American Caesar Read online

  There were exceptions. To some he appeared to be too remote, so far above his subordinates that he was unapproachable. Daniel E. Barbey, the admiral who served as his amphibious commander in World War II, wrote: “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 manner, speech, and dress.” Steve M. Mellnik, a coast artillery officer on Corregidor, resented the fact that the General “wrapped himself in a cloak of dignified aloofness” and “never tried to be ‘one of the boys.’ “ (Philip LaFollette thought he knew why—he said that 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.”) To such men he was inhuman. Robert L. Eichelberger sardonically wrote his wife from the front: “We have difficulty in following the satellites of MacArthur, for like those of Jupiter, we cannot see the moons on account of the brilliance of the planet. . . . Even the gods were alleged to have their weaknesses.”6

  Such feelings were rare, and in fact Eichelberger, highly ambivalent toward his chief, was constantly torn between disillusion and encomiums to him, but it is remarkable that anyone capable of criticism remained in this Jupiter’s presence. Once he put up general’s stars—he was still only in his thirties—almost all of those who were permitted to stay with him were blindly subservient, even obsequious. “None of MacArthur’s men,” one of the few of whom this was untrue told a writer, “can risk being first-rate.” They catered to his peacockery, genuflected to his viceregal whims, and shared his conviction that plotters were bent upon stabbing him in the back. Some of the sycophants were weird. His World War II chief of staff thought America should be ruled by a right-wing dictatorship. His intelligence officer admired Franco extravagantly. A third member of his staff spied on the others like an inquisitor, searching for signs of heresy. Clare Boothe Luce recalls: “MacArthur’s temperament was flawed by an egotism that demanded obedience not only to his orders, but to his ideas and his person as well. He plainly relished idolatry.”7

  On the other side were those, far from his headquarters, who disparaged everything about him: his religion, his rhetoric, even his cap. They doubted his sincerity, his motives, his courage. Nothing detrimental to him was too absurd to be believed by them. One could fill a volume with MacArthur apocrypha. He used rouge, they said; he dyed his hair; he wore corsets and a wig. 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. Because he owned the Manila Hotel, it was said, artillerymen (fliers) had been forbidden to shell (bomb) it. Gossip had it that pictures of him wading ashore at Leyte were faked. 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. The catalogue of myths about him is endless. Men who fought in the Pacific and are skeptical on every other topic will swear that some or all of these stories are true, though research exposes every one of them as a lie.

  One of his difficulties was that he wasn’t a modern man. 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. Nobility has been unfashionable for some time. “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!” Egalitarianism did not become the triumphant passion of Western society until about the middle of this century, however. Veterans of World War I and World War II saw MacArthur very differently. Doughboys were proud to have fought under the General. GIs weren’t; 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. He had no diminutive. Even his wife addressed him as “General.” Paul V. McNutt, U.S. high commissioner to the Philippines in the 1930s, 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. An officer who was a cadet when he was superintendent of West Point remembers: “He’s the only man in the world who could walk into a room full of drunks and all would be stone-sober within five 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.”8

  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. As Edmund Wilson has pointed out, the Civil War figure to whom Americans are introduced as children, and whom Carl Sandburg did so much to perpetuate, has little in common with the cool, aloof dictator who ruled this country unflinchingly as the sixteenth President of the United States. MacArthur shared Lincoln’s monumental will to win, but in other ways he was more like Washington. By all accounts the Father of Our Country was a haughty officer. David Meade noted that he lacked “personal suavity” and was “of a saturnine temperament . . . reserved and austere, and better endowed by nature and habit for an eastern monarch, than a republican general.” Count Axel Fersen observed: “He looks the hero; speaks little, but is courteous and frank. A shade of sadness overshadows his countenance, which is not becoming.” Like MacArthur, Washington was joined in the field by his wife; like him, he defied enemy sharpshooters. Washington’s staff deplored, one member of it wrote, “the little care he takes of himself in any action.” Both Washington and MacArthur were respected, like Pershing; not beloved, like Lee.9

