—
Despite all their high hopes, the trip was not a success. Although MacArthur did not realize it at the time, it probably sowed the seeds of later misunderstandings, as well as future disaster.
The troubles began in Los Angeles. Quezon insisted on staying several weeks, much to MacArthur’s annoyance. The Philippine president wanted to visit Hollywood, where he met Clark Gable and other stars, before finally agreeing to travel on to New York. There he made a disastrous speech at the Foreign Policy Association. Quezon had hoped to speak to an audience who was sympathetic to the defense of the Philippines and to Philippine independence; instead he was hit with hostile questions about whether the creation of a Philippine army would needlessly provoke Japan; whether he was squandering the country’s wealth on weapons of war; even whether he was comfortable teaching Filipino children “to kill.”
Quezon was incensed. At one point he retorted in a bellowing shout, “If I believed the Philippines could not defend itself, I would commit suicide this afternoon.” Afterward he reproached MacArthur for leading him into a roomful of “liberal pacifists” and not explaining the threats the Philippines faced. MacArthur did not fare much better. He was feted at a dinner where the lead speaker, a retired army general, made a jocular remark about the new Philippine field marshal’s uniform resembling that of a washroom attendant. The audience laughed appreciatively while MacArthur sat white-faced, staring into space.
In Washington, MacArthur later remembered, “Quezon was practically ignored.” Quezon wandered the halls of Congress trying to extract promises for his most important goal, his country’s independence. Most were unsympathetic; some were overtly hostile. Even those who supported the idea of independence could not foresee it happening before 1946.49 MacArthur went to the War Department to get some munitions for his fledgling army, and here, too, he met a wall of resistance and incomprehension. “My request for supplies and equipment went unheeded,” MacArthur remembered.50
Worst of all, the White House refused to receive President Quezon. Stunned, MacArthur asked why. There was no response; possibly Roosevelt decided a foreign dignitary who preferred to spend several weeks in Hollywood and then New York City probably wasn’t in a hurry to see Roosevelt, so why should Roosevelt be anxious to see him? Finally, though, he relented—sort of.
He was willing to clear five minutes on his schedule to meet MacArthur to discuss the matter.
MacArthur was outraged, but agreed.
The five-minute meeting actually lasted two hours. The two men smiled and laughed and argued, then argued more heatedly, then laughed and smiled. The upshot was that Roosevelt agreed to meet with Quezon at a luncheon in the next two weeks, although he assured MacArthur that he had no plans to grant the Philippines independence. MacArthur took what he could get, and they parted amicably.
The luncheon was as unsatisfactory as anyone would have expected. Quezon demanded FDR’s support for independence by December 31, 1938; Roosevelt said no. He added he couldn’t see granting independence in 1939 either. It was a tight-lipped, deeply disappointed Quezon who left the White House luncheon, disappointed but also disillusioned by the lack of support he was able to wring from his American supposed protectors—including MacArthur.
In April he set off for Mexico City; he would go on to a tour of Europe, not returning to the Philippines until August.
MacArthur, meanwhile, headed back to Manila with his aide, Captain Davis. The trip had been a bitter disappointment for him, as well. Even worse, the 1937 trip had driven an unexpected wedge of distrust between him and Quezon, which would grow until it reached chasmlike proportions.
There had been only two highlights for MacArthur. The first was the decision by the navy to send him help. He could have a flotilla of patrol torpedo or PT boats, they said; they hoped they would come in handy. MacArthur was grateful; it was better than nothing at all.
The other came after a phone call he made to Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
—
The call came as no surprise to Jean. They had spoken by phone almost every day since getting back to America. That Friday morning, however, MacArthur had a special request.
“Quezon has finally made his plans,” he said, “and I have to go back to Manila. Can you get to New York City?”
Jean said yes, and then waited until her sister Angie came home from her job at the Murfreesboro Power and Light Company for lunch before dropping a bombshell of her own.
“Angie,” she exclaimed, “I’m going to New York City to marry General MacArthur!”51
It was true. They had been secretly engaged for almost five months, after that quiet conversation in his Intramuros office when he had proposed. There was “no bended knee, or anything,” she remembered afterward—just a solemn request that she marry him, and then an equally solemn request that she keep it secret until he could return from his trip with Quezon and organize his affairs so that she could come out and join him in the Philippines.
Now the moment had come. Jean packed her bags, and her sister and aunt saw her off to the train station. They would not see her again for fourteen years.52
Arriving at Penn Station in New York, she was met by Tommy Davis, who took her to the Astor Hotel, where the general had rented a suite for her to change, and then they set off together for City Hall.
There was no elaborate church wedding, no display of pomp and circumstance, no double row of officers in dress uniforms holding swords on high for the bride and groom to pass under.
There were just the four of them: Jean, MacArthur, Tommy Davis, and Dr. Hutter, his mother’s former physician. Afterward they adjourned for breakfast at the Astor. But the press still got wind of what was up, and a clutch of reporters and photographers had gathered outside the hotel lobby.
“This is going to last a long time,” MacArthur told them. And so it did. Later MacArthur said, “[I]t was probably the best decision of my life.”
