Leaders in Dangerous Times: Douglas Macarthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower

Copyright 2013 Robert MacDougall.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-1232-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-1230-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-1231-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013916337

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Contents

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

Chapter I   Hero’s Son and Mama’s Boy

Chapter II   Middle Son of the Middle Border

Chapter III   Mac and Ike in 1917

Chapter IV   Bravado and Boredom

Chapter V   Military Men in the Jazz Age

Chapter VI   Team MacArthur

Chapter VII   Leadership for Survival

Chapter VIII   Turning It Around

Chapter IX   Leadership for Victory

Chapter X   The Post War, The Cold War,

and The Presidency

Chapter XI   The Korean War and the Presidency

Chapter XII   President Eisenhower

Chapter XIII   Old Soldiers

Postscript

References

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my family, especially my loving wife, Diane.

It is also dedicated to my history students at Central Catholic High School in Lawrence, Massachusetts, who gave me insights into

what was good and what was bad in the first draft!

Preface

T his book is a survey of the lives of Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower with an emphasis on their personality traits and the people and events in their lives that molded their leadership styles. I chose to write about these two men because their careers encompass many of the important events of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. My goal is to help the reader learn more about the history of the twentieth century and to evaluate the qualities of strong and effective leaders.

Introduction

A t two o’clock in the morning of May 7, 1945, Nazi Field Marshall Alfred Gustav Jodl and Admiral Hans Georg Von Freidenburg, representing what remained of the armed forces of Hitler’s Third Reich, entered a school building in Reims, France. The simple schoolhouse was being used as headquarters for the Allied Supreme Command and they had been summoned there to officially end World War II in Europe. Before a small gathering of news photographers and print journalists, the two stoically crestfallen commanders signed the surrender documents at a small wooden table. The supreme Allied commander, General Dwight David Eisenhower, then led the once-arrogant but now-humiliated Nazi leaders into a private room where he asked them, in clipped words, if they understood the terms of surrender and would adhere to them.

After the Nazi leaders were dismissed, Eisenhower and his officers posed for pictures, and Ike held up the pens used for the signing so that they formed a V. A few minutes later, he issued a statement. His advisers had encouraged him to release a flamboyant or dramatic communique, but Ike had resisted and the very simple message that went out to the world read: The mission of this allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7, 1945.

Ike and his staff celebrated their triumphant moment by sipping some stale champagne. Then, exhausted to the core, they all went off to bed. Ike fell asleep in the small hours of that morning reading Cartridge Carnival, another of the cheap paperback westerns he liked so much.

Four months later, on September 2, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur stood on the deck of the Battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay to receive the surrender of the Japanese. From the mast of the ship, the American flag that had flown over the United States Capitol Building on the morning of December 7, 1941, fluttered in the breeze. On the deck were hundreds of American and other Allied soldiers and sailors, lined up in formation and crowding the upper decks straining to get a view of the proceedings below.

Wearing his trademark faded tan uniform and battered general’s campaign hat, MacArthur addressed the assemblage at a standing microphone. Before him was a table covered with a green cloth on which were the formal documents of surrender. On the other aside of the table, enduring their humiliation, were the representatives of the Japanese imperial government led by Foreign Minister Mamuro Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu. Shigemitsu wore a silk top hat and a long black frock coat with tails.

MacArthur’s speech was forceful and dramatic. In part he said: "The issues involving divergent ideals and ideologies have been determined on the battlefields of the world and hence are not for our discussion or debate. Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the people of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred. But rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone befits the sacred purposes we are about to serve, committing all our people unreservedly to faithful compliance with the obligation they are here formally to assume.

It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded on faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance and justice.

MacArthur then invited the Japanese delegates to sign the instruments of surrender at the places indicated. With as much dignity as they could muster, the Japanese delegates hobbled forward to sign the documents on the table. The Allied copy was bound in leather, the Japanese copy in canvas. Following the Japanese, the representatives of the Allied nations stepped forward to sign. Finally, MacArthur himself sat at the table and drew five pens from his pocket. After writing parts of his name with each one, he handed over one of them to General Wainwright who, still haggard from his ordeal as a prisoner of war, gratefully accepted it.

