Glorious Commander

By Gerald Clarke

AMERICAN CAESAR: DOUGLAS MACARTHUR, 1880-1964

by William Manchester;

Little, Brown; 793 pages; $15

Douglas MacArthur is one of the major embarrassments of American history. On one hand he was, without quibble or question, a military genius of the rank of Alexander, Hannibal and Napoleon. On the other hand, as this flawed but fascinating biography makes clear, he could be one of the pettiest and most arrogant men ever to have worn the uniform of the U.S. Army.

MacArthur's strategies helped to win three wars, but foreigners often appreciated him more than his own countrymen. Winston Churchill spoke of him as "the glorious commander." To the Japanese, whom he outwitted at nearly every turn, he seemed endowed with almost superhuman powers. Yet Franklin Roosevelt privately labeled him one of the two most dangerous men in America (the other was Huey Long), and Harry Truman called him "a counterfeit."

MacArthur was a man of maddening contradictions, half mamma's boy and half the warrior son of a warrior father. Arthur MacArthur was not yet 20 when he led a charge up Missionary Ridge in the Civil War, an action that won him the Medal of Honor. He went on to fight Apaches in the West and Spaniards in the Philippines, which he subsequently administered as military governor. Temperamental and occasionally insubordinate, he was publicly rebuked by Teddy Roosevelt for predicting war with Germany. "Arthur MacArthur," his aide later said, "was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen, until I met his son."

Mary Pinkney ("Pinky") MacArthur should have worn stars herself. Few mothers have fought harder for their sons than she fought for Douglas, or dominated them so completely. When he was about to take his exams for West Point, she gave him a pep talk that he never forgot: "You must believe in yourself, my son, or no one else will believe in you." Naturally, he passed and, just as naturally, his mother moved to Craney's Hotel near his dormitory, where for four years she could see the lamp in her son's window and tell whether he was doing his homework.

He was, of course. Only two other cadets, one of them Robert E. Lee, had ever received higher grades at the Point. His contemporaries regarded him with awe, and pictures from the time show why. Lean and handsome, with a beaklike nose, he radiated confidence and authority. But peacetime Army life made MacArthur restless and insubordinate. "It's the orders you disobey that make you famous," he told one officer.

World War I gave him his chance, and he distinguished himself as second-in-command of the famous Rainbow Division. He had already begun to disregard dress regulations. He walked through the trenches in riding breeches, a turtleneck sweater, and a 4-ft.-long muffler knitted by his mother. The doughboys, unlike the G.I.s a generation later, adored him and called him "the fighting dude."

After the war MacArthur returned to West Point as one of its most innovative superintendents. At the age of 42 he married; seven years later he was divorced. He did a tour of duty in the Philippines, and then, in 1930 he became Army Chief of Staff in Washington. It was a post his father had sought but never received. Two years later, MacArthur ordered the forcible eviction of hungry veterans, the "bonus marchers," from their Washington encampment, a totally unnecessary action that only left anger and bitterness. He also began to speak of himself with such third-person grandiloquence as, "MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field. There is incipient revolution in the air."

In fact, the only revolution turned out to be the New Deal, and Roosevelt's brain-trusters regarded MacArthur with as much suspicion as he did them. After leaving the office of Chief of Staff in 1935, he retired from the U.S. Army and took on the job of whipping into shape the largely nonexistent army in the Philippines, which were being prepared for independence from the U.S. So far as anyone, including himself, could see, the job was a dead end.

Japan's belligerence revived MacArthur's career. A few months before Pearl Harbor, a worried Roosevelt placed him in charge of U.S. as well as native troops in the islands. Washington refused his pleas for more men, but sent dozens of B-17s and P-40s that it thought might discourage a Japanese attack. Nine crucial hours after he heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Imperial bombers destroyed most of the planes while they were still sitting on their runways, wing to wing. MacArthur's failure to heed the warning of Pearl Harbor and to save his planes was perhaps the greatest blunder of his career. It remains unexplained to this day. He followed that mistake by neglecting to move the stockpiles of food he had in other parts of the Philippines to the Bataan peninsula, where he planned to make his final stand. It was a costly error; the Bataan defenders succumbed to hunger as much as to the Japanese.

