American Caesar Page 6

  Still, he went out in style. So melodramatic was his exit, in fact, that it borders on the incredible; one’s skepticism is overcome only by the presence at the event of several newspapermen, whose accounts confirm one another. MacArthur had often said that much as he prized the Medal of Honor, what he really wanted was to die at the head of his regiment. The 24th Wisconsin’s annual reunion was to be held in Milwaukee on the evening of Thursday, September 5, 1912. Only ninety survivors of Missionary Ridge were still alive. Their commander was home ill, but when word reached him that Governor Francis E. McGovern would be unable to address them, MacArthur rose from his bed. His doctor and his wife protested—it was the hottest day of that summer—but he went, trudged to the lectern, and led their memories back through the early 1860s. He began his summation: “Your indomitable regiment . . .” Then he swayed and fell to the floor. Dr. William J. Cronyn, who had been the 24th’s surgeon, darted up and examined him. “Comrades,” he said, “the General is dying.” Led by the Reverend Paul B. Jenkins, who had been their chaplain, the ninety veterans knelt around MacArthur and recited the Lord’s Prayer. When they had finished, the doctor pronounced their leader dead. Captain Edwin Parsons slowly rose, took from the wall the tattered flag Arthur had carried to the heights over Chattanooga, and wrapped the body in it. Then Parsons faltered and fell across the general. Two weeks later he too was dead.54

  Pinky went into shock; her two sons arrived to arrange the funeral. While they were carrying out this sad duty, Arthur III learned that his destroyer had been awarded a navy pennant for excellence. “It came too late,” he sadly told Douglas, who understood; honors which could not be shared with their father seemed meaningless. Their mother, once she had recovered from her own grief, took another view. She expected her boys to be faithful to his memory and proud for her sake also. Henceforth she would be their chief inspiration, reminding them as long as she lived that they must be a credit to their father. And so they were. Before his premature death of appendicitis on December 2, 1923, Arthur III, handsome and mustachioed, would win a Navy Cross, a Distinguished Service Medal, a captain’s commission, and the command of a battleship. Douglas, of course, was destined to outshine everyone in the family, though there is reason to believe that he was never reconciled to his father’s death. To the end of his days he would be susceptible to flattery of every other sort, but any suggestion that his achievements surpassed those of the first General MacArthur—as they plainly did—would only anger him. Of his father’s collapse at that reunion he would say: “My whole world changed that night. Never have I been able to heal the wound in my heart.”55

  ONE

  Ruffles and Flourishes

  1880-1917

  “My first recollection,” Douglas MacArthur was fond of saying, “is that of a bugle call.” One wonders. It is too pat, too appropriate, too precisely what his first recollection should have been. Moreover, it conflicts with his Reminiscences, in which he writes that his “first memories” are of the three-hundred-mile march from Fort Selden to Fort Wingate, in which he “trudged” with “veteran First Sergeant Peter Ripley” at “the head of the column”—though this is even less likely, since he was just four years old at the time. The fact that his remembrances of his childhood are unreliable does not, however, mean that they are not valuable. Quite the contrary; they provide an excellent illustration of the rose-colored nimbus through which he always viewed the army, and particularly the frontier army of the 1880s, whose values and standards he would cherish to the end of his life. For him the hardship posts of the Southwest would always be inhabited by lanky men in dusty blue, by bearded scouts and sweating stallions exuding a pungent sweat, by noncoms counting cadence, by infantry marching in close-order drill. The sounds would be those of musketry and pounding hooves and trumpets and booming field guns and Indian tom-toms throbbing across the moonlit Jornada del Muerto; the backdrop, the beautiful, majestic desert; the sights, those of mule trains and riders reining in their splendid mounts and two little boys named MacArthur standing rigidly at attention during the twilight retreat ceremony. No wonder his favorite entertainment to the end of his life would be movie Westerns.1