MacArthur once again stood at the microphone and intoned, Let us pray that peace now be restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are closed. With that the Japanese officials bowed stiffly and made their torturous way down to the destroyer that would take them the eighteen miles back to shore. Just as they left, the sun broke through the clouds and created a display of slanting rays and glowing orb ironically similar to the now-discredited Japanese flag. Then, right on cue, four hundred B-29 bombers roared across the sky followed by fifteen hundred blue navy fighter planes. It was a spectacle that no one aboard the Missouri that glorious day would ever forget.

Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur brought World War II to a close in decidedly different ways. Was Eisenhower as dry and colorless as the ceremony at Reims suggests? Was MacArthur a vainglorious actor as some who observed his triumphant ceremony aboard the Missouri concluded? The story of how these two very different men came to be two of the most important people on earth, and what they each did with their fame and leadership potential after the war was over is the subject of this book. The careers of Douglas MacArthur and Dwight David Eisenhower tell us a great deal about the history of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. They also give us insights into the qualities that make a person a successful leader.

CHAPTER I

Hero’s Son and Mama’s Boy

Douglas MacArthur, 1890-1916

M ost of us would consider Fort Selden in southeastern New Mexico in 1885 to be a very dusty and dreary place. But to five-year-old Douglas MacArthur it was an exciting arena where blue-uniformed men swaggered about in knee-high leather boots and looked as if they would suddenly leap to their horses and ride off to an incredible adventure.

The man everyone at Selden looked up to as the commander in chief of the fort was forty-one-year-old Captain Arthur MacArthur, Douglas’s father. A dashing man with a black mustache and sturdy build, he cut an awesome figure on horseback and was one of the most admired military men in the country.

How could young Douglas ask for more? He had a hero for a father; and he lived in a place where he and his older brother Arthur could learn to ride horses, shoot real guns, and thrill to the pageantry of bugles blaring, flags snapping in the wind, and mounted men charging past in a cloud of dust.

He also had a mother who was very concerned about his physical and moral upbringing. From her, Douglas heard all of the stories of his father’s exploits twenty-two years earlier in the Civil War, and he never tired of listening to the legend. On the twenty-fifth of November 1863, Arthur, only nineteen years old, led the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin regiment in a daring and reckless charge against the Confederate forces dug in atop Missionary Ridge in Tennessee. The soldiers of the Twenty-fourth struggled up the rugged, woodsy hill, running past fallen trees and dead comrades as a steady rain of enemy bullets whizzed past them. When all of the officers and the flag bearer went down, young Arthur grasped the flag and, with a shout of On Wisconsin! led the Twenty-fourth to the top of the ridge. After the victory, with the smoke still billowing and his body still covered with sweat, Arthur stood exhausted as General Phil Sheridan commended him and proclaimed that he would receive the Medal of Honor.

Arthur was elected by his fellow soldiers to be the regimental leader, and he became the youngest colonel in the Union Army. In the next engagements, Arthur continued to distinguish himself, defying danger in a way that suggested he saw himself as a man of destiny who could not be brought down. At Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia, he was shot in the chest and thought to be dead, but the Confederate bullet had lodged in his chest an inch from his heart. The story was told that the lead had been slowed by a wallet in MacArthur’s breast pocket containing letters from home and his Bible.

A year later, the twenty-year-old colonel was leading another charge, this time on horseback. When his mount was shot out from under him, he continued on foot, caught a bullet in the shoulder, another in the chest, and yet another in the knee. Once again, he survived. General David Stanley proclaimed that the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin, bravely led by its young colonel, Arthur MacArthur, saved the day for the Union force (MacArthur 1964, 10).

