The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur by Mark Perry Read Free Book Online

sure the army got its money. Even so, Ickes (described by a colleague as having “the mind of a commissar and the soul of a meataxe”) was among those few in the Roosevelt administration to whom MacArthur gave a wide berth, recognizing that officials like Ickes were less susceptible to reason than others.
    Although MacArthur was loath to confront New Dealers like Ickes in person, he continued to walk the same fine line that he had walked since Roosevelt’s inauguration. He never spoke out in public against Roosevelt’s budget but continued to issue warnings that the American military was woefully underfunded. His was a delicate dance, though it suited Roosevelt: MacArthur was a hero of the Great War and a conservative face for the New Deal in an era of economic uncertainty—“the conscience of the American people”—and as long as he remained chief of staff, Roosevelt could point to him as a symbol of the administration’s commitment to national security. And Roosevelt realized, even if MacArthur didn’t, that his chief of staff’s complaints about army funding actually buttressed administration claims that it was getting the federal budget under control. So, while MacArthur pointedly continued to speak out about the lack of American military preparedness, appearing before civic groups and veterans’ organizations, Roosevelt just as pointedly refused to rein him in. And at the end of the summer of 1933, when rumors again circulated that Roosevelt was seeking MacArthur’s relief, the president wordlessly extended the chief’s term into the next year, signaling that he intended to keep him as the army’s senior officer until MacArthur had completed his four years as chief of staff. In all of this, MacArthur was a willing participant, allowing his ambition to override his political views. So while Roosevelt was “taming” MacArthur, he had a lot of help. As events in the months ahead would show, MacArthur was also taming himself.
     
    L ike his father, Douglas MacArthur was an admired soldier and a tough battlefield commander. And like his father, he was his own worst enemy. Both men had a puzzling habit of offending powerful figures who might be counted as potential allies. This had happenedwith Arthur MacArthur in the Philippines, in the first years of the century, when he faced off against William Howard Taft, the rotund Ohio lawyer (and future president) appointed by William McKinley to serve as the archipelago’s governor-general. Taft was unpopular with American soldiers, who resented his grating habit of describing the Filipinos as “my little brown brothers.” MacArthur’s soldiers, emerging from a bloody insurrection, also found this patronizing attitude hard to swallow: “He may be a brother of William Howard Taft,” they chanted, “but he ain’t no brother of mine.” But Taft’s unpopularity offered no benefit to Arthur MacArthur, who lost his tussle with the Ohioan for control of Philippine policy, which Taft insisted remain in civilian hands. The battle with Taft was bad enough, but in the process, MacArthur offended nearly every political figure in Washington and, as a result, many of his senior military colleagues. By the time he was relieved in July 1901, few of them came to his defense. Embittered by the experience, he spent the rest of his career in command of army posts in the Pacific Northwest, waiting for orders naming him army chief of staff. The orders never came. In his son’s eyes, Arthur’s acerbic personality was transformed into calm patience. He was a man, as Douglas later wrote, “of great equanimity and modesty of character, rarely aroused, placid, congenial.” In fact, he was anything but. And neither was his son.
    In the midst of his battle with Roosevelt over the army budget, MacArthur carelessly alienated the one man, General John Pershing, whose support he needed—and who had praised him for standing up to the president on the army pension issue. The dustup