Political theory and practice

A detailed and comprehensive biography of the man, includes much of his family life and personal relations, as well as his long career as a diplomat, which started at his father’s knee.  The trials and tribulations of his wife following him around Europe and the east coast of the United States, with repeated miscarriages and small children in tow is exhausting.  What she put up with is remarkable and yet as the author intimates the norm of the time though exaggerated in the case of JQA.

JQA had three distinct but interacting careers, the first as a professional diplomat, second as the sixth president, and third, subsequently, as a Congressman for nearly twenty years.  Throughout these careers he wrote and published poetry, and earned a little money from it, very little.  There was no family wealth and he earned his own living and had constant money worries.  One of the attractions of Congress after the presidency was the (pitiful) income.
There were many achievements in the diplomatic career, hard won though they were.  He also did some noteworthy things as a Congressman.  His least successful career was in the White House, and the poetry.
Because JQA spent so much time in Europe he saw, met, and mixed with many of the great personalities of the age including Napoleon, Wellington, Humphrey Davy, Russian emperors, Jeremy Bentham, Prussian generals, Italian inventors, etc.  on his brief returns to the United States in Boston, New York, or Washington he mixed with the leading lights in politics (Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun, James Monroe) and inventors like Robert Fulton.  
His diplomatic career started at age 13 when his father, in Paris to secure French support for the Revolutionary War, was sent to Russia to interest it in commercial contacts, and Adams Senior took along his prepubescent son, JQA, as secretary-translator.  JQA has been schooled for several years in French in Paris and was fluent at his age level, and the language of diplomacy was French, and the language of the Russian court was also French.  Adams Senior never learned any French despite his many years in Paris on several missions.  
JQA’s last diplomatic posting was to Great Britain as ambassador.  In between there was an array of appointments as minister (ambassador) to the Netherlands, Portugal (though this fell through before he embarked for Lisbon), France, Berlin, and back to Russia, and also many ad hoc missions to negotiate commercial contracts here and there.  The most significant of the latter was one of the negotiators of the Treaty of Ghent to end the War of 1812.  
The major themes of the book are:
Jefferson ran for president as the anti-Washington establishment candidate, as later did Andrew Jackson.  
The French decadent and absolutist monarchy supported revolution but USA has much more in common with the more egalitarian, mercantile English. My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
Identification with France of the southern Jefferson and his embryonic democratic party versus the identification with England of New Englanders like the Adamses.  The Jeffersons wanted a weak central government and strong states (to protect slavery) as the price of their adherence to the Union.  The New England Federalist wanted a strong central government to hold the union together to protect rights and make for commerce.  To the Jefferson democrats a strong central government was monarchical.  Besides the tariff the only source of funds would be from the sale of western land, but the pressure was to sell cheap, not dear.
Tension between the human rights of the Declaration of Independnce the reality of slavery.
The effect of the 3/5ths counting of slaves allowed the south to dominate the House of Representatives where presidential elections were solved, and presidential voting.
Constant conflict between French and English involved USA as a bystander, the more so when Napoleon was active.  JQA was in St Petersburg when Napoleon burned Moscow and in Paris when Napoleon returned from Elba and in a theatre when he appeared.
Impressing seaman from American merchant ships was a recurrent event.  Britain was both desperate for manpower to blockade Europe and contemptuous of USA ability to stop it.  
The idea of concurrent majorities that States had to agree to federal laws even regarding foreign relations, designed to keep the central government weak.  To advocate local improvements meant federal government taxation to pay for those improvements.  That meant bypassing state governments.  Most federal income came from tariff on New England trade.  
JQA had a brief term as a state senator in Massachusetts and also as a USA senator.  In each case he had no chance of re-election because he did not vote exclusively for the immediate, narrow, short-term interest of Massachusetts.  
Monroe made him Secretary of State and several previous Secretaries of State had succeeded to president.  But by then JQA seems to have had no party.  The extreme Federalists had abandoned him and the moderate federalists dissolved.  The swarm of job seekers startled him.     
His election was a result of the combined efforts of ambitious others who wanted to stop Andrew Jackson.  They (Henry Clay, John Calhoun, William Crawford, and Daniel Webster) threw their votes to JQA.  Jackson had the most popular votes but lost.  In those days elections without a majority of electoral votes went to the House of Representatives where the anti-Jackson’s combined for JQA because he had no future.  He had no party, no constituency, no ambition….
The intellectual, Indian-loving Adams had no chance the second time against the man of the people Andrew Jackson.  Calhoun swung to Jackson. Crawford died. Clay huffed and puffed. Webster had less influence than he,thought. The anti-Jackson coalition split. JQA followed his father as a one-term president. He was comprehensively defeated.  Like John Tyler and Millard Fillmore later, and perhaps Teddy Roosevelt, he was a president without a party.  He started as a Federalist and served in Congress first as a Republican, then a Democrat, and Whig as president and in his last stint in Congress.
Though JQA thought parties perverted democracy with deals, compromises, and coalitions, yet he rejected the direct democracy implicit in the nullifiers position.  
Indian-lover because he tried to honour existing Indian treaties.  The slave states suspected him to be a closet abolitionist though his attitude to blacks was ambivalent.
Haiti and it’s black government loomed very large in the minds of slaveholding Southerners.  They would not support any meeting of Latin American States that included Haiti.
Like Monroe before him, President JQA did not rush to recognise rebellious Latin American countries.  
Adams is credited in these pages with writing the Monroe doctrine. Even if he wrote the words, which are quite matter of fact, not declamatory, it was always and only Monroe’s decision.  
Major achievements of his presidency were peace and prosperity.  He negotiated several boundary disputes on the Maine border with England, and also commercial treaties to keep shipping open.  More important, he negotiated the Spanish out of Florida. Domestically he proposed many internal improvements, some of which were successful, but most were rejected.  
While president he planted about 200 trees on the White House grounds, sometimes doing the work himself.  It seems to have offered an escape from the unremitting and thankless job, as he saw it. He did not enjoy the politicking and working on the grounds also hid him from the press of job seekers.
As many as eight states proclaimed nullification of Congressional acts that did not suit them.  The most obstreperous were, no surprise, Georgia and South Carolina.  JQA always saw this as code for slavery.  He never seems to have challenged slavery in any way, though, in the first two careers.
When he left office he was 64, and not robust. Yet when a retiring Congressman from Plymouth suggested that JQA bid for his seat, he was easily convinced to do so, despite the protests of his wife and grown children. He may not have like politicking but he still had a case of Potomac fever.  He said going into Congress would allow him to speak his mind of the great principles without the onerous duties of the executive.  I translated that as ‘I will have the satisfaction of carping at Andrew Jackson even if no one listens.’  The author takes him, on this as with everything else, at his word.  
JQA was interviewed by Alexis de Tocqueville.
In Congress he chaired the House committee on tariffs which the front line in the battle between the States over nullification.  But more importantly, he became ever more committed to abolition and said so often, repeatedly, and well.  He accepted the assignment to defend the Amisted Africans before the Supreme Court, and though the case was decided on a technicality there is no doubt his arguments left the Court no choice but to find for the defendants.  It was a giant cause célèbre at the time.

