“While outside looking in at the windows were two hundred girls,” MacArthur exploded. As for MacArthur himself, White noted, his stance and striking features “and good eyes with a ‘come hither’ in them must have played the devil with the girls.”
Their conversation also touched on the German situation. MacArthur expressed his view that the Germans were weary of war and now despised the Kaiser, especially the women who now had the vote. As for the German army, MacArthur asserted it had been virtually demolished at the end, and would pose no threat to the Allies for a long time to come. It was the same view he had expressed to another visitor, the Prince of Wales, when he had stopped by Sinzig and wondered whether MacArthur was worried about a German resurgence.
“We beat the Germans this time,” he said in his most decisive voice, “and we can do it again.” Especially, he was thinking, if the Americans had General Douglas MacArthur at their head.6
William Allen White concluded, “[MacArthur’s] staff adored him, his men worshiped him, and he seemed entirely without vanity.”7 That was a judgment on which others were inclined to differ. One of them was General Pershing. Later much would be made of Pershing’s comment on MacArthur—“Has exalted opinion of himself”—in an efficiency report that recommended blocking the younger man’s promotion to major general.
But the truth is that in that same efficiency report Pershing noted MacArthur was “a very able young officer with a fine war record,” and when Newton Baker’s office told The New York Times that MacArthur’s seniors considered him the most brilliant young officer in the army, Pershing was likely one of them.8
All the same, there’s no doubt that Pershing and others believed this very able young officer still had some growing up to do. And when MacArthur returned home with the 12,000 Rainbow soldiers and the Eighty-fourth Brigade and divisional headquarters staffs on April 25, 1919, at the New York docks, he quickly learned how fast the glory can fade and mundane reality can take its place.
As the troops disembarked, a small boy was running past and stopped at seeing all the uniforms.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“The famous 42nd,” MacArthur answered.
“Were you in France?” the boy asked with some curiosity.
MacArthur grimaced. “Amid a silence that hurt,” he remembered, he and his men marched off the dock, saluted and shook hands, and then parted ways. It was over. Everything that they had endured and suffered to win the greatest war in history—the friends they had seen fall and die, the bravery and valor they had all shown in the face of danger—none of it had left any impression on the people they had served. The boy’s ignorant reaction turned out to be typical. “No one even seemed to have heard of the war” or seemed to acknowledge the presence of the soldiers who had fought it.9 America wanted to forget the last two years, just as it wanted to ignore the peace treaty being drawn up in Paris, which, as MacArthur told one of his former comrades, “seem[s] more like a treaty of perpetual war than of perpetual peace.” When the Senate failed to ratify the treaty and opted to keep the United States out of the postwar League of Nations, most Americans neither noticed nor cared.
The fact was, America was retreating into its prewar cocoon. If the men who had led the country to intervene in the conflict in Europe had truly but wrongly believed that this was “the war to end all wars,” the American people were willing to go along with the illusion. Soldiers and generals, no matter how brave, played no part in the country’s postwar agenda.
There was one exception to the general apathy. The New Yorkers of the 165th did get a magnificent parade down Fifth Avenue, followed by a celebratory dance at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel that MacArthur attended. That was a mistake. A manager spotted his boots with riding spurs and told him, “You may not dance in spurs. You might injure the dance floor.”
“Do you know who I am?” MacArthur demanded, meaning the most decorated soldier of the war.
“Yes sir, I do,” the manager replied. “But I must request you leave the dance floor and remove your spurs.” MacArthur spun around, grabbed his date’s arm, and swore he would never set foot, spurred or unspurred, in the Waldorf again—a promise he would remember with sheepish good humor four decades later, when he was the Waldorf Towers’s most famous resident.10
At the time, however, it was a depressed and chastened MacArthur who took the train to Washington, D.C., to be reunited with his mother and to see the army chief of staff to learn of his next assignment. Of course he was staying in the army; any other career was inconceivable. But his future hardly looked bright. The army was undergoing a drastic demobilization, sinking far below even prewar strength. Like his father after the Civil War he would be facing a profound dearth of command opportunities—and when he walked into the chief of staff’s office he was already resigned to that bleak reality.
Instead, he got the surprise of his life.
If any single American was responsible for winning World War One, it was Army Chief of Staff Peyton March. Pershing, the commander in France, would grab the glory, but it was March, sitting behind a desk in Washington, who personally manhandled the soldiers, ships, and supplies to put the AEF in the field. By so doing, he had enabled Pershing to provide the Allies with the vital reserve, and then the driving spearhead, that halted the last German advance of the war, shoved the German army back to its borders, and finally forced it to surrender.11
Thin, spare, and totally without charm or regard for others, March had been driven during the war by a single goal. That was to make the U.S. Army, and its officer corps, the epitome of a modern fighting force. Now that the war was over, March was determined to continue that development into the future. That meant starting with the center of the army’s nervous system, the academy at West Point.
