Douglas MacArthur

Douglas MacArthur was born on January 26, 1880, in Little Rock, Arkansas, at an army arsenal where his father was stationed ^[1]. The military surrounded him from birth. His father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., had won the Medal of Honor as a teenage officer in the Civil War and later rose to lieutenant general, at the time the highest rank in the United States Army. His mother, Mary Pinkney Hardy MacArthur, known as Pinky, came from a Virginia family and pushed her son's ambitions with relentless energy for the rest of her life ^[2].

The boy spent his early childhood on frontier posts in New Mexico, where he later said he learned to ride and shoot before he could read or write. The family moved often, following Arthur's assignments across the American West and to Washington. Douglas attended the West Texas Military Academy in San Antonio, where his academic record improved sharply, and he graduated as valedictorian ^[1].

In 1899 he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point. His mother took rooms at a hotel near the academy so she could watch over his progress. MacArthur thrived there despite a hazing scandal that drew congressional attention during his first year. He graduated first in the class of 1903 with one of the highest academic averages ever recorded at the academy, and he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers ^[2].

MacArthur's early assignments took him to the Philippines, a posting that began a lifelong association with the islands, and to Japan, where he accompanied his father on an official tour of Asia in 1905 and 1906 ^[1]. He served as an aide to President Theodore Roosevelt, took part in the American occupation of Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914, and worked on the army's general staff in Washington, where he showed an unusual talent for dealing with the press ^[3].

The First World War made his reputation. MacArthur helped organize the 42nd Division, a National Guard formation drawn from many states that he suggested would stretch over the country like a rainbow; the name Rainbow Division stuck. He went to France as its chief of staff, later commanded one of its brigades, and briefly led the division itself. He fought at the front repeatedly, was wounded by gas, and collected an extraordinary set of decorations, including two Distinguished Service Crosses and seven Silver Stars ^[3]. By the armistice he was a brigadier general and one of the most decorated American officers of the war.

After the war he served as superintendent of West Point, where he modernized the curriculum and expanded athletics, then held commands in the Philippines and the United States. In 1930, at age fifty, he became Chief of Staff of the Army, the youngest man to hold the post to that point ^[2]. His tenure was marked by fights for military budgets during the Depression and by the episode that most damaged his standing at home: the forcible eviction of the Bonus Army, a camp of unemployed veterans, from Washington in 1932. MacArthur led the operation personally and exceeded the intent of his orders, and the images of troops moving against veterans followed him for years ^[4].

In 1935 he went to Manila as military adviser to the new Commonwealth of the Philippines, tasked with building a Filipino army before the islands' promised independence. He accepted the rank of field marshal in the Philippine forces and retired from the United States Army in 1937 while continuing his work in Manila ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Douglas MacArthur usually begins with the Pacific war. Recalled to active duty in July 1941 as tensions with Japan grew, he commanded United States Army Forces in the Far East when Japanese aircraft struck the Philippines hours after Pearl Harbor, destroying much of his air force on the ground ^[4]. The defense of the islands collapsed into a fighting retreat to the Bataan peninsula and the fortress island of Corregidor. In March 1942, on President Franklin Roosevelt's orders, MacArthur escaped by patrol boat and aircraft to Australia, where he made the promise that defined his war: I shall return ^[5]. That April, Congress awarded him the Medal of Honor for his leadership in the Philippines, making him and his father the first father and son to receive the decoration.

As Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, MacArthur directed a long campaign up the coast of New Guinea and through the islands toward the Philippines. His forces refined a strategy of bypassing heavily defended Japanese strongholds, striking instead at weaker points and leaving isolated garrisons to wither, an approach that saved lives and time ^[3]. In October 1944 he waded ashore at Leyte, fulfilling his pledge, and the liberation of the Philippines followed through months of hard fighting, including the destructive battle for Manila in early 1945 ^[5].

On September 2, 1945, aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, MacArthur presided over the formal Japanese surrender ^[1]. As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers he then governed occupied Japan for nearly six years. The occupation demilitarized the country, broke up large landholdings in favor of tenant farmers, extended the vote to women, encouraged labor unions, and produced the 1947 constitution that renounced war and established parliamentary democracy under a symbolic emperor ^[6]. Historians continue to argue over how much credit belongs to MacArthur personally, but the transformation of Japan is widely counted among the most consequential Douglas MacArthur achievements.