Adams the Congressman in an 1848 photograph
He is also credited with steering the Smithsonian bequest into the museums we now know.  Believe it or not, Ripley, the original reactions to the gift were to reject it.  New Englanders suspected there was some nefarious trick to it by the English, while Southerners did not want anything to increase the size of the federal government.  They both wanted to reject it.  President van Buren wanted to take the money, disregard the stated purpose of the gift, and use it to buy votes in his re election bid by investing in worthless state bonds in Arkansas, Ohio, and so on. There was pressure from the Brits to use it as intended or give it back to them.
JQA, because he had no party and no future, was finally made chair of a committee to deal with it.  His own goal was a national university system starting in D.C. But that would cut across States rights so it never started.  He compromised on the establishment of the natural history museum.  A fine result, I say, having visited Smithsonian museums not enough, but what a terrific struggle to bring them about.  There were several later efforts to ambush it which JQA saw off.  It all seems as frebile, selfish, and shortsighted as a curriculum committee meeting.
He died at his seat in the House of Representatives.  He had become in his last years a tiger for abolition and a skilled maneuverer in Congress.  The book ends there.  There is no summing up, retrospective, legacy, score card of strengths or weaknesses.  
He continued to write and publish poetry throughout his life, and also published many speeches and essays on topics of the day.
The book rests on a mountainous knowledge of JQA, thanks in part to his diaries. Perhaps because so much comes from that source, the book sometimes seems to see the world only as JQA did.  Any alternative view could only be explained by bad will, thus Henry Clay is written off as a self-serving cipher, he who knew he had destroyed his career with the Missouri Compromise.  So, too, for others like Calhoun, who never compromised on his (despicable) principles. Only JQA seems to have been animated by the greater good, oh, and President Monroe, too, but only because he made JQA Secretary of State.  
The book gives a premium to what JQA wrote as the mark of the man, and much less to what he did, until his last Congressional career. But in one reading of these pages he abandoned his wife and family routinely, often in very difficult circumstances though he was anxious about it, in his diaries, he did it time after time in the name of duty (but might there not have been a different way).  He was hardly ever there for his children and when he was it was to chide  and restrain them.  He seems largely friendless.  The author refers to many people as his friends but there is no detail so they seem more like neighbors, acquaintances, colleagues.  In Washington he was a profound outsider because apart for the preceding eight years as Monroe’s Secretary of State he had lived outside the USA.  Yes, eight years in which he seems to have made no friends, nor found allies.  A loner he learned to be in his diplomatic life and loner he stayed even in the hive that is Washington.  
I found the book hard to read at times.  Not quite sure why.  Convoluted sentences, there were a few, but no more than in most books dealing with complications.  There was a great deal of detail especialy about his family life, that did not add to a reader’s understanding of the man, but was repetitious.  In the chronology another account of the wife, Louisa, fainting spells did not sharpen the picture of JQA.  I know the author left much out but I wondered if there might have been more — left out.

