It was lame duck day at Washington's Union Station. Douglas MacArthur's party gathered late in the afternoon at the platform where the Baltimore and Ohio's Capitol Limited was being prepared for its overnight run to Chicago, eighteen months after Herbert Hoover had passed through, embittered and unlamented. With the lame duck Army chief of staff were traveling three officers, and Pinky, his invalid mother, for whose care he had retained an army physician and was bringing along her daughter-in-law. Pinky felt death approaching and her son wouldn't leave her behind. On this first of October 1935  they were all on the way to Manila where Manuel Quezon and his Philippine Commonwealth were scheduled to be inaugurated.

MacArthur and his officers, of whom Dwight Eisenhower was one, could've been forgiven for thinking, in the vernacular, that they had it made. In addition to their army pay they were going to be compensated by the Philippine government as military advisers. MacArthur's prospective salary and allowances from his friend Quezon put him in the top one percent of Americans for annual income, even before his salary as Army chief of staff. More than that, he had arranged to be given a bonus of  46/100 of one percent of Filipino defense expenditures when the job was done.

A few days later when the train stopped at Laramie, MacArthur was handed a telegram from Washington, upon which he began to swear vigorously. He thought he had an agreement with the president that he would serve as chief of staff until December. The wire he held in his hands relieved him of the post and vaporized two of his four stars.

Roosevelt wasn't even in Washington. He had sent his instructions from San Diego, where he was preparing to review the Fleet and go on another fishing trip, this one down the coast of Mexico.(1)

What had happened?

The main thing that had happened was that America seemed to have caught up with the insight of Teddy Roosevelt--that the Philippines were America's Heel of Achilles, fatally vulnerable to Japan. In addition the country was sharing the experience of colonial powers at least as far back as the Romans, to wit: that sooner or later the colonial power began to be colonized by  the colonials, instead of the other way round. The urge to spin off  the Philippines was embodied in the Tydings-MacDuffie Act of 1934, which provided for the organization of a Philippine Commonwealth which would attain independence at a date subsequently fixed as 1946. The act was carefully drawn to safeguard American interests in the interim, to restrict Filipino immigration, to give the Philippine economy time to adjust. The American Navy might even retain bases. But Americans would no longer face competition from Filipino products.(2) And Douglas MacArthur, America's premier soldier, had been authorized to head up a mission which would help his friend Quezon get together a good Filipino army. All very neat!

 But even neater was a scheme MacArthur and Quezon had hatched.

MacArthur and Roosevelt had reasons for mutual dislike. The general had been appointed chief of staff by Herbert Hoover and made no secret of his Republican preferences. MacArthur would have been the senior service chieftain at FDR's inauguration if the president hadn't deliberately delayed replacing Admiral Pratt. MacArthur blew any chance Hoover had of getting reelected by his unnecessary zeal in chasing away the World War I veterans--the pitiful Bonus Army--who had come to Washington to lobby for early payment of a bonus that was due them. When Washington columnists Drew Pearson and Robert Allen published some unflattering remarks about the episode, MacArthur sued, only to drop the suit when Pearson discovered that the plaintiff had been maintaining a teenaged Filipina mistress in Washington's swank Chastleton apartments on Sixteenth Street, and had fallen out with her. Eisenhower was to spend a frustrating interval pounding the pavements trying to find the lady in the warren of Washington rooming houses .Pearson found her first and, along with her, MacArthur's  love letters. Money changed hands and the lady agreed to leave town. She had been brought from Manila by the general after his service as commander of the Philippine Department. Administration sources were supposed to have encouraged MacArthur to bring the ill-advised suit.(3) Opinion in Manila found nothing surprising about MacArthur's love affair. He was divorced and an intimate of the fast-living Quezon. But his eagerness to disperse the veterans convinced FDR that here was a potential man on horseback, as dangerous as Huey Long, the Louisiana Kingfish. He wanted MacArthur out of Washington. He even thought about appointing him the first high commissioner to the Philippines, but being on two federal payrolls posed a problem.(4)

Tydings-MacDuffie made it clear that the United States would retain sovereignty until final independence, and that the high commissioner, Frank Murphy, former mayor of Detroit, would ride herd on the Commonwealth. But details hadn't been spelled out and the seeds of trouble between the high commissioner and Filipino executives had been planted. The protocol for the inauguration hadn't been specified. The Bureau of Insular Affairs in the War Department handled Philippine matters, and the chief of staff, that is, MacArthur, was practically running the War Department because George Dern, the secretary, had heart trouble--and was being relieved of his burdens by the staff. Murphy in Manila discovered that he couldn't really reach the president in Washington. He kept bumping into the Bureau of Insular Affairs.

 The inauguration arrangements proposed by the War Department revealed what was afoot. Manuel Quezon would get twenty-one guns, appropriate for a head of state, while Murphy would get only nineteen, and those, a day or so later. From this, certain conclusions would be drawn.

