American Caesar:
Davis, Kenneth S.
Berkeley with the glad news, abruptly blood-spattered pages the evidence of the color his English with the miraculously leaves the parental house to go off to New titanic life-and-death...
...fiance of the authority of the President of well stand up, permanently, as the definiThe career thus begun is well-known the United States, in Korea in 1950, by tive biography of MacArthur...
...At West Point greatest of his "end runs") is over- master of both descriptive and narrative he won his "A" on the baseball team, shadowed by his gross miscalculations of prose-a supreme master, I would say, managed the football team, became First Communist China's psychology and of what might be called participatory Captain of the Corps (the highest possi- capabilities, whereby the initiation of prose, in that the reader is at once caught ble cadet rank), and graduated number nuclear holocaust was risked...
...and Dubin will go with his Lincoln, there will be much son," one of the "good conditions" of back to Kitty and the state of marriage head-scratching when his Anna Freud work, a contingency), work as motive from which he has episodically exiled appears but one of the same loyalists will justification, redemption and salvation, - himself, and will receive a full amnesty, guess that Maud, a young widow and the supreme personal vindication and few questions asked...
...an unprecedented double- Harper and Row, $10., 223 pp...
...Berkeley with the glad news, abruptly blood-spattered pages the evidence of the color his English with the miraculously leaves the parental house to go off to New titanic life-and-death struggle waged expressive American art-song which York to have her baby and there's an end there...
...Not until she died, age 84, run...
...gance and chronic insubordination...
...No highly controversial General Arthur a Virginia cotton broker, raised in the American general served his country MacArthur...
...Her democracy...
...touch with themselves...
...Both will see that Dubin triumphed Dubin derived from it, fill his head with of it: out of sight, out of mind...
...and, finally, the command of which he threatened the very foundations strong-willed driving ambition was in- United Nations forces in Korea...
...And the up in it and carried along by it, as if he one in the Class of '03, having made whole of his career is darkened byy the himself took part in the events described...
...At one extreme, the alien that, in the long run, excessively loud Commander for the Allied Powers within instills a fright for which we know stimuli damage the hearing apparatus...
...history...
...His suasive, his historical judgments generStevenson was young MacArthur a sis- triumphant operation at Inchon (the ally well-informed and balanced...
...Apparently physical contact, the acting out of fantasy Army) from the mid-'30s until Pearl numbers of us have erected a wall be- in the presence of a group, individuals Harbor...
...The nuances of inner experience brave, brilliant service in France during World War I as colonel, the brigadier FEELMGS: Despite its capacity for terror, general in the 42nd ("Rainbow") Divi- OUR VITAL SIGNS therapists promise that contacting this sion, which he helped organize...
...of constitutional democracy...
...was somewhat tarnished in the public eye Thus does William Manchester begin Kenneth S. Davis when he refused to obey civilian authorhis masterful full-length portrait of a to our free institutions...
...And the most likely to become an American spect, including (or especially) arroboth classes of reaction-that of hero- Mussolini...
...and none colonel in the Union Army...
...His psychological inhis dying mother had approved...
...She, daughter of dantly justified by objective fact...
...self-glorifying communiques through terpretations are generally acute and perYet no more than young Roosevelt or which he generally reported them...
...pure Evil-a drama so siveness had divisive effects upon his ployed in Hoover's Washington of 1932...
...the amazing service as Supreme rier are varied...
...His path to glory led through the "police action" against Mexico in 1916...
...were really feeling, we would become stint as Army Chief of Staff (the youngest John N. Kotre "self-actualized" or "fully functionin history) in the late '20s and early '30s;, ing...
...The brave paradox of a man, noble and ig- DOUGLAS MacARTHUR, 1880-1964 act which brought him his initial fame, noble, inspiring and outrageous, arrog- however, was also an act of insubordinaant and shy, the best of men and the worst William Manchester tion...
...until in the end, one calling it a qualified vic- income Jewish jokes and other very sad she crops up as her father's future col- tory, the other a Pyrrhic one...
...worship, that of villain-hating-would He was very much the son of his Yet Douglas MacArthur was also very seem in retrospect to have been abun- father, the brilliant, famous, always much his mother's son...
...upon it the spirit and forms of American hollow...
...She was utterly ruthother made greater blunders...
...essentially imaginative literature- And then back to work, unremitting Sooner rather than later, we feel sure, fiction-will elicit howls of protest in the work, Dubin's true and abiding passion, Fanny will be gone from Dubin's life- academic journals, and the full assent of consuming, imperious necessity and inanother "life" appropriated and trans- those same two critics who will wonder dissoluble marriage, the work of creating muted into nurturing memory...
...Through nonverbal exercises, Marshal after resigning from the U.S...
...He is a sified "mamma's boy...
...of Power and Honor and Glory so inhim to Harvard, as Adlai Stevenson's His solid accomplishments as Chief of tensely he almost made it come true on followed him to Princeton-establishing Staff, for instance, are overshadowed in important occasions, he was the selfherself for four years in a hotel below the historic memory by his needlessly brutal appointed star of a self-conceived drama Academy "Plain...
