Douglas MacArthur: Statecraft and Stagecraft in America's East Asian Policy (review)

Russell Buhite, the author of several respected studies of U.S. politics, diplomacy, and war in the twentieth century, has written a short, spirited, and persuasive study of General Douglas MacArthur's long career in Asia. Building on several scholarly monographs, Buhite demonstrates how the General's assignments in the pre-World War II Philippine Islands, the Southwest Pacific Theater during the Second World War, Occupied Japan, and during the Korean War all served in large part as stages in a form of political theater in which one man starred. The (hostile) critics usually took the form of presidents and other (invariably rival) commanders, but MacArthur's target audience remained the American public.

Like several other recent biographers and military historians, Buhite finds more to criticize than admire in the General's various performances. A barely adequate military strategist, MacArthur tended to win battles in which he had an overwhelming advantage and lose those in which he faced a determined enemy on more or less equal terms. Although he considered himself a grand geopolitical theorist, most of MacArthur's pronouncements on these subjects sound either obvious or foolish. In short, Buhite concludes, there was a good deal more stagecraft than statecraft in the General's long years of service.

Buhite stresses his intent to write a straightforward military and diplomatic study. Yet he, like biographers before him, simply cannot avoid putting the General on the psychologist's couch. This makes sense and Buhite offers several compelling observations about how the General's ego, insecurities, resentments, and narcissism influenced many of his professional actions. For example, commenting on MacArthur's mishandling of the 1932 "Bonus March," Buhite observes that "paranoia was the quality most revealing of his worldview. He could not make friends. He wanted admirers rather than friends, so he sustained himself by making enemies" (p. 20).

MacArthur's "overweening ego," Buhite insists, went far beyond the need for adulation. Rather, he must be seen as the victim of a "disorder referred to by psychologists as a 'narcissistic personality disorder'." Buhite outlines the definition of this affliction and persuasively, in my view, correlates MacArthur's behavior to it. He does so without being nasty or petty, more in sorrow than in anger.

His evaluation coincides with that of Gerald Wilkinson, a British liaison officer who served with MacArthur in Australia in 1943. In an appraisal of the General directed to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Wilkinson wrote:

General directed to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Wilkinson wrote: He is shrewd, selfish, proud, remote, highly strung and vastly vain. He has imagination, self-confidence, physical courage and charm, but no humor about himself and no regard for truth, and is unaware of these defects. He mistakes his emotions and ambitions for principles. With more moral depth he would be a great man; as it is, he is a near miss which may be worse than a mile…His main ambition would be to end the war as Pan-American Hero in the form of generalissimo of all Pacific theaters…

With the large exception of Occupied Japan and the early conduct of the Korean War, it is difficult to find a situation where MacArthur actually set policy or had much influence on policymakers. After his dismissal in April 1951, and despite the initial outpouring of emotion on his behalf, MacArthur really did "fade away." Buhite offers a balanced, accessible critical history of the General's life in Asia and the Pacific that should be especially useful for students in military and diplomatic history classes.