The military career of Douglas MacArthur spanned bows and arrows at the start and finished with thermonuclear weapons. He lived in a fort in the Southwestern United States with his soldier father when Apaches attacked with bows and arrows and left the army in the atomic age.

Most of the things this know-it-all thought he knew about Douglas MacArthur turn out to be false, the product of unscrupulous journalism, red-baiting politicians, or dithering Secretaries of State re-writing history.  
1. He did not exceed his mandate Korea.
2. He did not propose nuking China or anyone else while in Korea.
3. He did not provoke Chinese entry into the Korean War.
4. He did not defy civilian authority during that war or before.
5. He did not cower in fear from combat in World War II as in the disparaging phrase ‘Dugout Doug.’
6. He did not abuse his role in post war Japan to please himself. 
7. He did not underestimate the Japanese before, during, or after World War II.
8. He did not indulge in personal luxuries in Manila before the Japanese invasion.
9. He did not indulge in personal luxuries in Manila upon his return.
The list could go on.
How did he get so vilified?  Two major reason emerge.
First, in the politically charged environment of Washington D. C. he never did not fit any the conventional moulds, so he was denigrated at times by conservative Republicans, liberal Democrats, and all stations between with their obliging hacks in the press. At other times one or another of these combatants embraced him and that riled the others even more.
Second, he was aloof in person and did not court any journalist.  With personal shyness, lifelong paranoia, and a propensity to magniloquence on many occasions he made an easy target for those seeking a cheap shot. (I always think of Bill Bryson when I think of taking cheap shots which just shows that it works because he has made a career out of it.) MacArthur was always good for copy.
Perhaps more important than those two points is the fact that there was the studied reluctance in his superiors to give him clear, concise, and unequivocal orders in crises.  That master of multiple meanings President Franklin Roosevelt was the Grand Vizer of ambiguity during the siege of Bataan, allowing MacArthur to infer from his radio messages that support and relief were on the way when none was contemplated, let alone on the way.  MacArthur passed these reassurances on to his embattled army and the desperate Filipinos. Accordingly he felt betrayed when no help came and that he had been tricked into betraying the trust of his command and the Filipino people. In this context it made sense for him to say ‘I shall return’ because it was a personal pledge since he no longer trusted Washington D. C. and neither did anyone else in the Philippines at the time.

