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

journalistic enterprise, promptly told me about it,” he wrote. “Frankly it gave
me
a jolt to learn that the President of the United States would encourage a libel suit against two newspapermen who had supported the chief goals of his administration.”
    But Franklin Roosevelt didn’t need two newspapermen to support “the chief goals of his administration”—he needed Douglas MacArthur to support them. And by May 1934, the president had him. MacArthur had not only collaborated with Roosevelt in supporting one his most cherished programs, but also kept private his doubts about the president’s economic programs. While MacArthur had quietly lobbied Congress for increases in the army budget, he never publicly denounced Roosevelt or called into question the president’s views. Roosevelt, for his part, reciprocated by keeping MacArthur on as chief of staff and remaining silent when MacArthur won congressional victories that restored the planned cuts to the officer corps. In fact, the more Roosevelt’s political allies insisted that MacArthur leave, the more Roosevelt insisted that he stay. This was Roosevelt at his most masterful: Relieving MacArthur would have pleased Roosevelt confidante Josephus Daniels, as well as Harold Ickes and Ross Collins, but it would have thrown down the gauntlet to the Republicans, igniting an ugly partisan fight that Roosevelt didn’t want. In retrospect it’s not at all surprising that Roosevelt made these calculations; what’s surprising is that his supporters didn’t understand them.
     
    D espite his work on the CCC and the president’s support for him in the cabinet, the scandal over Cooper subdued the army chief of staff. His confrontations with Ickes and Collins and his continuing, if sotto voce, disagreements over the army budget might not have driven him away from Roosevelt, but the president’s defense of him did little to close the rift between MacArthur and the president’s team. In fact, nothing had changed since the day Roosevelt had become president: MacArthur was viewed with suspicion by Roosevelt’s closest aides and was greeted at administration events as an interloper. He was “a lonely figure,” one journalist noted. “No one spoke his language. No one wanted to speak it. At the Army-Navy reception at the White House he would arrive just in time to lead the officers in the President’s receivingline, pay his respects to the First Lady, for he is the spirit of chivalry, and go back to work.”
    The degree of MacArthur’s isolation from the administration became obvious in February 1934, when Roosevelt sent White House troubleshooter James Farley to ask army air corps head Benjamin Foulois whether the army’s planes could carry the nation’s airmail. Farley’s inquiry was the result of a Senate investigation that showed that the postmaster general had awarded contracts to commercial aviation companies without competitive bidding. When the investigation uncovered widespread fraud, the contracts with the commercial carriers were canceled. But someone had to carry the mail, and Foulois told Farley that his pilots could do it. Roosevelt was reassured, but over the next eight days, the army air corps suffered eight separate crashes—the result, Foulois claimed, of unpredictable weather and navigation errors. Eight pilots died in February, and three more in March. Embarrassed by the crashes, Roosevelt called MacArthur and Foulois to the White House. “General,” he asked Foulois, “when are those airmail killings going to stop?” The answer enraged Roosevelt: “Only when airplanes stop flying,” Foulois said. Although the crashes ended, the air corps was saddled with carrying the mail until May, when new contracts were signed with commercial carriers. It was a harrowing four months for the corps, and at the end of it, Foulois was targeted by Congress for the handling of his pilots.
    Foulois was a controversial figure. Taught to fly by the Wright brothers,