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On the 11th of March, 1942, General Douglas MacArthur and his family fled from Corregidor Island in Manila Bay in the Philippines through Japanese patrolled waters. The Philippines fell to the Japanese not long afterwards. In theory, MacArthur had suffered a terrible defeat, but 2 and 1/2 years later, he returned to exact revenge, fulfilling his statement made in 1942 when he left the Philippines that "I shall return." Who was the general who lost and then won the Philippines? How did he end up as the man charged with reconstructing Japanese society after the war?
This is the story of General Douglas MacArthur, America's most controversial general. The man known to history as Douglas MacArthur was born on the 26th of January, 1880 in the city of Little Rock in the state of Arkansas in the Southern United States. Douglas's father was Arthur MacArthur Jr., a lieutenant general in the US Army. His father, Arthur MacArthur Sr., was a lawyer, judge, and politician who was born in Glasgow in Scotland and who migrated to Massachusetts when he was 13 years old. He flourished in the US and became the governor of Wisconsin. Arthur Jr. began serving in the American Civil War on the Union side shortly after he turned 17 years old. Although he too studied the law, he prioritized his military career after he
was awarded the Medal of Honor for his wartime service. Ultimately, he served in many different places as the United States and its influence expanded. These included postings along the western frontier in Utah and New Mexico. He was a prominent commander in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and served as governor of the Philippines between May 1900 and July 1901. All of this is important as it highlights how Douglas was an army brat before the term was really used, the son of a military officer who moved around between military bases during his youth.
It meant the MacArthurs also had links to the Philippines from early on in the phase of the US rule there after the Spanish-American War. Arthur married Mary Pinkney Hardy in 1875. They had three sons, Arthur the third, Malcolm, and Douglas. Malcolm died of measles in childhood. Douglas spent his childhood in a succession of military bases on the western frontier as the US was cementing its control over places like Utah, the Dakotas, and the Pacific Northwest, as well as New Mexico and Arizona at the end of the 19th century.
Many of these places were quite lawless in the final quarter of the 19th century. For this reason, army commanders like Arthur MacArthur oversaw bands of soldiers in the various locations during the 1880s and 1890s. It is often noted that Douglas's mother dressed him in dresses as a child. This is accurate, but it should be noted that it was not that uncommon during the Gilded Age. Perhaps the scale of it reflected Mary's unfulfilled wish for a daughter. In 1889, the family moved back east to Washington, D.C. and Douglas attended school there for several years before the MacArthurs left again.
Texas was the destination on this occasion. In San Antonio, he attended West Texas Military Academy where he excelled and was the final year valedictorian. Pursuant from this, he was admitted to West Point Military Academy in 1899. His mother lived nearby in New York while Douglas's father was in the Philippines. This led to him being mocked for his mother's seemingly overprotective behavior, although it certainly didn't limit Douglas's performance.
He was one of the top-performing students during his three years at West Point and in 1902, he was commissioned directly into the Army Corps of Engineers as a second lieutenant. After finishing at West Point, Douglas headed out west again all the way to California. His father's tenure of the position of governor of the Philippines had ended on the 4th of July, 1901 and he was recalled to the West Coast. Although it was not explicitly stated, he was recalled from the Philippines after William McKinley's government decided he was not the right man to try to subdue the widespread rebellion that was underway among the Moro in the southern island of Mindanao.
The Philippines was a theater that successive generations of the MacArthurs would have a love-hate relationship with. While his father might have been recalled from the island archipelago in Southeast Asia, Douglas was dispatched to the Philippines in 1903 to take up his first posting as a newly commissioned officer fresh out of West Point. He contracted malaria in 1904 and was sent back to California to recuperate. After this, he was appointed as aide-de-camp to his father. Arthur was just then about to embark on a mission throughout the Western Pacific and Asia as the United States Navy under President Theodore Roosevelt sought to project itself more as a Pacific power.
