MacArthur had adored organized team sports during his cadet years, and he saw it as an important adjunct to training a cadre of military officers. “Nothing brings out the qualities of leadership, mental and muscular coordination, aggressiveness, and courage more quickly,” he liked to say.54 In addition to breathing new life into the official football and baseball programs, MacArthur set in motion a whole new system of intramural sports, including hockey, tennis, golf, and polo. The competition proved so tough that the games were soon known as “Intra-murder” sports. MacArthur was delighted, however, and wrote up four lines of poetry that he had carved on the stone portals leading to the gymnasium:
Upon the fields of friendly strife
Are sown the seeds
That, upon other fields, on other days
Will bear the fruits of victory.
That motto is still there to this day.55
—
In other battles, especially with Congress, MacArthur was less successful.
He pushed hard for more money for new buildings, including a new stadium, and for doubling of the size of the Corps. He lost on both counts.
But as 1922 began, the superintendent of West Point had other things on his mind.
He was getting married.
—
She was Louise Cromwell Brooks, a wealthy, attractive divorcée who was the stepdaughter of one of America’s richest men, Edward T. Stotesbury, and the ex-wife of another rich businessman, Walter Brooks. She had spent the war years in Paris with her two children; there she became a popular party girl in Parisian society and, in the words of historian Carol Petillo, “an early flapper.”56
At one of those parties she met a handsome American army officer who took an immediate fancy to her vivacious personality and well-rounded physical charms. He was no one less than John J. Pershing, commander of the AEF, and when he returned to Washington, D.C., after the war, she returned to the States as well. She became Pershing’s official hostess, and there were even reports that they might get married.57
It was not to be. In September 1921 she was in New York City and joined a party of army officers who were driving up to West Point for the day. There she met another handsome officer, the superintendent of West Point, who was seventeen years Pershing’s junior and, unlike Pershing, seemed to be interested in something more than a casual relationship.
Indeed, Douglas MacArthur fell hopelessly and helplessly in love, almost at first sight. In October she was back in New York and staying at the Ritz-Carlton, and invited him to come down for a visit. He had to decline, as he had a series of conferences scheduled with the Academy Board that was going to demand his full attention.58 But from that moment on, he was hooked. His courtship of the wealthy, vivacious divorcée became virtually an obsession for him, and he poured all the yearnings and romantic emotional baggage he had been carrying for decades into the relationship. For the very first time, his mother moved into the background as the most important woman in his life.
“I [have] now come to the end of the Rainbow—to find you,” he wrote to Louise on October 15, after she had returned to Washington.
I have followed that arc of light in childish delight, hoping to find at the other end of the bow the way, and the truth, and the light. And now face to face with destiny, dazzled and blinded with the glory I have come upon, I can but mumble incoherently my thanks to a God that guided my faltering steps.
What did Louise, the sophisticated flapper, make of this romantic gush?
We have the answer in her own handwriting, at the bottom of the letter: “After our second meeting and we were engaged!”59
What MacArthur’s mother made of this whirlwind courtship, this intrusion of another woman into the intimate relationship she enjoyed with her son, is another matter. Douglas himself, it seems, was oblivious to the disruption it represented—or the drastic change that marriage would represent for a forty-one-year-old bachelor. Instead, “Are you really mine, you beautiful white soul,” he wrote the first week of November, “you mirth-making child—you passion-breeding woman—you tender-hearted angel—you divine giver of delight…You sweet altar of Old Fashioned Roses.”60
It’s not difficult to infer that his relations with Louise involved his first sex with a woman, or at least the first that counted. Louise would later claim that Douglas was a virgin when she met him.61 It must also have been a strange, if exciting, encounter for her to have this charismatic and virile national war hero all but eating out of her hand—and a sexual novice as well. In any case, she seems to have been as smitten as he was, and plans were made for a wedding in January 1922.
Meanwhile, from her bedroom in the superintendent’s house his mother maintained a stony silence.
As preparations got under way, the “mirth-making child” began making inquiries about the man she was about to marry. First she spoke to General Pershing. Whatever sense of disappointment he may have felt at watching his hostess and paramour carried away by a younger rival—one with whom he had rocky relations himself—we can only guess. MacArthur wrote an angry letter when he learned what Pershing told her in response.
“I hate cowardice in a man,” MacArthur told Louise, “and this is evidence of just that. He is trying to break your spirit. Don’t let him.”
What had Pershing said? He had evidently revealed to Louise something that even MacArthur’s mother had not known.
Douglas MacArthur had once been engaged to another woman.
—
To this day no one has found out her last name. We know her simply as Ramona, a young woman MacArthur met in Panama in 1911 when he and a fellow officer were on a brief tour of duty in the Canal Zone. “Ramona was very charming and gracious to us,” he told Louise, “and made our stay of four weeks very attractive.” A “flirtation” sprang up, he confessed, and after his father died Ramona came to see him in Washington, D.C.
“I was in mourning,” MacArthur explained, “not going out and used to drop in on Ramona about twice a week.” He thought theirs was a friendship, he said; Ramona, it seemed, had other ideas. She was the “victim of one of those real infatuations which amount almost to a disease.”