It is a similar story in Korea but with a larger cast and with even more at stake in the age of atomic bombs. President Harry Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Omar Bradley, and Secretary of Defense George Marshall all individually communicated directly with MacArthur, as well as in combinations. Then there was the United Nations, and the twenty-three (23) allies to consider. The energetic Secretary of State was capable of sending twelve (12) signals in a single day.  Moreover, each correspondent chopped and changed from one day to the next.  And each of them was conscious of the impending judgement of history and so at times wrote for that future audience as much, perhaps more so, than for MacArthur, who also was aware of posterity and replied in kind.
The most haunting memorial in that city of memorials, Washington, D. C.
On occasion their communications were phrased as orders, at other times as suggestions.  Some communiques were laid out as alternatives, implicitly leaving the choice to MacArthur and when he chose he was then castigated for the choice. Often the messages were short, so short that the point was not always clear.  Others were long-winded and contradictory.  He asked once for a clarification of a short message and got back sixteen pages (16), written by a committee (the Joint Chiefs), which lent itself to any number of interpretations.
To return to that list of points above.
1. His mandate from the United Nations originally charged him to ‘unify Korea.’  He had had explicit instructions to drive ‘the enemy’ out of Korea from Truman.  When it seemed he was about to succeed in those aims, the ambiguity went into overdrive because China stirred.  One confusing, contradictory message after another came from his many Washington superiors who would urge him to do ‘anything necessary’ but ‘do not take any risks.’  Doing what was necessary had inherent risks. It was like walking a zig-zagging tight rope in the wind. Yes, Washington D.C. did change that mission but did not want to broadcast it so it was phrased obliquely. But MacArthur was never a man to take the hint. Once engaged he fought to win.
2. In desperation in 1951 he did propose using radioactive nuclear waste as a barrier to stop border crossing by Chinese armies. Crazy, to be sure and immediately rejected with clarity for once but he did not propose nuking Red China as routinely claimed since.
3. We now know that the Soviets and Chinese had planned the incursion long in advance. To organise and equip such a force took months of preparation. MacArthur’s provocation was to defeat the North Koreans comprehensively which was the mission at the time.
4. Whenever he had orders he could understand, he obeyed even if he protested and sometimes told the press so, which he should not have done, very annoying to Washington but not a fatal offense.  The exception is Roosevelt’s order to him to leave Corregidor, abandoning the 20,000 Americans and 80,000 Filipinos of his army.  He stalled, he temporized, he proposed alternatives, he pressed for reinforcements and supplies, he asked about evacuating the entire force, etc.  The third time he was ordered to leave the message said a great relief force aimed at the Philippines awaited him in Australia.  He took the bait only to find 300 American soldiers in Australia!  
5. ‘Dugout Doug’ exposed himself to enemy fire repeatedly.  In Korea on day four before he was assigned command he went to the front lines for an inspection. To see he stood erect with binoculars amid the huddled ROK soldiers who were reeling from one crushing defeat after another. In the South Pacific he joined patrols more than once risking his life and those of his aides and he watched kamikaze planes attack the ship he stood upon.  In World War I he, a general, was awarded five (5) Silver Stars for personal and conspicuous bravery.  What more could he have done but be killed. (By the way Manchester quotes more than one armchair psychologist who sees in MacArthur’s cavalier disregard for his personal safety a shade of Thanatos. The only way to live up to his father’s standard, they speculate, would be to be killed in battle.)
6. He was indeed a Caesar, an autocrat, who ensured that Japanese women got the vote, and every women who won an elected office while he was there got a letter from him with congratulations. This is one of his many enlightened measures of which we never hear. He redistributed land in Japan far quicker and more decisively than Mao ever did in China. He brought in John L. Lewis to create trade unions. Free public education came next. None of these measures represented the administration in Washington; it was his program.
7. Prior to Pearl Harbor, he asked for air power for Manila in anticipation of a Japanese attack.  He also re-organized his command in anticipation. In battle he was cautious and careful. During his time in Tokyo he assumed the best of the Japanese. The effort to conciliate Japan, Manchester attributes to MacArthur personally, not the State Department, not the President.
8. and 9. He did use furnishings and trappings to impress others, but he had no interest in creature comforts  of any kind, still less personal luxuries. He did not drink alcohol though he often held a glass at receptions he did not drink from it. Though he would deny nothing to his wife,

