The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur Read Online Free PDF Page A

involved deploying some two hundred trains and thirty-six hundred army trucks, supplying tens of thousands of trousers, shirts, and socks, and upgrading hundreds of barracks and military receiving areas. “It was a momentous day,” one of MacArthur’s staff later recounted. “In a few hours more had been accomplished than in the previous month. . . . That night, instead of a stray light here and there the War Department’s windows were ablaze. The big machine was rolling in a war effort.”
    MacArthur was overjoyed by the army’s response. In a circular to senior officers, he described CCC planning as “the greatest peacetime demand ever made upon the Army and constitutes a task of character and proportions equivalent to emergencies of war.” But in one sense, it is not surprising that the army met the CCC challenge: Recruiting, housing, and training men is what senior officers spent their careers doing. MacArthur’s agenda on the CCC became apparent in his official chief of staff report for 1933. His message was aimed at both Roosevelt and the congressional budget committees: “To epitomize the military lessons of the 1933 mobilization, it [the CCC] has given renewed evidence of the value of systematic preparation for emergency, including the maintenance of trained personnel and suitable supplies and the development of plans and policies applicable to a mobilization. Particularly it has served to emphasize again the vital need for a strong corps of professional officers and for an efficient body of commissioned Reserves.”
    For MacArthur, the CCC success proved that the military’s officer corps was the seed corn of American national security, the one part of the War Department budget that must remain untouched. Roosevelt’s budget planners conceded the point, though grudgingly, and only because cutting into the army officer corps meant trimming the CCC. Eisenhower was among the first to understand MacArthur’s agenda and acknowledge the victory: “Gen. MacA. finally won the most importantphases of his fight against drastic cutting of National Defense,” he wrote in June 1933. “We will lose no officers or men (at least at this time) and this concession was won because of the great numbers we are using on the Civilian Conservation Corps work and of Gen. MacA’s skill and determination in the fight.”
     
    M acArthur was pleased with his CCC victory, but it made him uneasy. The army hadn’t been established to run public-works programs, but to defend the country. MacArthur was not alone in his feeling. Senior army officers harbored deep doubts about involving the military in an initiative promoted by a president who wanted to cut their budget—and by an administration filled with officials who described their leader as a “warmonger.” Then too, the army’s oversight of the CCC blurred the line between civilian and military spheres: Civilian leaders, army officers privately observed, were quick to condemn the military for intervening in policy debates, but shed their worries when the interference increased their popularity—or the likelihood that they would be reelected. MacArthur’s role in saving the CCC might have been good for the army budget, but there was no denying that organizing a domestic program putting hundreds of thousands of young Americans to work strengthened the political hand of an elected president. No matter how well-meaning they were—and no matter how deep the economic crisis—MacArthur and the military had signed on to a program that made Roosevelt look good.
    MacArthur was caught up in the contradiction. In June, he sent Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, a photograph of young men at a religious service in a CCC camp in California, appending a note intended for the president: “This photograph exemplifies to a marked degree one of the President’s essential ideals of the entire Civilian Conservation Corps project, the making of better citizens.” Roosevelt must