Quezon had greased the way. The Philippine legislature had appropriated $350,000 to bring Vice-President Jack Garner, the ailing Dern,  and a gaggle of junketing congressmen and their wives out for gala ceremonies during the delightfully cool Philippine winter. The legislature had likewise approved compensation for American officials displaced by the Commonwealth. Sanctimonious Frank Murphy tried to spoil the fun by declining the sizable sum of $4,500 due him. He also sent a coded message to Hyde Park for the president's eyes, telling of the local maneuvers. The upshot was that Cordell Hull nixed the idea of inviting foreign dignitaries to the ceremonies, and General Malin Craig was suddenly summoned from the golf course and told he was the new chief of staff.(5)

All of which explained MacArthur's outburst at Laramie.

Murphy was busy. He was deathly afraid that, despite Quezon's numerous bodyguards,the Filipino would be assassinated before he could be inaugurated. Indignation meetings were being held at the home of Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the original insurrection against American rule and Quezon's political rival, and more than one enthusiast was vowing to kill Manuel as a patriotic duty. When the lights suddenly went out at one of the inaugural balls, Murphy's vice-governor was certain that assassins were about to strike.(6)

Quezon had accumulated a long list of people who had reservations about him. Hoover had vetoed the original version of Tydings-MacDuffie, only to have it passed over his veto. Then Quezon insisted that the Filipinos reject it. Whereupon FDR gave Quezon a Dutch uncle talk, telling him that with Congress in its present mood he was likely to get less, rather than more, concessions if he reopened aspects of the legislation. To those who hoped to plant a model American democracy on the shores of the China Sea, Quezon appeared slippery, authoritarian, and possibly corrupt. The State Department resented his repeated attempts to pose as the head of an independent state. The Army's Philippine Department thought him potentially disloyal. The high commissioner's people, who grudged giving up power, thought that all these things were probably true.

In the end, Murphy solved the precedence problem by arranging that he and Quezon would be inaugurated at the same ceremony and they marched out  practically arm and arm, more like bride and groom than squabbling politicos.

Simply stated, Quezon's friend MacArthur was a prodigy. At West Point his marks rivaled those of a cadet named Robert E. Lee.  He got his first recommendation for the Medal of Honor for a reconnaissance behind Mexican lines at Vera Cruz while FDR was bustling around preparing the West Coast for war. He was a brilliant star at the front in France. But he was also a maverick. He ignored uniform regulations to distinguish himself from the common herd. In group pictures he had the trick, while others looked at the birdie, of gazing off at some lofty vision that escaped the others. Some of his visions were bizarre, as when he assured Quezon that the Philippines could be defended ; .and the first bill sent to the Commonwealth legislature set up the defense program, designed by MacArthur after the Swiss citizen soldier model. It was a bizarre conception. As late as 1938 the general was describing it in his superheated prose: "...the battle would have to be brought to these shores so that the full strength of the enemy would be relatively vitiated by the vicissitudes of an overseas expedition... in any event, it would cost the enemy, in my opinion, at least a half million men."

Quezon probably saw the defense program as useful politically and as a makeweight against the Philippine Department, the local American Army command. MacArthur probably  figured that he would be back in a Republican administration in Washington before things got too far along. After all, the Republicans had been the dominant party since the Civil War. But his modeling the program after the Swiss ignored the fact that the two countries couldn't have been more dissimilar. No question that the Filipinos, reasonably trained and equipped, made excellent soldiers. They had been great guerrillas. The Philippine Department had two good regiments of them in the Philippine Scouts. But the recruits who walked in for MacArthur to train, were, many of them, illiterate, and speaking a half-dozen different lingoes, sometimes mutually incomprehensible. The program was starved of funds by the Commonwealth and stinted of equipment by the War Department.

When the American regulars weren't thinking of MacArthur's creation as potentially seditious, they thought of it as a joke. They were confirmed in their opinion when in 1937, MacArthur accepted the rank of field marshal complete with a nifty  black-and-white uniform, self-designed, with a gold baton. The field marshal never had as many as five thousand troops in the field.(7)

American strategy in the Philippines had been formulated by the Joint Board. Upon independence, withdraw all forces and refuse to guarantee the Philippines. In the meantime keep the establishment intact but avoid reinforcing a place that was a trap, a doomed outpost. Americans were mistrustful. A few months before he succumbed to his bad heart, George Dern wrote that the high commissioner might need U.S. troops to move against "the present [Quezon] regime." The joint Army-Navy war plan ORANGE contemplated no reinforcing of the Army garrison, which would merely try to prevent a Japanese invader from using the port of Manila until such time as the Navy could fight its way back across the Pacific. The services agreed that the chances of the Navy arriving in time were remote, extremely remote.(8)

If Quezon was a nuisance to American officials, this was his way of winning concessions. He decided to come to Washington in 1937 with MacArthur, looking for military equipment. The general had hoped that by that time the Republicans would be back in power, and, according to Eisenhower, had actually lost several thousand pesos betting on the Republican ticket. Quezon proclaimed that the Islands should be given independence in a year or two. Why wait until 1946! At the same time he was saying privately that he didn't favor independence at all, nonetheless relishing the occasions when he received twenty-one guns. He neglected to call on FDR in favor of a tour of New York night spots and MacArthur, who took time off to get married,  had to spend hours begging FDR to receive the Filipino. The interview didn't go well.

