Both disliked Pickering. He had long before decided this was because of his personal relationship with MacArthur, which was far closer than their own. Pickering declined more invitations to cocktails, or bridge, or dinner with the MacArthurs than both of them received. And MacArthur often addressed Pickering by his first name, an "honor" he rarely accorded Willoughby or Whitney or, for that matter, anyone else.
There was more than that, of course. Pickering had never been subordinate to MacArthur. Worse than that, they knew—and there was no denying this— that he was, in effect, a spy in their midst, making frequent reports on MacArthurs activities that they never got to see.
In the case of Whitney, Pickering had made a social gaucherie the day he had met MacArthur when he arrived in Australia from the Philippines with members of his staff—soon to be dubbed the "Bataan Gang." He had not recognized Major Whitney as a Manila lawyer he had known before the war.
The truth was that he simply hadn't remembered the man. Whitney had decided he had been intentionally snubbed, and had never gotten over it.
Pickering had written his wife from Australia, in early 1942, that his relations with MacArthurs staff ranged from frigid to frozen, and that had been when he had been a temporarily commissioned Navy captain sent to the Pacific by Navy Secretary Frank Knox. The temperature had dropped even lower when he had been sent to the Pacific as a Marine brigadier general and with the title of Deputy Director of the OSS for Asia.
MacArthur—with the encouragement of Willoughby and Whitney, Pickering had come to understand—had not wanted the OSS in his theater of operations. Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence officer, and Whitney, who had been commissioned a major in the Philippines just before the war, and was serving as sort of an adviser, were agreed that intelligence activities should be under MacArthur's intelligence officer. Whitney, moreover, had decided he had the background to become spymaster under Willoughby.
MacArthur had not refused to accept the OSS in his theater, he had simply been not able to find time in his busy schedule to receive the OSS officer sent to his headquarters by Wild Bill Donovan, the head of the OSS.
Donovan, who was a close personal friend of Roosevelt, had complained to him about MacArthur's behavior, and Roosevelt had solved the problem by commissioning Pickering into the Marine Corps, assigning him to the OSS, and sending him to deal with MacArthur.
Pickering had a dozen clashes with the Bataan Gang during World War II, the most galling to Willoughby and Whitney his making contact with an officer fighting as a guerrilla on Mindanao after MacArthur—acting on Willoughby's advice—had informed the President there "was absolutely no possibility of U.S. guerrilla activity in the Philippines at this time."
Pickering had sent a team commanded by a young Marine intelligence officer—Lieutenant K. R. McCoy—to Japanese-occupied Mindanao on a Navy submarine. McCoy had established contact with a reserve lieutenant colonel named Wendell Fertig, who had refused to surrender, promoted himself to brigadier general, announced he was "Commanding General of United States Forces in the Philippines," and begun guerrilla warfare against the Japanese occupiers.
When, late in the war, MacArthur's troops landed on Mindanao, they found Brigadier General Fertig waiting for them with 30,000 armed and uniformed troops, including a band. Pickering had had Fertig's forces supplied by Navy submarines all through the war.
Every report of Fertig's successes—even of a successful completion of a submarine supply mission to him—during the war had been a galling reminder to the Bataan Gang that Pickering had done what MacArthur had said—on their advice—was impossible to do.
Pickering had learned that MacArthur had a petty side to his character. The one manifestation of this that annoyed Pickering the most—even more than MacArthur's refusal to award the 4th Marines on Corregidor the Presidential Unit Citation because "the Marines already have enough medals"—was MacArthur's refusal to promote Fertig above his actual rank of lieutenant colonel even though Fertig had successfully commanded 30,000 troops in combat. An Army corps has that many troops and is commanded by a three-star general.
Whitney had risen steadily upward in rank—he ended World War II as a colonel and was now a brigadier general—and this added to Pickering's annoyance and even contempt.
Aware that he was being a little childish himself, Pickering took pleasure in knowing that Brigadier General Whitney's pleasure with himself for being at El Supremo's elbow when he met with the President would be pretty well soured when he saw Pickering get off the Presidential aircraft.
There turned out to be less of an arrival ceremony for the President than there had been at K-16 when MacArthur had landed there to turn the seat of the South Korean government back to Syngman Rhee.
The door of the Independence opened, and two Secret Service men and a still cameraman and a motion picture cameraman went down the stairs. Then Truman came out of his compartment and went down the stairs.
MacArthur saluted. Truman smiled and put out his hand, then started shaking hands with the others of MacArthur's party.
The first man off the Independence after Truman was a stocky Army chief warrant officer in his mid-thirties. He carried a leather briefcase in one hand and a heavy canvas equipment bag in the other. He wore a web pistol belt with a holstered .45 around his waist. A jeep was waiting for him. He got in it and drove off before General of the Army Omar Bradley came down the stairs.
George Hart knew—and had told Pickering—what the equipment bag contained, and what Chief Warrant Officer Delbert LeMoine, of the Army Security Agency, was doing with it. LeMoine was the Presidential cryptographer. Messages intended for the President that had come in since they left Hawaii had been forwarded to Wake Island. Wake Island, however, did not have the codes. The President would have to wait for his mail until LeMoine decrypted it.
The dignitaries aboard the Independence came down the stairs one by one and shook hands with MacArthur and the members of his staff he had brought with him from Tokyo. Pickering decided he was not an official member of the Truman party, and waited until the handshaking was over before he got off the Independence.
He gave Brigadier General Courtney Whitney a friendly wave. Whitney returned it with a nod and a strained smile.
Truman and MacArthur got in the backseat of a something less than Presidential—or MacArthurian—1949 Chevrolet staff car and drove off for a private meeting.
Then everyone else was loaded, without ceremony, into a convoy of cars and jeeps and driven to one of the single-story frame buildings lining the tarmac. Inside, a simple buffet of coffee and doughnuts had been laid out for them.
Pickering had just taken a bite of his second doughnut when another Army warrant officer touched his arm.
"Would you come with me, please, General?" he asked.
"Sure," Pickering said. "What's up?"
The warrant officer didn't reply, but when Hart started to follow them, he said, "Just the general, Captain."
The warrant officer led Pickering to a frame building—identical to the one where coffee and doughnuts were being served—a hundred yards away and held open the door for him.
There was an interior office, guarded by a sergeant armed with a Thompson submachine gun. He stepped out of the way as Pickering and the warrant officer approached, and then the warrant officer knocked at the door. A moment later LeMoine unlocked the door, opened it, and motioned Pickering inside.
Then he closed and locked the door and turned to Pickering with a smile.