THE LAST WEEK - THE ROAD TO WAR
Chapter 10 - Part 3
August 30, 1939

Yet Patton flourishes, one of two cavalry officers to finish as an honor graduate in June 1924, 25th of 248 graduates overall. Middleton graduates eighth in the class, and is asked to stay on as an instructor. Another honor graduate is Major John Wood, an artilleryman.

Patton keeps a detailed notebook on his studies, with comments on the importance of artillery fire, writing that deserters, skulkers, and malingerers should be shot, and that "victory in the next war will depend on execution, not plans." After completing the class, he sends the notebook on to his friend, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Another student at Leavenworth that same year is cavalryman Terry de la Mesa Allen, who is greeted by a fellow student unpleasantly: "Why in the hell are we training cavalry officers in peacetime when they won’t use them in wartime?"

Allen retorts, "Because they make the best infantry-division commanders in wartime." Unlike Patton and Ike, Allen takes the course casually. On his first day of school, Allen stares at a question that reads, "What are the enemy’s intentions?" Allen writes "The enemy didn’t tell me," and bounces out, five minutes late to play tennis with his girlfriend, the daughter of a senior officer. The head of the school calls Allen the most indifferent student ever enrolled. Allen proves that point by graduating 221st out of 241 in a class headed by Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In July 1924, Patton is assigned to the First Corps Headquarters in Boston as corps G-1 (Personnel Officer), and spends eight months with his in-laws, pushing paper and writing papers. One such essay for the Cavalry Journal discusses warfare of the future. Patton sees generals flying in helicopters, watching on a television as tanks blast each other, and aircraft drop dreadful flame weapons. These mechanical devices, Patton writes, will be invented in the near future. Meanwhile, he says, the Army needs wheeled armored vehicles. He adds that wars will be fought where roads are scarce, and that "It is the duty of cavalry and should be its pride to be bold and dashing."

For the Patton family, the highlight is when Patton buys a new black mare named Dinah, and introduces the family to the horse by bringing it into the dining room through the French window. The low point is the death of the family’s police dog, Barney, run over by the British ambassador’s car. Late in January 1925, Patton gets new orders: to Hawaii. He sails from New York on the Army transport Chateau-Thierry on March 4, 1925, going through the Panama Canal. He takes seven of his horses with him.

George Catlett Marshall, a temporary colonel stuck at the permanent rank of major, frets in Washington over his future, too. Marshall is serving as aide to the chief of staff, Gen. John J. Pershing, living at Fort Myer, going to official functions. His duties in Washington end on July 12, 1925, when he and his wife and mother-in-law take the ubiquitous Army transport St. Mihiel to Shanghai, where Marshall becomes executive officer of the crack 15th Infantry Regiment, which defends America’s interests in the International Concession of Tientsin, China. It is the plum assignment for a colonel in the U.S. Army. The 15th Infantry’s 850 officers and men occupy a brick barracks that was, before 1914, the German army’s headquarters in Tientsin on the Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse. The 15th Regiment’s men include numerous officers and NCOs who have taken demotions so as to finish out their 20 years’ service, thus counting their days down to the pension in luxury by military standards. Even privates have houseboys to shine their boots and shave them, officers and their wives haul home vast quantities of expensive Chinese furniture and rugs after their tours, and the regiment enjoys the highest morale in the Army and endures the highest venereal disease rate, the result of encounters with Chinese and White Russian prostitutes.

Marshall arrives in Chinwangtao on September 7, 1924, and has to serve as acting CO for two-and-a-half months, guarding the international concession against invasion by any of the many rival forces fighting China’s continuing civil war. Given that the various factions mass 12,000-man armies, this duty requires the American, British, French, and Italian forces in China to rely on diplomacy and bluff. Marshall also relies on a young captain named Matthew B. Ridgway to fend off the Chinese hordes and to get the regiment out of the bordellos and back into training. Ridgway does both, getting the troops out of their downtown barracks and into the rice paddy fields to train hard. Marshall sees Ridgway’s talent. Ridgway, in turn, writes that Marshall will someday "occupy a place second only to George Washington in the military history of the United States."

