American Caesar Read online

  Copyright © 1978 by William Manchester

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: May 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-316-03242-1

  Contents

  Acclaim for William Manchester’s "American Caesar"

  Books by William Manchester

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chronology

  Epigraph

  PREAMBLE: Reveille

  PROLOGUE: First Call

  ONE: Ruffles and Flourishes

  TWO: Charge

  THREE: Call to Quarters

  FOUR: To the Colors

  FIVE: Retreat

  SIX: The Green War

  SEVEN: At High Port

  EIGHT: Last Post

  NINE: Sunset Gun

  TEN: Recall

  ELEVEN: Taps

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Look for These Other Books by William Manchester

  ACCLAIM FOR WILLIAM MANCHESTER’S

  American Caesar

  Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964

  “A great biography! A balanced, forthright account of the life and accomplishments of the most controversial General in American history.”

  — William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

  “A blockbuster of a book. . . . It reads like a novel, but all of it is based firmly on the complex but fascinating record.”

  — Edwin O. Reischauer, New York

  “Superb. . . . A tremendous book, and the research behind it is awesome.”

  — Lt. General James M. Gavin, New Republic

  “A perfectly splendid book. As fine a piece of American military biography as anything in our history.”

  —Josiah Bunting, Chicago Sun-Times

  “Highly readable. MacArthur bestrides this book like a colossus.”

  — Leonard Bushkoff, Washington Post

  “Manchester brings the General alive as few have been able to render him. We see both the public and the private man.”

  — Los Angeles Times

  “Manchester chisels away the myths and misunderstandings. The MacArthur that remains is a man of granite, a vital, continually surprising, larger-than-life figure.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “A moving reading experience. . . . American Caesar is William Manchester’s finest book.”

  —Boston Herald-American

  “Definitive. . . . A magnificent biography. . . . The personal, the political, and the familial episodes are as engrossing as the military.”

  — United Press International

  “Stunning. . . .The author has tackled the colossal story with a dash and courage matching MacArthur’s own.”

  — Burke Wilkinson, Christian Science Monitor

  BOOKS BY WILLIAM MANCHESTER

  Biography

  DISTURBER OF THE PEACE: The Life of H. L. Mencken

  A ROCKEFELLER FAMILY PORTRAIT: From John D. to Nelson

  PORTRAIT OF A PRESIDENT: John F. Kennedy in Profile

  AMERICAN CAESAR: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964

  ONE BRIEF SHINING MOMENT: Remembering Kennedy

  THE LAST LION: Winston Spencer Churchill;

  VISIONS OF GLORY: 1874-1932

  THE LAST LION: Winston Spencer Churchill;

  ALONE: 1932-1940

  History

  THE DEATH OF A PRESIDENT: November 20-November 25, 1963 THE ARMS OF KRUPP, 1587-1968

  THE GLORY AND THE DREAM:

  A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

  A WORLD LIT ONLY BY FIRE. The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age

  Essays

  CONTROVERSY: And Other Essays in Journalism, 1950-1975 IN OUR TIME: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers

  Fiction

  THE CITY OF ANGER

  SHADOW OF THE MONSOON

  THE LONG GAINER

  Diversion

  BEARD THE LION

  Memoirs

  GOODBYE, DARKNESS: A Memoir of the Pacific War

  TO THE 29TH MARINES

  3,512 LANDED ON OKINAWA

  APRIL 1, 1945

  2,821 FELL IN 82 DAYS

  THE HIGHEST PRICE EVER PAID

  BY A U.S. MARINE CORPS REGIMENT

  IN A SINGLE BATTLE

  Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

  — SIMONIDES AT THERMOPYLAE

  Author’s Note

  Officers’ ranks change during their military careers, and attempts to keep track of their promotions merely confuse the reader. In this work, therefore, ranks are omitted unless essential to an understanding of a passage. In the absence of designations to the contrary, “the General,” when thus capitalized, always refers to Douglas MacArthur. George C. Marshall’s Christian name is used to distinguish him from Richard J. Marshall, MacArthur’s World War II deputy chief of staff.

  Tenses present a similar problem of clarity. To avoid tortuous excursions into the miasmas of the pluperfect, the text occasionally reads, “he recalls” and “he remembers” when a specific recollection may in fact have occurred years earlier, often in published memoirs. The present tense enhances lucidity and heightens the sense of immediacy. Citations in the chapter notes, of course, pinpoint the date of each reference.

  Chronology

  1825 Arthur MacArthur, Sr., arrives in United States from Scotland.

  1845 Arthur MacArthur, Jr., born.

  1862 Arthur Jr. commissioned as first lieutenant in Union army.

  1863 Arthur Jr. wins Congressional Medal of Honor.

  1864 Aged nineteen, Arthur Jr. becomes a full colonel.

  1866 Arthur Jr. begins Indian fighting on frontier.

  1870 President Grant appoints Arthur Sr. a federal judge.

  1875 Arthur Jr. marries Pinky Hardy.

  1880 Douglas MacArthur (hereinafter MacArthur) born January 26 on army post; his frontier childhood begins.

  1893 MacArthur a cadet at West Texas Military Academy.

  1896 Judge Arthur MacArthur dies.

  1898 General Arthur MacArthur, Jr., fights in Spanish-American War.

  1900 Arthur Jr. named military governor of the Philippines.

  1901 MacArthur testifies before congressional committee while still a West Point cadet. Arthur Jr. relieved for insubordination to William Howard Taft.