  Of course, there was genuine romance there. To a small boy—he was nearly seven when Company K was posted to Leavenworth, and thus spent his formative preschool years in remote forts—the life was in many ways idyllic. His father might see it as professional stagnation, his mother as a time of Spartan housekeeping and childhood diseases, but other impressions naturally left a stronger mark on Douglas, then “Doug” to the captain and “Dougie” to Pinky. Apart from the lack of playmates—Billy Hughes, the son of the company’s first lieutenant, was the only other boy their age—Doug and his brother Arthur led the kind of life other children merely read of in Chatterbox. At Fort Selden they learned to ride and shoot before they could read or write. Each brother had his own spotted Navaho pony. Shoeless and shirtless, wearing only headbands and fringed leggings of tanned hide, they would ride off into open country taking potshots at rabbits. Once they encountered, but did not shoot, a solitary camel—a survivor of the herd Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had brought from Egypt by chartered ship in 1855. If they were on foot, they could hitch a ride home on a mule-drawn water wagon. Back on the post, they would play with the heliograph, watch their father command the daily parade, and later sit under the desert stars listening to soldiers yarn.2

  Douglas MacArthur as a baby

  MacArthur (left) and his brothers, Arthur III, 1884

  The storytelling was important, for children have an infinite capacity to respond to vicarious experience. It could only be vicarious; the closest the boys came to combat was a false alarm. Scouts reported that Indian raiders were headed toward Fort Wingate, and Pinky and a sergeant scooped up Doug, who was playing outside the stockade, and carried him into the compound. To Company K it was only a pointless scare, but when a cavalry squadron stopped by the next day with a description of the engagement, which had occurred at a nearby fort, the child felt that he had survived a great adventure. (Geronimo, he learned, had won a grudging admiration from the bluecoats because he kept Apache casualties low.) Nearly every man on the post had recollections of bloody Civil War battles, accounts which had improved with time, though Doug’s favorite, naturally, was one of his father’s. “Show them the letters!” he would plead when strangers came, and Captain MacArthur would fetch a wad of envelopes from Milwaukee which he had been carrying, crammed in a shirt pocket, when a Confederate bullet had hit him there. A charred hole showed where the lead had stopped just short of his heart. There it had remained, contained by paper, evidence that his life that day had been charmed.3

  Pinky interpreted it as divine intervention. As a proud Confederate Valkyrie she must have been distressed by tales in which Southerners were always losers, but with the Victorian lady’s gift for rationalization she transmuted all brave men into holy warriors. Patriotism, like piety, was an absolute virtue in its own right. The cause itself was almost irrelevant; what counted was unflinching loyalty to it. There was always a tremendous amount of saluting by the MacArthur children. She insisted on it. The occasion didn’t much matter—the ascent and descent of the flag, a visit by any adult, even a newspaper story about the arrival of the Statue of Liberty in New York—as long as it was done well. At bedtime her last words to Doug would be: “You must grow up to be a great man,” and she would add either “like your father” or “like Robert E. Lee.” The fact that his father and Lee had fought on opposite sides counted for nothing. The fact that both had fought well was everything.4

  At Selden, he would recall late in life, his mother began tutoring him in the three Rs, at the same time instilling in him “a sense of obligation.” He remembered: “We were to do what was right no matter what the personal sacrifice might be. Our country was always to come first. Two things we must never do: never lie, never tattle.” She also guided his reading. His father was a walking encyclopedia of political, military, and econ
omic facts, but a small boy could not be expected to make head or tail of manifest destiny, Clausewitz, or J. S. Mill. He could understand heroism, however, and she saw to it that her sons never lacked books about martial heroes. In her lap they learned the virtue of physical courage and the disgrace of cowardice. Once she told Doug that men do not cry. He protested that his father’s eyes were often moist at the retreat ceremony. That was different, she quickly explained; that was from love of country; that was allowed. But tears of fear were forbidden.5

  His mother was to remain close to him until he was in his fifties, but her influence on him was naturally greatest in these early years. If his father provided him with an example of manliness and a love of language, Pinky contributed other qualities that would distinguish him to the end of his life. Some were superficial: the courtly manner he acquired and the fastidiousness which, she would later tell him, he had inherited from his plantation forebears. Others were more subtle, because she herself was a complex woman, being both meek and tough, petulant and sentimental, charming and emotional. Under her mannered, pretty exterior she was cool, practical, and absolutely determined that her children would not only match but surpass the achievements of her father-in-law and her husband. Americans of a later generation may find it hard to fathom a woman who could realize her ambitions through the exploits of her men, particularly when they wore a uniform she had hated in her youth. Nevertheless it remains true that in her own complicated way Mary Pinkney MacArthur was resolved to defeat the Yankees on a battleground of her own choosing, with her own weapons, under a flag she alone could see.6

