American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964

...Scholars interested in a more detailed analysis of MacArthur as military commander would do well to follow up Mr...

...Manchester observes, "how well the MacArthur constitution would stand the test of time...

...Manchester writes: One could fill a volume with MacArthur apocrypha...

...But for sheer majesty and sweep of narrative, they will find American Caesar hard to equal...

...FDR, a far subtler hand, played the Robin Hood ploy to great effect, posing as a high-born renegade crusading against privilege, and shamelessly talking down to his gaping admirers in the process...

...he dyed his hair...

...Thus it was that MacArthur's major historical contribution-probably a greater, more enduring one than that of any other military man in modern history- was destined to flower on foreign soil...

...In covering both the General's good and bad moments, William Manchester writes with insight, elegance, and verve...

...GIs weren't...

...What neither appreciated was that identical traits led to his winnings and his losses...

...The catalogue of myths about him is endless...

...Manchester's splendid life with a reading of Professor D. Clayton James' multi-volumed work, The Years of MacArthur...

...Today we see somewhat milder versions of this affliction when genuinely talented public figures like Senators Moynihan and Haya-kawa regularly don cap and bells to gain public acceptance and media exposure and -just possibly-achieve some lasting good once they have caught the eyes of the gallery...

...by the 1940s antiauthoritarianism had become dominant...

...Nobility has been unfashionable for some time...

...Few...could have guessed," Mr...

...Veterans of World War I and World War II saw MacArthur very differently...

...There are ways, of course, of sneaking through the clod barrier-Ike did it with a vacant grin and a deliberately plebian uniform...

...He used rouge, they said...

...But not the least unhappy result of our inverted national snobbery is the way in which it forces potentially great leaders like these to live lies and, in effect, base their political careers on personal dissemblance...

...MacArthur demanded that he be revered, and he wasn't...

...And I am certain," he added, "that it would never have been accomplished had the occupation been dependent on the deliberations of the Far Eastern Commission-with the Soviet power of veto...

...In his memoirs he called it"probably the single most important accomplishment of the occupation, for it brought to the Japanese people freedoms and privileges which they had never known...

...MacArthur was a noble -if sometimes pompous and overreaching-anachronism in America's age of the non-hero...

...One of the reasons he wasn't as respected as he would have wished reflects more shabbily on MacArthur's foes than on himself...

...American Caesar is that rarest and best of historical biographies-a popular triumph written without condescension or violent partisanship...

...Doughboys were proud to have fought under the General...

...Unfortunately, it is sometimes easier to put on the jester's cap than to take it off, except to throw it into the ring and start off on another round of comic turns in pursuit of higher office...

...The General simply didn't know what to make of it...

...One of his difficulties," Manchester writes, "was that he wasn't a modern man...

...how, a third of a century later, it would endure, observed in every particular...

...His hauteur, his willingness to defy his superiors, his fascination with the political process, his contempt for vacillation-these would be his undoing in the end...

...And we pay a dreadful price for our prejudice in the form of mediocre leadership and worse...

...Egali-tarianism did not become the triumphant passion of Western society until about the middle of this century, however...

...But the General had an inkling...

...discomfort in the presence of unabashedly superior talent and character, especially if they happen to come in aristocratic wrappings...

...We fear and loathe such standing affronts to the populist myth of an America of the commonplace, by the commonplace, and for the commonplace-Everyman's New World Revenge for thousands of years of exploitation and snubs at the hands of privilege...

...Alas," wrote Carlyle, "the hero of old has had to cramp himself into strange places: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world...

...During his lifetime, his admirers saw only his victories...

...Because he owned the Manila Hotel, it was said, artillerymen (fliers) had been forbidden to shell (bomb) it...

...If MacArthur is to be seen in the round, the magnitude of this vice-regal triumph, and those which followed it in Tokyo during the postwar years, must be grasped and understood as expressions of the very hub of his character...

...And he manages to capture not only the character of his enormous protagonist, but also that of the Trumans, the Marshalls, the Achesons, and the many other major jousting partners of the General's long and remarkable career...

...Ralph Waldo Emerson put his finger on it, if not in it, thirty years before MacArthur's birth when he sniffed that, "Every hero becomes a bore at last.'' Emerson, who managed to become a first-class bore without passing through even a minor heroic phase of his own, still had a point...

...he wore corsets and a wig...

...There can be no doubt that they made a great democracy of Japan...

...Years before "McCarthyism" became the by-word for smear tactics and character assassination, MacArthur's left-wing critics proved every bit as vicious and deceitful as the Wisconsin weasel at his worst...

...Bad enough to start with, it was strongly reinforced in MacArthur's lifetime by the class tensions fanned by the Great Depression and cleverly manipulated by FDR and his liberal heirs...

...His idea of playing to the gallery was strictly Victorian-the heroic profile, the occasionally over-inflated patriotic rhetoric, and a basic reliance on skill, daring, and duty...

...At the peak of his professional life he was trapped in the no-man's land between the eras of the hero and the anti-hero...

...There is a petty mean streak in the American character that is an inevitable by-product of the generations of half-digested half-truths endemic to the egalitarian current in our national thought...

...One of the strongest virtues of William Manchester's massive new biography of the General is that it recognizes this core dilemma of his life- the plight of the hero in an unheroic age...

...In democratizing and rebuilding Japanese society after World War II, the supposedly reactionary old soldier accomplished the seemingly impossible and quite possibly did more to protect the values of Western civilization in the years that followed than any of his "progressive" foes...

...MacArthur's turgid communiques, and his love of braid and ceremony evoked malicious laughter all across the Pacific...Ike asked to be liked, and he was...

...The result is that many of us, perhaps a majority today, feel genuine Aram Bakshian, Jr., a former presidential aide and a Communications Manager for Union Carbide Corporation, writes frequently on historical and cultural subjects for American and foreign periodicals, including the Wall Street Journal, History Today, and National Review...

...Gossip had it that pictures of him wading ashore at Leyte were faked...

...his critics saw only his defeats...

...Like Churchill and Roosevelt, both distant cousins of his, he was a Victorian, a nineteenth-century figure who spoke in the elevated manner but who, unlike them, never learned to mask his zeal with wit and grace...

...Men who fought in the Pacific and are skeptical on every other topic will swear that some or all of these stores are true, though research exposes every one of them as a lie...

...In postwar Japan, where, for the first and last time in his life, MacArthur actually held dictatorial power, not only as a warlord, but as a lawgiver, he used his absolute authority wisely, humanely, and with astounding success...

...Other observers had sensed it coming from a long way off...

...That sort of work didn't come naturally to Douglas MacArthur, which is why his domestic political ambitions were doomed from the start...

...how, under it, Japan would become a mighty industrial power, second only to the United States in the non-Communist world...

...But along the way they reaped historic fruit...

...It was rumored that he had drowned his first wife's lover in a Philippine swimming pool, and reported that in escaping from flaming, weeping Corregidor in 1942, he had brought with him his furniture, a refrigerator, and a mattress stuffed with gold coins...

...the whole thrust of his career and character ran a collision course with the mid-twentieth century American Zeitgeist...

...In New Guinea, it was bruited about, he kept a private cow while GIs went without milk, and built a million-dollar mansion at Hollandia...

...While not entirely unforeseen, the age of the non-hero was completely mystifying to this aristocratic soldier-intellectual of Victorian vintage...