Also back in the States from China is Maj. Joseph Stilwell, rocketing through the Infantry course at Fort Benning. Maj. Omar N. Bradley is also en route to Fort Benning, but he takes his 10 weeks leave, and uses it to work in a summer job on the construction of the Bear Mountain Bridge, at $10 a day, a badly-needed sum. During the work, a cable comes loose, and hits Bradley, ripping off his wristwatch. Realizing the consequences if the cable had hit him and sent him spiraling into the Hudson River, Bradley spends the rest of the summer fishing and reading about Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. Bradley is impressed at Sherman’s use of rapid, sweeping movement, finding it superior to the Great War’s trenchlines.

Major Jonathan Wainwright, on the other hand, takes a two-year break from developing the Army general staff’s "War Plan Orange" for the defense of the Philippines by commanding the 3rd Cavalry Regiment at Fort Myer, providing glittering horsemen for funerals and President Harding’s funeral in 1923.

In the Philippines, Brig. Gen. Douglas MacArthur frets over not having gained his second star, having heard that the Secretary of War regards him as being too young. "Too young!" MacArthur explodes. "Why, Genghis Khan commanded the union of his class at 13 and at 48 commanded the largest army in the world. Napoleon was only 25 when he was the world’s most celebrated military leader. Mustafa Kemal Pasha was 38 when he commanded his country’s armies!" So MacArthur’s mother, widow of Gen. Arthur MacArthur, hero of Missionary Ridge and the Philippine Insurrection, takes up her son’s cause, writing everyone in Washington, demanding that second star. Ten days before stepping down as Army Chief of Staff, Gen. John J. Pershing grants that second star, making MacArthur the youngest major general in the U.S. Army. MacArthur pins on the second star on January 17, 1925, and is transferred stateside, first to Atlanta where he visits his father’s old Civil War battlefields.

In San Antonio, Texas, Elwood "Pete" Quesada is training to fly in America’s air arm, which is down from its Great War peaks to a mere 396 serviceable aircraft, its leaders locked in arguments with each other on the proper use of aircraft in a future war. Nevertheless, Brooks Field in San Antonio, as the Air Service’s top flight school, has the money: and 16 hangars prove it. After three days of physicals and paperwork, Quesada learns drill and plays football, winning one game and breaking his leg for his trouble. Seven weeks after his cast comes off, Quesada’s classmates have finished half their training. Quesada looks like a washout.

Luckily for him, First Lt. Nathan Twining, a former West Point football star, helps Quesada make up the work, spending two days at Brooks over the Christmas holiday flying in Jenny trainers. Quesada’s heart quickens as the engine sputters to life, and he picks up the pace: in 10 minutes he manages straight and level flight; in 30 minutes he is doing constant-altitude turns; 60 minutes after take-off, his first assisted landing. In 14 days with Twining, Quesada becomes proficient. He solos six hours after instruction. Twining is impressed, and the two form a deep friendship. In February 1925, Quesada graduates from flight school, moving up to Kelly Field and its pursuit course.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr., working hard as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Washington, finds himself atop the exploding Teapot Dome scandal. The chaos begins when Congress investigates ridiculous spending in the new Veterans Bureau. Pressmen and politicians are alike are astounded that the bureau is paying 98 cents a gallon for floor wax when it can be bought in stores at four cents a gallon. Worse, the bureau has purchased $70,000 worth of 98-cent gallon, enough to wax its floors for decades. Towels that sell in Woolworth’s for four cents apiece are being purchased at 19 cents each. Meanwhile, surplus goods are being sold at shockingly low prices: bedsheets that cost the taxpayer $1.37 each are going for 27 cents a piece, while 25,000 new sheets are being bought at $1.03 each. The head of the Veterans’ Bureau, Charles R. Forbes, goes to Leavenworth. The Bureau’s attorney, rather than face a Congressional committee, commits suicide. So does a key Harding crony, Jesse Smith. The veteran scandal leads investigators to the questionable leases of the Navy’s Teapot Dome oil reserves, but Roosevelt, having done nothing illegal, ignores the growing scandal.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt, having pushed the Navy into developing aircraft carriers, now decides to follow in his father’s footsteps again, and run for governor of New York State in 1924. The Republicans tell him he won’t get their backing: Roosevelt voted to allow the sale of 2.75 percent beer as a State Assemblyman in 1920. Worse, Roosevelt considers Prohibition an "iniquitous law." And Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor takes home bottles of booze from foreign embassy parties for her parties. But Roosevelt’s opponent has his own two weaknesses: Manhattan’s Alfred E. Smith is an Irish Catholic, two objects of massive Anglo-Saxon Protestant prejudice, and is, more importantly, seeking the White House, leaving open a possible gap for Ted to exploit.