Arthur spent the rest of the war recovering from his wounds. When the war ended, the boy colonel led his regiment in a triumphal parade down the streets of Milwaukee. Admired by all, he was the toast of the city and the state. The glorious exploits of Arthur MacArthur and the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin regiment would be talked about for generations to come.

At Fort Selden, Douglas and his brother played war games. It was they who were charging up Missionary Ridge, defying death and miraculously surviving a hail of lead. It was heady stuff for the young Douglas to know his father was such a great hero. It was a source of pride and inspiration. Of course, he would be like his father. He, too, would be a soldier, show incredible bravery, and win great honors. For Douglas MacArthur’s entire life, the Arthur MacArthur legend was an inspiration. It was also a burden, one that he did not always realize was there. His mother often reminded him, Douglas, you must always be a credit to your father.

Arthur MacArthur’s mission at Fort Selden was to protect local settlers from the nearby Apaches. In his memoirs, published in 1964, Douglas MacArthur was not as generous in spirit toward the Apaches as he was toward the Filipinos and the Japanese, so he referred to the Apaches as marauding Indians (MacArthur 1964, 12). Arthur MacArthur had performed many duties in the West since the Civil War such as guarding the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad; the army, as it always does, was constantly reassigning him. So it was that after three years at Fort Selden, the MacArthur family was on the move again, this time to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. In this new environment, Douglas missed the exciting atmosphere of the West and he was forced to attend a regular school where he daydreamed and underachieved.

Arthur MacArthur’s notable talents soon won him an appointment to a staff position in Washington, D.C. Although it was even more boring to a young boy than Leavenworth, Washington at least allowed the young Douglas a chance to glimpse the lifestyle of the nation’s capital far from the rugged and wild life of the frontier. He saw congressmen and other dignitaries and got his first awareness of the significant difference between civilian and military life.

Douglas’s lackluster performance in school continued in Washington. Very little about what he was learning and the way he was instructed inspired him. As he finished grade school, he most likely appeared to his teachers to be headed toward a very mediocre future. However, his academic performance and his entire outlook on his life were about to make a dramatic turn. His father was transferred to Fort Sam Houston in Texas, and there Douglas was to discover a love for learning and to see the connection between education and his childish dreams of military glory.

Douglas was just entering his teenage years when he arrived with his parents at Fort Sam. His brother Arthur, now eighteen, had earned an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, and so Doug was going to lead the life of an only child, much doted upon by his mother, Mary Pinkney MacArthur.

Mary Pinky Hardy had married Arthur MacArthur in 1875. They had met the year before in New Orleans, and Arthur had instantly fallen in love with this beautiful southern belle, the daughter of a Virginia cotton merchant. For the first time, Douglas recounted many years later, the dashing ‘boy colonel’ had the good sense to surrender (MacArthur 1964, 14). For her part, Pinky, as she was always called, fell in love with the much admired war hero even if he did win his medals fighting for the other side in the recent war.

Pinky and Arthur had three sons. The eldest, Arthur III, was born in 1876; and they were very proud of his naval academy appointment in spite of the slightly traitorous aspect of his going into the other branch of the service. Malcolm was born in 1878, and Douglas entered the world in 1880. When Malcolm died suddenly in 1883, Pinky increased her focus and devotion to her two remaining sons, particularly the baby of the family, three-year-old Douglas.

Perhaps spurred on by Pinky’s undivided attention, or inspired by the quality of his new teachers, Douglas began to thrive academically at Fort Sam. He attended the West Texas Military Academy, and suddenly everything interested him. He became proficient at mathematics and science; he learned in detail the stories of past leaders and historic military campaigns; he developed a love for the classics. Over time, he developed a writing style that emulated ancient and Victorian Era writers. To the end of his days, Douglas MacArthur expressed himself, no matter what the occasion, in melodramatic prose with frequent references to the Bible or ancient literature. At times this would make him truly eloquent and inspiring. Occasionally, however, he would be a ridiculously pompous charlatan, an actor on stage overplaying his part.