Jean, but she asked little.  They both spoiled their son without stint.
It is also true that the frustrations of the restraint, vacillating orders, massive Chinese manpower, decaying ROK army, half-hearted allies, and unremittng Eurocentrism produced outbursts from him in 1951, and then he started making wild proposals, too often public, for bombing Manchuria, for transporting Chiang Kai-Shek back to the mainland, for blockading Russian ports in Asia… Over the edge, indeed. (Mind you he was 71 years old at the time.) Truman bit the bullet and relieved him of command in a way, unfortunately, calculated to be insulting and demeaning. But MacArthur remained so calm, dignified, and unchanged that his humiliation was invisible to everyone, except Jean who knew the man as no one else ever did.
MacArthur was now much more free to speak, and he spoke. Though he did not attack the Truman Administration head-on when invited to do so at a Senate hearing. He did refer to conspiracies, which good hearted liberals then and since dismissed as delusions….until the Moscow archives were read to show that virtually his every Korean message to and reply from Washington D.C. was transmitted verbatim to Moscow and onto Peking thanks to Messers McLean, Burgess, and Philby. If MacArthur’s tactics were less successful in 1951 than in 1950 or earlier it was partly because the Chinese and North Koreans knew what was coming. There are people who still praise in my hearing Kim Philby and his associates. There is no doubt that this intelligence led to many, many deaths that might otherwise not have occurred in the Korean War, and at the highest level it allowed the Chinese to out-wait the United States because they knew how divided, confused, and paralyzed Washington D.C. was.
But then he did become in 1952 what he had despised in others, a general who did not know when to shut up. He travelled the length and breadth of the United States and said, dressed in full uniform ranks of medals agleam, all manner of things to anyone who would listen. He became ever more inconsistent, volatile, intemperate, illogical, and shrill. He craved audiences and loved the applause and grew ever more extreme to get the former and to bask the latter, becoming briefly an incandescent Cold Warrior. Soon enough he destroyed his own credibility, but not before ensuring that Truman would not be re-elected. Indeed this last act of MacArthur’s life is pathos – his thirst for adulation led him to say anything to get the applause. He advocated bigger and more weapons, a swollen standing army, while cutting all taxes to the bone. But no more crazy than any Tea Party Republican today.
The conflict over command between MacArthur and Truman has a parallel in that between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan, though Truman was no Lincoln, but then McClellan was no MacArthur. The giants in this quadrangle are MacArthur and Lincoln.
There were moments in the 1952 Republican convention when his name was bruited and then faded quickly but, much to MacArthur’s chagrin, Eisenhower was the people’s choice then and later. While MacArthur did not actively undermine Eisenhower, he disregarded him.
It is also true that MacArthur was an egomaniac, thinking most of the world revolved around him. Any hesitation, any demure, any criticism was taken personally and never forgotten. He was driven to live up to the Olympic grandeur of his father (as told to him by his widowed mother) all of his life. Perhaps that also explains the battlefield risk-taking. That comparison may also explain his eloquence for his father was a prolix autodidact.
MacArthur did not have the common touch of Dwight Eisenhower nor the love of the warrior that George Patton had, nor the humility of Omar Bradley, nor the modesty of Joe Stilwell. He was awkward in social settings, shy and reserved which made him seem icy.  He did not visit hospitals to speak to his wounded like Eisenhower. He did not cry on the battlefield at the deaths of his men, as Patton did.  He did not carry a rifle like Omar Bradley.  He did not speak of ‘we’ when referring to his army as Joe Stilwell did, but always ‘I.’
He restored the corrupt Filipino oligarchy in Manila at the end of the war, absent any of the reforming zeal that he showed in Japan. Most of these oligarchs had been happy collaborators with the Japanese who abused their fellow citizens. There was no land reform, no vote for women, no organized labor introduced by MacArthur here.
He saw to it that Japanese Generals Masaharu Homma and Tomoyuki Yamashita were convicted and executed when their crime was to have fought MacArthur to a standstill.
The book is superb, representing years of research, facts have been tripled-checked and cross referenced. It pulls no punches about MacArthur’s many failures and faults. Failures and faults that seem intrinsic to the man who was Caesar out of time. Yet it also leaves the impression that he was a giant. In reading this book at times I thought of him as Achilles, mercurial, audacious, preternatural, sulking, personally loyal, and altogether difficult to deal with. MacArthur had no Patrocalous to act as a trusted buffer. He had subordinates but he, unlike, Achilles recognized no equal.
It is also superbly well written, finely judged, subtle, insightful, penetrating. The highest praise I can give it is that it stands on the same level as Robert Caro’s monumental studies of the years of Lyndon Johnson.  