Douglas was constantly on the move thereafter. Between 1907 and 1910, he was back in the US posted to various military schools and barracks. His father retired quietly in the middle of this having been passed over for the position of Chief of Staff of the Army. He died in 1912. Prior to this, Douglas had served a spell in Panama where the US military was involved in finishing the Panama Canal project after the government had taken the enterprise over from the French in 1904.
Douglas was posted to the Office of the Chief of Staff in 1912, the central command structure of the US military. Douglas was an experienced as he entered his mid-30s. He had served in the Philippines, Panama, and bases in California, Texas, and Wisconsin. However, with the exception of the rebellion in the Philippines, he had really not been anywhere near a live war yet. Moreover, his period of service in Southeast Asia had involved fort construction rather than fighting and was cut short by malaria.
The events of 1914 were therefore important in his ascent as a military commander and for the experience he acquired. In April, MacArthur was assigned to the Vera Cruz expedition. Ever since 1910, Mexico had been mired in a sprawling political and social revolution that ultimately resulted in the deaths of between 1 and 1/2 and 2 and 1/2 million people along with the displacement of millions more. Inevitably, the conflict spilled over the southern border into California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, though for the most part the US managed to contain the situation.
The first major military intervention by the US occurred in April 1914 after the Tampico affair in northeastern Mexico saw clashes between Mexican forces and the US Navy. In response, President Woodrow Wilson ordered an expedition to occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz. MacArthur arrived at the front at the start of May. Not long afterwards, he led a small mission to establish control over the local railway line, during which he and his men were attacked. MacArthur had his uniform grazed by several bullets, but he escaped unharmed. Afterwards, he was nominated for the Medal of Honor.
The awarding board decided not to grant it, noting that MacArthur had no authorization to conduct the mission, a worrying early sign of his tendency to exceed his authority. Vera Cruz remained under US military occupation until the end of the expedition in November 1914. Part of the reason for the US disengagement from Mexico in the early winter of 1914 was that international events were placing the Americans in a potentially dangerous situation. The First World War had broken out in Europe in the summer of 1914. The United States remained neutral at first.
However, it had interests in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Its position was especially difficult in the Atlantic as the German government persistently engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare. The sinking of many American ships, as well as German interference in Mexico, eventually led to Woodrow Wilson's government declaring war on Germany in April 1917. By then, MacArthur was a major. After the Vera Cruz expedition, he had been made head of the Bureau of Information and was consequently the de facto head of media relations for the US Army. When the country entered the war in April 1917,
he was appointed to head up the 42nd Infantry Division, one of the units that was to be mobilized speedily and sent to Europe while wider conscription was underway for a more extensive campaign in 1918. The 42nd became known as Rainbow Division on account of being cobbled together with people from different parts of the US and different ethnic groups during an era when divisions were often created along strict ethnic lines. MacArthur arrived with his men at the Western Front in France in November. They entered active service in February 1918. In March, MacArthur was exposed to mustard gas after he forgot his gas mask while heading out on duty.
In mid-July 1918, MacArthur and his men fought in the Champagne-Marne Campaign. This was during the last major attempt by Germany to break through and tip the war on the Western Front in its favor before US forces became so numerous in France that defeat became inevitable. That final push failed and by the autumn, the British, French, and Americans were pushing slowly eastwards. Between September and November, MacArthur took part in the Saint Mihiel Offensive and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive remains the largest military offensive in US history in terms of sheer manpower as over 1
million American servicemen were deployed. In the end, direct conquest of the German Empire would not be necessary. In early November, the German Empire collapsed internally. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated on the 9th of November. The armistice ending the fighting was signed two days later and Germany then descended into the German Revolution, a period of intense civil war and ideological conflict in cities like Berlin and Munich. In the middle of this chaos, MacArthur was assigned to lead the 42nd into the Rhineland to occupy and administer the Ahrweiler district.
