Unlike their counterparts in European military academies, many plebes did not plan on a life in the military. Students often attended West Point for the free college education it offered. Unfortunately, they often got what they paid for. West Point lagged far behind the new research universities popping up around the country.39 Its curriculum had hardly changed since its creation during the presidency of James Monroe in 1817. Students memorized and regurgitated. Nothing more. Grades reflected the accuracy of the regurgitation. Nothing else. When plebes studied strategy, they consulted the battles of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant.40 If a plebe asked a question or wanted to understand the material he recited, the faculty cut him short: “I’m not here to answer questions,” they said, “but to mark you.”41
The absurdity of this approach nearly got Eisenhower expelled. One morning he forgot to prepare a math lecture. He stood at the board puzzling it out and, after a few tries, succeeded—but not in the prescribed way. “Mr. Eisenhower,” his instructor said, “you memorized the answer, put down a lot of figures and steps that have no meaning whatsoever … in hope of fooling [me].” Eisenhower took this as an accusation of cheating. He became “red-necked and angry” and went right back at his professor, a clear act of insubordination. As tensions rose, a more senior faculty member happened to walk by. After looking over Eisenhower’s work, the senior instruction said, “Eisenhower’s solution is more logical and easier than the one we’ve been using. I’m surprised that none of us … has stumbled on it.” Eisenhower survived. But so did the academy’s hostility to initiative or innovation. This particular professor never forgave him.42
A decade earlier, in 1903, when MacArthur graduated from West Point, most plebes thought that the best assignment lay with the Corps of Engineers—probably because it led most easily to a private sector career. Promotions in this branch often came sooner than in the other branches. MacArthur, as the top of his class, obviously ended up in the corps. His first assignment took him to the Philippines, just a few years after his father had left. He took up the job of constructing roads and barracks and, eventually, a wharf. Once, while searching for timber, two Filipino insurrectionists ambushed him, shooting his hat from his head. MacArthur returned fire and killed both men. An observing sergeant, figuring that only Providence had saved MacArthur, predicted “the rest of the Loo’tenant’s life is pure velvut.”43
A year later, it seemed anything but. MacArthur had contracted malaria and the “dhobe itch.” In October 1904, he returned to San Francisco to recover. By this point his father had become a major general, and Arthur MacArthur arranged for his recovering son to become his own aide-decamp. As a perk, the assignment included a long tour of Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. In particular, the two MacArthurs observed the workings of the Japanese, German, French, and British colonial empires. In all, they traveled nearly twenty thousand miles, and the experience convinced the younger MacArthur that America’s future was “irrevocably entwined with Asia and its island outposts.”44
When Arthur MacArthur suddenly passed away in September 1912, his widow’s health began to decline rapidly, and Douglas asked for reassignment near his mother. Secretary of War Henry Stimson felt that, “In view of the distinguished service of General Arthur MacArthur, the Secretary of War would be pleased if an arrangement could be effected” that would keep Douglas close to his widowed mother in Washington. The best way to do this was to make Douglas an assistant within the office of the newly created chief of staff.45
He arrived in Washington just as the dust settled following an existential struggle between Major General Leonard Wood, the new chief of staff, and Adjutant General Frederick Crayton Ainsworth. Wood represented the progressive wing of the military: he wanted centralization, professionalization, and greater executive control over the military. As adjutant general, Ainsworth headed one of the army’s bureaus. He stood for the old model: independent bureaus, a more federalized organization, and congressional perks. As is often the case in institutional fights, the issue that sparked the showdown involved something minor: how to handle military paperwork more efficiently. Yet it quickly escalated to a fight over the army’s future: would it fashion itself after European armies (particularly Prussia)? Or would it resemble the nineteenth-century citizen-army of the American past?
Henry Stimson, who served as secretary of war during Wood and Ainsworth’s battle, ultimately favored the progressive wing of the army. An austere patrician from New York with a strong sense of duty and a clear sense of right and wrong, Stimson entered public service when President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1906. He quickly built a strong reputation as a capable antitrust champion, which led to his appointment in 1911 as secretary of war to William Howard Taft. In the fight between Wood and Ainsworth he favored Wood generally but not decisively, hoping the two could resolve their differences despite the fact that their exchanges grew terser through 1911 and into the next year. Stimson finally felt compelled to act when Ainsworth finally sent a message that suggested Wood, as well as War Secretary Stimson, could not comprehend the “evil effects” of their paperwork “plan.” Ainsworth had violated Stimson’s sense of decorum. Wood wanted Stimson to initiate a court martial. But Stimson settled on simply relieving Ainsworth. In February 1912, Ainsworth “retired,” indicating that the progressive wing of the military had become ascendant.
Congress, of course, did not go unaware of the bureaucratic battle. Many members understood that Ainsworth’s departure called in question the old arrangement of using army bureaus to funnel appropriations back to home districts. Thus, in successive appropriations bills, Congress attached riders to remove Wood from office and to return power to the adjutant general’s office. President Taft vetoed them all. He stood by his war secretary and army chief of staff. The adjutant general’s office would remain under the thumb of the general staff. But congressional opponents did not go quietly; they fired a parting shot by reducing the general staff from forty-five to thirty-six officers. MacArthur got his assignment even as the staff downsized—a telling testament to the legacy of his father.46
As soon as he arrived in Washington, MacArthur ingratiated himself with Wood. Whether he understood it or not, his arrival after the bitter feud worked with his pedigree to make him a neutral arbiter with the still embittered officers throughout the army’s bureaus who had come to loathe Wood but still respected the MacArthur name. Wood, however, clearly understood this dynamic, and so he utilized MacArthur extensively. Soon after becoming president, Woodrow Wilson apparently recognized the same dynamic at work and offered MacArthur a job as a White House aide in 1913. MacArthur, loyal to Wood, declined.47 In any event, as Eisenhower and Clay still made their way at West Point, MacArthur had already managed to move to the nexus of army politics.
The outbreak of hostilities in Europe in the summer of 1914 made MacArthur’s position especially interesting. Initially, President Woodrow Wilson struggled to keep the United States out of the war, suspecting the motives of all the belligerents. Yet other prominent Americans feared that eventually the United States would be dragged into the conflict. In particular, Theodore Roosevelt, Stimson, and Wood—all out of office by 1914—argued that the army should actively prepare for that eventuality. Wilson would have none of it. As if to emphasize his feelings he refused to meet with his military leaders with any regularity; worse, he threatened to fire any military leaders caught making contingency plans in case war came.48 In theory, the Joint Army and Navy Board should have allowed for some provisional discussions of American involvement in the war. Here, again, the Wilson administration remained intentionally unprepared. Assistant Secretary of War Henry Breckinridge summed up the views of the Wilson administration: he only “fooled with” the board “on hot summer afternoons when there was nothing else to do.”49
When Germany’s decision to unleash unlimited submarine warfare forced Wilson’s into the war on the side of the British and French Entente, the army suddenly found itself facing a first-rate opponent on the other side of a wide ocean. Unsurprisingly, the broader national