The 117-year-old institution in upstate New York was still very much mired in prewar assumptions and attitudes, just as much of its physical plant dated back to the Mexican War. March had already discussed his plans with Secretary of War Baker for bringing West Point into the twentieth century. But changing the outlook up there, four hundred miles from Washington, was going to require someone tough and resourceful with “a comprehensive grasp of world and national affairs,” March had written, “and a liberalization of conception that amounts to a change in the psychology of command.”12 That man would have to be expert in the latest technologies of war, but also sensitive to the sweep of history and the need to preserve tradition while recognizing the need for change—and for obeying General March’s wishes.
Then the door opened and Douglas MacArthur, the man Peyton had decided was the one to do it, was standing in front of him.
“Douglas, things are in great confusion at West Point,” the chief of staff said. “It’s forty years behind the times. Mr. Baker and I have talked this over and we want you to go up there and revitalize and revamp the Academy. It’s been parochial in the past. I want to broaden it and graduate more cadets into the army.”13
March wanted West Point’s courses updated, the curriculum modernized, and hazing ended. Even more radically, he wanted its cadets to graduate in three years, not four. That was more than enough time, he had decided, to forge officers for the wars of the future.14
MacArthur was stunned. He was still nursing the leg wound he had received just before the Armistice. Now he was back in the States for less than a month and the army’s chief of staff was telling him he was going to be superintendent of his beloved West Point, the youngest superintendent in more than a century.
“I’m not an educator, sir,” he protested. “I am a field officer. Besides, there are so many of my old professors. I can’t do it.”
March smiled. “Yes, you can do it.”15
It was a pleased but somewhat apprehensive MacArthur who went back to his mother to break the news, and say it was time to start packing. He would be reporting to West Point on June 15, and there was no time to lose.
Mac spent the next six weeks tirelessly working to get hims
elf ready for the job. He read over every file on West Point at the War Department; he spoke to fellow officers at the War Department. He also talked to members of Congress about what was happening up at the monastery on the Hudson, and listened as they poured out their doubts and frustrations.
What he discovered was that West Point, his beloved Point, was in a hell of a mess—so much so that some in Congress were talking openly of abolishing it altogether.
The trouble began soon after war broke out, when the academy’s regular four-year program was drastically shortened to one year, so that the academy could graduate enough commissioned second lieutenants to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding force.16 But that left a yawning, and dangerous, gap as each class graduated faster than the last. An institution built around older students molding the character and habits of the younger ones over the course of four years had suddenly come apart.
“The traditional disciplinary system,” as MacArthur later wrote, “so largely built around the prestige and influence of the upper classmen was impossible in a situation where there were no upper classmen.”17 Instead, chaos reigned inside the Corps with such rapid turnover and the admission of so many cadets who would never have qualified under peacetime rules.
In fact, six months after the Armistice, there was no longer a Corps at all but three separate corps. The first was the last of the speeded-up wartime Corps, still sporting their traditional gray bell-buttoned dress coats and black-striped trousers. The second group was the next class of plebes who the War Department on November 1 ordered to enter early that winter, and who were forced to wear privates’ uniforms in order to keep them distinct from the gray-clad fourth classmen.18
If that was not confusing enough, the War Department also ordered returning officers who would have graduated in the class of 1921 back to West Point for an additional half year of training.19 They wore not cadet gray or a private’s olive drab but their commissioned officers’ uniforms, complete with Sam Browne belts and field boots. Many had seen action in France, and some had commanded men under fire—yet starting that spring they would be submitting to the same training, and living under the same discipline, as the rawest, youngest plebe.
It was true class conflict, with all the jealousy and distrust that any Marxist would have wished. Then in May 1919 came the inadvertent coup de grâce. Chief of staff March announced that the “greys” and “orioles” (the returning officers) would all be staying for a full three-year course, instead of graduating in a year, as many had assumed.20 More than 100 cadets resigned from the Academy; those who stayed were filled with remorse and bitterness—not just toward the army for making a misery of their time at West Point, but toward their fellow classmates. “The Corps had died November 1918,” a staff member later wrote. “Not even a miracle could bring it back to life.”21
Some recent historians of West Point, like Theodore Crackel, disagree. They reject the claim that the tangle of 1918–19 posed any existential challenge, let alone required bringing in an outsider like MacArthur.22 Those on the ground at the time, however, felt differently. “At the Academy,” notes historian Stephen Ambrose, “all was turmoil.” The time had come for a radical revision of how West Point functioned and trained its cadets, and Douglas MacArthur was appointed to do it.23
So for those instructors and administrators still reeling from the problems of the past year came the worst news of all. The new superintendent was someone with no teaching or academic administrative experience, a mere stripling of thirty-nine compared to the seventy-one-year-old he was replacing.
As for MacArthur, it would be his first test at executive leadership, with no chain of command to rely on. He and his mother drove up to the superintendent’s house on June 12, 1919. The iron grille gate opened; a truck loaded with their luggage pulled up in the driveway; soon trunks and cases were being taken through the front door of the large brick house. MacArthur made sure his mother was comfortable, and then set off for the office.
It was June 1919. In two weeks Germany would finally sign a peace treaty in the halls at Versailles, under sullen protest—dissent from which Hitler’s Nationalist Socialists would take their cue. Two months earlier Benito Mussolini had created his new nationalist party in Italy, while Vladimir Lenin launched the Communist Party’s Third International in Moscow.