It was vital for the post-war reconstruction, the production of things like iron and steel along with the mining of coal recommenced as quickly as possible in the Rhineland. This was MacArthur's first experience of military occupation of a defeated enemy and reconstruction of its society and economy. MacArthur's division left France in April 1919 as the peace talks were underway in Paris and large parts of the continent were imploding into civil wars, revolutions, and independence conflicts. In his final months in Europe, MacArthur
had oversight of maintaining the military occupation of parts of the German Rhineland. This was useful experience when it came to his role in the post-war occupation and reconstruction of Japan after the Second World War. Back in the United States in 1919, he was made the superintendent of the military academy at West Point. At 39 years of age, MacArthur was the youngest officer to hold this position in over a hundred years. Over the next three years, he overhauled and reformed the curriculum. During the war, the emphasis at West Point had been on training officers in the minimal requirements as quickly as possible and then sending them off to France.
MacArthur wanted a considered approach to officer training and introduced the study of subjects like history and politics as well. In 1922, he headed to the Philippines. The island archipelago remained under US occupation after the Spanish-American War and had a large military presence there as unrest continued on the southern island of Mindanao. MacArthur served in the Philippines in the mid-1920s and again for a year and a half at the end of the 1920s. He was promoted to the rank of major general at the start of 1925. In August 1927, while back in America, he was appointed
as the new president of the American Olympic Committee after the sudden death of the incumbent William C. Prout. In this role, MacArthur was charged with preparing the athletes for the Summer Olympics which were held in Amsterdam in 1928. Douglas started a family as well during the 1920s. He married comparatively late in life by early 20th century standards. His wife was Louise Cromwell. She came from a well-known New York society family and was wealthy. She and Douglas met in 1921 when he was 41 and she was 31.
She had been married previously to Walter Brooks, Jr. and had two children already from that marriage which ended in divorce in 1919. This meant that Douglas became a stepfather to Evelyn and Walter when he married Louise on Valentine's Day, 1922 at Palm Beach. The marriage, the second of Louise's four marriages overall, lasted until 1929. It was a strange union. Louise was a liberated woman of the 1920s, while Douglas was socially conventional, his values rooted in those he had acquired growing up in the 1890s
and 1900s. To add to the incompatibility between them, MacArthur was sent off to the Philippines not long after they married, and they spent a large part of the years that they were married living apart. They did not have any children prior to divorcing in 1929. In 1937, MacArthur remarried to Jean Faircloth, the daughter of a Tennessee banker. Although Douglas was 57 years old by then, Jean was only 38 and still capable of having children. Their only child, Arthur MacArthur IV, was born in February 1938. During the 1930s, Douglas's career progression continued.
He returned from his latest posting to the Philippines in 1930. Soon afterwards, he was appointed to the position that his father had been passed over for a quarter of a century earlier. At 50 years of age, he was made chief of staff of the US Army and made a general. News reports proliferated in the period that followed about MacArthur's excessive behavior. It was said that he acted more like a military ruler than a chief of staff, presiding over a kind of military court and making sweeping statements about how the US might soon need a military strongman to prevent revolution in the streets.
The context has to be kept in mind. The Great Depression was underway, unemployment had skyrocketed, and fascism was gripping Europe with the Nazis coming to power in Germany at the start of 1933. The Soviet Union had not only emerged from the Russian Civil War victorious after the First World War, it had cemented its rule, and communist support was growing in many countries. MacArthur's politics were unequivocal. He viewed the Russians as a threat, while he also wanted to further accelerate America's rise as the preeminent power in the Pacific Ocean.
His populism was on show in 1932 when around 43,000 military veterans marched on Washington to demand their army bonuses and that pensions should be paid early in response to the economic crisis. MacArthur initially sent camp equipment to the Bonus Army, as it became known. Then, when fears arose that the leadership of the Bonus Army had been infiltrated by communists, he ordered a heavy-handed crackdown, including the calling in of tanks and the use of tear gas. Many people praised MacArthur's uncompromising methods, while studiously ignoring his earlier support for the veterans.
