The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur by Mark Perry

Allen discovered her. It was as if she had been sent from heaven.
    Pearson and Allen visited the Chastleton, but Cooper had already left. She wasn’t hard to find, however; there were few young Eurasian women living in Washington, and the two reporters located her, finally, in a simpler apartment in another part of the city. Cooper provided Pearson and Allen with a windfall of information on MacArthur, but unlike the anecdotes provided by Louise, Cooper’s information was politically explosive—she claimed that MacArthur told her that he, and not George Dern, ran the War Department (“Dern is a sleepy old fool,” MacArthur said), that he was the power behind Herbert Hoover (he was “a weakling,” MacArthur bragged), and that he referred to Roosevelt as “that cripple in the White House.” She also provided Pearson and Allen with a fistful of love letters from MacArthur and said she was prepared to testify in court to everything he had told her.
    Pearson and Allen provided this information to their lawyer, who told MacArthur’s counsel that during the upcoming trial he would call Cooper as his first witness. The information had the desired effect. Not only was MacArthur horrified at the prospect of having his affair made public, but he also knew that his private comments about Dern and the president would prove particularly damning. He dispatched Dwight Eisenhower to look for Cooper, but she wasn’t at the Chastleton or even at the apartment where Pearson and Allen had found her.The two columnists had wisely bundled her off to Baltimore, where she lived under the watchful eye of Pearson’s brother. Fortunately for MacArthur, this sordid scandal had a reasonable ending: He agreed to drop the lawsuit and silenced Cooper with fifteen thousand dollars. She used the money to set herself up in business as a hairdresser in the Midwest and as seed money for a trip to Hollywood, where she scouted out film opportunities.
    Years later, Admiral William Leahy, who served as Roosevelt’s military advisor and would later be the titular head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, heard of the scandal and was surprised that MacArthur had agreed to drop the lawsuit. “He was a bachelor at the time,” Leahy said. “All he had to do was say ‘so what?’” Leahy suspected that the real reason MacArthur was so anxious to rid himself of Cooper was that he feared what his mother “Pinky” would say. “It was that old woman he lived with in Fort Myer,” he explained. But if that was true, it was only partly so. MacArthur also had Roosevelt—“that cripple in the White House”—to worry about, as well as the coterie of New Dealers who continued to lobby for his removal. But although MacArthur intended to keep his relationship with Cooper secret, numerous administration officials knew of it. Among these were Steve Early and Harold Ickes. Ickes even kept a running account of the MacArthur scandal in his diary. And Early and Ickes weren’t the only ones who knew about Isabella Cooper—Roosevelt also knew about her.
    What is extraordinary about the Cooper incident is not Roosevelt’s reaction to it, but the steps he took to defend his chief of staff. In writing his memoirs, Pearson revealed that Roosevelt not only recommended that MacArthur sue the reporters, but also named the price the army chief should exact: precisely $1.75 million. Roosevelt then went further. In mid-May 1934, after Pearson and Allen published a column on MacArthur’s “dictatorial, insubordinate, disloyal, mutinous and disrespectful” behavior during the Bonus March, Roosevelt told his cabinet that he thought Pearson was a “chronic liar,” that he had “authorized” MacArthur to sue them, and that he wanted them “out of business.” Roosevelt couldn’t have made his wishes any clearer: He supported MacArthur and expected his cabinet to do the same. Pearson was shocked. “Two members of the Cabinet, who felt this to be amost unethical way to suppress