In His Own Write (July/August 1991 | Volume: 42, Issue: 4)

In His Own Write

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Historic Era: Era 8: The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945)

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July/August 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 4

In April of 1951, I was ten years old and living with my family on Chicago’s South Side when the newspapers reported that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was to be paraded past our neighborhood as part of the clamorous tour of American cities that followed his recall from Korea. The news put my father in a quandary. He knew that MacArthur represented a big part of our history and that it would be wrong to deny me a look at him. But he also saw MacArthur’s dismissal not as the tragedy the general and his admirers believed it to be, but as the most forceful evidence that the Constitution still mattered, that it was incumbent upon even the most exalted soldier to follow the orders of his civilian commander in chief.

My clearest memories of that day are not of the parade, but of my father walking with me across the grassy Midway, gravely explaining why, while it was okay for us to have a glimpse of the general, we wouldn’t be sharing in the wild enthusiasm that the crowds were sure to show. A mighty cheer went up as, first, police motorcycles appeared, and then the big open car in which the general sat. My father did not cheer, and so, of course, neither did I, and I’m not sure how much of my memory of how the old soldier looked that day is authentic, and how much is garnered from photographs seen afterward, but there was the battered campaign hat, the khaki greatcoat, the raptor’s nose and lordly wave.

Almost 40 years later, I was asked to write a brief profile of the general for the National Geographic. I found it curiously difficult to do. I visited the Philippines, where he spent a quarter of his professional career, and found surprisingly few traces of him: the penthouse atop the Manila Hotel in which he lived just before the war is gone, blown up by the Japanese in 1945 on the final day of their occupation of the city, and replaced by an opulent suite indistinguishable from similar suites anywhere else on Earth, and even the coastline in Palo on Leyte island where he waded ashore on October 20, 1944 and redeemed his pledge to return has shifted, so that the life-size bronze statuary that marks this historic spot is now landlocked above the beach.

 

I consulted the literature, everything from sycophantic memoirs by former aides published during his lifetime that would have deeply embarrassed a less vainglorious man, to hostile studies in which his every word and deed is disparaged; from MacArthur’s own ornate but curiously opaque Reminiscences and William Manchester’s best-selling American Caesar to D. Clayton James’s magisterial three-volume study The Years of MacArthur. But, as James admits, the private man behind the familiar props remains maddeningly elusive: “There are aspects of his ... personality which neither I nor