It's highly debatable whether he was operating with actual information about the leadership of the Bonus Army or on just a hunch. MacArthur was a Republican, but he had a good relationship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who entered office in 1933 and remained as president down to 1945. In 1935, he accepted an offer to take up a new position in the Philippines, which carried the rather cumbersome title of Office of the Military Advisor to the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines.
The US had begun granting independence to the Philippines that year, and the first president of the newly created Commonwealth government, Manuel Quezon, hired MacArthur with a huge salary to train and prepare a new Philippine Army. MacArthur thus headed back to Southeast Asia. He spent 6 years in this new role, and his son was born in Manila. It was a vital job. In 1931, the Empire of Japan, which already controlled Korea, had invaded the Manchuria region of China and turned it into the puppet state of Manchukuo. In 1937, a broader war commenced with China, and it became wholly evident that the Japanese were determined to become the dominant power in the Far East.
An issue for them was oil. Tokyo was reliant on the United States for petroleum to keep its economy and army running. If Roosevelt's government reduced its supply, it could trigger conflict. It might also drive the Japanese to try to take over the nearest source of abundant oil, which was around the island of Borneo. The Philippines was right next door. MacArthur spent the late 1930s and the early 1940s training the Philippine Army as the Empire of Japan expanded in China.
American troops remained in the Philippines as well as the archipelago remained a US dependent territory. In July 1941, in response to the growing threat of war with Japan and the devolving situation in Europe and other parts of the world following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Roosevelt federalized the Philippine military forces that MacArthur had been training for 6 years. This meant that he went from being a semi-private military contractor to returning to the US Army as a formal commander once again.
4 and 1/2 months later, the US, the Philippines, and MacArthur were violently dragged to war. On the 8th of December 1941, hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Japan attacked the Philippines, destroying a large number of the US planes stationed there as well as other resources. Intense air and naval barrages reduced MacArthur's forces even further as the Japanese prepared for amphibious landings. In response, MacArthur moved his headquarters to Corregidor Island in Manila Bay. The Battle of the Philippines continued through to May 1942 when the last strongholds of Filipino and American resistance capitulated to the Japanese.
By then, MacArthur was long gone. He had been ordered by Roosevelt to make his escape before he was captured and in mid-March he and his closest advisers and officers escaped from Corregidor. The Empire of Japan reached its peak in late 1942 and early 1943 as it expanded to control all of Southeast Asia, Burma, and large parts of the Western Pacific. In the aftermath of his flight from the Philippines, MacArthur was awarded the Medal of Honor that he had first been recommended for all the way back in 1914. This was a controversial decision. While no one could deny that his position had been difficult in the Philippines and no commander would have been able to hold the islands in the
face of the surprise Japanese attack, there were issues with how MacArthur had conducted himself. News filtered out that shortly before leaving the Philippines, MacArthur had accepted half a million dollars in payment for fulfillment of his contract with the Commonwealth government, a sum equivalent to about eight million dollars today. It was not a good look in the face of the adversity created for all Americans by the war. On top of this, there were criticisms of MacArthur's immediate response to receiving the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Some observers noted at the time that he should have followed through on US contingency plans and immediately attacked what was then known as Formosa, modern-day Taiwan.
The US General Dwight Eisenhower pointed out as well that the Medal of Honor was bestowed for acts of special valor in combat. MacArthur's actions in the Philippines did not qualify. Nevertheless, in order to save face for his abandonment of the Philippines, the medal was awarded in 1942. At 62 years of age, MacArthur was the oldest active duty recipient. MacArthur was appointed as the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific area in April 1942. This meant he had overall command of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific, the active theater of which was centered
on New Guinea and Western Oceania in 1942, stretching south towards Australia. The Japanese ambition was to conquer the rest of these islands and if at all possible, to secure a bridgehead in Australia. As Supreme Commander, MacArthur had to coordinate with the Australians to prepare for any invasion like this. The plan, if things went badly, was to concede northern Australia to the Japanese and retreat to the Brisbane line in order to use the desert to defend the main centers of population in Australia in the southeast of the continent. The Allies never had to resort to this plan as Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 reduced their capacity for further expansion in the Pacific.