Revolution and discontent were in the air. Not least in West Point, New York.
—
Colonel William Addleman Ganoe, the academy’s official adjutant to the superintendent, was the first person MacArthur met. Ganoe had wearily handled the paperwork associated with the school’s administrative meltdown during the past two years. Over the last month he had eavesdropped on conversations among faculty and staff about the new appointment.
“Looks like another effort to wreck the Academy,” some said. “The Academic Board will make a monkey out of him,” another remarked. “I remember him as a cadet,” said one of the wives. “He might have looked and acted all right. But appearances are deceiving.” Another said wistfully, “Maybe he’ll just sit back and let them run the show,” meaning the board.24
Ganoe didn’t think so. He remembered Cadet MacArthur from the days when he himself had been a plebe, sixteen years before, and could recall a tall, handsome ranking officer of the Corps, “glittering immaculate with maroon silk sash, plumed dress hat, glinting sword and four gold stripes of chevrons.”25 Still, Ganoe had been devoted to MacArthur’s predecessor, and had already written out his resignation when he heard the click of shoes on the terra-cotta floor in the hallway, and the door opened and Douglas MacArthur burst in.
Ganoe rose and saluted. MacArthur ignored the salute, then stepped forward and took his new adjutant by the elbow.
“Ganoe, Ganoe,” he said slowly, as if reminiscing. “Yes, now it comes back. A girl in bustle and corset singing a love song.” He smiled and laughed. “Long time ago.”
Ganoe was stunned. The song was one Ganoe had sung in drag at the conclusion of the 1903 version of the amateur theatricals that were staged every year by West Point cadets, a throwaway number Ganoe himself barely remembered—but MacArthur had remembered and had dragged the song up out of his memory to greet him.26
From that moment on, William Ganoe was MacArthur’s admirer and ally. His reminiscences of MacArthur’s brief but decisive tenure as superintendent at West Point are an invaluable guide to those tense years, and give us an intimate picture of the MacArthur who was still to come.
Ganoe noticed at once, for example, that the brigadier from France “wasn’t as robust as when he had been a cadet. He had been slender then,” Ganoe remembered, “but now his muscles seemed to have shrunk into sinew. There were beginnings of crow’s feet at his eyes, and his cheeks just escaped being hollow.” A year and a half of trench warfare had taken its physical toll. Yet if MacArthur was not as cool and breezily correct as he had been in West Point days, he was more centered and more at ease with himself. A year and a half of leadership and command had also left their mark.
Most strikingly, there was no evidence of decorations—no sign of the Silver Stars or two D.S.C.s or the D.S.M. This was MacArthur as he would remain until the day he left the army three decades later. Except “for the stars on his shoulders, he might have been taken for any passing officer off duty.”27
MacArthur also made quick work of Ganoe’s letter of resignation. After a series of detailed and direct questions about every aspect of the current setup, from the Cavalry Department and the Officers’ Club to the Commissary, Cadet Store, and academic curriculum, MacArthur took the letter and tore it into tiny bits. He also informed Ganoe that his new title would be chief of staff. “Adjutant” wasn’t a title worthy of the wide range of tasks and responsibility MacArthur would now expect Ganoe to shoulder.
MacArthur understood the gravity of the task he faced. “The Old West Point…had gone,” he later wrote. “It had to be replaced.” The question was whether what replaced it would prepare the officers it trained—an
d the United States Army—for the realities of twentieth-century warfare, or simply be a pale, outmoded imitation of what came before.
That in turn depended on how MacArthur handled himself. If he made embracing the future look feasible and attractive, the changes he and Peyton were hoping for would happen. If he offended or alienated possible supporters, and left hostages to fortune potential opponents could exploit, the effort at reform would fail.
Starting that day, MacArthur would transform himself into a visible pillar of strength around which everyone, from generals to privates, could rally, and whose every word and gesture was a source of hope and encouragement. It would complete the process of heroic self-fashioning that he had begun during his years in France. It would last him through the next decade and his years as chief of staff. It laid the foundation for his leadership style during the Second World War and Korea.
And it began with people.
—
Ganoe noticed at once MacArthur’s remarkable and lifelong gift for inspiring confidence from those who worked with him and under him, a characteristic that he would share with two other leaders in the next war, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
MacArthur showed it first when, to everyone’s relief, he turned down the invitation to stage a formal review of the Corps as a greeting for the new superintendent. “They’ll see me soon and often enough,” he told Ganoe. “There are occasions when ceremonial is harassment. I saw too much of that overseas.”28 Instead, there was an easy informality to the MacArthur style of command that allowed him to command without being commanding. He could be as aloof as his father had been, but at West Point under Douglas MacArthur “the air was quickly charged with new vitality that extended from his new chief of staff on down.”29
The informality also went with his willingness to let people handle tasks and assignments in their own way. As one of his staff during the Korean War noted, MacArthur “judged people [by] what they did best”—and then left them to do it. It would be one of his most attractive features as a general, one that even those who didn’t like him came to appreciate. As one officer remarked to another during the Point years, “He makes you feel you’re the only man in the only job.”30
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