FDR subsequently decided to allow MacArthur to be reassigned to the States according to the normal rotation scheme. The general thereupon retired from the army  in high dudgeon. Quezon continued him on as field marshal in the Philippine service.

The new high commissioner, former Indiana governor Paul McNutt, eventually came to the conclusion that the United States should forget about Philippine independence, and stay in the Islands as a check on Japanese expansionism. He claimed that FDR agreed with him. In the summer of 1938, McNutt and the rest of American officialdom had got a.shock(9)

 In 1937, the Japanese-Chinese war resumed and the Japanese proceeded to chew up the Chinese divisions that had been trained by a German military mission. Observing these events, Quezon became disillusioned, as well he might, with the paltry results of MacArthur's training program, which was nevertheless devouring much of the Commonwealth budget. In June 1938, McNutt had come down from the summer capital at Baguio to confer with Quezon on the results of the completed session of the legislature, to learn to his surprise that the president was about to leave on a trip to Japan, a two-week vacation. MacArthur apparently knew nothing of the junket. On the evening of June 24th, a knot of well-wishers had gathered at the Manila pier where the Kongo Maru, bound for Kobe, was loading sugar and the presidential automobile. The only American in the party was Major Hutter, the army physician who had come out to the Philippines to look after MacArthur's mother, and who was accompanying the tubercular Quezon as his personal physician. But the Japanese consul-general was there with his assistant, along with some Japanese businessmen, wishing bon voyage to Quezon, dapper in a white tropical suit and a Panama hat.(10)

McNutt wired the War Department the news, saying that he hadn't informed Ambassador Grew in Tokyo about the visit. But Quezon wired ahead to Grew and the diplomat learned that the Japanese planned to treat the Filipino as incognito since he was traveling for his health in his private capacity. As a courtesy, a Foreign Office representative would meet him at Kobe.

The cat began to emerge from the bag when Wilfrid Fleischer, the New York Herald-Tribunes  Tokyo correspondent, filed a dispatch that said that, ‘Well-- maybe Quezon was in Japan for his health,' but that he was also seeking political assurances that Japan would spare the Islands in any southward expansion. Also, after an interval of travel, the president could expect to be entertained in Tokyo by Foreign Minister Ugaki and Premier Konoye. Quezon branded Fleischer's story as inaccurate, but he did dine with Ugaki and Konoye. Grew, for some reason, believed Quezon protestations of innocence. But Fleischer went on to charge that after Ambassador Grew left the party, Quezon lingered and arranged for private discussions the next morning, which, Fleischer said, also took place.

After the war, retired American General Elliott Thorpe, counter-intelligence chief for the occupation forces,  wrote a book called  East Wind, Rain,  where he stated that American  officers went through Japanese Foreign Office records and confirmed Quezon's political discussions. Thorpe gave no details but maybe Fleischer had it right all along. (11).

In 1939 FDR made some changes in the way Philippine affairs were handled. He put MacArthur's enemy Ickes in charge instead of the War Department. And he appointed to the high commissioner's post Francis B. Sayre, an old friend who habitually addressed the president as ‘Frank.' Sayre had entered official life near the top by marrying a daughter of Woodrow Wilson, and had lately been assistant secretary of state and head of a joint U.S.-Filipino commission charged with finding ways to ease the shock of impending independence. Sayre got off to a disastrous start by trying to end-run his titular boss Ickes, who never forgave him. Ickes organized his own staff to handle the Philippines and made no secret of his disdain for the officers in the Bureau of Insular Affairs. The War Department wasn't pleased at being cut out and the reaction in Manila was that in view of impending independence the proper supervising agency would have been the State Department. MacArthur quipped that Ickes thought the Philippines were one of his national parks. Sayre proved unequal to riding herd on Quezon, and Roosevelt even wrote him to advise not paying attention to Quezon's pinpricks, and spent some time trying to find a replacement for his friend. Early in 1940, Quezon informed Sayre that he thought MacArthur and his programs to be crazy, and that he intended to accept his resignation. Would Sayre explain to FDR?  Sayre figured that one for a hot potato and demurred until he could see the president personally. He said the issue was too "inflammable."(12)