After that, however, MacArthur did everything right. Though he never received more than 12% of the Americans sent abroad, he almost immediately put the Japanese on the defensive. He was very cautious with the lives of his men. From the time he left the Philippines until he reconquered them two years later, his troops suffered fewer than 28,000 casualties; by contrast, 72,000 Americans fell at the Anzio landings in Italy. Proclaimed MacArthur: "I will not take by sacrifice what I can achieve by strategy."

The Japanese were a savage foe. As MacArthur prepared to liberate his beloved Manila, Tojo's troops strapped hospital patients to their beds and then set the buildings on fire. They raped and killed women of all ages, and, according to Manchester, gouged out the eyes of babies. All told, 100,000 Filipinos were murdered. Yet when he took charge of occupation forces in Japan, emperor in all but name, MacArthur showed himself to be magnificently generous. The Japanese never had a more enlightened ruler. He rebuilt Japan along liberal lines. He helped draft a democratic constitution, gave the vote to women and broke up ancient land holdings.

When his third war broke out in Korea, MacArthur was 70, but he took vigorous charge of United Nations forces. He engineered the Inchon landings behind the enemy's lines, one of the most startlingly successful maneuvers of all time. He then recklessly and arrogantly pressed his luck. Despite repeated warning signs from Peking, he pushed U.S. troops up to the Manchurian border. Massed Chinese soldiers intervened and drove U.N. troops into a bitter winter retreat. The war was needlessly widened at the very moment that victory was in sight.

Manchester argues that Truman was not quite the decisive leader hagiographers claim, and that he shares the blame for the Chinese invasion. But when MacArthur repeatedly defied his orders from Washington, the President had only one choice: to relieve him of command.

"Old soldiers never die. They just fade away," MacArthur emotionally told a joint session of Congress when he returned. He did gradually fade away, although he served for a time as chairman of Remington Rand (later Sperry Rand) and occupied a plush apartment in Manhattan's Waldorf Towers, which he shared with his second wife, Jean, and his son, Arthur. He was not ordinarily given to candor about himself, but a few years before he died in 1964, he gave some indication of what it had been like to be Douglas MacArthur. "My mother put too much pressure on me," he said. "Being No. 1 is the loneliest job in the world."

His is a dramatic, often melodramatic, story. Manchester, a meticulous researcher, marshals all the necessary facts with fairness and perception. Unfortunately, he plods heavily, sometimes grotesquely, through his material. "Korea," he writes in one instance, "hangs like a lumpy phallus between the sprawling thighs of Manchuria and the Sea of Japan." Yet American Caesar succeeds despite such lapses. Fourteen years after his death, MacArthur still provides an inexhaustible story of a hero and those who worshiped and reviled him.

Excerpt

"In his braided cap, pausing to relight his corncob from time to time, he once more made a conspicuous target. A Nambu opened up. He didn't even duck.

As he strolled about, inspecting four damaged landing craft and looking for the 24th Division's command post, with the diminutive [Carlos] Romulo skipping to catch up, [General George] Kenney heard the General murmur to himself: 'This is what I dreamed about.' Kenney thought it was more like a nightmare. He could hear the taunts of enemy soldiers, speaking that broken English which was so familiar to soldiers and Marines in the Pacific: 'Surrender, all is resistless!' and 'How are your machine guns feeling today?' and 'F.D.R. eat shit!'

The airman heard a G.I. crouched behind a coconut log gasp: 'Hey, there's General MacArthur!' Without turning to look, the G.I. beside him drawled, 'Oh, yeah? And I suppose he's got Eleanor Roosevelt along with him.' Apparently enemy soldiers were just as incredulous. After the war [Tomoyuki] Yamashita said that despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he couldn't believe that MacArthur was really there on that first day of the invasion."

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