SHE FOLLOWED A TRAIL OF LOVE LETTERS : HE CALLED HER BABY GIRL - DARLING OF MY LIFE - and MY BELOVED

Excerpt: 

"On the ninth of December, 1930, a young woman disembarks from the President Fillmore, which has just docked in New York City after a long ocean voyage. Isabel Cooper has finally arrived from Manila, having come to the United States at the behest of her lover, General Douglas MacArthur.  She is eighteen, or twenty-one, or somewhere in between.

She follows a trail of love letters strewn across the Pacific, written by MacArthur and posted from Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe, Yokohama, Tokyo, Honolulu, and San Francisco.  They mark his route home after being recalled from his two-year assignment as the commanding general of the Philippines Department.  They also mark the intensity of his ardor for the charming, worldly Filipina performer he had met the year before.  (How worldly could she be as a barely legal woman in 1930?)

Just weeks before Isabel Cooper's arrival, the fifty-one year old MacArthur is promoted to the rank of general, ordered to Washington, D.C. and appointed by President Herbert Hoover as the chief of staff of the United States Army.

MacArthur installs Isabel Cooper in a suite at the Chasleton Hotel, conveniently near his State, War, and Navy Building office.  His redoubtable mother, Pinky, lives with him in the official chief-of-staff residence in Fort Meyer, Virginia.  He lavishes Isabel Cooper with gifts, mostly clothes. Their liaison is not a secret to Washington insiders -- it is his mother that he wants to keep in the dark."  (pages 15-16)

(Her letters back to him do not exist.  Did he destroy them?)

Quoting one of the letters Douglas wrote to her:

"My love encompasses you and enshrines you deep in my heart... I kiss your dear lips and press your soft body to my own... I long for you so that the memory makes me feel ill and faint." (page 19)

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