Douglas proved reasonably skilled in athletics at West Texas. His description of his participation in sports that he wrote in his memoirs reveals his pompous and superficially eloquent style quite clearly: I became the quarterback of the eleven, the shortstop of the nine, the tennis champion of the campus (MacArthur 1964, 17). Almost any other man on earth would have simply said he was the quarter back on the football team and the shortstop on the baseball team!

By the time he graduated from West Texas, Douglas had compiled a record that allowed him to think seriously of trying to get into the greatest military academy in the world, the venerable lofty fortress on the bluff overlooking the Hudson, West Point. Douglas went to live in Milwaukee with Pinky while his father went on to a new station in Saint Paul, Minnesota. With a West Point appointment as a sole focus, Douglas took courses at West Side High School and, with Pinky’s ever-present encouragement, studied and prepared for the competitive examination that he was to take that spring.

On the day of the test, Douglas was nervous, nauseous, and on the point of vomiting; but Pinky’s advice that morning stayed with him for the rest of his life. It was a piece of wisdom that would serve him well in command situations when the fate of thousands of men rested on his performance. Doug, she said, 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’ll know you have done your best. Now, go to it (Manchester 1978, 47). When the scores were in, Douglas had placed first and won a congressional appointment.

Coinciding with Douglas’s success in Milwaukee, Congress declared war on Spain in April of 1898. On May 1, Admiral Dewey annihilated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in the Philippine Islands. To command the American military force that would occupy the Philippines, the president appointed Arthur MacArthur and elevated him to the rank of brigadier general. In a fit of youthful recklessness, Douglas was eager to forget about going to West Point and told his father he wanted to enlist for the Philippine expedition. Arthur immediately squelched the thought. He assured his eager son that there would be many more wars in the years to come and admonished that it was his duty, right then, to prepare for them.

Thus, in the summer of 1898, Arthur MacArthur sailed for the Philippines; and in June of 1899, Douglas MacArthur enrolled at West Point. For the next four years, each would have experiences that would have profound effects on their own futures and on the future of the world. Arthur would blaze a path in the Philippines that his son would follow. The MacArthur presence in Asia would be a major force in the region for over fifty years. Father and son were each to be involved in historic disputes between military and civilian authority in Asia. Each was to struggle mightily to get the American people and their government to see the importance of Asia to their interests. Each was to feel he was a voice crying in the wilderness, unheard and tragically ignored.

When Douglas began his plebe year at West Point, Pinky went with him. It is a bit difficult for a modern reader to decide what to make of the fact that the new soldier’s mother took up residence in a hotel just down the hill from the academy and that Douglas was agreeable to that! For the first two of his cadet years, he would break the rules and sneak down the hill to visit his mother at the hotel. Psychologists would have an excellent time analyzing this, especially the part about Pinky’s involvement in Douglas’s testimony before a court of inquiry looking into hazing at the point.

At the turn of the century, hazing of new students was a common practice at West Point—and at many other schools across the country. (Indeed, it sometimes rears its ugly head even in the twenty-first century!) Cadets who had been at the Point for a year (yearlings) and upperclassmen very often simply beat up plebes for some trumped-up offense. Douglas MacArthur was a bit of a special target during his plebe year because his father was the famous Arthur MacArthur, and southern cadets were eager for payback against the son of the hero of Missionary Ridge. The most egregious torment visited upon nineteen-year-old Douglas was the spread eagle he was forced to perform. While his superiors stood about and laughed, he was forced to squat naked over a pile of broken glass and bounce up and down flapping his arms. Not only was this humiliating, it posed the very real risk of his legs buckling and his bare buttocks and genitals crashing onto the sharp glass.

In December 1900, a special court of inquiry was established by President McKinley to investigate hazing at the Point. Douglas was called to testify before the court. To the old men of the court, he described the kinds of hazing that went on; but when they asked him to name the cadets who had subjected him to the eagle and other tortures, he refused. His parents had always told him never to lie, but never to tattle.