  She dressed Doug in skirts and kept his hair in long curls until he was eight, thus extending his childhood and his dependence on her, but the primitive period ended two years earlier, with his father’s transfer to Leavenworth and his own entrance into the second grade there. By his own admission, he was a poor student. Although surrounded by children his age, he missed the freedom of the desert. The sole compensation, as he later wrote, was the “never-ending thrill” of watching parades on a larger post, with “the cavalry on their splendid mounts, the artillery with their long-barreled guns and caissons, and the infantry with its blaze of glittering bayonets. “ Even that was lacking when, six months after his ninth birthday, the MacArthur’ moved to Washington, took a house on Rhode Island Avenue, and entered him in the Force Public School. His academic performance continued to be indifferent; he had to wear spectacles to strengthen his eyesight; apart from his grandfather’s home he saw little that appealed to him. “Washington,” in his words, “was different from anything I had ever known. It was my first glimpse at that whirlpool of glitter and pomp, . . . of statesmanship and intrigue. I found it no substitute for the color and excitement of the frontier West.”7

  MacArthur as a small child

  MacArthur as a boy

  One afternoon in the autumn of 1893, when he was thirteen, he overheard his father remark to his mother, “I think there is the material of a soldier in that boy.” The fact that Arthur said it is unimportant; millions of men have dreamed that their sons would follow in their footsteps. What mattered is that this son swore never to forget it—and never did. No adolescent rebellion for him; all his life he would seek to be a man-at-arms in whom his father could have exulted. Introducing habeas corpus in Japan after World War II, he told his staff that he had been inspired by Arthurs example in the Philippines, and at the age of seventy he told a friend in Tokyo, “Whenever I perform a mission and think I have done it well, I feel I can stand up squarely to my dad and say, ‘Governor, how about it?’ ”8

  In that same fall of 1893 the governor brought home the news, welcome to his younger son if not to his wife, that after four years away from troops they would head westward again, to San Antonio. There Douglas entered the academy later to be known as the Texas Military Institute. Dark, wiry, and already handsome, he crossed Fort Sam’s lower parade ground at eight o’clock of an October morning and appeared on the school’s unprepossessing grounds, which in the words of a contemporary were “part grass and part dirt in good weather, all mud in rainy weather.” He was wearing a $13.50 braided gray cadet uniform and carrying, as required, a Bible, a prayer book, and a hymnal. The institution had been founded by an Episcopalian bishop, which pleased Pinky. Chapel was held at 8:25 A.M. every day in the ivy-covered stone Church of Saint Paul, where the boy was confirmed the following April, “Biblical lessons,” in his words, having opened “the spiritual portals of a growing faith.”9

  “This,” he would later say of the West Texas Military Academy, “is where I started.” It was not an easy start. Like most such schools, the institution had its share of youths who had been sent there because they were disciplinary problems at home—“some of the meanest boys this side of hell,” an alumnus later conceded. They were resentful of young MacArthur because his father was a major, scornful of him because he was a day student, and jealous because he was becoming, at last, an outstanding student. As he put it, there had come to him “a desire to know, a seeking for the reason why, a search for the truth. Abstruse mathematics began to appear as a challenge to analysis, 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. . . . My studies enveloped me.” So did a burgeoning interest in foreign affairs—in Cuba, in Ethiopia, and in France’s Dreyfus affair—though this didn’t impress the rowdies, either.10

  Acceptance by his peers came in his third year, and was won on the playing fields. In some ways his exploits there are more impressive than his classroom accomplishments, for though he had a first-rate mind he was not a born athlete; what he achieved in sports he achieved by sheer stamina. He became the academy’s tennis champion despite weak form. On the diamond he lacked power at the plate, so he became a deft bunter, a swift shortstop, and the team’s manager. On the gridiron, according to Gahahl Walker, a classmate, “they made him quarterback, which did not require so much weight but brains and nerve. He held the job down. The scrimmages were hard on him. You could see his lips turn blue, but he would get up and fight again.”11

