example.
MacArthur was a gigantic personality, a renowned alumnus of West Point, overbearing, and commandingly self-assured. He had a stunning memory—Ike recalled that MacArthur could look over a speech or memorandum and immediately recite large portions of it from memory. MacArthur often spoke of himself in the third person and insisted that his headquarters, wherever they were located, bear his name.
MacArthur displayed his ego early in Ike’s time with him. The occasion was an infamous confrontation, the Bonus March of 1932. With the Depression deepening and broadening that year, veterans of World War I demanded bonuses that had been promised them for their service. The terms of that bonus, approved by Congress in 1924 over the veto of President Coolidge, allowed payments to veterans of the war but deferred the full bonus until 1945, a condition that seemed punitive to those veterans cast out of work by the Depression. In protest, they descended on Washington that May, their gathering mass a source of fear and threat to the Hoover administration, which moved ambivalently: Hoover tried to protect the rights of the marchers and even secretly slipped them supplies, but he also resisted their entreaties for aid. As thousands of bedraggled men set up tents in and just outside of Washington, clashes with police produced a few casualties and, among those inclined to imagine anarchy, raised the specter of an ominous challenge to order.
After the Washington, D.C., police department forcibly evicted the protesters from an abandoned set of Washington office buildings, Hoover ordered the Army to push the marchers away from the Capitol but to refrain from following them across the river, where more were camped. Eisenhower urged MacArthur to delegate the matter—it was, Ike thought, unseemly for the chief of staff to move on ragged marchers. MacArthur ignored him. Instead, he donned his uniform and ordered Eisenhower to do so as well—Ike had to scurry home to get it.
The troops under MacArthur’s command pushed the marchers out of the buildings and toward the bridges leading away from Washington. As they approached, an order arrived from the White House reiterating Hoover’s message of restraint: “Don’t allow any of our troops to go across the Anacostia bridge.” Eisenhower hailed MacArthur, but the general refused to listen. “I don’t want to hear them, and I don’t want to see them,” he said of the orders the messenger carried. “Get him away.” Instead, MacArthur ordered his troops to follow the veterans across the bridge, and on the other side the encampments burst into flame. “It was a very pitiful scene,” Eisenhower recalled, “these ragged, discouraged people burning their own little things.” Eisenhower, having advised MacArthur not to lead the troops himself and having been ignored, now advised MacArthur to decline comment. He was ignored again. MacArthur met with the press and sealed his place as the symbol of the attack on the marchers.
“That mob was a very angry looking one,” he told reporters that evening. “It was animated by the essence of revolution.” The elimination of the marchers was necessary, he added, because “they came to the conclusion that they were about to take over in some way either direct control or indirect control of the Government.” That was absurd: twenty thousand ratty veterans, even with a few radicals among them, stood no chance of overthrowing the U.S. government, even in 1932. But it accurately captured MacArthur’s megalomania and his paranoia. MacArthur saw radicals in those shabby shanties on either side of the Potomac River. Eisenhower saw desperate men, veterans who had served their country and wanted promised compensation for it. In New York, the ambitious young governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, listened to the radio reports of the rout and came to his own conclusion: Hoover, FDR decided, had just lost the 1932 election.
Many of the nation’s
MacArthur was a gigantic personality, a renowned alumnus of West Point, overbearing, and commandingly self-assured. He had a stunning memory—Ike recalled that MacArthur could look over a speech or memorandum and immediately recite large portions of it from memory. MacArthur often spoke of himself in the third person and insisted that his headquarters, wherever they were located, bear his name.
MacArthur displayed his ego early in Ike’s time with him. The occasion was an infamous confrontation, the Bonus March of 1932. With the Depression deepening and broadening that year, veterans of World War I demanded bonuses that had been promised them for their service. The terms of that bonus, approved by Congress in 1924 over the veto of President Coolidge, allowed payments to veterans of the war but deferred the full bonus until 1945, a condition that seemed punitive to those veterans cast out of work by the Depression. In protest, they descended on Washington that May, their gathering mass a source of fear and threat to the Hoover administration, which moved ambivalently: Hoover tried to protect the rights of the marchers and even secretly slipped them supplies, but he also resisted their entreaties for aid. As thousands of bedraggled men set up tents in and just outside of Washington, clashes with police produced a few casualties and, among those inclined to imagine anarchy, raised the specter of an ominous challenge to order.
After the Washington, D.C., police department forcibly evicted the protesters from an abandoned set of Washington office buildings, Hoover ordered the Army to push the marchers away from the Capitol but to refrain from following them across the river, where more were camped. Eisenhower urged MacArthur to delegate the matter—it was, Ike thought, unseemly for the chief of staff to move on ragged marchers. MacArthur ignored him. Instead, he donned his uniform and ordered Eisenhower to do so as well—Ike had to scurry home to get it.
The troops under MacArthur’s command pushed the marchers out of the buildings and toward the bridges leading away from Washington. As they approached, an order arrived from the White House reiterating Hoover’s message of restraint: “Don’t allow any of our troops to go across the Anacostia bridge.” Eisenhower hailed MacArthur, but the general refused to listen. “I don’t want to hear them, and I don’t want to see them,” he said of the orders the messenger carried. “Get him away.” Instead, MacArthur ordered his troops to follow the veterans across the bridge, and on the other side the encampments burst into flame. “It was a very pitiful scene,” Eisenhower recalled, “these ragged, discouraged people burning their own little things.” Eisenhower, having advised MacArthur not to lead the troops himself and having been ignored, now advised MacArthur to decline comment. He was ignored again. MacArthur met with the press and sealed his place as the symbol of the attack on the marchers.
“That mob was a very angry looking one,” he told reporters that evening. “It was animated by the essence of revolution.” The elimination of the marchers was necessary, he added, because “they came to the conclusion that they were about to take over in some way either direct control or indirect control of the Government.” That was absurd: twenty thousand ratty veterans, even with a few radicals among them, stood no chance of overthrowing the U.S. government, even in 1932. But it accurately captured MacArthur’s megalomania and his paranoia. MacArthur saw radicals in those shabby shanties on either side of the Potomac River. Eisenhower saw desperate men, veterans who had served their country and wanted promised compensation for it. In New York, the ambitious young governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, listened to the radio reports of the rout and came to his own conclusion: Hoover, FDR decided, had just lost the 1932 election.
Many of the nation’s
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