A fabulous book about a titan. It will take two entries to review the basics. This is part 1.
It is all there in the title, and I do not mean that word ‘Caesar.’ What I do mean is that it includes neither the definite article ‘the,’ nor the indefinite ‘an.’ MacArthur is beyond those mundane grammatical considerations: one of kind, sui generis. A giant and a midget in one. Astounding achievements combined with a pettiness that seems out of character but was not. He was all one package.

He was widely maligned after the Korean War, and had a lot of buckets dumped on him earlier in World War II. He brought much of this criticism on himself by his unending paranoia that everyone in Washington was out to get him, by his colossal ego in which he was always trying to live up to his father’s mythical reputation, by his absolute determination to see through whatever he put his hand to despite changing circumstances, by his use of moral arguments rather than military one to justify his strategies and tactics though these were genius, by his unsocial nature through which he preserved his mystique but held most people at a distance, by his completely one-eyed devotion to and utter dependence on his wife Jean. He was a hard man to like.
Yet, as William Manchester shows MacArthur was born to the sword though he never carried a weapon yet he was in battle time and after time. He led, he directed, he observed, but he did not pull a trigger. The exception is in Manila when Tokyo Rose

in 1941 broadcasted that Japanese squads were descending on the city to capture him and his family to deliver them to torture, ignominy, and execution. The aim of the broadcast was to frighten MacArthur and thus to show to Filipinos that not even their Field Marshall was safe.
Then he pocketed a revolver with three bullets, giving the rest of the bullets back to the ordinance officer to put to other uses. A typical beau geste from a man who made so many grand gestures that they became irritating. (Reader, tax that brain, figure out why only three bullets were necessary.)

He went over the top in World War I with riding crop in hand wearing the star of a general on his shoulders without either a helmet or a gas mask, he led patrols into No Man’s Land in the night, he stood in trenches attacked by Germans… Those exploits won him five Silver Stars for valor, each well deserved. But his theatrics drove Jack Pershing mad. No division commander should go on a patrol, go over the top, or even be in a front line trench, let alone one under attack.
When carpeted by Pershing and threatened with censure, MacArthur — clearly thinking of Douglas Haig who had never seen a trench, Joseph Joffre who bragged of not have heard a rifle shot, but not mentioning these Allied generals — said he wanted to see what it was like for himself and also it heartened the men to see a general sharing their risks and hardships. Pershing took that as an implicit criticism of himself and ordered him removed from command, Pershing forever joining the mental Enemies List MacArthur carried around for his whole life. As happened repeatedly MacArthur had arranged for his exploits to be publicized to acclaim in France, England, and the United States, and Pershing could not then censor a hero.
It gets worse because Pershing had commanded George Marshall to prepare the order for removal, which he did, and that entered Marshall’s name, too, on MacArthur’s Enemies List. Once on that list, there was no remission.
The occasions in World War II when MacArthur was shot at, bombed, strafed, sniped at, are all too numerous to mention. He exposed himself to enemy fire time after time, in a garrison hat with the stars of command visible. He was on the point with an Australian patrol in Borneo when the two officers with him were killed by enemy fire. An Australian captain pushed him down and screamed at him to leave. Chastened, he did. More Silver Stars came. He had a child-like delight in medals and awards throughout his life. Each one was precious to him. If the Sultan of Obscuria proposed giving him a medal, he wanted to have it. Yet he seldom wore them.
Leaving aside the details, which William Manchester assembles and presents in a compelling prose (without recourse to the adolescent present tense), the best testament to MacArthur’s military genius comes from Japanese war records. They show that they found him unpredictable, deceptive, cautious and bold, and never where they could hit him. In 1942 they thought he would give battle on the plain north of Manila, instead he withdrew into the Bataan peninsula with his forces intact in a move the Japanese described as brilliant. The Japanese had not expected that and were neither supplied nor organized for a siege.