“I had no love for her but I was shocked at my responsibility,” he wrote.
To clear his conscience, he tried to summon up the courage to propose, but “I could not do so.” Then on his return from his secret mission to Mexico, he learned to his shock that Ramona was telling everyone they were engaged to be married. He had sent her postcards while in Mexico, and “there might have been letters,” but nothing was said that warranted her belief they were about to be bride and groom.
When he went to see her to tell the truth, there was a painful scene.
“She charged that my indifference was due to association with lewd women,” he told Louise, hastily adding, “this was untrue. She had by this time become violent with me.”62
He never gave her a ring, he told Louise, and made no formal proposal. “My part in the affair was characterized by inexperience, vacillation, and weakness. I was young and careless and was plunged into tragedy before realizing it.” His one regret was that he had hoped Louise would be spared “this sickening recital.”
As for now, “You are the only love of my life, the only woman I have ever coveted or desired to wed,” he wrote, “and at the last God will bear me true witness of this in the final day of Judgment.”63
It was an impressive, if embarrassing, confession to make—especially coming from a man who believed he could never show any flaw or mistake in judgment, on or off the battlefield, without ruining the image of perfection he was supposed to live up to: that of his father. We don’t have Louise’s reply, but it’s obvious that a chill set in on their relationship. And in mid-December Louise sent him a letter that said it was time to postpone the wedding until the following summer.
MacArthur wrote a long, pleading letter in response. She had agreed to marry him in January, then changed it to April. Now came this. He protested.
“We can no longer drift.” He argued that the summer would be too late; before then he expected to be under orders to leave West Point. “I must pack, must sort our things,” and “I cannot do so when everything is so nebulous.”
“I pray to God,” the letter ended, “that the divine spark will cause you to rise over obstacles—they are really small when analyzed—and give with the generosity of the Queen you are.”64
Louise acquiesced. On January 15, 1922, they announced their engagement, and they were married on February 14—Valentine’s Day. The ceremony wasn’t at West Point but in Palm Beach at El Mirasol, Louise’s stepfather’s estate. It was a chastened bride and a stern groom who marched down the aisle between the two hundred guests. They had had a brief but fierce fight just before the ceremony, when Douglas arrived in his dress whites and medals and found Louise casually standing on a stepladder hanging decorations. She didn’t even know where her chiffon dress and diamonds were, but she reacted badly when MacArthur delivered a scolding lecture on the importance of being prompt.
It was, as biographer William Manchester notes, an omen.65 In any case, the ceremony went off without a hitch and the newspapers carried the headline MARRIAGE OF MARS AND MILLIONS.66 Of the two hundred guests, however, there was one in particular who was missing. It was Douglas’s mother, Pinky. She had flatly refused to attend. Instead, she was back at West Point, supervising the packing.
This was because two weeks after his engagement, MacArthur had learned that General Pershing was removing him as superintendent of West Point.
CHAPTER 9
THE TUMULTUOUS YEARS
With you I live for the first time.
Without you I die for the last time.
—DOUGLAS MACARTHUR TO LOUISE CROMWELL BROOKS, NOVEMBER 1921
Douglas MacArthur saw his work at the academy as a success.
“My work of reconstruction is almost done,” he had told Louise the second week of the previous November. “I have made West Point almost human and in so doing I have turned the enormous resentments that greeted [me] at the end of the war into words of sympathy and praise….Long after I am dead and moulding the Corps will call me Father of West Point.”1
Later historians like Stephen Ambrose tend to agree. Few thought so at the time, however, and MacArthur seems to have had an inkling that his days as superintendent were increasingly numbered. The fact that the order relieving him of command came from Pershing himself led many to wonder if it was the act of a jilted suitor—so much so that Black Jack had to make a statement to the press denying that the motive was personal. “It’s all poppycock,” he said, “without the slightest foundation.” It was time for General MacArthur to move on for foreign command duty, he explained, and Pershing had found the perfect post for him: the Philippines.2
Did Pershing act out of personal as well as sexual spite? No real evidence supports that conclusion; in fact, the bulk of evidence points the other way. In his letter ordering MacArthur’s transfer, Pershing expressed his own dissatisfaction with MacArthur’s actions as superintendent, especially his agreeing to testify on Capitol Hill about the West Point budget without notifying either Pershing or the secretary of war.3 In any case, the opposition to what MacArthur was doing at West Point was growing so intense, both inside and outside the academy, that it was inconceivable he would end up serving the usual four-year term as superintendent.
It was in many ways ironic, almost tragic: In trying to carry out Peyton March’s wishes for reform, MacArthur had managed to alienate virtually every important constituency at the Point, including many of the cadets themselves. Lacking sufficient support from his superiors, he had seen some of his most important reforms reversed, while others were stuck in abeyance. He also knew his successor, Fred Winchester Sladen, would try to undo as many of the others as he could. “I fancy [Sladen’s appointment] means a reversal of many of the progressive policies which we inaugurated,” he wrote gloomily.4
And so in late June 1922 MacArthur vacated the superintendent’s house, while his mother moved into the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., with his brother Arthur and his family. Pinky’s health was not strong: The few notes she penned during those years that survive show a deteriorating, spidery handwriting.
