General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)
"You
couldn't shrug your shoulders at Douglas MacArthur," observes historian
David McCullough. "There was nothing bland about him, nothing passive
about him, nothing dull about him. There's no question about his patriotism,
there's no question about his courage, and there's no question, it seems to me,
about his importance as one of the protagonist of the 20th century."
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Douglas MacArthur lived his entire
life, from cradle to grave, in the United States Army. He spent his early
years in remote sections of New Mexico, where his father, Arthur MacArthur
Jr., commanded an infantry company charged with protecting settlers and
railroad workers from the Indian "menace." As a teenager, Arthur
had served with distinction in the Union Army, eventually earning the
Congressional Medal of Honor for leading a courageous assault up Missionary Ridge in Tennessee. But he soon discovered that life in
the post-Civil War U.S. Army held little of the glamour he knew during the
war.
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These
years were even harder for Douglas' mother, Mary Pinkney
Hardy MacArthur, whose upbringing as a proper Southern lady had done little to
prepare her for raising a family on dusty western outposts. But seen through a
boy's eyes, life at a place like Ft. Selden, New Mexico, was heady stuff. "My first memory
was the sound of bugles," Douglas Mac Arthur recalled in his
"Reminiscences." "It was here I learned to ride and shoot even
before I could read or write -- indeed, almost before I could walk or
talk." Even more importantly, by watching his father and listening to his
mother, he learned that a MacArthur is always in charge.
When
Douglas was six, Captain
MacArthur was assigned to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, where
"Pinky," as his mother was known, could finally introduce him and his
older brother Arthur to life back in "civilization." Three years
later the family took another step in that direction when they moved to Washington, D.C., where Arthur took a
post in the War Department. During these formative years, Douglas was able to spend time
with his grandfather, Judge Arthur MacArthur, a man of considerable
accomplishment and charm. As his grandfather entertained Washington's elite, Douglas learned another
valuable lesson: a MacArthur is a scholar and a gentleman. Douglas, who had
always been an unremarkable student, first started to reveal his own
intellectual gifts when his father was posted to San Antonio, Texas, in 1893. There he
attended the West Texas Military Academy, thriving in an
atmosphere which combined academics, religion, military discipline and
Victorian social graces. By virtue of his excellent record there, his family's
political connections and top scores on the qualifying exam, Douglas received an appointment
to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1898. Over the next
four years, he would achieve one of the finest records in Academy history.
General
Arthur MacArthur -- back from the Philippines, where he had helped
defeat the Spanish and served as military governor-- looked on proudly as his
son graduated first in the class of 1903. What became a lasting connection with
the Philippines began with Douglas' first assignment out
of West
Point,
when the young Lieutenant sailed to the islands to work with a corps of
engineers. While on a surveying mission there, he recalled being "waylaid
on a narrow jungle trail by two desperados, one on each side." MacArthur
responded without hesitation. "Like all frontiersmen, I was expert with a
pistol. I dropped them both dead in their tracks, but not before one had blazed
at me with an antiquated rifle." Soon after this first brush with physical
danger, MacArthur enjoyed excitement of a different kind, when he was assigned
to accompany his father on an extended tour through Asia, where the General
would review the military forces of eleven countries. The MacArthurs,
Pinky included, were treated like royalty, and Douglas came away from the trip
firmly convinced that America's future -- and his own
-- lay in Asia.
One
of Douglas's next assignments
included service as an aide in Theodore Roosevelt's White House. But when he
found himself in a tedious engineering assignment in Milwaukee in 1907, his
performance dropped and he received a poor evaluation. To add to his confusion,
he had fallen in love with a New York debutante named Fanniebelle, and his brilliant career prospects seemed to
wane. But Douglas made amends in his next
assignment, at the staff college at Leavenworth, and when his father
died in 1912 he was transferred to the War Department in Washington, so that he could care
for his mother. While there he was taken under the wing of Chief of Staff
Leonard Wood, a protege of his father, and his career
was again firmly on track. In 1915 MacArthur was promoted to major and the
following year became the Army's first public relations officer, performing so
well that he is largely credited with selling the American people on the
Selective Service Act of 1917, as the country moved ever closer to joining the
war in Europe.
Even
though his record to that point had been excellent, the First World War gave
Douglas MacArthur his first real measure of fame. Quickly promoted to brigadier
general, he helped lead the Rainbow Division -- which he had helped create out
of National Guard units before the war -- through the thick of the fighting in France. With a flamboyant,
romantic style matched only by real feats of courage on the battlefield,
MacArthur became the most decorated American soldier of the war.
While
his peers were demoted to their pre-war ranks, MacArthur kept his through a
plum new assignment as Superintendent of West Point. Although he antagonized
many of the old guard, MacArthur made good on his mandate to drag the moribund
Academy into the 20th century, enabling it to produce officers fit to lead the
country in the type of modern war he had just experienced first hand. He also
managed to get married -- to Louise Cromwell Brooks, a vivacious scandal
erupted when Chief of Staff John J. Pershing -- with flapper and heiress very
different from her spit-and-polish second husband. A minor whom Louise had had
an affair during the war -- shipped MacArthur from West Point to a makeshift assignment
in the Philippines. Although disappointed,
MacArthur was glad to be back in his beloved islands; Louise, used to the
glamorous society of cities like New York and Paris, was not pleased. Even
after their return to the States in 1925, the marriage continued to
deteriorate. Louise filed for divorce in 1928. Once again, MacArthur found
solace in the Philippines, where he took command
of the Army's Philippine Department and renewed a friendship with the island's
leading politician, Manuel Quezon, whom he had known
since 1903.