MacArthur, therefore, focused his resources on ensuring that the Japanese did not advance any further south than New Guinea. Although the Japanese overran the Dutch colony on the western side of the island, MacArthur's forces prevented them from capturing the whole of the island and largely expelled them from the west in the second half of 1942. This was a bitter campaign in disease-ridden tropical conditions. By 1943, the war was turning definitively against Japan. It continued to make advances in Burma and threatened to take the city of Kolkata in northeastern India, while China remained a never-ending scene of death and destruction, where over 20
million people would lose their lives before the war ended. However, further east in the western Pacific, US manpower and industrial capacity was starting to be fully deployed. In February 1943, the Guadalcanal campaign ended in US victory. Pockets of Japanese resistance continued in New Guinea, yet these were more like isolated islands of fanatical Japanese resistance and could be bypassed in the wider campaign. MacArthur therefore began planning his return to the Philippines to avenge the defeat in 1942. The campaign was launched in mid-October 1944 as the Battle of the Leyte Gulf crippled Japanese naval and air power in and around the islands of the archipelago.
On the 20th of October, MacArthur accidentally staged a masterful piece of military propaganda when he was photographed walking through the water onto the shore of Red Beach in Leyte. The plan had been for him to be photographed on shore. However, his boat grounded before reaching dry land, meaning he had to wade ashore. It made a much better impression than the planned photo. The picture was released with the text of the speech MacArthur gave on his arrival in which he declared, "People of the Philippines, I have returned."
The Philippines were gradually conquered over the next 6 months and were turned into an advanced base to bomb Japanese targets in Formosa, China, and on the home islands. These Allied victories over the Japanese were all taking place between 1942 and the summer of 1945 in an environment in which the bulk of Allied resources were being directed towards defeating the Nazis and the other Axis powers in Europe. The plan was to focus on Japan after the Germans were defeated. Given this, it was a question of when the Japanese would be defeated, not if.
The problem, as demonstrated by the way pockets of fanatical Japanese soldiers refused to surrender in New Guinea and across the Philippines, was that an amphibious invasion of Japan itself was going to be necessary in order to end the war. Throughout the spring and summer of 1945, MacArthur was one of the main commanders preparing plans for the invasion in association with the civilian government of President Harry Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt after he died on the 12th of April 1945. Estimates were that somewhere between 1 and 1/2 million soldiers could lose their lives in the campaign. Therefore, when the news arrived that the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon in the US had borne fruit on the 16th of July 1945,
Truman's administration immediately decided to use the new weapon. Two bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August 1945. Japan surrendered on the 15th of August. The formal signing of the surrender took place on the 2nd of September after MacArthur sailed into Tokyo Bay on board the USS Missouri. MacArthur didn't just oversee the formal surrender of Japan. 4 days earlier, he had been appointed to oversee the Japanese government following the surrender and to begin the process of the post-war reconstruction of Japan.
This was not only about rebuilding the country. There was retribution, too. Although it often gets overlooked because of the Holocaust in Europe, the Japanese had committed appalling war crimes in China and Southeast Asia, and many commanders and political leaders were placed on trial after the war. MacArthur oversaw the tribunal's activities from late 1945 onwards. The one thing he cautioned against was prosecuting Emperor Hirohito. Many Americans were of the view that the emperor had been a key figure in the war and Japan's crimes.
MacArthur advised Truman's government to look beyond this and think strategically about how a compliant emperor could be used to bring about peace and reform. Following his advice, Hirohito escaped prosecution and was not even forced to abdicate. He remained as emperor until his death in 1989. Beyond this, MacArthur oversaw the beginning of the deradicalization of Japan after the war and the rebuilding of its economy. As with Germany after the conflict, this was an incredible success.
