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Time for a Change. The days of SCAP tutelage in Japan ended with John Foster Dulles' first great diplomatic tour de force —the "peace of reconciliation,'' signed at San Francisco in September 1951. But though the occupation was over, relations between the U.S. and Japan remained unequal: under the original U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty, signed along with the peace treaty, the U.S. could use its Japanese bases to support military action elsewhere in Asia, could bring into Japan any weapons it chose, including H-bombs, could even use its forces to aid the Japanese government in putting down internal disturbances. These were bonds that left Japan precious little room for international maneuver and that chafed increas ingly against dark memories of Hiroshima and the deep national pride of the Japanese people. When Nobusuke Kishi became Premier in February 1957, he was already talking of a "new era" of equality in Japanese-U.S. relations. Only ten days before Kishi took office, Douglas Mac-Arthur II arrived in Tokyo as U.S. ambassador.
The Gumshoe. No country could have been more suitable for Douglas MacArthur II's first ambassadorial post than Japan. By tradition, he should have become a military man: besides Uncle Douglas, the MacArthur military roster includes Douglas II's father, a Navy captain, and Grandfather Arthur MacArthur, who was U.S. military governor of the Philippines. At 13, on a courtesy visit to Japan aboard his father's ship, young Douglas—whose horizons had previously been limited to Bryn Mawr, Pa. and Washington, D.C.—decided once and for all that diplomacy was the life for him.
Back home, MacArthur went through Milton Academy and Yale, where he played guard on the 1931 football team captained by Albie ("Little Boy Blue") Booth. In 1934 he married Laura Louise ("Wahwee") Barkley, daughter of Veep-To-Be Alben Barkley. The next year he got his first Foreign Service appointment and began to display an affinity for adventure in what should have been dull diplomatic jobs. In Naples he did a gumshoe job on a network of passport forgers; in Vichy, after the fall of France, he acted as contact man with French Resistance leaders and helped smuggle out downed Allied pilots—a cloak-and-dagger existence ended only when he was interned by the Nazis for 15 months.
Professionally, MacArthur's crucial break came in 1951 when he was picked to make a three-week European tour with Dwight Eisenhower, then in the process of setting up NATO. He performed so ably that Ike drafted him as SHAPE adviser on international affairs. When Ike went into the White House, MacArthur followed him as Counselor of the State Department under John Foster Dulles. As self-styled "Chief of Staff for Conferences," MacArthur handled arrangements for the 1955 Geneva summit, traveled some 80,000 miles a year, and acquired his first major Asian experience by acting as Dulles' No. 2 man in the establishment of SEATO.