The present tense enhances lucidity and heightened the sense of immediacy.
Caesar was not and is not lovable. His generosity to defeated opponents, magnanimous though it was, did not win their affection. He won his soldiers’ devotion by the victories that his intellectual ability, applied to warfare, brought them. Yet, though not lovable, Caesar was and is attractive, indeed fascinating. His political achievement required ability, in effect amounting to genius, in several different fields, including administration and generalship, besides the minor arts of wire pulling and propaganda. In all these, Caesar was a supreme virtuoso.
Not a simple man!
Yet he was also endowed with great personal charm, a will of iron, and a soaring intellect. Unquestionably he was the most gifted man-at-arms this nation has produced. He was also extraordinarily brave. His 22 medals — 13 of them for heroism — probably exceeded those of any other figure in American history. He seemed to seek death on battlefields.
His belief in an Episcopal, merciful God was genuine, yet he seemed to worship only at the altar of himself. He never went to church, but he read the Bible every day and regard himself as one of the world’s two great defenders of Christendom. (The other was the pope.) For every MacArthur strength there was a corresponding MacArthur weakness.
LIke FDR and Adlai Stevenson, he was a wellborn victim of Uberdngstlichkeit, a mama’s boy who reached his fullest dimensions in following maternal orders to be mercilessly ambitious.
MacArthur was never able to develop a feeling of warmth and comradeship with those about him. He had their respect but not their sympathetic understanding or their affection. He was too aloof and too correct in his manner, speech, and dress. The General wrapped himself in a cloak of dignified aloofness and never tried to be “one of the boys.”
MacArthur’s mind, a beautiful piece of almost perfect machinery, had to be stimulated almost exclusively by reading, because he never had the benefit of daily rubbing elbows with his intellectual equals — let alone his superiors.
By the 1940s antiauthoritarianism had become dominant. MacArthur’s turgid communiques, and his love of braid and ceremony, evoked malicious laughter all across the Pacific. His contemporaries then were far more impressed by his former aide, Eisenhower, with his friendly nickname, his infectious grin, and his filling-station-attendant’s tunic. Ike asked to be liked, and he was; MacArthur demanded that he be revered, and he wasn’t. Even his wife addressed him as “General.” Paul McNutt said, “I wouldn’t hesitate to call President Quezon ‘Manuel,’ but I never called the General ‘Doug.’” Had anyone done so, the response would doubtless have been arctic. “He’s the only man in the world who could walk into a room full of drunks and all would be stone-sober within 5 minutes.” But only levelers will think this pejorative. John Gunther’s chief impression was of his “loftiness and sense of justice. He is that rare thing in the modern world, a genuinely high person.”
His own heroes were Lincoln and Washington, and in some ways he resembled them. Like them, he was slandered and misunderstood. Lincoln is still misjudged.
He looks the hero; speaks little, but is courteous and frank. A shade of sadness overshadows his countenance, which is not becoming.
Most of all, however, MacArthur was like Julius Caesar: bold, aloof, austere, egotistical, willful. The two generals surrounded themselves with servile aides-de-camp; remained long abroad, one as proconsul and the other as shogun, leading captive peoples in unparalleled growth; loved history; were fiercely grandiose and spectacularly fearless; and reigned as benevolent autocrats.
Unposed pictures of him are almost impossible to find. Like King David, Alexander, and Joan of Arc — like virtually all of history’s immortal commanders — he was always performing.
Yet there was something disturbing about MacArthur’s thespianism. Probably no other commander in chief relished the spotlight so much or enjoyed applause more. In a word, he was vain. Like every other creature of vanity, he convinced himself that his drives were in fact selfless.
To an even greater degree than Lord Nelson (who acknowledged it) he was a seeker of glory. “It is a law of nature, common to all mankind, which time shall neither annul nor destroy, that those who have greater strength and power shall bear rule over those who have less.” He had the strength and power, he meant to bear rule over others, and he expected tributes from them. If he didn’t get them he sulked. Marshall described him as “supersensitive about everything”; Kenney noted that he was “extremely sensitive to criticism.”
Men have always been inconsistent in their attitude toward immodest paladins. Hubris was the classic defect of doomed characters in Aeschylean drama, yet haughtiness was essential in Aristotle’s ideal man. Medieval Christianity ranked pride as the deadliest of the 7 deadly sins, but chivalry was nothing if not prideful. MacArthur’s haunteur was a tremendous asset in the rule of Nippon. His relationship with his subjects there was to some extent sadomasochistic; a part of the Japanese wanted to taste the whip of someone like him, just as a part of him enjoyed holding the whip. It was his relationship with the administration in Washington which became poisoned by his egomania.