Economic prosperity led to both nations becoming model states within the Western system. Japan became the world's second largest economy until overtaken in the early 21st century by China. American generals tend to be involved more closely in US politics than they are in most other Western countries. The first president, George Washington, was the commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Many veteran generals, like Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower, became presidents. MacArthur had forced his way into the American consciousness as the Second World War progressed and was viewed as a potential presidential candidate in its aftermath.
Indeed, even in 1943 and 1944, while he was still actively commanding in the Pacific, he had met with supporters about the possibility of challenging Roosevelt in the 1944 election. While he decided against it on that occasion, he did mount a bid to become the Republican Party candidate in 1948. He faced a large field of candidates. The governor of New York and the party's defeated candidate in 1944, Thomas Dewey, was the frontrunner. While the governor of California, Earl Warren, and Robert Taft, the son of the 27th president, William Taft, were among the other notable candidates. MacArthur's candidacy was a debacle. He delayed making an official announcement that he was running, hoping that a write-in campaign could be mounted without him having to formally
launch his bid. This meant he entered the race late, and it was also unclear if he intended to resign his military positions in order to run. When he failed to make any major impression in some key Midwestern primaries, he backed out of the race. Dewey ultimately became the Republican Party candidate again and lost to Truman. MacArthur was entering his late 60s when he ran for the Republican Party candidacy in 1948. He would have to retire soon, but there was one last controversial episode in his long, colorful career. The Korean Peninsula had been divided into a Western and US sphere of influence in the south and a Soviet-aligned block in the north at the
end of the Second World War. The point of demarcation was set along the 38th line of latitude north of the equator. In the post-war era, a communist regime headed up by Kim Il-sung, a Marxist guerrilla who had fought for years against the Japanese, was established in the north, while in the south, what was supposed to be a Western-style democracy was established. This was led by Syngman Rhee from 1948, a politician who is generally viewed as an authoritarian strongman today. In 1949, the Chinese Communists won the long-running Chinese Civil War.
Emboldened by the US unwillingness to support the nationalists there, Kim Il-sung invaded South Korea in June 1950 with the goal of uniting Korea under communist rule. His strategic gamble was poorly judged. The US and the new United Nations voted to intervene. Given his close proximity in Japan and the large number of troops under his command, MacArthur was appointed as the commander-in-chief of the campaign. He launched an amphibious invasion of South Korea after the North Koreans had overrun most of the peninsula in the late summer. Under his command, the United Nations relief forces gained secure bridgeheads in South Korea and then quickly advanced to retake the city of Seoul. Following this, the UN and US troops invaded North
Korea and captured the capital, Pyongyang, in mid-October 1950. It was at this juncture that China intervened in the war, a development which led to the most infamous events in MacArthur's long career. The Chinese intervention in the Korean War tipped the balance of power in the fighting back towards the communists. In October 1950, a quarter of a million men mobilized in Manchuria, the region north of the Korean peninsula. Then, around 200,000 began moving south of the Yalu River into North Korea. In early December 1950, they liberated Pyongyang and then pressed south of the 38th parallel, leading to the capture of Seoul again in the first week of January 1951.
A new counteroffensive allowed MacArthur to reclaim the South Korean capital in March. Then, things became inflammatory. MacArthur was frustrated by the toing and froing across the border and suggested to numerous European diplomats and allies that a more aggressive approach was needed. Most worryingly, he speculated about using potentially dozens of nuclear weapons to bomb Manchuria to knock China out of the conflict.
