Special Section: In Search of History

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said, in readiness to command the American expeditionary force in Asia when the war broke out. This was a year before Pearl Harbor, but he insisted war was coming. Beware of the Japanese Navy, he said, and continuing, he said that Japanese carrier-based aviation was superb. He believed, however, that the Japanese Army was not even second class, that it was shot through with venality. He, himself, was building the new Philippine Army. He was altogether impressive.

I wrote my dispatch on the defenses of Asia for TIME and then, provocatively, sent it upstairs from my room at the Manila Hotel to his penthouse suite. I had written that after three months of seeing all the generals —American, French, Dutch, English—in Southeast Asia, by far the best in every respect was General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Army, retired. With this judgment MacArthur totally agreed, and I was immediately summoned to him.

It was late in the afternoon, and he was dressed in an old West Point bathrobe of blue and gray wool which displayed the Army "A" on its back; occasionally he puffed on a corncob pipe. We rejoiced together that we alone understood the Japanese peril to America; in this sympathetic mood, he began to reminisce. He had been a young first lieutenant when he came here after graduation from West Point in 1903; he had fought the little Philippine brown brothers in the Aguinaldo insurrection. He had commanded a U.S. division in combat in World War I; had been Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army under Hoover; had retired. But he felt that our fate and Asia's were intertwined.

MacArthur was to be in Asia from 1935 to 1951 without ever coming home, conquering the Pacific islands, occupying and restoring the Japanese islands, commanding in Korea until Harry Truman fired him. Harry Truman fired him for good cause, of course, but there was in their clash a quintessence of the century-old clash in American history between military and civilians. MacArthur understood the politics of Asia, and not only in his legacy to Japan but in his parting admonition to his successors ("Anybody who commits the land power of the United States on the continent of Asia ought to have his head examined") demonstrated this understanding. What he could not understand were the politics of America. He was convinced that the military and the political executives were co-proprietors of American history, equal partners in the great adventures of war.

It did not occur to me that he was flawed politically until two years later. By that time, we, too, were at war with the Japanese. He had just escaped from Corregidor, was again an American general, not a Philippine field marshal, had been named commander of all U.S. forces in the Southwest Pacific—but with no visible support in troops, ships or supplies. He was indignant. I visited him in his headquarters at Melbourne, Australia. He managed to denounce all at once, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President; George Catlett Marshall, the regnant chief of staff; Harry Luce, the publisher of my magazine; and the U.S. Navy. ("White," he said, "the best navy in the world is the Japanese Navy. A first-class navy. Then comes the British Navy. The U.S. Navy is a fourth-class navy, not even as good as the Italian Navy.") He was completely wrong in this in the spring of 1942, for the U.S. Navy was about to prove it was the