  But to find closer parallels to MacArthur, one must look—though this would have horrified him—across the Atlantic. He was as conceited and ostentatious as the Earl of Essex, another viceroy, in Ireland. Like Clive of Plassey, whom the Earl of Chatham called the “heaven-sent general,” he was a mystical orator who thought in cosmic terms. It may be said of MacArthur, as the Durants said of Napoleon, that “all the qualities of Renaissance Italy appeared in him: artist and warrior, philosopher and despot; unified in instincts and purposes, quick and penetrating in thought, direct and overwhelming in action, but unable to stop. . . . Tocqueville put it well: he was as great as a man can be without virtue, and he was as wise as a man can be without modesty.” 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.10

  They were also possessed of first-class brains. Sophisticates in the last quarter of the twentieth century are disdainful of military intellect, but great captains have always been men of genius. Goethe thought that Napoleon’s mind was the greatest that the world had ever produced; Lord Acton agreed. That century rated warriors higher than this one does. Walt Whitman wrote: “Knowest thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards? And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles, the making of perfect soldiers.” Bonaparte’s analytical gifts and his phenomenal memory were recognized in his time as signs of his massive cerebral powers. MacArthur matched them. The man who wrote the Japanese constitution, like the creator of the Napoleonic Code, was clearly a prodigy. His knowledge of history and law was astoundin
g. And he never forgot anything. Once he reminisced, blow by blow, about a boxing match he and a visitor, reunited with him after forty-seven years, had watched the evening that they had parted. Meeting John Gunther in 1950, he picked up the thread, exactly where it had broken off, of a conversation they had held at their last meeting, in 1938. He knew the history of every Japanese unit he faced in the field: where it had fought in China during the 1930s, its role in the conquest of Malaya, the reputation of its commander, and intelligence appraisals of its morale. During a planning conference for the invasion of Honshu in 1945, a briefing officer said that the surf on a certain beach was treacherous. “Certainly,” the General said; “I remember seeing it when I came out to Japan with my father in 1905.” Then he reeled off tidal details. The incredulous officer, checking them, found them correct in almost every particular.11

  Harry Truman called him “a counterfeit,” and most intellectuals, wincing at his William Jennings Bryan speeches, thought him a ham. It is true that despite occasional gleams of Churchillian eloquence he usually spoke poorly. He was far more effective in conversations a deux. But those who dismiss him as shallow because his rhetoric was fustian err. They fail to see behind the outer mask to the inner identity that informs it. If you question them, you almost always find that they were offended by his surface histrionics. That was undeniably there. He had the Cyrano gift for feeling the pulse of an audience; his ornate hat, his sunglasses, and his corncob pipe were props; he knew how to use his profile, his hands, his resonant voice. 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.12

  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. Asked what he believed in most, he snapped: “The defense of the United States.” Many shrewd observers took him at his word. Vincent Sheean wrote: “Unwavering patriotism is, I concluded from my talks with him, the key to his character.” It was one key, but not the chief one. What Douglas MacArthur believed in most was Douglas MacArthur. To an even greater degree than Lord Nelson (who acknowledged it) he was a seeker of glory. Only once did the General approach a similar admission. Addressing a reunion of his World War I Rainbow Division in 1935, he quoted Dionysius: “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.” This yearning for adulation was his great flaw. He had others, notably mendacity and overoptimism, based on his conviction that he was a man of destiny, which repeatedly led him to announce “mopping-up” operations before battles had been won. As Wellington said of Pitt the Younger, he was “too sanguine. . . . He conceives a project and then imagines it is done.” But it was his manifest self-regard, his complete lack of humility, which lay like a deep fissure at his very core. In the end it split wide open and destroyed him.13

  Men have always been inconsistent in their attitudes 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 seven deadly sins, but chivalry was nothing if not prideful. MacArthur’s hauteur 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. Link upon link the bond between events on the battlefield and his own ruin was forged, and, as is essential in genuine tragedy, the gods used the victim himself to forge the links. The Greeks would have had a better grasp of MacArthur than MacArthur had of Dionysius.