Although
he and Quezon failed in their bid to have MacArthur
named governor of the Philippines, President Hoover
helped take the sting out of it by naming MacArthur to the Army's top job,
Chief of Staff, in 1930. But the early '30s were a trying time to be Chief,
when the Great Depression made Americans deaf to MacArthur's
warnings about the rising tide of world fascism. Despite his able leadership,
the Army fell to all-time lows in strength under his watch. This, along with
the damage to his reputation from the Bonus March of 1932, when he very visibly
led army troops in routing impoverished World War I vets from the capital, made
MacArthur receptive to other opportunities. Once again, he was drawn to the Philippines. In 1935, his old friend
Quezon, President of the newly created Philippine
Commonwealth, invited him to return to Manila as head of a U.S. military mission
charged with preparing the islands for full independence in 1946.
The
next few years were among the happiest in MacArthur's
life. On his way to Manila, he met and fell in
love with 37-year-old Jean Marie Faircloth from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. When Pinky died
shortly after their arrival in Manila, Jean helped fill the
void, and her devotion would remain a source of strength for the rest of his
life. After the birth of their son, Arthur MacArthur IV, the 58-year-old
general proved a doting father. But their blissful life in Manila was slowly overshadowed
by the growing threat posed by an expansionist Japan. MacArthur, despite the
able assistance of top aide Dwight Eisenhower, would not have enough time or
money to build a force capable of resisting the Japanese. When war finally came
with the blow at Pearl Harbor on December
7, 1941,
the Philippines was doomed: MacArthur's air force was quickly destroyed, his army
shredded, and by January his forces had retreated to the Bataan peninsula, where they
struggled to survive. From his command post on the island of Corregidor at the mouth of Manila Bay, MacArthur watched his
world fall apart.
But
despite MacArthur's poor showing in the Philippines, President Roosevelt
knew he couldn't let America's most famous general
fall to the enemy, and ordered him to withdraw to Australia. Although it ran
counter to his notion of a soldier's duty, MacArthur left his men facing sure
destruction, comforted only by the belief that he might lead an army back to
rescue them. For the next three years, the world watched as his personal quest
-- "I shall return" -- became almost synonymous with the war in the
Pacific. Although MacArthur's path through the dense
jungles of New Guinea was hardly imagined in
the initial war plans, his singleminded drive and
resourcefulness made it one of the two prongs in the Allied drive to roll back
the Japanese.
Simultaneously
fighting a two front war -- one with the Japanese, the other with the U.S.
Navy, who understandably saw the Pacific as theirs -- MacArthur slowly gained
momentum. In October of 1944 the world watched as he dramatically waded ashore
at Leyte, and in the following
months liberated the rest of the Philippines. On September
2, 1945,
he presided over the Japanese surrender on board the "U.S.S.
Missouri," bringing an end to World War II. His place as a leading figure
of the 20th century already secure, MacArthur may have made his greatest
contribution to history in the next five and a half years, as Supreme Commander
of the Allied Powers in Japan. While initiating some
policies and merely implementing others, by force of personality MacArthur
became synonymous with the highly successful occupation. His GHQ staff helped a
devastated Japan rebuild itself,
institute a democratic government, and chart a course that has made it one of
the world's leading industrial powers. Yet by the late 1940s, MacArthur was
increasingly bypassed by Washington, and it seemed his
remarkable career might be over. But in June of 1950, the sudden outbreak of
the Korean War -- "Mars' last gift to an old warrior" -- thrust
MacArthur back into the limelight. Placed in command of an American-led
coalition of United Nations forces, MacArthur reversed the dire military
situation in the early months of the war with a brillian
amphibious assault behind North Korean lines at the Port of Inchon. But within weeks of
this great triumph he and Washington miscalculated badly. MacArthur's
approach to the Chinese border triggered the entry of Mao's Communist Chinese,
and as 1951 dawned, they faced what he called "an entirely new war."
Although the able leadership of General Matthew
B. Ridgway stabilized the military situation near the
prewar boundary at the 38th parallel, MacArthur's
months of public and private bickering with the Truman administration soon came
to a head.
On April 11, 1951, the President relieved
General MacArthur, triggering a firestorm of protest over our strategy not only
in Korea, but in the Cold War as
a whole. As the last great general of World War II to come home, MacArthur
received a hero's welcome. Despite his dramatic televised address to a joint
session of Congress, however, the issue died quickly, and with it any hopes
MacArthur had of reaching the White House in 1952.
True
to his word, the old soldier "faded away" from the public eye, living
quietly in New York until his death in
1964. While it's questionable whether his storied life ever brought him
complete satisfaction, one thing is clear: Douglas MacArthur had more than
fulfilled his self-imposed destiny of becoming one of history's great men.