But on January 17, 1924, Roosevelt’s world starts exploding when his brother Archie phones from New York to say, "Of course, I may be wrong, but I’m afraid there’s been dirty work at the crossroads with this oil business. I don’t want to talk on the phone. When are you coming to New York?"

Ted heads home that night, and discovers that Archie knows of a $68,000 check given by Sinclair Oil men to Interior Secretary Albert Fall in payment for the lucrative oil leases. Should Archie volunteer his testimony? Thirty years old and war-disabled, Archie is in trouble. So, by family connection, is Ted. But they agree that Archie must tell all that he knows, even though it’s hearsay.

Archie spills the beans, and Congress summons the oil man, G.D. Wahlberg, who vanishes. Ted, remembering that his father set up the Bureau of Investigation, calls their director, which produces Wahlberg. Trembling and shaking, Wahlberg tells the committee that Sinclair Oil did not give Fall $68,000, but "six or eight cows and bulls." That tale does not survive the national roar of laughter, but the whole sordid Teapot Dome scandal starts unraveling, and among those under the light is Ted himself, for his shares and his wife’s shares in Sinclair Oil. Furious, Ted writes a forthright statement that gives his complete history of his family’s history with the oil company. That ends the investigation of the Roosevelts, and an exonerated Ted launches his gubernatorial bid.

Smith runs for both re-election as governor and president, and has an old friend nominate him at the Democratic National Convention in the old Madison Square Garden: Franklin D. Roosevelt, making his first major political appearance after being stricken with polio.

Roosevelt has spent much of 1923 struggling to cope with his paralysis, teaching his children to swim, working on his stamp collection (mostly inexpensive stamps from Asia), cataloguing his books, and somehow not appearing downcast. He whirls about Hyde Park in a tiny wheelchair, small enough to negotiate the old mansion’s narrow corridors, and uses a pulls a rope on a dumbwaiter converted into an elevator to reach the second floor. His staff servants figure out ways to move him from wheelchair to dinner-table chair and back with great dexterity, and carry him when necessary. FDR’s political adviser, Louis Howe, makes sure nobody outside of the immediate family ever sees Roosevelt being carried.

History is often made through strange connections. In Warm Springs, Georgia, a boy named Louis Joseph, stricken with polio, regains some use of his limbs from swimming in the water of a dilapidated hotel. A New York banker named George Foster Peabody buys the hotel, leases it to a friend, Tom Loyless, a former newspaper editor, to run, and Peabody mentions his acquisition to FDR, who is intrigued by the Joseph case. Told that a year after swimming in the pool’s water, the boy is walking with canes, FDR heads straight to the hotel to see the miracle for himself.

The pool is fed by a subterranean spring, which gives it a constant temperature of 88F, enabling patients to stay in it for vast amounts of time without being exhausted. FDR goes there for the first time in August 1921, and feels life in his toes. He keeps returning, and buys the entire property: hotel, cottages, pools, and all, along with 1,200 acres of land, making it a non-profit corporation where polio victims of all ages, ethnicities, and income levels can get treatment.

Polio has a titanic effect on Roosevelt. All of his wealth and privilege can not help him rise from a chair, squat on the grass, or even climb a stair more than two inches high. He cannot dress or undress himself completely, getting in and out of trains and cars is a massive ordeal, and to walk, he has to wear heavy, painful iron braces, and balance his weight on an aide – and still maintain a smile for the cameras and audience. Standing on lecterns, he has to prop himself up on it perfectly, resulting in the permanent newsreel image of a grim expression for the first few moments, followed by the dazzling smile.

Nor can he be left completely alone – there always has to be a valet or aide close at hand, since Roosevelt cannot even rise from a chair to greet a visitor or from a bed. His childhood fear of fire, brought on by seeing a close relative in flames from an accident, is worsened. And he refuses to even discuss his favorite sport – golf.

Yet amazingly, FDR never complains publicly and rarely privately about his paralysis. He never lets anyone be sorry for him or show pity, snapping "No sob stuff!" to those who do.