It was April 30, 1937. Jean and Douglas MacArthur would remain virtually inseparable for the next twenty-seven years. She would be his constant companion in war and peacetime. He would arrange to have her by his side throughout the entire Second World War, as well as the war in Korea. He had at last found the intimate advisor and emotional prop he had been missing since the death of his mother. Someone who would make his every need her need; someone to reassure him through every crisis and moment of self-doubt, and support him through every difficult decision; someone who could advise him on how to handle perplexing people, and could even handle them herself.
But someone who was also a wife and sexual companion, and mother of his children. It was a moment of personal triumph at a time of growing professional frustration, a pledge of future happiness no matter what else happened.
Meanwhile, events were unfolding that ensured he was going to need that pledge.
—
In July 1937 fighting broke out between Chinese and Japanese forces on either side of the Marco Polo Bridge in Manchuria. Although no one knew it yet, the Second World War had just begun.
As the fighting increased, the balance of victory quickly shifted in Japan’s favor. Chinese Kuomintang armies were sent reeling in retreat while their foes, the Chinese Communists, retreated deep into the mountains. Meanwhile the Japanese unleashed all the terrible furies of modern war, including the indiscriminate bombing of cities and civilians, as well as the fury of a racist imperialist rage.
In December 1937 they occupied the Chinese capital, Nanking, as Japanese soldiers went on an orgy of killing, rape, and unspeakable bloodlust. More than 300,000 Chinese civilians were murdered, many of them women after being repeatedly and brutally raped. Even the Nazi ambassador in Nanking was horrified, and wrote a letter protesting what he called “the work of bestial machinery.”
Roosevelt had already bracketed Japan with the other international aggressors, Germany and Italy, in his “quarantine” speech in November, setting the stage for economic sanctions against the island empire. But
there was no stopping the Japanese military juggernaut now. In March 1938 the Japanese parliament, or Diet, was dissolved; Japan’s generals and admirals were now in full control of the country as the last vestige of the rule of law disappeared from the political scene.
On October 21 Japanese troops swept into Canton, and on the 25th into Hankow. They had taken Shanghai the previous November after a four-month siege. Foochow on the Taiwan Strait had already fallen; Swatow, the port city east of Hong Kong, was clearly next. Chinese forces were now virtually cut off from their east coast, and although Roosevelt pledged $50 million in aid to support Chiang Kai-shek, if Swatow fell it was not clear how that aid, or any other help, could reach him.
The occupation of China’s coastline as far as Foochow also meant that Japanese forces were now closer than ever to Luzon and the Philippines.
If war did come, only a few miles of ocean would protect its inhabitants now.
—
For MacArthur, 1938 opened with the gathering threat to the Philippines from the west, but also deteriorating relations with those he relied upon for his plans for the defense of the Philippines, starting with Dwight Eisenhower.
He had returned to Manila with his bride in May, to take up married residence in his penthouse apartment. Virtually everybody who was anybody in Manila already knew Jean; the verdict regarding their betrothal was overwhelmingly positive. But she found her plush new surroundings a bit trying. Like a true Southerner, she loved the heat and found the penthouse’s central air-conditioning far too cold for her taste. She wound up installing a series of hidden electric heaters around the apartment, so that she could secretly warm her feet and toes while visitors complained how hot Manila was, and how they cherished the air-conditioning running full blast.53
They had barely recovered from the first blush of married bliss when the bad news began to pour across MacArthur’s desk. The first 20,000 reservists had graduated from the first five-month training program. While MacArthur pronounced the men fit and the program a success, Eisenhower and Ord knew otherwise. Almost none of the graduates could do even the minimum tasks the program was supposed to prepare them for, largely because most of the training had been spent doing remedial work like getting the men used to living in barracks, using bathrooms and other modern facilities, and learning how to read rudimentary English—while even basic supplies and equipment had been entirely missing.54
In any case, the training budget of 16 million pesos was clearly too low. MacArthur told Eisenhower that they had been promised another 30 million pesos to finance the mobilization, but neither he nor Ike really believed the money would ever be forthcoming.55
Then had come disconcerting news from Washington. It had been decided that MacArthur should return to the United States at the end of 1937 to assume a new army command. The order came from Chief of Staff Malin Craig, but it was obvious the real force behind the move was MacArthur’s critics, especially Murphy and Secretary Ickes. They wanted to short-circuit any further moves by MacArthur to build up the defenses of the Philippines; even his ally General Holbrook would not be against removal of the man who had become an increasing source of friction over men and resources.56 Pershing and others in the army also thought if MacArthur was no further along in organizing his vaunted Philippine army, it was time for him to come home.