Toynbee held that the concept of the nation-state began to decline in the 1870s, before either Truman or MacArthur had been born. To Toynbee, nationalism was “a sour ferment of the new wine of democracy in the old bottle of tribalism.” Since the Korean War, it has become clear that mankind is slowly becoming soberer, that the Germans are less Teutonic, the English less British, the French less Gallic — that chauvinism is on the way out everywhere except among the newest of the underdeveloped nations, where it is recognized as a sign of immaturity.
Every mistake in war is excusable except inactivity and refusal to take risks.
There was more to him than soldiering. On the level of folklore he had shown Americans how a champion’s life should be lived, had invested new meanings in the concepts of honor, intrepidity, and idealism.
His experience had been extraordinary, even in those stirring times, but its chief historical significance lies in the lesson he drew from it. The keystone of all his achievements, Arthur concluded after the war, had been those 40 minutes when he had climbed the strategic heights overlooking Chattanooga — in defiance of orders. The moral, he would later tell his adoring son Douglas, was that there are times when a truly remarkable soldier must resort to unorthodox behavior, disobeying his superiors to gain the greater glory.
Both the range of his knowledge and the isolation of his years on the frontier are important to an understanding of Arthur’s immense influence on his children. Douglas eventually inherited over 4000 books from his father. From him and them he acquired a remarkable vocabulary, a mastery of Victorian prose, a love of neo-Augustan rhetoric, and a ready grasp of theory.
Nevertheless Taft’s hostility toward MacArthur was genuine, and growing. He thought him “pseudo-profound,” a “military martinet who was ‘very set in his opinions.’” To Helen, Taft wrote that “the more I have to do with M. the smaller man of affairs I think he is. His experience and his ability as a statesman or politician are nothing. He has all the angularity of military etiquette and discipline, and he takes himself with the greatest seriousness.”
Arthur suggested that the archipelago was
the finest group of islands in the world. Its strategic position is unexcelled by that of any other position on the globe. The China Sea, which separates it by something like 750 miles from the continent, is nothing more or less than a safety moat. It lies on the flank of what might be called a position of several thousand miles of coast line; it is in the center of that position. It is therefore relatively better placed than Japan, which is on a flank, and therefore remote from the other extremity; likewise, India, on the other flank. The Philippines are in the center of that position. It affords a means of protecting American interests which, with the very least output of physical power, has the effect of a commanding position in itself to retard hostile action.
The presence of America in these islands is simply one of the results, in logical sequence, of great national prosperity, and in remote consequences is likely to transcend in importance anything recorded in the history of the world since the discovery of America.
Despite his friendship with Aguinaldo and Quezon, and his disapproval of the color bar in Manila, there were overtones of racism in his conclusions. He felt that he had grasped the “psychological” and “ethnological” characteristics of the Filipinos and predicted that history would judge his stewardship there as a high point in the march of the “Aryan race,” introducing “republicanism” and “Americanism” among peoples less blessed than their masters. In short, he believed that he had opened a new US frontier not much unlike the old one.
At bedtime her last words to Doug would be: “You must grow up to be a great man,” and she would add either “like your father” or “like Robert E. Lee.”
Under her mannered, pretty exterior she was cool, practical, and absolutely determined that her children would not only match but surpass the achievements of her father-in-law and her husband. Americans of a later generation may find it hard to fathom a woman who could realize her ambitions through the exploits of her men, particularly when they wore a uniform she had hated in her youth.
As he put it, there had come to him “a desire to know, a seeking for the reason why, a search for the truth. Abstruse mathematics began to appear as a challenge to analysis, dull Latin and Greek seemed a gateway to the moving words of the leaders of the past, laborious historical data led to the nerve-tingling battlefields of the great captains. My studies enveloped me.” So did a burgeoning interest in foreign affairs — in Cuba, in Ethiopia, and in France’s Dreyfus affair.
For though he had a first-rate mind he was not born athlete; what he achieved in sports he achieved by sheer stamina.
“He was one of the quickest fellows to obey orders I ever treated. He was tremendously interested in anatomy, biology, physiology, and everything that concerned health and medical science.” He was also determined to rid himself of the defect.