  1903 MacArthur graduates from West Point; first captain, first in class. As a second lieutenant, he comes under fire in the Philippines.

  1904 Promoted to first lieutenant.

  1905 Tours Far East with his parents.

  1906 Appointed aide to President Theodore Roosevelt.

  1908 Reprimanded twice for insubordination.

  1911 Promoted to captain.

  1912 Arthur MacArthur, Jr., dies.

  1913 MacArthur appointed to general staff.

  1914 His daring April Vera Cruz raid; recommended for Congressional Medal of Honor.

  1915 Promoted to major.

  1917 As a colonel, assigned to Rainbow Division as chief of staff.

  1918 Fighting in France, is decorated nine times for heroism. Pinky demands that he be promoted.

  Aged thirty-eight, MacArthur becomes a general, commands R
ainbow Division.

  1919 Becomes superintendent of West Point.

  1922 Marries Louise Brooks.

  1925 MacArthur serves on Billy Mitchell court-martial.

  1929 Louise divorces him.

  1930 He takes a Eurasian mistress. He becomes army Chief of Staff.

  1932 Bonus army incident.

  1934 $15,000 buys off his mistress.

  1935 Pinky dies in Manila.

  1936 MacArthur becomes Philippine Field Marshal.

  1937 He marries Jean Marie Faircloth.

  1938 Arthur MacArthur IV born in Manila.

  1941 FDR recalls MacArthur to active duty as U.S. Far East commander.

  Japanese attack; MacArthur’s air force is destroyed on the ground.

  He withdraws to Bataan and Corregidor.

  1942 The MacArthur’ escape to Australia. MacArthur awarded Congressional Medal of Honor. He defends Australia in New Guinea.

  1943 MacArthur bypasses Rabaul.

  1944 Hollandia: a MacArthur masterpiece.

  FDR-MacArthur meeting in Honolulu.

  MacArthur becomes a five-star general.

  1945 Manila, Bataan, and Corregidor recaptured.

  MacArthur defies the Joint Chiefs, retakes central and southern Philippines.

  He flies into Yokohama—unarmed.

  Japanese surrender to him on battleship Missouri.

  As SCAP, he becomes ruler of 83 million Japanese.

  1946 Execution of Homma and Yamashita, both innocent. MacArthur constitution becomes law of the land in Japan.

  He introduces Nipponese to women’s right, labor unions, land reform, and civil liberties.

  1950 North Korea invades South Korea.

  MacArthur becomes first United Nations commander. He visits Formosa.

  1950 MacArthur’s letter to VFW; Truman orders it withdrawn. Inchon, MacArthur’s greatest victory; Seoul recaptured. UN General Assembly votes, 47 to 5, to order him to conquer North Korea; he therefore crosses the 38th Parallel.

  MacArthur-Truman conference on Wake.

  Chinese enter the Korean War.

  MacArthur forbidden to attack

  Chinese bases in Manchuria.

  White House rejects

  MacArthur’s four-point plan to widen the war.

  1951 MacArthur torpedoes Truman’s truce appeal.

  His letter to Joe Martin.

  Truman strips him of all commands.

  Nationwide acclaim for MacArthur.

  Senate hearings on his dismissal.

  Acheson bars MacArthur from U.S.-Japanese peace treaty conference.

  1952 MacArthur delivers keynote address at GOP national convention.

  He tries to deprive Eisenhower of presidential nomination.

  1955 He proposes that war be outlawed.

  1961 The MacArthur’’ sentimental journey to the Philippines.

  1962 MacArthur’s farewell to West Point.

  1964 He begs President Johnson to stay out of Vietnam, then dies at Walter Reed Hospital.

  Entombment of MacArthur in Norfolk, Virginia.

  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.

  — ARNOLD TOYNBEE

  “Not a simple man!”