Douglas was in a tight spot, however, for if he persisted in his refusal, he could be expelled from the academy; and his hopes and dreams (a phrase he always used) of a military career dashed. Then, during a court recess, he received an extraordinary message from Pinky. Written in verse form, it concluded:

The world will judge largely of mother by you.

Be this your task if task it shall be,

To force this proud world to do homage to me.

Be sure it will say when its verdict you’ve won,

She reaps as she sowed: ‘This man is her son!’

Douglas knew what he would have to do. Come what may, I would be no tattletale (Manchester 1978, 52). His mother’s opinion was to guide his actions just as much as his father’s reputation.

Was there ever a son more the product of his parents than Douglas MacArthur? As strong as the image of his father fighting gloriously in battle may have been, the image of his mother and her strong and compelling voice was just as powerful. He would feel her presence during the next thirty-five years while she lived, and in spirit for the rest of his own life.

Fortunately, the men of the court were able to learn the information they sought in other ways and did not dismiss Douglas from the academy. For the next three years, he thoroughly enjoyed every minute he spent at West Point, and the corps of cadets held an honored place in his thoughts and feelings until the very hour of his death sixty years after he graduated. Scholastically, he accumulated the highest score of any cadet in twenty-five years, an achievement he claimed amazed him since he knew several fellow cadets who were smarter than he and who studied harder. But the fact was that Douglas studied longer into the night and worked harder than anyone else. Furthermore, he had an astounding ability to recall information and was capable of committing whole pages of text—even complicated physics proofs—to memory. This ability was to serve him well in his career when he could remember every move an opposing general had ever made and every foot of terrain in an area he had only visited once many years before. Douglas MacArthur was, to sum up, hardworking and brilliant.

This is not to say that Douglas MacArthur was a perfect cadet at West Point. To be sure, he could wear his uniform with a razor crease in the pants and offer a snappy salute, but he had his rebellious moments. We have already seen how he broke the rules to visit his mother—an outing he sometimes shared with other cadets who would join him and Pinky for tea in the hotel lobby. Once, when an upperclassman came into the hotel, Pinky had to hide her son and his pal and, at the first opportunity, send them to the cellar where they escaped through the coal chute. More egregious was the time Douglas went AWOL with two comrades while the corps was attending a horse show in New York City. They went into a local saloon where they each had three martinis and then attended a burlesque show before returning, undetected, to the corps. What may have been his most outrageous stunt—if he actually did it and the only proof is the word of an admiring friend—was to engineer the hauling of a huge cannon from the parade ground to the roof of the West Academic Building. It was such a large gun that it took workmen with block and tackle nearly a week to get it back down.

Both MacArthur and Eisenhower, who went to West Point ten years later, as we shall see, believed that cadets who were too hidebound and slavish to the rules would not be good officers. Those kind of stuffy, unimaginative men would lack the ability to be bold and creative. Furthermore, they would not be popular with the troops who served under them.

Of all the things he accomplished at West Point, his participation on the baseball team was what gave Douglas MacArthur the most pride and pleasure. Although he was a weak hitting right fielder, he always seemed to find a way to help his team. His most memorable moment occurred in the first baseball game ever played between Army and Navy. It was 1901 and his father was much in the news for his activities in the Philippines, so Doug was getting heckled during the game by midshipmen in the stands. Late in the game, he drew a walk, then stole second and went to third on an overthrow and scored on a base hit. The run he scored was the margin of army’s victory that day, and he forever after took great pleasure in the memory of how he had, with modest abilities, shut down the Navy hecklers. The varsity A he earned for baseball adorned his robe for the rest of his life; he sported it in the last photo taken of him in 1964, just days before he died.