“Doug, you’ll win if you don’t lose your nerve. You must believe in yourself, my son, or no one else will believe in you. Be self-confident, self-reliant, and even if you don’t make it, you will know you have done your best. Now, go to it.” The “cool words of my mother,” he said, “brought me around.”
It was a lesson I never forgot. Preparedness is the key to success and victory.
A less smitten classmate concluded that he must have been “arrogant from the age of 8.” Various other cadets thought he seemed to be “brave as a lion and smart as hell,” a youth with “a mind like a sponge,” and one who would be “flogged alive without changing his mind” once it had been made up. “To know MacArthur is to love him or to hate him — you can’t just like him. He had style. There was never a cadet quite like him.”
He did not ask the corps to do anything. He told them, in plain words, just what they would do. And they did it. Colonel Treat had pleaded; MacArthur commanded.
The bolder and more forward girls singled him out. He developed a line. One girl would begin, “Ooh, you’re the son of the general in the Philippines,” and he would reply, “Yes’m, General MacArthur has that proud distinction.”
But later it was rumored that Douglas had set a corps record in 1903 by being affianced to 8 girls at the same time. When this was mentioned to him he replied chauvinistically, “I do not recall that I was ever so hotly engaged by the enemy.”
To classmates he noted that on the subject of the first captain the corps appeared to be divided into 2 groups: those who resented MacArthur’s high opinion of himself and those who felt that modesty, for so gifted a man, would be hypocrisy. That division would persist into another generation, eventually splitting the American nation in a historic schism.
Roads were unpaved, and mobility, by later standards, glacial. A 5-mile shopping trip was a day’s excursion.
“The power that rules the Pacific is the power that rules the world” — and his own observations confirm it. Much later he will write that the trip “was without doubt the most important factor of preparation in my entire life. It was crystal clear to me that the future and, indeed, the very existence of America, were irrevocably entwined with Asia and its island outposts.”
Lieutenant MacArthur, while “deeply impressed” by “the thrift, courtesy, and friendliness of the ordinary citizen” of Japan, also distrusted the “feudalistic samurai.” He noted “the boldness and courage” of the Nipponese soldiers and the “iron character and unshakable purpose” of their commanders.
Some 3 years ago, I had the good fortune to be seated next to you at luncheon. The amiable manner in which you then, listened to my talk, in behalf of a possible future for my son Douglas Mac Arthur outside the Army, encourages me now, to address you now in that connection; and more especially as I recall that first class men are always in demand, and that you frequently have occasion to seek them.
The son referred to is 29 years old…
***I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.
War was not declared, Wood did not take the field, and he never reached the White House, but the Vera Cruz incident discloses much about MacArthur: his ingenuity, his eye for terrain, his personal bravery, and his toadying to his superiors. Later he would bestow similar presidential benedictions on other men in a position to give him a leg up.
Major MacArthur is a high-minded, conscientious and unusually efficient officer, well fitted for position requiring diplomacy and high-grade intelligence.
After it was all over, in 1919, a colonel who hadn’t been overseas wrote of MacArthur that it was “hard for me to conceive of this sensitive, high-strung personage slogging in the mud, enduring filth, living in stinking clothing and crawling over jagged soil under criss-crosses of barbed wire to have a bloody clash with a bestial enemy.” The explanation was that men like MacArthur, raised to believe in Victorian heroism, invested even the nightmare of trench warfare with extravagant chimeras of fantastic glory.
There were, he came to believe, people in the army out to get him — deskbound men who envied and resented a fighting officer. This was the beginning of his paranoia, which was to bring so much anguish to him and to others in the years ahead.
The enduring fortitude, the patriotic self-abnegation, and the unsurpassed military genius of the American soldier of the World War will stand forth in undimmed luster; in his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me or from any other man; he had written his own history, and written it in red on his enemy’s breast, but when I think of his patience in adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion I cannot express.
This was a time of heavy paperwork for Colonel MacArthur. “He toiled very early in the morning on his field plans. Alone, he made notes on a card, and by the time we met for a staff discussion he had the plans all worked out. He asked for our opinions but, more often than not, we all concurred with his. His plans invariably covered the optimum situations as well as the minimum. He was meticulous in organization and consummate in planning.”
Remembering his father, MacArthur had said to an officer who inquired about his unorthodox attire, “It’s the orders you disobey that make you famous,” but there was no point in courting disapproval. It seemed wiser to present the Rainbow’s commander with a fait accompli.