MacArthur: A Biography (review)

Few historical figures engender as much pure emotion as Douglas MacArthur, a man who could be, in one of Richard Frank's apt descriptions, "unbelievably moving to his friends and intolerably bathetic to his ranks of critics" (p. 164). The middle ground on MacArthur is sparse, and much to Frank's credit he does not offer bland admonitions about finding the true man between the extremes. Rather, he concludes that the real MacArthur alternated between hero and villain—at turns the brilliant and inspiring commander and leader, at times the vainglorious and impertinent blowhard.

Frank finds plenty of examples of both MacArthurs, beginning with the officer's personal bravery under fire on the Western Front in World War I. It was a trait he maintained for the rest of his career, contrary to the false 'Dugout Doug' impression created in the Philippines at the onset of World War II. In interwar assignments as commandant of West Point, Chief of Staff of the Army, and military advisor in the Philippines, MacArthur began to reveal his less appealing side. He was highly opinionated on most topics, and had a penchant for venturing far from his lane in expressing and even acting on those opinions. In 1932, he exceeded orders in expelling the Bonus Army from Washington, D.C., in part because he saw the group as rotten with communist influence. From his perch in the Philippines he willfully filed misleading reports about the strength of Filipino forces, launching a lifelong trend of "announcing that things were as he wished them to be rather than as they were" (p. 37).

World War II and the Korean War saw MacArthur bounce from apogee to nadir with disturbing regularity. Frank attributes the failures of December 1941 more to bad timing than any actions or inactions by MacArthur, but excoriates the general for the blood-letting in the opening battles for eastern New Guinea in late 1942. The pattern continued for the next three years. One MacArthur masterfully used the skills of his subordinates and the advantage of codebreaking to bypass Japanese forces along the coast of New Guinea, another MacArthur ordered brutal and costly frontal assaults on dug-in enemy positions in the Philippines. In Korea, as is well known, the extremes became more violent, and the brilliance of Inchon was more than offset by the stunningly brazen challenge to President Harry Truman's authority that ended MacArthur's career.

Frank deals with all of these issues and more in 176 tightly-packaged pages. The book is not perfect—the early chapters are rushed and incomplete—but it manages to summarize a long and complicated life while making the original argument that the best of MacArthur came not from a genius of inventiveness or innovation, but rather an ability to recognize the genius in the ideas of others, and adapt those ideas to the problem at hand. MacArthur is a judicious and well-argued account, and a welcome addition to the literature on one of history's most enigmatic figures.