When North Korea invaded the South in June 1950, MacArthur took command of United Nations forces. His amphibious landing at Inchon that September, executed against the doubts of many planners because of the port's extreme tides, cut the North Korean army's supply lines and reversed the war almost overnight ^[7]. The triumph proved brief. As UN forces drove toward the Yalu River, China entered the war in massive strength in late 1950, throwing the front back south in one of the worst reverses in American military history ^[4].

The Chinese intervention hardened a dispute that had been building between MacArthur and President Harry Truman. The general pressed publicly for expanding the war, including strikes on Chinese territory, while the administration sought to keep the conflict limited and avoid a wider war with China and the Soviet Union ^[7]. MacArthur aired his disagreements in letters and statements that contradicted stated policy, most damagingly in a message read in Congress in April 1951.

On April 11, 1951, Truman relieved MacArthur of all his commands for insubordination. The decision set off a political storm. MacArthur returned to the United States for the first time in more than a decade to enormous crowds, ticker-tape parades, and an address to a joint meeting of Congress in which he recalled an old barracks ballad about old soldiers who never die but simply fade away ^[4]. Senate hearings that followed largely vindicated the administration's view that the general's strategy risked, in the words of General Omar Bradley's testimony, the wrong war in the wrong place, and the controversy became a landmark case for civilian control of the military in the United States ^[7].

MacArthur married twice. His first marriage, to the wealthy socialite Louise Cromwell Brooks in 1922, ended in divorce in 1929; the couple had no children ^[2]. In 1937 he married Jean Marie Faircloth, a Tennessean he had met on the voyage to Manila. The marriage was devoted and lasted until his death. Their only child, Arthur MacArthur IV, was born in Manila in 1938 and spent his early childhood in the Philippines, Australia, and Japan alongside his father's headquarters ^[1].

The general cultivated a deliberate public image: the crushed and braided cap of a Philippine field marshal, aviator sunglasses, and a corncob pipe. Colleagues and biographers described a man of genuine intellect and courage joined to vanity, a taste for flattery, and a theatrical instinct that his critics found insufferable and his admirers found inspiring ^[2]. He read widely in history, rarely socialized, and worked from headquarters that revolved entirely around him. His relationship with his mother remained unusually close until her death in Manila in 1935.

After his relief in 1951, MacArthur never held command again. Some supporters promoted him for the presidency, and he delivered the keynote address at the 1952 Republican convention, but the nomination and the office went to his onetime aide, Dwight Eisenhower ^[4]. MacArthur accepted the chairmanship of the board of Remington Rand, later Sperry Rand, and settled with Jean and Arthur into a suite at the Waldorf Astoria Towers in New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life ^[1].

He emerged occasionally for public moments. In 1961 he made a sentimental return visit to the Philippines. In May 1962 he traveled to West Point to accept the Sylvanus Thayer Award and delivered his farewell speech to the corps of cadets on the theme of duty, honor, country, an address still read at the academy ^[5]. He also privately counseled Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, warning against committing American ground forces to a land war in Asia. His memoir, Reminiscences, appeared in 1964.

Douglas MacArthur died on April 5, 1964, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., at the age of 84, following surgery ^[1]. After a state funeral he was buried in Norfolk, Virginia, his mother's ancestral city, in a memorial created in the old city courthouse.

Any honest Douglas MacArthur biography has to hold two verdicts at once. He was, by wide agreement, a commander of rare gifts: the New Guinea campaign, the return to the Philippines, the Inchon landing, and the governance of occupied Japan each would have secured a lesser man's reputation on its own ^[3]. In Japan his standing has remained notably high, since the occupation he led set the framework for the country's postwar democracy and prosperity ^[6]. He was among the most decorated soldiers in American history, holding the Medal of Honor and rising to the five-star rank of General of the Army in December 1944.

The criticisms are equally durable. Historians fault the loss of his air force in the opening hours of the Pacific war, the intelligence failures before China's intervention in Korea, and above all the public defiance of a sitting president that forced his removal ^[7]. Biographer William Manchester captured the divided judgment in the title of his 1978 study, American Caesar, which presented MacArthur as a figure of both grandeur and dangerous ambition ^[2].

His name endures across the landscape of the twentieth century's memory: the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk holds his papers and his tomb, Japan and the Philippines both preserve sites tied to his career, and the basic Douglas MacArthur facts, the promise at Corregidor, the surrender on the Missouri, the farewell before Congress, remain fixtures of American historical consciousness ^[1]. Debates about limited war, civilian control, and the temptations of military celebrity still return, again and again, to his example.