy at West Point. What none of them could know was that in less than a year events would disrupt all their plans, and a sudden explosion in Havana Harbor would change the destiny of the United States, and that of the MacArthur family.

  —

  “I never worked harder in all my life.”

  That was MacArthur’s recollection many years later of the time he spent in the winter and spring of 1897–98 preparing for the next great hurd
le he faced in his pursuit of a military career. “Always before me was the goal of West Point,” MacArthur wrote, “the greatest military academy in the world.”17

  It had been his father’s dream to attend, but he never did. Douglas tried to get an at-large appointment right after graduating from West Texas, but despite a sheaf of supporting letters from the commanding general of the Department of Texas, Wisconsin Senator John L. Mitchell (whose father had been one of the late Judge MacArthur’s closest friends), four governors, two congressmen, and two bishops, President Grover Cleveland turned him down. He tried again later with the newly inaugurated President McKinley, but again the result was disappointment.

  Now his parents sprang into action. Arthur MacArthur once told one of his aides, the future secretary of war Peyton March, that he had started planning to get Douglas into West Point the day the boy was born.18 So he and Pinky devised what they considered a foolproof plan to get Douglas accepted, even though it had several moving parts.

  The goal was to secure his nomination to West Point by Wisconsin Representative Theabald Otjen, yet another old friend of the late judge, by establishing residence in the congressman’s district. They would do this by setting Douglas and his mother up in the swank Plankinton House hotel in Milwaukee, where she could supervise his studies for the West Point entrance exam while Arthur MacArthur would commute from St. Paul on weekends to see how things were progressing. In addition, Milwaukee was the home of a leading back specialist, Dr. Franz Pfister, who would treat the slight curvature of the spine that Douglas had developed at West Texas so that there could be no physical obstacles to his entering West Point.