Philippine Executive Order No. 1 paid MacArthur $500,000 in 1942, and the payment stayed secret until 1979

On 3 January 1942, on Corregidor, Philippine President Manuel Quezon signed Executive Order No. 1. It granted Douglas MacArthur $500,000. It also granted Richard K. Sutherland $75,000, Richard J. Marshall Jr. $45,000 and Sidney L. Huff $20,000, for $640,000 in total. The stated reason was service from 15 November 1935 to 30 December 1941. The money was wired to New York in February 1942, while US and Filipino troops were besieged on Bataan. In 1935 Quezon had promised MacArthur 46/100 of 1 percent of Philippine defense spending. Later in 1942 Quezon offered Dwight Eisenhower $60,000, and Eisenhower refused it. MacArthur's memoir, Reminiscences, does not mention the payment. Historian Carol Petillo found the order in Sutherland's papers and published it in 1979. In 1980 a retired officer said the money was for guerrilla operations. Biographer Geoffrey Perret concluded the payment was almost surely legal. MacArthur and his wife Jean are entombed in the former Norfolk City Hall, which the city runs as the MacArthur Memorial. Their only child, Arthur MacArthur IV, born in Manila in 1938, took an assumed name in Manhattan after 1964, according to biographer William Manchester. At 87 he sent a statement to the February 2025 Manila anniversary ceremony.