constitution at the end of 1935.
Congress wanted to give the Philippines independence, but worried for the islands’ safety as Japan aggressively expanded its empire into China. “Can we suppose that Japan, suffering from a lack of raw materials and from excessive over-population will not be interested in the fate of these islands eventually?” asked an observer in 1935.33 The “commonwealth period” aimed to provide cover while the Filipinos developed a capable selfdefense. When Manuel Quezon became the first president of the commonwealth government, he turned to Douglas MacArthur for advice. “General,” he asked, “in your professional opinion, can the Philippine Islands defend themselves in an independent status?”
“I know they can,” MacArthur replied.
“If the matter can be arranged with the President of the United States,” he continued, “will you accept the post as Military Adviser, taking charge of all defensive preparation in the Islands?”
MacArthur answered “in the enthusiastic affirmative.”34
No sooner had MacArthur agreed to move to Manila than he made Eisenhower part of his team. “You and I have worked together a long time,” he explained. “I don’t want to bring in someone new.”35
The Philippine assignment held several advantages for American soldiers. Most important, in a time of depression they could draw two salaries: one from the Philippine commonwealth, the other their regular American pay. In fact, MacArthur’s combined salary from the United States and the Philippines made him the highest-paid military leader in the world (at about $4,000 a year).36 The assignment also allowed MacArthur to hold the rank of field marshal (a unique opportunity since the American military did not offer this option).
MacArthur landed in Manila, hoping to build an elaborate army of thirty divisions (the American army at that time consisted of three). Eisenhower’s job quickly became finding the means to build MacArthur’s army from the limited resources available to a poor nation in the midst of a global depression. It proved impossible. “The General is more and more indulging in a habit of damning everybody,” Eisenhower confided, “who disagrees with him over any detail, in extravagant, sometimes almost hysterical fashion.” He “now … seems to consider that the combined use of his rank, a stream of malapropos, and a refusal to permit the presentation of opposing opinion will, by silencing his subordinates, establish also the validity of his contentions.” However, as Eisenhower observed, the Philippines lacked everything from ammunition to training facilities. “He makes nasty cracks about ‘technicians’ and ‘small-minded people’ when we try and show that we are simply arguing from the standpoint of the amount of money available. I’m coming to believe,” he concluded, “that the 30 Div. Plan is adopted, not because he believes there is any honest possibility of attaining it, but to justify [his] early appointment [as] Field Marshal.”37
Complicating matters, pleas for more resources fell on deaf ears in Washington. Even simple requests, such as obtaining obsolete rifles from the U.S. Army, stalled in a bureaucratic limbo. Eisenhower pressed MacArthur to return to the United States to lobby for weaponry and anything else that would help train the Filipino army. But MacArthur resisted.38 Instead, through much of 1936 he instructed his staff to plan for a grand Philippine army whereupon Eisenhower would explain that the Philippines could not afford it. “I argue these points with more heat and persistency” observed Eisenhower, “consequently I come in for the more severe criticism,” usually in the form of “regular shouting tirades” from MacArthur.39
With Quezon in tow, MacArthur finally traveled to the United States to plead the cause of Philippine preparedness in early 1937. The trip went badly. Roosevelt had grown cool toward MacArthur after he left Washington and avoided MacArthur’s requests to meet. He refused to see Quezon at all. Eventually, MacArthur convinced Roosevelt to hold a short interview with Quezon only to be horrified as Quezon harangued the president for five hours, demanding immediate independence. Roosevelt refused. Worse, MacArthur failed to get any promises on matériel for the Philippines.40
Yet when he returned to Manila, MacArthur announced success. First, he explained that the Army Corps of Engineers had given him several engineers to assess the archipelago’s suitability for hydroelectric dams. As it turned out, Clay belonged to the group. It “looked like an ideal opportunity,” he explained.41 By this point a fixture in the Washington social scene, the Washington Post covered Clay’s plans to depart on its “social page.”42
Second, MacArthur announced that, while no additional funds would come from Washington, he had obtained a different windfall. Quezon had just promised him “oil money” (revenue generated from a tax on coconut oil) that would allow a tripling of the equipment budget. It also provided for the constructing of new office space for the “use of engineers that are to come over in October [that is, Clay].” He then revealed that his “real purpose in having [the engineers] here under my thumb is that, though paid by funds of the [Philippine] Power Development Corporation, I can use them to help us out whenever they are not busy on other work.”43 With this new information in mind, Eisenhower went to work on a revised budget for submission to the Philippine National Assembly with more army appropriations. He submitted it in August 1937.
Things went badly from there. Eisenhower began to hear, to his surprise, that Quezon had perhaps not promised MacArthur any “oil money” and therefore did not anticipate a revised budget calling for an expanded equipment appropriation. In fact, by October Quezon had called MacArthur on the carpet. He could not understand why the budget ultimately came to so much more than MacArthur had apparently initially promised.44
MacArthur responded that he had “never approved” of the plan for thirty divisions “or even suggested it except as an expression of his hopes and ambitions.” Indeed, “all portions of the plan that exceed the” original estimate were “nothing but the products of [his staff] … without approval from him.” If the obvious dissembling were not enough, MacArthur then called together his staff (including Eisenhower) and reprimanded them for sending the budget without his approval, despite (in Eisenhower’s words) every “scrap of auxiliary evidence, letters, partial plans presented to the Gen., requisitions, and the direct testimony,” indicating the literal opposite of his claim.
Eisenhower could not take it. He “challenged” MacArthur “to show that I’d done anything not calculated to further his plans.” MacArthur moderated. He made clear “his ‘personal’ confidence in” his staff. He even “accepted much of the blame for the misunderstanding” even while he “‘shouted down’ any real explanation” of the situation—to which Eisenhower wrote in his journal, “But it was not a misunderstanding! It is a deliberate scuttling of one plan … while he adopts another one, which in its concrete expression, at least, I’ve never even heard of before.”
The episode finally broke the relationship between the two men. Eisenhower confided that he must “decide soon whether I can go much further with a person who, either consciously or unconsciously, deceives his boss [Quezon], his subordinates and himself (probably) so incessantly as he does.” In reality, Eisenhower had “remained on this job, not because of the Gen.—but in spite of him. I’ve got interested in this riddle of whether or not we can develop a [Philippine War Department] and an army capable of running itself.… But now I’m at a cross road.”45
Just as Eisenhower debated whether to demand a transfer away from MacArthur, Clay arrived in Manila and took up residence in the same hotel as the Eisenhowers and MacArthurs. For the next year, the three future military governors lived in the same building. Quickly, Clay developed a working relationship with MacArthur (“General MacArthur never came to the office but about an hour a day,” he recalled, but every “once in a while, he’d call me up and we would go to a prize fight. He loved prize fights”).46
