Eisenhower thought any public comment by the army inadvisable and, as MacArthur prepared to return to the War Department, suggested his boss ought to avoid contact with the press and let the Hoover administration defend the army’s actions. During a late-night press conference, however, MacArthur was unable to resist gloating at having saved the nation from ‘incipient revolution’ by a mob of ‘insurrectionists,’ likening it to the liberation of a nation from tyranny. The press reacted to MacArthur’s outburst with almost universal condemnation.

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Eisenhower was chosen to draft the official after-action report that stoutly defended MacArthur and the army; privately, he shared in the general disgust at the army being ordered to attack its own veterans, calling it a pitiful scene. About all he ever publicly said about the incident was that he had counseled MacArthur concerning the impropriety of becoming directly involved. Yet at times his attitude toward MacArthur and the Bonus March seemed rather self-serving, and his few public remarks biographer Piers Brendon described as ‘disingenuous,’ ‘bland,’ and ‘charitable.’ Eisenhower, he believes, was ‘ever ready to sacrifice plain-speaking on the altar of benevolence.’

After loyally defending MacArthur’s actions during the Bonus March for years, however, a truer expression of Eisenhower’s disdain was revealed in 1954 when he noted in his diary: ‘I just can’t understand how such a damn fool could have gotten to be a general.’ He was even more candid later during an interview with Stephen Ambrose: ‘I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch he had no business going down there. I told him it was no place for the Chief of Staff.’

The long-term damage from the Bonus March was incalculable in an era in which the military was already under fire and facing budgetary cutbacks. MacArthur and the army became the public exemplars of an ungrateful nation that rewarded its veterans by gassing, bayoneting, and shooting them. During his long and distinguished military career MacArthur was at the heart of numerous controversies, but none did more to permanently tarnish his reputation, and that of the army he headed, than the Bonus March. Eisenhower had properly anticipated trouble and offered sound advice; MacArthur, perhaps blinded by his own self-importance, had not heeded it. The lamentable result was an unmitigated public relations fiasco at a moment when the army could ill afford to become even further inconsequential.

In February 1933 Eisenhower moved into a tiny alcove no larger than a broom closet behind a slatted door adjacent to MacArthur’s large inner sanctum, to become his principal special assistant and, on occasion, his aide. MacArthur’s method of summoning Eisenhower to his presence was to simply raise his voice. Eisenhower would later write that Douglas MacArthur’spoke and wrote in purple splendor.’ Most of their discussions were really monologues in which MacArthur pontificated and Eisenhower listened, often bemused by his chief’s references to himself in the third person. Whereas George S. Patton Jr. and MacArthur believed they were men of destiny, Eisenhower had no such illusions or aspirations.

MacArthur was squired to Capitol Hill and around Washington in a fancy, chauffeured limousine. Eisenhower, whose business frequently required him to visit Capitol Hill, took a street car or taxi and was humiliated at having to return all leftover change and file a travel voucher for reimbursement. MacArthur ‘never once offered Eisenhower a ride in or use of the car.’ Eisenhower never forgot it, and even after his two terms as president the memories still smarted. ‘No matter what happens later you never forget something like that,’ he confessed to a reporter shortly before his death.

Life with MacArthur was a vivid reminder of the difference between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots.’ More than twenty years after leaving his hometown of Abilene, Eisenhower was still dirt poor and faced career prospects as bleak as the economy. What little hope the military professionals of the 1930s had was vested in Douglas MacArthur, whose reputation for bravery and the reform of West Point was unmatched in the army.

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