The tunnel was the headquarters on Corrigedor, the island off the Bataan peninsula.
In 1944 he sewed confusion among the Japanese in the Southwest Pacific leap-frogging over their strong points (Rabaul, Wewak) and cutting them off.
Manchester shows that his casualty rate and use of supplies set against destruction of the enemy (Japanese soldiers incapacitated, area taken, time taken) was about ten times, yes 10 times, better than that of Dwight Eisenhower in the European Theatre of Operations, and 20 times better that Admiral Chester Nimitz (he of Saipan, Tarawa) in the North Pacific. The priority of Europe meant supplies were lavished on Eishenhower’s command, while Nimitz hit objectives head-on, signaling long in advance his next target – no subtlety there.
MacArthur would not have attacked a stupendous fortification like Saipan or a deathtrap like Tarawa but would have bombed and shelled each in a demonstration, and then leap-frogged over each to the next weakest island to cut their communication and supply. He would then have left them quarantined and boxed in. He put out of the war a dug-in Japanese army on Rabaul of 120,000 front line troops shipped there especially to give him battle by taking two barely defended islands north of it with the loss of some hundreds of casualties. Nimitz had 27,000 dead marines to take Saipan with its 80,000 defenders. The Japanese on Rabaul stayed there on ever decreasing rations until the Emperor told them to lay down their arms in 1945, so there was never a dramatic American flag raising on it like Iwo Jima, but then there was no comparable butcher’s bill.
On the offensive his many victories were often so quick and, in contrast to the gruesome backdrop of Tarawa or Saipan, so bloodless that they were even not reported back home, and did not enter the annuals as the great strokes they were. In fact, in the Philippines in 1944 he was criticized for moving too slowly by maneuver and not by head-on assault with the overwhelming fire power at his command. His response was public and clear, and as always in the first person: ‘I will take any objective I can by maneuver and feint to preserve every life I can, and I am sure that mothers, wives, sisters, fathers at home want it that way.’ We can be pretty sure the Grunts agreed. But for him to call a press conference and answer criticisms in this way was JUST NOT DONE! But that was the MacArthur way, his way.

Saipan
Like Napoleon at Waterloo, Lee at Gettysburg, or Haig anytime, MacArthur blundered. There are many recorded instances of very successful generals in the midst of a crisis lapsing into nearly a waking coma. Napoleon at Waterloo stood silent for hours, not replying, seeming not to hear the reports and requests of subordinates, which grew more and more urgent. Lee at Gettysburg seems to have entered a trance after he gave the order for Pickett’s Charge early in the morning and stayed that way for the rest of the day, even though it was clear things were going wrong even before Pickett’s men moved into position to carry out the order. Who can wonder at it?
The pressure, the burden these generals had borne for so long, the momentous events before them, the responsibility of the blood, these would crush most of us.
MacArthur had such moments, too. During the New Guinea Campaign, he had tried everything to avoid a direct assault with aerial bombardments, naval attacks, feints around the island, commando raids, and none had sufficed. Time demanded action before the Japanese could be reinforced. The result was the Kokoda Trail. No Australian needs to be told about this battle (though the spellchecker does not know it) in which nature took five (5) soldiers for everyone lost in action. While it raged in conditions straight out of Dante’s Hell, MacArthur had such a comatose period when he seems to have tuned out, sitting at his desk at times like an effigy of himself, silent, motionless. He was impervious to the explanations of General Robert Eichelberger about those conditions; he never stirred himself to examine the ground; he barely spoke to the Australian General Thomas Blamey whose troops did the foul work; he seems almost to have been in denial that it was happening. For MacArthur to sit quietly for hours on end was extraordinary because he was usually a restless pacer, either on his own, thinking, or with a retinue of subordinates. In fact his office space was chosen to allow him to pace, as was his accommodation. For him to be sympathetic and attentive would have made no difference whatsoever to the ordeal that had to be endured, but it would have been human.
This is the first of two parts.
I read this book in my Presidents Reading on the grounds that MacArthur, like Eisenhower after him, had many supporters who pushed him as a candidate, first in 1944 and again in 1952 after President Harry Truman dismissed him.