Sovereign Soldiers. Grant Madsen
He then revealed that his “real purpose in having [the engineers] here under my thumb is that, though paid by funds of the [Philippine] Power Development Corporation, I can use them to help us out whenever they are not busy on other work.”43 With this new information in mind, Eisenhower went to work on a revised budget for submission to the Philippine National Assembly with more army appropriations. He submitted it in August 1937.
Things went badly from there. Eisenhower began to hear, to his surprise, that Quezon had perhaps not promised MacArthur any “oil money” and therefore did not anticipate a revised budget calling for an expanded equipment appropriation. In fact, by October Quezon had called MacArthur on the carpet. He could not understand why the budget ultimately came to so much more than MacArthur had apparently initially promised.44
MacArthur responded that he had “never approved” of the plan for thirty divisions “or even suggested it except as an expression of his hopes and ambitions.” Indeed, “all portions of the plan that exceed the” original estimate were “nothing but the products of [his staff] … without approval from him.” If the obvious dissembling were not enough, MacArthur then called together his staff (including Eisenhower) and reprimanded them for sending the budget without his approval, despite (in Eisenhower’s words) every “scrap of auxiliary evidence, letters, partial plans presented to the Gen., requisitions, and the direct testimony,” indicating the literal opposite of his claim.
Eisenhower could not take it. He “challenged” MacArthur “to show that I’d done anything not calculated to further his plans.” MacArthur moderated. He made clear “his ‘personal’ confidence in” his staff. He even “accepted much of the blame for the misunderstanding” even while he “‘shouted down’ any real explanation” of the situation—to which Eisenhower wrote in his journal, “But it was not a misunderstanding! It is a deliberate scuttling of one plan … while he adopts another one, which in its concrete expression, at least, I’ve never even heard of before.”
The episode finally broke the relationship between the two men. Eisenhower confided that he must “decide soon whether I can go much further with a person who, either consciously or unconsciously, deceives his boss [Quezon], his subordinates and himself (probably) so incessantly as he does.” In reality, Eisenhower had “remained on this job, not because of the Gen.—but in spite of him. I’ve got interested in this riddle of whether or not we can develop a [Philippine War Department] and an army capable of running itself.… But now I’m at a cross road.”45
Just as Eisenhower debated whether to demand a transfer away from MacArthur, Clay arrived in Manila and took up residence in the same hotel as the Eisenhowers and MacArthurs. For the next year, the three future military governors lived in the same building. Quickly, Clay developed a working relationship with MacArthur (“General MacArthur never came to the office but about an hour a day,” he recalled, but every “once in a while, he’d call me up and we would go to a prize fight. He loved prize fights”).46 More important, he connected with Eisenhower. “We were great friends,” Clay said.47 “I had known Eisenhower socially in Washington, but it was not until the Philippines that I came in close contact with him. And I became very close to [him] and remained so until his death.”48 Together, they organized maneuvers for U.S. and Filipino soldiers, developed an engineering school, and did their best to create a modern Philippine army. Ultimately, both men concluded the Philippines needed many things, new dams being the least important of them.
At the same time, Quezon appeared to have realized the truth about the budget. Through 1937 he reached out to Eisenhower and treated him as an informal presidential adviser, asking his thoughts on everything from “taxes [to] education, honesty in government, and other [policy] subjects.” He “seemed to enjoy” the discussions. “Certainly I did,” recalled Eisenhower.49 While the difficulties with MacArthur remained, Eisenhower’s growing responsibilities and friendships made the work interesting enough that he decided to stay in the Philippines after all.
In many ways, though, his growing involvement in Philippine politics led to the final break with MacArthur. A “group of Filipino legislators,” recalled Clay, “felt that they could turn over [MacArthur’s] job of military advisor to Colonel Eisenhower and save the Philippine government a great deal of money.” Eisenhower earned much less and paid his own rent (unlike MacArthur who lived in the penthouse of the Manila Hotel at government expense). “I know that … Colonel Eisenhower had no part in this, and that he told these Filipino legislators that if they proceeded any further he would just have to ask to be sent home.” But their ideas did not remain secret. When it finally came to “General MacArthur’s attention … he just couldn’t believe that this could have happened … unless it had been instigated by Colonel Eisenhower.”50
While Eisenhower left on a long-deserved vacation, MacArthur demoted him, prohibited him from contact with Quezon, and relegated him to work that kept him away from the National Assembly. Upon his return Eisenhower learned of these new restrictions, and attributed the matter to MacArthur’s jealousy and thin skin. “He’d like to occupy a throne room surrounded by experts in flattery,” he wrote in his journal.51 Recognizing that his career had come to a standstill, Eisenhower once again reached out to Fox Conner, and once again Conner provided. Within a few months, Eisenhower received orders taking him back to the States. Quezon begged him to stay. But at that point, he told Quezon, “No amount of money can make me change my mind.”52
Clay also returned to the States about this time. Congress had approved construction of the Denison Dam along the Red River between Texas and Oklahoma. When completed, it would be the world’s largest rolled earth–filled dam, and something Clay had wanted to work on “for a long, long time.”53 In the summer of 1938, when he learned of the opportunity to build the dam, he jumped at it.54
In retrospect, the saga of Clay, Eisenhower, and MacArthur in Manila reads like so much court intrigue involving men who, in the near future, would hold the fates of millions in their hands. Certainly, the personality conflict revealed a lot about the character of Eisenhower and MacArthur as well as Clay, who managed to become a confidant of both men. But to focus on personality, tempting as it is, masks the important substantive dispute that first brought them into conflict.
For his part, MacArthur revealed an approach to military service driven by a sense of mission and a burning desire for success, and he could take great risks to accomplish that mission. This instinct led him to bravely challenge President Roosevelt’s planned cut of army personnel in 1933, but it led just as easily to his ham-fisted effort to sneak a bigger military budget past Manuel Quezon. At times, his willingness to treat every mission as a pivotal moment in world history reduced him almost to caricature; yet his instinct to succeed at all costs and seek almost apocalyptic tests of his character fit a kind of military ethos and as often as not ended with stunning victories.
By contrast, Eisenhower brought a sensibility to his work deeply attuned to the limits of his environment. He coupled this sensibility with a willingness to consider what military theorists subsequently called “grand strategy”—namely, the use of all the resources available to a nation (economic, moral, political) along with military might—and the way that all resources could be deployed directly or indirectly.55 The eminent nineteenth-century German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously argued that “war is merely the continuation of politics by other means.”56 The eminent nineteenth-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck famously noted that “politics is the art of the possible.” Eisenhower absorbed both insights in thinking of war as the art of the possible.
In the postwar years, these two Americans—MacArthur and Eisenhower—would embody contrasting visions of how America should fight the Cold War. Their personal inclinations would result in a political rivalry that would ultimately shape more than their increasingly strained friendship. But in the meantime, while Clay began work on his dam and Eisenhower traveled home, war erupted in Europe. Most Americans wanted to stay free of the conflict, but Roosevelt began to see American entry as inevitable. In foreign policy he tended to gather information informally through anecdote and conversation, assuming this gave him a better sense of a country than he could receive