"As Young As Your Faith"

An old man climbed aboard United Air Lines flight 709 in New York last week to fly to Los Angeles and celebrate his 75th birthday. His famous stride had become a careful step, his hands looked transparent and his skin like parchment, but his back was West Point-straight, his manner commanding. When the stewardess saw that General Douglas MacArthur had not fastened his safety belt (he never does), she made the best of it and said nothing.

A head wind delayed the flight an hour and 14 minutes, and the plane landed in a fog so dense that an American Legion color guard ceremoniously marched into a fence. The general at first failed to see the crowd, and got into his car. But then he spotted his admirers and climbed out to give Los Angeles a MacArthurian accolade. Its conclusion: "There are no lost horizons here except in the matchless imagery of your studios."

Next morning Douglas MacArthur and his wife motored to MacArthur Park for the dedication of a war memorial that includes a statue of the general and a pool containing replicas of the islands he conquered in the Pacific. He was pleased and genial, but when a local architect rushed up to him at the dedication ceremonies and burbled, "I'm going to wish you a happy birthday as I want you to wish me one, because today is my birthday, too." General MacArthur looked at him, through him and away from him.

"I Am of Caesar." When his time to speak came, MacArthur, with emotion, made a defense of patriotism as opposed to fuzzy internationalism. Said the general who won a military campaign as the agent of a worldwide organization of governments: "Seductive murmurs are arising that [patriotism] is now outmoded by some more comprehensive and all-embracing philosophy, that we are provincial and immature or reactionary and stupid when we idealize our own country." General MacArthur called for a return to the simple philosophy of Stephen Decatur. for "it is fine to be called patriots or nationalists...if it means you love your country above all else."

After the dedication he whirled off to a luncheon of the 60th annual convention of the Episcopal diocese, where he reminded the audience: "Although I am of Caesar. I did try to render unto God that which was His."

That night he attended an hour-long reception and then marched into the main dining room of the Ambassador Hotel for his birthday banquet. In his main address, General MacArthur made a cloud-high. impassioned appeal for "the abolition of war,"* but his words--in vintage MacArthur oratory--on youth and age are likely to be remembered longer: "Youth is not entirely a time of life--it is a state of mind. It is not wholly a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips or supple knees. It is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions... Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals...You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair. In the central place of every heart, there is a recording chamber; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young. When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and then only, are you grown old..."

* Some editors seemed startled by the "abolition of war" line, although it has been standard MacArthur fare since 1945, when he accepted the Japanese surrender on the Missouri. He wrote the famed no-war, no-arms clause in the Japanese Constitution, and in scores of Tokyo conversations with visiting Americans, he discoursed on the line "War is obsolete."

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