The staff responded with a combination of enthusiastic loyalty and hard work. His commandant of cadets, Major Robert Danford, remembered MacArthur’s leadership as “a leadership that kept you at respectful distance, yet at the same time took you in as [an] esteemed member of his team, and quickly had you working harder than you had ever worked before in your life.”31
MacArthur also built confidence with his easy style of greeting when anyone came into the office. He would rise with a smile, shake hands, turn to the desk to pick up his gold cigarette case, and offer its contents with, “Have a pill?” Then he would sit down and listen with an intensity and focus of those liquid black eyes that some visitors found almost unnerving. “His listening fairly shrieks,” one once told Ganoe. “He not only looks through you, but down the back of your neck.”32
Then he would rise and pace back and forth, repeating what he had heard word for word with the powerful memory Ganoe had first noted. Then he would ask a series of penetrating questions until the visitor was both exhausted and exhilarated—and convinced that the superintendent had made the best and most rational decision possible.
One time in a fit of daring, Ganoe decided to put MacArthur’s memory to the test. When a visitor came in, he stationed a stenographer outside the door as the man told a five-minute story. As MacArthur stood and paced and repeated the story, Ganoe and the stenographer went over the notes. To their amazement, his recitation was almost verbatim.33 No one questioned the superintendent’s ability to retain any information passed on to him ever again.
—
MacArthur also built loyalty by his willingness to cut through red tape in order to see the right thing done or, in the case of a cadet’s complaint, justice served. “Rules! Rules!” he would tell Ganoe scornfully.
“Rules are mostly made for the lazy to hide behind…Some little thing goes wrong. Instead of mending the situation on the spot, we make a rule,” he said.34 MacArthur’s approach, by contrast, was to deal with the situation head-on.
Ganoe found that out in late August when MacArthur came back to the office after a round of inspection. MacArthur said, “Come in, Chief,” and then shut the door behind him.
MacArthur started talking almost before he had taken off his cap.
“I’m convinced now of what I opined all along,” he said. “The Academy has come to the end of an epoch. We are training these cadets for the past, not the future.”
He began pacing the room. “How long are we going to prepare for the War of 1812?”
Ganoe didn’t answer. He had learned that when MacArthur was pacing like this, like a tiger in a cage, and speaking to his guest, he was actually “communing aloud with his own mind. He was questioning MacArthur’s reasoning in front of a live witness.” It was something subordinates would see again and again, at the War Department, in the Philippines, Brisbane, and Tokyo: the sight and sound of MacArthur communing with his own mind.
He went on.
“Chief, I learned certain principles, certain means and methods over there that taught me the changes which have come with warfare.” The days of small professional standing armies, including the U.S. Army, were done. Now “whole populations will fight whole populations.” That means “the regular soldier no longer plays the role he has played for centuries.” In the age of total warfare, an officer must learn to lead soldiers who are also civilians, to understand their thinking, their motivations, and their perspectives on the world.
“He must be trained along broad and humane lines,” Mac continued, but a future officer also had to be able to confront the realities of the age of total war, with barbed wire, trenches, and mass death. “The kind of war the world has developed is an endless physical and mental preparation. Why put that off for a minute with the cadet? Why cheat him by our waste and neglect?”
MacArthur finally stopped and turned. “Chief, it seems to be the common belief that what happened to the Academy last year was a calamity. I regard it as an opportunity” to make West Point confront the radical changes in the world—and warfare.
He was going to start that afternoon, with Cadet Summer Camp. “Of what possible benefit is Cadet Summer Camp?” he demanded to know.
Ganoe’s memory drifted back to his own days in the summer. The mornings spent doing formal drills in uniforms and formations that a Winfield Scott or Robert E. Lee might have approved of; the afternoons spent lying on their cots in barracks; marching to fife and drum to the mess hall for sumptuous dinners served by white-jacketed waiters; evenings spent reading or at a formal dance at Cullom Hall; while cadet sentries in gray uniforms and white cross belts changed guard as if they were at Buckingham Palace, shouting in unison, “All’s well!”35
“Sentry duty—sentry duty!” MacArthur said with a wry smile, as if he had been reading Ganoe’s mind. “Walking post like that against the Boches! Walking that way at all would have been the man’s end.”
MacArthur shook his head. “No, it’s out of time and out of place. It is not only inappropriate, it’s baneful. We bring them up as fashion-plate soldiers in a rich man’s vacation spot.”
And so Cadet Summer Camp would be no more. Or so it would be if the Academic Board approved so momentous a change. Ganoe had to wince.
Ganoe: “General, you’ll meet with a world of opposition.”
MacArthur: “Chief, we met more than that in France and won.”
But then Ludendorff and the kaiser hadn’t sat on West Point’s Academic Board.
—
The Academic Board was, as Clausewitz himself might have said, the Schwerpunkt of the West Point establishment.