On June 11, 1903, Douglas MacArthur joined the long gray line of graduates from the academy that extended back to 1802. He had accumulated a scholastic score exceeded only by two men, one of whom was Robert E. Lee. In his cadet grays, Doug cut a snappy figure, handsome and slender with a true soldier’s erect bearing. He was voted most likely to succeed by his classmates, but was either loved or despised by equal numbers. Some thought him insufferably conceited and arrogant while others felt admiration for his abilities and secure in his confident presence. This diametrical view of him was to endure and eventually divide the nation and the world on the subject of Douglas MacArthur.

During the four years Douglas was at West Point, Arthur MacArthur, Jr., was in the Philippines handling military matters and establishing the MacArthur reputation there. In 1898, after a combined Filipino and American force had defeated the Spanish, President McKinley had decided to annex the islands rather than return them to Spain or grant them outright independence. McKinley believed the Philippines would have better government under United States guidance and that the United States, which had no intention of permanently annexing them, would offer them the solid blessings of good management and a prosperous economy. Eventually, the islands would be given their independence, but first they had to be prepared for it.

Arthur expected the Filipinos would be receptive to this reasonable and hopeful plan for their future. To his shock and dismay, Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the Philippine forces, was outraged at the prospect of throwing off Spanish imperialism only to be subjected to American rule no matter how benign it might be described. On February 5, 1899, Aguinaldo’s troops, numbering nearly forty thousand Filipinos, attacked the American forces near Manila, and a war began that would prove to be longer, more costly, and far more bloody than the war with Spain.

General Otis commanded the American army, but Arthur MacArthur and his Second Division carried the major fighting against Aguinaldo. Using a series of flanking movements he had learned under General Sherman in the Civil War, Arthur drove Aguinaldo back again and again. The bravery he had displayed at Missionary Ridge was still part of his soul; he continued to inspire his men with his courage under fire. At one point, a man fell dead at his side and bullets punched into the ground all about him as he advanced unscathed. Newspapers back in the States were once again filled with stories about the exploits of Arthur MacArthur. He was being compared with the other military hero of the day, Theodore Roosevelt, the new vice president who had exhibited similar bravado in the Cuban campaign. Indeed, with his round face, steel gray hair, metal-rimmed glasses, and broad mustache, Arthur looked strikingly like the hero of San Juan Hill.

Aguinaldo, however, proved to be a tough man to defeat. He turned to guerrilla tactics and took to the hills in the Bataan Peninsula. For the first time, American troops faced the kind of hit-and-run tactics that were to bedevil them in Asia several times over the next century. When Otis was recalled to the States and MacArthur was appointed military governor of the Philippines, he offered amnesty to Aguinaldo and his men but was rejected.

As governor, MacArthur tried to bring enlightened government to the islands. He introduced Anglo-Saxon legal principles in place of the severe Spanish code. He oversaw construction of schools, roads, and hospitals. He refused to allow any form of racism to infect the operation of his government or any of the social functions he held. When Aguinaldo was finally captured in March 1901, Arthur befriended him and his nineteen-year-old Mestizo aide, Manuel Quezon. This enlightened rule and the friendship with Quezon were to set the stage for Douglas’s appearance a few years later.

Back in Washington, the McKinley administration did not feel their military governor in the Philippines was pacifying the archipelago under enlightened rule. On the contrary, McKinley and Secretary of War Elihu Root felt that Arthur’s arrogant attitude and the very fact that he was a military man was exacerbating the situation and extending the insurrection. Eight months before Aguinaldo’s capture, Mckinley appointed William Howard Taft to head the Philippine Commission and sent him to Manila to establish civilian rule, but with no clear directive as to where Taft’s powers began and Arthur MacArthur’s ended. This ambiguity would surely cause problems unless the two men could become friends and work in tandem, and this they most emphatically proved unable to do.