  His last year was an unbroken series of triumphs. Both the football and baseball teams were undefeated. He was chosen first sergeant of A Company, the highest rank a day student could attain. He organized and led a prizewinning drill squad and was one of four cadets to achieve perfect marks in deportment. For his recitation of J. J. Roche’s “Fight of the Privateer General Armstrong,” he was awarded the Lockwood Silver Medal in elocution. With an academic average of 97.33 he won the Academy Gold Medal and became valedictorian of the class of 1897. At San Antonio’s charity ball that spring he led the grand march; the girl on his arm, appropriately, was named Miss Houston. The legend of his invincibility had begun. Now he was ready for West Point—or so he thought.12

  He couldn’t get an appointment. The previous year Judge MacArthur had spent the last weeks of his life rounding up letters of recommendation for his grandson; Douglas’s father had been doing the same, and the result was an impressive dossier: endorsements from thirteen assorted governors, senators, congressmen, and bishops. Grover Cleveland was not persuaded; his four presidential appointments went to other applicants. So, the next year, did William McKinley’s. Worse, when the boy took a preliminary physical examination, he flunked it. He had curvature of the spine. Fate seemed to be against him. But his mother was for him, and she was a wily competitor. When her husband was posted to Saint Paul in October 1897, she and Douglas moved into Milwaukee’s Plankinton House, 330 miles away. Pinky was planning to envelop the West Point admissions office in a pincers, first by establishing a legal residence in the district of Congressman Theabold Otjen, who had been a crony of the judge’s, and second by having her son’s spinal defect corrected by Dr. Franz Pfister, a celebrated Milwaukee specialist.13

  In his eighties Dr. Pfister recalled that he and his patient “worked together for a year. He was one of the quickest fello
ws to obey orders I ever treated. He was tremendously interested in anatomy, biology, physiology, and everything that concerned health and medical science.” He was also determined to rid himself of the defect. Thus one of Pinky’s pincers groped toward her objective. The other was more difficult. Since Douglas was not the only youth who wanted to attend the Point, Otjen’s nominee would be decided by a competitive examination in City Hall. The congressman appointed three Milwaukee school principals to supervise it, whereupon Pinky hired a fourth, Principal “Mac” McLanagan of West End High, as her son’s tutor. “Every school day,” Douglas would recall, “I trudged there and back, the two miles from the hotel to the school. I never worked harder in my life. Chemistry and physics occupied him in the school laboratory; at the Plankinton House he studied algebra, English, and history, with his mother as a second tutor.14

  MacArthur, aged sixteen, at West Texas Military Academy

  Arthur III, MacArthur’s brother, as a naval officer

  The night before the examination, Douglas, for the first time in his life, could not sleep, and after breakfast he was nauseated. Pinky accompanied him to City Hall, on the steps of which she gave him a pep talk that might have been taken from one of Burt L. Standish’s dime novels about Frank Merriwell, then enjoying their first flush of popularity: “Doug, you’ll win if you don’t lose your nerve. You must believe in yourself, my son, or no one else will believe in you. Be self-confident, self-reliant, and even if you don’t make it, you will know you have done your best. Now, go to it.” The “cool words of my mother,” he said, “brought me around.” Dashing inside, he broke another record. The Milwaukee Journal’s yellowing edition of June 7, 1898, tells the story. Under the headline HE WILL GO TO WEST POINT, the paper reported that he had placed first among thirteen applicants. “Young MacArthur,” the story observed, “is a remarkably bright, clever, and determined boy. His standing was 99 1/3 against the next man’s 77.9. He scored 700 points out of a possible 750. He is eighteen years old and resides with his mother in the Plankinton House. He came to the examinations with the determination to win after studying very hard in preparation for the tests and gave the strictest attention while at work, and consequently, like Dewey and Hobson, put aside all possibility of failure in his undertaking. He accomplished his purpose with a big margin to spare.” The winner drew a Merriwell conclusion: “It was a lesson I never forgot. Preparedness is the key to success and victory.”15