...At another, it becomes so The continual blare of high-decibel emoautocratic ruler of Japan and imposed aloof that we seem, deep down, to be tions may eventually deafen...
...Dubin's stories, and once a year take him to visit, laborator in a bibliographical note, a brilliantly-argued thesis, in The Art of and there pay homage at, the gravesites happy ending a bit too facilely achieved, Biography, that all good biography is of the boy's paternal grandparents...
...The malaises created by the bar- is curious that no therapist has observed War II...
...Once again, as useful assumption about another perall of Fanny's Dubins...
...his career to a close...
...what remains the third highest academic acts which closed it-his repeated de- He has written a notable book which may record in Academy history...
...married how anyone could have missed this self- "lives" out of that disorderly, bad novel, no doubt, probably to a dull dog of a local evident truth, while tendering gratitude the world...
...fused in her son during his formative It was a career as brilliant as the man Always the root of his trouble was an years, and she stuck to him like glue who made it, but flawed as he was flawed overweening egotism and wilfulness and thereafter...
...He was again less and endlessly (often foolishly) conother became, through the compulsions a national hero in 1898 (and after) as niving in her pursuit of ambitions realizof an imperious nature, so great a threat Major General MacArthur commanding able only through Douglas after her husCommonweal: 246 band's career went into decline...
...Franklin ity in the Philippines and was conman, perhaps the most gifted with natural Roosevelt deemed him in 1932, " the sequently removed from his military talent of all the generals America most dangerous man in America" (Huey command-but he remained the perfect has produced, who all his life long Long was the "second most danger- hero in the eyes of his youngest son, aroused in myriads of beholders extreme ous"), meaning that he was, of all men, Douglas, who emulated him in every reand opposite emotional reactions...
...Psychiatrist Willard Gaylin would 27 April 1979: 247...
...For work, not love (which is, librarian, her faithful swain, who will by to Dubin for establishing it (they will as Dubin reflects, "a means of making a virtue of his youth and persistence outlast hope) once and for all...
...If only we knew who superintendency of West Point in the we really were, if only we knew what we early 1920s...
...forces in the Philippines...
...distortive of his perceptions of objective relations with other women: his first mar- His series of strategic masterpieces in reality that it ultimately incapacitated riage ended in divorce because of "mat- the South Pacific, where his mastery of him for his role as soldier of democracy...
...SCAP) during which he was in effect the no reason...
...The Lawrence herself a respected psychotherapist and sufficient repayment of all grievous losbiography will receive a respectful press author of influential papers in the field, ses, including the final one, the work of on the whole, though a few surly sorts turned her father onto the great man's composing enduring lives stroke by will ask why we needed another one (an celebrated daughter...
...another gift for Dubin...
...His shining heroism ridiculous, the most sublime...
...Between books, stroke against the heaviest odds-work is objection which Dubin anticipated), and Dubin will take much joy in his gifted, the essential subject of Malamud's most only two of the horde will see in the tawny grandson, teach him Yiddish and ambitious and richest novel...
...ernal interference," according to the di- the indirect approach (the long "end Such a man presents highly difficult vorced wife...
...In the past decade, therapeutic the organizing top command of armed A CONSIDERABLE amount of technology has striven to connect us with forces for the newly created Philippine psychotherapeutic energy is being inner feelings by turning up their volCommonwealth (he was made Field devoted these days to getting people "in ume...
...Books: BRILLIANCE, DEFIANCE, AMBITION g HE WAS A GREAT thundering AMERICAN CAESAR.- U.S...
...Histrionic and 1899 his mother followed him there-as virtues, his failures more memorable paranoid, living an anachronistic dream Franklin Roosevelt's mother followed than his triumphs...
...Her maternal posses- use of troops against unarmed unem- of pure Good vs...
...It ward as the Allies advanced, in World "me...
...the supreme command of Allied tween "me" and a strange area of inner awaken dead emotions and "re-own" forces in the South Pacific, then north- experience that could not possibly be feelings they have projected outward...
...In his 'teens, Arthur MacAr- "charm" tradition of the Southern belle, more greatly than Douglas MacArthur in thur became one of the authentic heroes was hard as nails beneath her manifested his purely professional capacity...
...the Willard Gaylin, M.D...
...and so were the acts which brought of men, the most protean, the most Ltde, Brown, $15, 793 pp...
...in ways so fatal that to liberal minds they ambition, conjoined with basic psychoThus, when he entered West Point in make his faults more memorable than his logical insecurities...
...other" is salvific...
...the swift, surprising flank move- challenges to any serious biographer of in 1935, when her son was 55, did he ment) classed him with the greatest cap- him, but William Manchester rises to marry happily-and his second wife, nee tains (Marlborough, say, or Lee), are them triumphantly in this meticulously Jean Faircloth, was a woman of whom discredited by remembrance of the lying, researched work...
...none of the Civil War, the youngest breveted "soft" femininity...
Vol. 106 • April 1979 • No. 8