That left MacArthur with a painful choice. He could uproot himself and Jean and abandon his great project by returning to the States; or he could quit the army—or to put it more accurately, retire. After much soul-searching, that was the choice he made. He sat at his desk and composed a letter he had never imagined he would have to submit. He wrote that since his health was failing (a total lie), and it was time to make way for younger, more deserving officers (also clearly a contradiction of his own view of things), he had decided to retire from the army after thirty-four years of unbroken service. On October 11, 1937, Craig told MacArthur that President Roosevelt had accepted his request.57
It had been a gut-wrenching decision. To leave the United States Army, to abandon the institution to which first his father and then he himself had dedicated his life, required a decision he could never have made a year before. There is no doubt that if it hadn’t been for his marriage to Jean, he would never have made it. She had given him the confidence to make the most crucial career choice he had made since he had been superintendent at West Point—to take risks he had never dared to take before. He was leaving the most powerful institution in his life, in order to forge a new future.
Still, across the water there must have been many who celebrated the choice he had made, not least Franklin Roosevelt. The man whom he had once feared as a political rival had not only exiled himself in the Philippines; MacArthur had now voluntarily severed the formal ties between himself and the United States. It was a happy yet magnanimous president who sent a message from the White House to Manila:
Dear Douglas: With great reluctance and deep regret I have approved your application for retirement, effective December 31. Personally, as well as officially, I wish to thank you for your outstanding services to your country. Your record in war and in peace is a brilliant chapter of American history….I count on seeing you as soon as you get back.58
Of course, Roosevelt assumed Douglas MacArthur would never come back. He was sure, as they all were at the War Department and the State Department, which had labored hard to deny him any support, that they would never have to see him again—or that they would only when he had had enough of his failed experiment of creating a genuine Philippine army.
Yet MacArthur would fool them all. He wasn’t prepared to declare failure by a long shot. Instead, he was about to dig himself in deeper, in order to fulfill a promise—even though those to whom he made the promise were also losing faith in him.
One was President Quezon. MacArthur’s resignation from the United States Army should have been a sign of his unqualified commitment to helping the Philippines arm for war. Douglas MacArthur was now all in, as the phrase has it, and no one should have been more appreciative than his friend Quezon.
Yet Quezon drew the opposite conclusion. On the last day of 1937, he reappointed MacArthur as military advisor to the president. Deeply moved, MacArthur answered, “This is a call of duty I cannot fail.”59 But to Quezon, MacArthur’s resignation meant the end of his usefulness to the Philippines. As an active army officer, he had been Quezon’s link to the powers in Washington. Now he was no more than field marshal of the Philippine Army—or more cruelly, a glorified drill instructor for Philippine Army trainees. A thought began to take root in the deep recesses of Quezon’s mind: perhaps giving his friend command as military advisor had been a mistake.
The other was Dwight Eisenhower. The issue broke in January 1938 when MacArthur decided that what his new Philippine Army needed was a parade.
It was time, MacArthur told Eisenhower and Jimmy Ord, to demonstrate to the Philippine people—which really meant the residents of Manila—that their hard-earned investment in a fighting army had been worth the money. The way to do that was with a parade through the streets of the capital by the men he and Eisenhower had trained—a kind of Grand Army of the Republic parade of the sort that his father had been part of after the Civil War, and that Bill Donovan’s Fighting Sixty-seventh had led down Fifth Avenue in New York, to cheers and fanfare and the promise that a new future had dawned.
Eisenhower was not convinced. It would be expensive and chew up a military budget that was shrinking, he said. He did not add that the budget was bound to shrink further now that MacArthur no longer had any active ties to the War Department or the United States Army—indeed, his former friend General Holbrook was all too happy to cut him loose. MacArthur overruled him. But when Quezon learned of the plan, he was furious.60 “The president was horrified to think that we were ready for a costly national parade in the capital,” Eisenhower remembered. Quezon saw it as a perfectly fruitless waste of public money, and castigated MacArthur for even suggesting it.
There was a scene, an ugly one.
“General, all you’re saying is that I’m a liar, and I am not a liar,” Eisenhower remembered saying. “So I’d like to go back to the United States right away.”
MacArthur tried to placate his irate lieutenant. According to Eisenhower, he threw an arm around Ike’s shoulder and said, “It’s fun to see that Dutch temper take you over. It’s just a misunderstanding, and let’s let it go at that.”62
But Ike could not. For him, the string of misadventures in the Philippines had finally run their course. Likewise for Tommy Davis, who with Ike’s help transferred back to the States.63 Jimmy Ord had no choice in the matter. Later that same January he was killed in a plane crash. “From then on most of the planning fell on my shoulders,” Eisenhower later remembered. Nothing had essentially changed, “but without my friend, all the zest was gone”—especially when he had lost his respect for his commanding officer.64
So there it was. While MacArthur looked for a replacement for one key subordinate, the competent, popular Ord, he had to digest the fact that, rightly or wrongly, his decision to shift the blame for an idea that had triggered a violent reaction from Quezon had now alienated his other key subordinate. These were not happy times for his command.
Eisenhower was headed back to the States anyway, to make one last desperate plea for money and equipment. On the one hand, he and MacArthur had needed a break from each other, and it was a relief to see his wife, Mamie; on the other, it was obvious that as the drums of war beat louder not only in Asia but in Europe as well, the War Department was reluctant to yield up materiel to the Philippines that it might need itself in the event of war.
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