  — said of MacArthur by a Japanese statesman to John Gunther, 1950

  PREAMBLE

  Reveille

  He was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform. Flamboyant, imperious, and apocalyptic, he carried the plumage of a flamingo, could not acknowledge errors, and tried to cover up his mistakes with sly, childish tricks. 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 twenty-two medals—thirteen of them for heroism—probably exceeded those of any other figure in American history. He seemed to seek death on battlefields. Repeatedly he deliberately exposed himself to enemy snipers, first as a lieutenant in the Philippines shortly after the turn of the century, then as a captain in Mexico, and finally as a general in three great wars. At the age of seventy he ordered his pilot to fly him in an unarmed plane through Chinese flak over the length of the bleak Yalu. Nevertheless, his troops scorned him as “Dugout Doug.”1

  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 regarded 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. Behind his bravura and his stern Roman front he was restive and high-strung, an embodiment of machismo who frequently wept. He yearned for public adulation. His treatment of the press guaranteed that he wouldn’t get it. After World War II he was generous toward vanquished Dai Nippon—and executed two Nipponese generals whose only offense was that they had fought against him. He emerged from the 1940s as a national hero in Canberra, Manila, and Tokyo—but not in Washington, D.C. He loathed injustice—and freed Filipino patricians who had collaborated with the enemy. He refused to send an expedition against the Hukbalahap insurgents on the ground that if he were a Philippine peasant, he would be a Huk himself. Continuing his sidestepping to the left, during his years as American viceroy in Japan he introduced the Japanese to civil liberties, labor unions, equal rights for women, and land reforms which were more thorough, in the opinion of Edwin O. Reischauer, than Mao Tse-tung’s. Meanwhile, he became a cat’s-paw for reactionaries at home. The army was his whole life, yet at the end of it he said, “I am a one hundred percent disbeliever in war.” In his campaigns he was remarkably economical of human life—his total casualties from Australia to V-J Day were fewer than those in the Battle of the Bulge—but his GIs, unimpressed, continued to mock him cruelly.2

  His paranoia was almost certifiable. He hated an entire continent: Europe. Europeans could not understand why. They knew he was immensely proud of his Scots lineage. He had made his name as a fighting general in France in 1918. His statecraft was Bismarckian; his style in battle, closer to Sandhurst’s and Saint-Cyr-l’Ecole’s than to West Point’s. Charles de Gaulle understood him as no American could, and the British were dazzled by him. To Churchill he was “the glorious commander,” to Montgomery the United States’ “best soldier” of World War II, to Lord Alanbrooke “the greatest general and the best strategist that the war produced.” Nevertheless, obsessed with emerging Asia (which he regarded as his) he was almost insanely jealous of Washington’s partiality toward the Continent. Given his suspicious nature, this led to the conviction that Europeans in general, and the English in particular, were conspiring against him. He believed that the Pentagon was party to their intrigues. George Marshall—who disliked him personally but called him “our most brilliant general”—seemed to be the prime suspect, though with MacArthur you could never be sure. One moment he would be malicious, and in the next, tolerant. He was, among other things, extremely devious.3

  He appeared to need enemies the way other men need friends, and his conduct assured that he would always have plenty of them. But his craving for love was immense, too. In his youth he idolized his father, a general like him, and, like him, a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor. His relationship with his autocratic Southern mother was more complex. Like Franklin Roosevelt 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. Pinky MacArthur moved to the U.S. Military Academy when he enrolled there—from Craney’s Hotel she could see the lamp in her son’s room and tell whether or not he was studying—and later she mortified him by writing ludicrous letters to his superiors, demanding that he be promoted.

  His one open flicker of revolt against her was his first marriage, to a sexy divorcee. Pinky refused to attend the wedding, and the union ended, predictably, in divorce. Between marriages he kept an exquisitely beautiful Eurasian mistress, first in the Philippines and then in a hotel apartment on Washington’s Sixteenth Street. He showered her with presents and bought her many lacy tea gowns, but no raincoat. She didn’t need one, he told her; her duty lay in bed. Finally she mutinied. Terrified that his mother would find out about her—he was fifty-four years old and a four-star general at the time—he sent another officer to buy the girl off with a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, in the mezzanine of the Willard Hotel on Christmas Eve, 1934. Then, after these two shattering romantic defeats (and immediately after his mother’s death) he waged a brilliant campaign for the hand of his second wife, a poem of womanhood. She and their only child became the sources of his greatest happiness. MacArthur, being MacArthur, became the total father, but, being MacArthur, he couldn’t let go. In the end his suffocating adoration enshrouded his son’s soul.4

  “Very few people,” said George C. Kenney, “really know Douglas MacArthur. Those who do, or think they do, either admire him or dislike him. They are never neutral on the subject.” Certainly no other American commander, and possibly no other American, has been more controversial. MacArthur first testified before a congressional committee while still a cadet at West Point. He was an insubordinate junior officer; thrice in those early years he flirted with courts-martial. Dis aliter visum. At Leavenworth they gave him troops, and that made all the difference. Tall, lean, athletic, gentlemanly but firm, calm in crises, with tremendous reserves of physical and nervous energy, he became the apotheosis of leadership. Thereafter most of those closest to him would venerate him, some of them comparing him to Alexander the Great—with Alexander a poor second—or saying, as George E. Stratemeyer did, that he was “the greatest leader, the greatest commander, the greatest hero in American history. “ Perhaps the most striking evidence of his charismatic appeal was provided by Jonathan M. Wainwright, whom he left behind in the Philippines and who therefore spent four harrowing years in POW camps. Freed, Wainwright said of MacArthur: “I’d follow that man—anywhere—blindfolded.” Then he devoted his remaining years to supporting MacArthur for President.5