  They would also have understood Truman, who, as faithful to his own star as MacArthur was to his, joined him in disfavor as the curtain fell upon their dramatic confrontation. The President was undone by another of the deadly sins: anger. It had led him to humiliate the General publicly, and on November 4, 1952, the ravening Furies, outraged, turned upon the humiliator to wreak vengeance at the polls on his anointed successor. What adds to the poignance of this is that each of the two protagonists, acting in behalf of the first established international community, questioned the other’s loyalty, not to the United Nations, but to the United States. Neither recognized that patriotism, vitiated by the growing global diaspora, has become parochial, a tarnished, disappearing virtue. 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 bottles of tribalism.” Since the Korean War, it has become clear that mankind is slowly becoming soberer, that the Germans, for example, 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.

  The Korean campaign lay half in one era and half in the other. It was one of those events which are inscrutable during the moment of action and become comprehensible only long afterward. In Washington in the early 1950s the outcome was acclaimed as a triumph of collective security. Omar Bradley assured a Senate committee that Korea meant American troops would be joined by those of allies in any future Asian land war. Actually—and MacArthur saw this—the conflict had been an adventure in traditional coalition warfare, with the United States dominating the coalition. On his deathbed in Walter Reed Hospital the General begged Lyndon Johnson to stay out of Vietnam.14

  That was his last official act. He had lived and fought by H. H. Frost’s maxim that “every mistake in war is excusable except inactivity and refusal to take risks,” but he recognized a bad risk when he saw it. He had come a long way from the frontier forts of his childhood, and in a sense his career had traced the history of conflict between armies. In MacArthur martial ontogeny had recapitulated martial phylogeny. During his infancy Indians attacked his father’s troops with bows and arrows; in his last years—when he proposed that war be outlawed—superpowers were brandishing nuclear weapons. He recognized the implications of the great sea change and changed with it, because if he was the most infuriating member of his profession, he was also among the wisest. But judgment of him cannot end there. 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. The five stars that rode on his shoulders, like the stars in the Southern Cross that shone over the green hell in which so many of us served, had witnessed deeds which should eclipse the pettiness and self-centeredness of the General at his purplish worst. At his best, which is how he deserves to be remembered, he provided us with a legend which spans more than a century, for it germinated on an embattled Tennessee slope in the red year of 1863, seventeen years before Douglas MacArthur first blinked at the world and began his eighty-four-year journey under the colors, from reveille to taps.15

  PROLOGUE

  First Call

  Missionary Ridge overlooks Chattanooga, and few will envy it. The vast crescent of peaks on the horizon is undeniably majestic, but the city itself, as seen from the ridge, is flat and drab. The tainted coils of the Tennessee River wind sluggishly through the downtown area. Squat bridges span them. Switch engines shuttle in the railroad yards, cutting strings of boxcars, collecting trains. Tall chimneys emit dense smoke, for Chattanooga has become
an important industrial center; standing on the brow of the ridge one sees the soaring Jaycees Tower, the Quaker Oats and Central Soya mills, three banks, a factory manufacturing electrical components for nuclear-reactor systems, and many ugly water towers. The residential neighborhoods visible below are shabby, for those who can afford better homes have built on the uplands, including Missionary Ridge itself, which, though bisected at one point by the six lanes of interstate Route 75, is for the most part pleasant and serene.1

  The prospect was very different on the drizzly evening of Tuesday, November 24, 1863. The ridge, then a tangle of rock, thick vines, pine, and oak, was in the possession of Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of the Tennessee, 46,165 strong. A continuous chain of gray-clad sentries in forage caps walked the crest; the muzzles of their bronze cannon, defended by two lines of works, looked down on the city, a thousand feet below, where the 59,359 men of the Union Army of the Cumberland had pitched their tents. The federal troops were under siege. Though led by Lincoln’s best generals—Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Hooker, Thomas—they seemed to be at Bragg’s mercy. Threatened with starvation, the besieged had lost so many horses for lack of food that there were not enough of them to take a battery into action. The best the frustrated Grant could do was to order his men to “feel” the Confederate position the next morning.2