William Howard Taft was an enormous man—326 pounds—who, in his white suit, dripped sweat in the oppressive Philippine heat. Yet when he met MacArthur at the Malacañan Palace (the Philippine White House), MacArthur’s hand dripped icicles so much that Taft felt chilled. MacArthur resented Taft’s intrusion into his domain, and from that moment on, the two men sparred for control of policy and never got along. MacArthur was jealous of all of his prerogatives, and Taft felt that the general fancied himself a new Napoleon who would establish a military dictatorship in the islands. MacArthur, for his part, had no respect for this marshmallow of a man who had no concept of what the military people were going through in their fight against the insurrectos. Taft did not appreciate the daring capture of Aguinaldo and did not seem to think it was significant; MacArthur thought bringing Aguinaldo in was a momentous event that would change the entire complexion of the war.

At last, Secretary of War Root felt he had no choice but to remove MacArthur from command. On July 4, 1901, MacArthur sailed for home. In a foreshadowing of his son’s fate fifty years later, Arthur came home to a public outraged at his dismissal. Furthermore, as his son was to do, he testified before a senate committee regarding the conduct of the war and the importance of Asia in United States foreign policy. The Philippine Islands, he declared, are the finest group of islands in the world. (Their) strategic position is unexcelled by any other position on the globe. They are, quite simply, at the center of U.S. interests (Manchester 1978, 35).

After his graduation from West Point, Douglas MacArthur was thrilled to learn that his first assignment was to be the Philippines. Three years after Arthur left Manila, Douglas arrived there and was immediately smitten by the beauty of the bay and the moonbeam delicacy of the lovely Filipino women (Perret 1996, 48). He was also thrilled to learn of the affection felt for his father by the natives. (He would have been appalled to learn of the evaluation put forth by one of Arthur’s aides who said, Arthur MacArthur was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen, until I met his son. (Manchester 1978, 30))

Douglas’s job was to survey the harbor at Manila and make improvements. During the year he spent there, he traveled about the island of Luzon, spent time on the Bataan Peninsula across from the city, concluding that its mountains and thick vegetation made it a fine place for Aguinaldo to have made his last stand, and visited the rocky island of Corregidor sitting like a dot at the bottom of the Bataan exclamation point. How could he know that all of these places would play huge roles in his future?

One day, while he was searching in the jungle for trees suitable for dock pilings, an incident supposedly occurred that tells us a either a great deal about MacArthur’s ability to respond to danger or his ability to burnish his image with a mythological tale that cannot be verified. In his memoirs he tells the world how he was accosted on a remote trail by two banditti. Skilled in the use of his revolver he drilled both of them, but one did manage to get off a shot that pierced MacArthur’s hat and lodged in a tree. (MacArthur 1964, 29) This is a great story that MacArthur tells very well, but by the time he told it to the world in 1964, there were no witnesses. We are left to either admire his story telling skills or his bravery… or both.

After his year in the Philippines, Douglas was ordered to join his parents in Japan where Arthur was observing the Russo-Japanese War. Japan had started the war with a surprise Sunday morning attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. Both MacArthurs were convinced that Japan’s success in the struggle and its occupation of Korea and Formosa would some day lead that nation to attempt to control the entire Far East. Back in Washington, President Theodore Roosevelt held similar views and was telling all who would listen that the United States should prepare to fight a war with Japan at some future date. It was partly this concern that prompted him in 1908, his last year in office, to order the United States Navy to paint its battleships white and steam around the world on a goodwill mission that would also make a show of U.S. power in Tokyo Bay.

After the war ended with a peace brokered by Roosevelt, Douglas and his parents toured Asia. Traveling through China, Indochina, Siam, Burma, and India, they were so impressed with the culture and resources of Asia that they concluded that America’s future was tied to the Orient. Strategic security could be found there, money could be made there, and other great powers getting established there before we did would place us in peril.

After the Asian trip, Douglas held a series of stateside posts, only a few of which inspired him. In 1906, he served as an aide-de-camp to President Roosevelt, a position that truly was an inspiration! Given the opportunity to observe the great man up close and admire his leadership qualities, Douglas took mental notes about such