Besides the superintendent himself and the cadet commandant, the board consisted of the heads of the departments of instruction at West Point. It would be easy, and misleading, to portray them as a band of benighted and superannuated traditionalists.36 It was true that since the members all had lifetime tenure, and long service as professors, they were inclined to see the prestige of West Point as a direct reflection of their own authority—an authority they were prepared to defend against all challengers, including one, in MacArthur’s case, who had been one of their students.
But there were some members, the younger ones, who did see the need for changes at the school, especially after the debacle of the war years. And all of them were as keen as MacArthur to preserve the spirit of the institution for which they had spent their lives, and its motto: “Honor, Duty, Country.” Their powers were absolute regarding curriculum, textbooks, methods of instruction, admission and graduation requirements. If Mac could win them over to his side, then his and March’s program could go on to victory. If not, it would die in No Man’s Land, unburied and forgotten.37
As adjutant, William Ganoe attended all Academic Board meetings as a non-voting member. He watched MacArthur attend his first, watched him come in after the other dozen members had taken their seats, and observed how their faces showed “every expression, from tense anticipation by the younger members to resigned endurance by the elders.”38
Among the younger were Colonel Lucius Holt, head of the English and history faculties and West Point’s only Ph.D. (from Yale), and Major Charles Hines, acting professor of ordnance and gunnery, who was just thirty-one years old. They and the Corps Commandant, Major Robert Danford, who was an old friend of MacArthur’s from cadet days, were by and large inclined to look favorably on the new superintendent’s proposals.
But six of the older Academic Board members, led by Colonel Gustav J. Fiebeger, head of civil and military engineering, and the chairman of the department of modern languages, Colonel Cornelius Willcox, were not. Fiebeger and Willcox had been cadets at West Point before MacArthur was born; both were prepared to oppose anyone trying to impose reforms during a short tenure, which would then leave them and the rest of the permanent staff holding the bag.39
It wasn’t long before their worst fears were realized. After a breezy, “Well, Chief, what’s first on the agenda,” to Ganoe, MacArthur began quizzing
the individual board members about every aspect of every department, much as he had quizzed Ganoe, and without making comment on the answers. The members were impressed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge but sensed that there was an agenda under the polite but relentless questioning—an agenda that would mean the end of the old West Point way of doing things.
At last one of the senior members (almost certainly Fiebeger) rose and addressed MacArthur directly. He spoke of the recent disasters that had befallen the Point, and how the board members were struggling to restore some semblance of the school’s former glory. Any new interference, he implied, would only disrupt things more. Let each department head work out the solution on his own was the request. Stay in your lane and leave us alone was the subtext.
MacArthur smiled and asked a single question. “For my own enlightenment, please tell me: Would there be no advantage to a cadet in knowing the bearing one subject has on another,” in other words a more cross-disciplinary approach.
Fiebeger’s answer was cold and final. “Unnecessary, in the present scheme.”
MacArthur’s answer was to ask Ganoe if there was anything else on the agenda, and on learning there was not, he announced the board meeting was at an end.40
Afterward, back in his office, Mac shook his head with a puzzled smile.
“Old practices die hard,” he told Ganoe. “I wish some of these elderly gentlemen had been with me a little in France.” They would have learned the importance of knowing what’s happening on your right and left flanks, he said. One’s survival depends on it.
“I am unable to declare why the same principle is not applicable to a curriculum,” he declared. Right now cadets went from one class to another like a traveler going from one town to the next with nothing tying them together. “It’s a lot of loose bricks without mortar,” MacArthur concluded, and he was out to see if that could be changed.41
And with that, the battle was on.
—
MacArthur started his war with the West Point establishment with what he called some personal reconnaissance. He began sitting in on classes, the first and only time Ganoe remembered a superintendent actually going to find out what was happening, and visiting professors in their offices. The reaction ran from outrage to surprised delight, but either way MacArthur was unconcerned. He was learning what he had to know in order to do battle, just as he had with trench raids during the war. Once, as he left his office to head for another class, he called out, “I’m getting an education. I don’t know yet how liberal!”42
It also gave him a chance to meet some of the cadets, whose reactions to the new superintendent and war hero were varied. Some found him rather aloof, “walking across the Diagonal Walk, apparently lost in thought, his nose in the air, gazing at distant horizons.”43 Marty Maher, the legendary athletic trainer at the academy for more than half a century, said cadets “could always count on him for a square deal.” There was one embarrassing and potentially humiliating incident involving an editorial in the cadet newspaper, whose student editor casually took it upon himself to criticize aspects of MacArthur’s leadership. MacArthur was furious—not just at the insubordination, but also that the paper had leaked the fact that some at West Point were unhappy with the new superintendent, in a form that might reach higher-ups at the War Department. He ordered every last newspaper confiscated before the issue left the grounds—and personally fired the paper’s faculty advisor.44
The staff, too, got mixed messages from their new boss. When Army beat Navy in baseball, cadets poured out that night onto the grounds, marching and shouting past MacArthur’s quarters to Fort Clinton, where they built an enormous bonfire.
The next morning MacArthur summoned Commandant Danford.
“Well, Com, that was quite a party last night.”
“Yes, it was, sir—quite a party!” Danford answered.
