Books: Hero's Memory of a Hero

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On the Steps. As Chief of Staff of the Army, MacArthur had a memorable set-to with Franklin Roosevelt, who proposed a cut in Army appropriations. "The President turned the full vials of his sarcasm upon me. He was a scorcher when aroused. I spoke recklessly to the effect that when we lost the next war and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur but Roosevelt." Roared F.D.R.: "You must not talk that way to the President!" MacArthur bolted to the door and vomited outside on the White House steps. But F.D.R. later changed his mind and restored the budget cut. "You've saved the Army!" an elated officer told MacArthur.

In his account of World War II, Mac-Arthur is proud of his leapfrogging tactics in New Guinea and the Philippines and sharply critical of other U.S. commanders who attacked everything headon. He points out that the loss of men and materials in the bloody frontal assaults on Okinawa and Iwo Jima alone exceeded his entire losses in all his Southwest Pacific campaigns.

Also, a Theologian. As ruler of occupied Japan, MacArthur felt no hostility toward his fallen foe; he simply considered Japan a feudal country that would have to be yanked into the modern age. To help it along, he imposed impressive reforms: land redistribution, dissolution of trusts, creation of labor unions, enfranchisement of women. "I had to be an economist, a political scientist, an engineer, a manufacturing executive, a teacher, even a theologian of sorts," MacArthur writes rather proudly. When Publisher Robert McCormick visited Japan before the 1948 primaries, he was so dismayed by MacArthur's "socialism" that he refused to support him for President.

MacArthur was still bitter about Harry Truman: "He has an engaging personality, a quick and witty tongue. He seemed to take great pride in his historical knowledge, but it seemed to me that in spite of having read much, it was of superficial character." MacArthur still ardently defends his desire to broaden the Korean War and has scant patience with those who disagreed. His firing by Truman was, he writes, cruel and abrupt: "No office boy, no charwoman, no servant of any sort would have been dismissed with such callous disregard for the ordinary decencies."

For all his vaunted vanity, MacArthur claims a lot less for himself in his memoirs than most of his admirers do. He generously gives credit to subordinates for many of his successes. But there is enough left over to keep the Old Soldier from ever fading away.

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