This would create a cordon sanitaire that would prevent further reinforcement of North Korea, leading to a swift victory. When word of MacArthur's statements reached him, Truman decided to relieve him of his command on the 11th of April 1951 as MacArthur's statements fundamentally contradicted the government's evolving strategic position and implied direct criticism of how Truman was handling the war. He was replaced by General Matthew Bunker Ridgway as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in the Far East. Under Ridgway, the war was fought to a stalemate and an armistice was agreed in 1953, which did not end the war, but
which allowed North Korea and South Korea to return to the status quo from before the war. MacArthur flew back to San Francisco after his dismissal. It is important to remember how much of a reality shift this was for him. MacArthur had barely returned to the US since leaving to take up the post of military adviser in the Philippines all the way back in 1935. He had lived in the Philippines until the war broke out in 1941, then he had fought for years in the Southwestern Pacific before living in Japan for the second half of the 1940s. When he touched down in California in 1951, it was into a country that he barely
recognized, even though everyone there knew who he was. He gave a farewell address to Congress on the 19th of April, in which he ended by stating that "Like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away. An old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty." Yet, while he claimed he was going to simply fade away, in reality, MacArthur started a speaking tour of the country in which he was deeply critical of Truman's administration. There is no doubt that he was trying to gauge public sentiment about him making a run for the Republican Party candidacy in the 1952 presidential election.
It didn't materialize. As his tour continued, MacArthur drew smaller crowds, and it was his old friend and rival Dwight Eisenhower who won the Republican primaries and then the presidential election the following year. As President Eisenhower consulted MacArthur about the situation in Korea. Dwight Eisenhower had been in the Philippines with MacArthur between 1935 and 1939 training the Philippine Army, and the two men knew each other very well. Clearly though, they were of very different temperaments. Eisenhower had to be convinced by Republican Party stalwarts to run for president in 1952 and was famously critical of the military-industrial complex that was developing as a result of the Cold War.
MacArthur would never have leveled such criticisms at the war industry if he had become president. Instead, he joined the board of Remington Rand, an arms manufacturer, in 1952 after he abandoned his ambitions to run for president. Earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in modern terms, he and Jean lived out of a suite in the plush Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. He was admitted to hospital shortly after his 80th birthday celebrations there in 1960. During his final years, he wrote his memoirs, later published with the title Reminiscences, and was consulted by President John F.
Kennedy about the deteriorating security situation in Cuba in 1961 and 1962. In a departure from the aggressive approach that had led to his recall from Korea in 1951, MacArthur urged Kennedy to blockade the island during the Cuban Missile Crisis to avoid war. A year and a half later, he was admitted to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he died at 84 years of age on the 5th of April, 1964. MacArthur had lived as a nomad all of his life, never really settling down anywhere. He therefore requested that he should be buried in Norfolk, Virginia, seat of the US Navy's largest Atlantic base, and also where his mother had been laid to
rest back in 1935. The United States has had many generals who inflamed public opinion and who historians have deemed to have acted in a very dubious manner. Most of these commanders aroused hostility, though, after they left office. Andrew Jackson, for instance, was a general before he became the most divisive president that America had ever seen. Douglas MacArthur was somewhat different in that he was a magnet for controversy even while he was still in uniform. In the 1930s, he frequently blurred the distinction between the military and the civil government.
It was during the Second World War and the nascent Cold War, though, that MacArthur really began to divide opinion. Many people criticized his handling of the Battle of the Philippines in late 1941 and early 1942. Nonetheless, he remained one of the top generals in the Pacific theater and was appointed to basically oversee the post-war reconstruction of Japan once the war ended. His comments on American politics and the consideration which he gave to running in the 1948 presidential election before he had resigned from the military deeply concerned people who perceived that MacArthur was overstepping the boundary between
politics and the military. This came into sharp focus early in 1951 when he exceeded his remit as commander in the Far East and questioned the Truman administration's approach to the Korean War. His advocacy of the unrestricted use of nuclear weapons also indicated how dangerous some of his strategic thinking had become. All of this stood in sharp contrast to MacArthur's counterpart in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, a general who understood the boundaries he was not allowed to cross, acted appropriately, and became president in 1953.
MacArthur's career ended ignominiously, and he never made the breakthrough into high political life which he had desired. Instead, he is remembered today as perhaps the most dangerous general which the United States ever had. What do you think of Douglas MacArthur? Did he pose a genuine threat to the security of the United States by blurring the boundary between military and civilian rule, or was he one of the country's greatest generals?
Please, let us know in the comments section. And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