“How many did you skin?” the superintendent asked, meaning “punish.”
Danford shot back, “Not a one!”
“Good!” MacArthur said, banging his fist on his desk for emphasis.
“You know, Com, I could hardly resist the impulse to get out and join them!”45
A less pleasant encounter was with a professor who wanted two of his instructors replaced—a request that normally went without question at the Point. MacArthur, however, smelled several rats, as he told his chief of staff—including a lack of due process, tradition or no tradition. When he confronted the professor directly as to why he wanted the instructors fired, he could give no answer except that they were mediocre.
“Sir,” MacArthur answered sharply, “we’ll always have the mediocre with us. They are in the majority. We have a decided duty to develop them in order to better and leaven the whole….We must not strive for ready-made perfection. We must construct it. I have every confidence,” he said with a smile as he showed the man the door, “that with your kind of personality you can elevate these two instructors till they’ll be above par.”46
Request denied. MacArthur may have saved two instructors from an injustice—but he had also made an enemy of their senior professor.
“The professors are so secure, they have become set and smug,” he complained to his confidant Ganoe. “They deliver the same schedule year after year with the blessed unction that they have reached the zenith in education.”47
It was MacArthur’s fate that his impatience to reform the curriculum alienated those who would have to carry it out. Change at West Point required careful consensus building; MacArthur’s leadership style ran in the opposite direction. Indeed, he was learning that things got done best when he could handpick his staff. Otherwise, he tended to make as many opponents as he did converts to his vision of what must be done.
In the meantime, the battle for hearts and minds kept swinging back to the Academy Board.
It resisted any attempt to overhaul the curriculum and grew increasingly furious at his interference, no matter how well intended or well informed—or well supported from above. He did have his supporters club on the board, like Commandant Danford and Colonel Holt. But the pro-MacArthur party was too small in number, and too inexperienced in the ways of West Point, to make a difference. MacArthur found that suggesting even minor changes in classroom procedure, like introducing the slide rule to science (or natural philosophy) classes, met with a wall of uncomprehending resistance. Even the abolition of Cadet Summer Camp threatened to stir a major revolt, and MacArthur reluctantly had to pull back.
This Côte de Châtillon refused to be taken by frontal assault. So MacArthur reverted to guerrilla warfare. When his aide Lewis Hibbs asked whether he should schedule a board meeting for the usual 11 A.M., MacArthur angrily said no. “Call the meeting at 4:30 pm. I want them to come here hungry—and I’ll keep them there till I get what I want.”48
Still, the battle spilled out into the open only once, when one of the die-hard older professors began badgering MacArthur at a faculty meeting. He uttered remarks, Danford remembered, that “bordered on the insubordinate,” as the rest of the faculty shifted uneasily in their chairs and stared at their shoes. Finally MacArthur could take it no longer.
“Sit down, Sir,” he barked. “I’m talking.” Danford, MacArthur’s ally, considered it a “wholesome lesson” for the entire faculty. But it’s not clear that anything useful came from it, then or later.49
In the end, MacArthur’s hopes of overhauling the West Point curriculum, with up-to-date offerings in English and history, and the creation of a whole new battery of courses from psychology and sociology to political science and economics, had to wait several more years.50 Instead, during his short, stormy tenure of less than three years, he had to be content with the smaller victories.
He managed to get only a single combined course in economics and American government, and a few extra classroom hours of English past the board.
—
But in 1921 it did give way on certain vital points. There was no more Fort Clinton summer camp; cade
ts spent their summers at Fort Dix instead for more serious military instruction. MacArthur forced the board to liberalize the regulations on the use of leave, which he had seen as important so that cadets could learn about the civilians they would one day lead in battle.
Two other changes were important to MacArthur personally.
One was hazing. MacArthur hoped to see it eliminated, or at least no longer receive any hint of official sanction.51 On New Year’s Day 1919 a plebe named Stephen Bird had committed suicide under the barrage of abuse from upperclassmen; MacArthur called together a meeting of first classmen to discuss possible changes in the system. But even MacArthur’s authority and charm, including handing out cigarettes to the classmen (forbidden under regulations), could not get them to budge. Nor could he get Beast Barracks, the three-week boot camp that upperclassmen ran for incoming cadets, abolished—although he and Commandant Danford agreed that its round-the-clock brutality gave cadets entirely the wrong idea of what army discipline was about.
Finally, he and Danford worked out a plan to put Beast Barracks under the command of commissioned officers instead of upperclassmen. “The alumni set up a howl,” as Stephen Ambrose noted, but the plan stuck while MacArthur was superintendent.52
MacArthur’s other big change in cadet behavior was setting up an Honor Committee and a written honor code. The honor system, that a cadet’s word is always accepted and that he is expected to tell the truth at all times, had been part of West Point going back to 1817 and the academy’s Moses, Sylvanus Thayer. But a written code backed by an Honor Committee that could investigate and adjudicate but left punishment to higher-ups was an innovation that made the system not only more fair but more transparent. It may have been MacArthur’s single longest-lasting reform during his years as superintendent, with the possible exception of sports.53
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