"For a time they had worked closely and harmoniously together, and as a writer Eisenhower may even have been at least a co-inventor of the florid MacArthurian prose style. "You know that General MacArthur got quite a reputation as a silver-tongued speaker when he was in the Philippines," Eisenhower wrote to a friend. "Who do you think wrote his speeches? I did." MacArthur was Eisenhower's first exposure to a senior officer who chose not to draw a clear-cut distinction between the military and the political in Washington's commingling of the two, who had a wide acquaintance with people in every branch of government. "Working with him brought an additional dimension to my experience," said Eisenhower. MacArthur was aware that Eisenhower had been directing the War Department efforts to reinforce him but ignored this, and his reaction to Eisenhower's progress toward eminence in Europe was a mixture of envy and something close to paranoia. MacArthur told his British liaison officer, Gerald Wilkinson, that Eisenhower had not been "wholly loyal" and that for this reason MacArthur had not kept him on in the Philippines when his term was up. (Eisenhower says the opposite: that he requested to be let go and that MacArthur tried to persuade him to stay on; given the choice, belief inclines toward Eisenhower.) MacArthur told Wilkinson that he thought Eisenhower, "spotting White House jealousy of himself (MacA) has enhanced his own position by feeding the White House with anti-MacA data- a delusion on MacArthur's part, to say the least."