5 The Plot to Seize the White House



On July 1, 1933, General Butler’s phone rang soon after he had had
breakfast.  Calling from Washington, an American Legion official he had
met once or twice told Butler that two veterans were on their way from
Connecticut to see him about an important matter and urged him to make
time for him.
 About five hours later, hearing a car pull up into his secluded
driveway at Newtown Square, Butler glanced out the porch window.  His
lips pursed speculatively as two fastidiously dressed men got out of a
chauffeur-driven Packard limousine.
 At the door the visitors introduced themselves as Bill Doyle,
commander of the Massachusetts American Legion, and Gerald C.
MacGuire, whom Butler understood to have been a former commander of
the Connecticut department.
 Butler led the visitors into his study at the rear of the house, and they
took chairs opposite his desk.  MacGuire, who did most of the talking,
was a fat, perspiring man with rolls of jowls, a large mouth, fleshy nose,
and bright blue eyes.  He began a somewhat rambling conversation
during which he revealed that he, too, had been a Marine, with a war
wound that had left a silver plate in his head.  Doyle established his
combat credentials by mentioning that he also had a Purple Heart.
 Butler’s compassion for wounded veterans made him patient as
MacGuire encircled the subject of their visit in spirals that only gradually
narrowed until their apex pierced the point.  The point, it seemed, was
that MacGuire and Doyle, speaking for a coterie of influential
Legionnaires, were intensely dissatisfied with the current leadership of
the American Legion.  Considering it indifferent to the needs of rankand-file
veterans, they revealed that they
hoped to dislodge the regime at

a
forthcoming Legion convention to be
held in Chicago.  They urged