No one felt she was up to sailing away to the Philippines, and the idea of her, Douglas, and Louise sharing a long voyage across the Pacific was unappealing to all of them.
There is, however, a famous photograph of her from that time, showing her gazing adoringly at a picture of her son that she is holding—no, embracing—in her arms. If her son was determined to make this mistake and marry this woman, she would still think no less of him, the picture says. And if after a few years in the Philippines he did realize he had made a mistake, his mother would stand by him—and give him the support and strength he would need to sever ties with the wife he called his “pulsing, passion flower.”
The loving couple sailed from San Francisco on September 25. “My leaving West Point is a matter of complete indifference to me,” he had told Louise. “On the ashes of Old West Point I have built a New West Point—strong, virile, and enduring.” And indeed, even his fiercest critics have had to agree that what he did at West Point marked a major transformation for the better—and laid the foundations of the academy that trained the officer corps that successfully led the United States Army to victory in World War Two.
All the same, it was not a happy Douglas MacArthur who was returning to the Philippines.
In addition to ending his assignment to West Point on a distinctly sour note, he was also saddled with a less-than-glowing new efficiency report for his personnel file written by his old nemesis, General Pershing.
Pershing’s rating of his performance and knowledge was “above average,” which in the Army means mediocre. He called MacArthur “a very able young officer with a fine record for courage” but said he “has an exalted opinion of himself.” MacArthur was someone whom he had once recommended for promotion to major general. But now Pershing reversed himself. There should be no promotion, he stated, and of the forty-six active brigadier generals in the army, Pershing rated him no better than thirty-eighth—a bitter and as Geoffrey Perret has remarked, unwarranted downgrading.5
To what degree personal bitterness over Louise may have influenced Black Jack’s judgment is, of course, impossible to determine. But whatever the reasons, Pershing’s judgment would have confirmed the unhappy impression that MacArthur had been fired as superintendent. MacArthur must have seen returning to the Philippines as a kind of exile, perhaps even the beginning of the end of his career.
No wonder, then, that his return to the Philippines occupies one of the shortest passages in his memoirs: barely four paragraphs for nearly two and a half years. In many ways, it was the lowest point of his life. Yet it would be crucial to the making of his future and the future of the Philippines.
The presence of Louise did not help his overall mood. MacArthur’s professional troubles were increasingly compounded by personal ones. On the voyage out, her children treated their new stepfather with a distant coolness that he returned with interest.
Then there was the luggage issue. Douglas and Louise were traveling with one hundred army officers and forty army wives, including sixteen other newlyweds. Since MacArthur was the ranking officer, his luggage went on the ship first. Unfortunately, Louise had brought so many trunks, hatboxes, and suitcases that the other officers and their wives were limited to one trunk each—and so many automobiles that there was no room in the cargo hold for even a single Model T.6 Thanks to Louise, Douglas was already the most unpopular American officer in the Philippines before he even stepped off the boat.
Still, there were signs of hope when they landed. The moment he disembarked in Manila Harbor, under “the massive bluff of Bataan and the lean grey grimness of Corregidor,” he was amazed at the “the progress that had been made” since he had left Luzon as a lieutenant in 1904. “New roads, new docks, new buildings were ever
ywhere.”7 There was a new legislature, too, the Philippines’ first, headed by its energetic, idealistic young president and MacArthur’s acquaintance from twenty years ago, Manuel Quezon.
Quezon was preoccupied with charting his own independent course as nationalist leader and avoiding being seen as a tool of American imperialist interests. Indeed, his ultimate goal was full and complete independence, and in 1919 he had gone to Washington to lobby for it. President Wilson and Congress had rebuffed his efforts, but Quezon—and MacArthur—believed the weight of history was on his side.8
The other hopeful sign was the presence of MacArthur’s old mentor, General Leonard Wood, now governor-general of the Philippines. He greeted his protégé warmly, and then the two of them sat in Wood’s office with the electric fan whirring from the ceiling, while the general waxed eloquent on the progress the Philippines had made since MacArthur had last seen it.
“Peace and order reign in every province and archipelago,” Wood would have proudly told him. Even the fearsome Moros, the last bastion of resistance during the insurgency that Douglas’s father had fought, are “now a peaceful people.” Wood was more worried about “the ravages of the business depression” that had descended on the Philippines after the “sudden stoppage of war demands” for Philippine hemp and coconut oil.
Since 1919, Wood stated, the situation had been bad. “Unemployment prevailed, credit deflation continued, monetary circulation fell off, bank deposits decreased, imports diminished, while exports increased.” Nor was he very sympathetic to the Quezon-led push for independence. Quite apart from the issue of whether the Filipinos as a people were ready for it, it wasn’t clear to Wood how it would help to solve the economic downturn, which he believed ultimately couldn’t be overcome without direct U.S. help.9
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