Incredibly, despite the continued hostility of vast segments of the media, opposing politicians, and later whole foreign nations, Roosevelt’s paralysis is treated with silence, if not respect. Photographs of FDR usually show him sitting or from the waist up. News stories don’t mention his disability. The only films that show FDR walking are family home movies. Cartoonists don’t stress Roosevelt’s lameness – many depict him standing and walking. Even foreign leaders don’t know that Roosevelt is disabled. While gossip and slander accuses FDR of suffering from all kinds of illnesses, including syphilis, the true nature of his battle with polio and inability to move his legs goes undiscussed, a baffling concept in the prejudice-laden 1930s and in the Internet-dominated 2000s.

Just as importantly, from the ordeal of polio and from mixing with a variety of fellow sufferers, FDR develops something he had lacked before: an empathy for humanity, concern with their condition and pain, replacing his aristocratic hauteur with warmth and compassion.

Also changed by the ordeal is FDR’s wife Eleanor, who is no longer the cuckolded wife of a politician, but the primary care-giver of a disabled person. She has to help heal her husband, care for his basic needs, and battle for him.

The first fight comes with FDR’s powerful and domineering mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, whose response to her son’s condition is the same as most Victorians: to shut the cripple away in the attic. She demands that FDR give up his political ambitions and retire to Hyde Park, simply to live as the estate’s squire. Eleanor is infuriated by this demand. She will absolutely not live under the imperious thumb of her mother-in-law, nor will she let her husband give up his dreams and become a useless appendage. Giving up politics would only kill him more quickly.

Eleanor wins this first battle of wills, and in doing so, discovers a personal fire and power that she never knew she had. As her husband recovers slowly, rebuilding his political career, Eleanor acts as his eyes and ears, encouraged by FDR’s political guru, Louis McHenry Howe. In 1922, when FDR backs Al Smith’s gubernatorial bid against William Randolph Hearst, Eleanor works for Smith in Dutchess County, learning how politics really work. The Republicans carry the county – as usual – but only by 1,000 votes. Eleanor tells her friends that from experience, she sees that the Democratic Party "seems to be more concerned with the welfare and interests of the people at large, and less with the growth of big business interests." That settles it: she’s now a lifelong liberal. She gets involved with the Trade Union League and FDR’s drive to put Smith in the White House.

FDR’s support of Smith in 1922 is critical: Roosevelt believes that only Smith can keep the volatile and erratic Hearst out of the State House and the White House, and Smith wins easily. Smith asks FDR to run for U.S. Senator, but Roosevelt isn’t ready yet. But both Roosevelts call upon Smith to run for president, and Smith asks FDR to serve as his campaign manager. Roosevelt of Hyde Park accepts, irritating the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay.

On June 26, 1924, FDR, struggling to his feet on his braces, delivers his "Happy Warrior of the political battlefield" speech for Smith at the convention, which blows the lid off the old building, but the nomination deadlocks between Smith and Klan-backed William Gibbs MacAdoo for hundreds of ballots. Among those impressed by Roosevelt’s rhetoric is Missouri political boss and Jackson County delegate Tom Pendergast, who says that had FDR been able to physically run, he would have been the convention’s choice. "He is the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met," Pendergast says.

William Jennings Bryan tries to speak, and is rudely shouted down. The colorless John W. Davis wins the nomination and loses to the equally colorless Calvin Coolidge, but FDR’s strength makes him again a national figure.

Meanwhile, Smith and the other Roosevelt face off in the gubernatorial race, and both Roosevelt wives, both named Eleanor, hit the campaign trail. However, Franklin’s wife makes speeches, while Theodore’s wife mostly waves to crowds. But at one appearance on Long Island, Ted’s Eleanor sees that robed Ku Klux Klansmen are handing out leaflets supporting Ted’s election. The Klan opposes the Irish Catholic Smith. Eleanor shows the leaflet to Ted, and he drops his usual stump speech to denounce the Klan, saying, "At this time intolerance in many forms is stirring in this country. The word ‘Americanism’ is soiled when used by a group furthering intolerance. Such a group is the Ku Klux Klan." Ted proves his point on October 28, when he stumps for votes and commemorates his father’s birthday at Mother Zion Church in Harlem, a Manhattan neighborhood that is rapidly filling up with African-Americans, drawn north by industrial jobs and fewer racial barriers.

Ted carries all but six of New York’s counties, but five of them are in New York City, so Roosevelt loses to Smith by 108,589 votes. (Smith: 1,627,111, Roosevelt: 1,518,522)