A great warrior has no need for earthly titles or given names. His surname alone is enough to stir a thousand memories. It is part of his uniform, his face, the sound of his voice; it denotes the full measure of the man—his personality, his power, his exploits.
Such a man died last week. For the record, he was a five-star General of the Army, and his first name was Douglas. But there was no need in New Guinea or on Corregidor or in the Solomons or Tokyo or on any of the continents of the earth to ask his title or by what name his parents had christened him. It was enough to say—MacArthur.
Larger Than Life. One of the most brilliant soldiers of all time, MacArthur stamped out his character and achievement on a full half-century of history. In another age, he might have been an emperor. He envisioned himself as a child of destiny. Like Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, he conceived and fought monumental battles with huge armies, and like those bygone warriors, he viewed his times and his own acts as decisive in history. His triumphs and his failures often thrust him into whirlwinds of international controversy. He generated stubborn loyalties and intense hatreds. He was a realist who by the strength of his personality succeeded in making himself larger than life. He was a master of the imperial gesture, the meaningful touch that lent grandeur and drama to his image. His nation bestowed on him the Medal of Honor and 20 other decorations for gallantry and extraordinary valor, and he received similar decorations from many other countries. Yet he seldom wore a medal, and he could stand midst a troop of ribbon-festooned heroes and, by the jaunt of his corncob pipe or the tilt of his old but gold-glittering garrison cap, appear positively Olympian. His orations often seemed florid. Yet he could be succinct and moving when the occasion demanded. In early 1942, he was ordered to leave beleaguered Corregidor before it fell to the Japanese. "We go," he cried, "during the Ides of March." And that is when he went. "I shall return," he pledged on his arrival in Australia. And when he set foot once more in the Philippines nearly three years later, he proclaimed: "I have returned!" His utterances were by turn axiomatic ("In war, there can be no substitute for victory"), grandiloquent ("Though I am a Caesar, I rendered unto God that which was his"), or eloquently simple, as when he spoke at a cemetery near Pearl Harbor: "I did not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death." Nowhere did he seem to hold history more firmly in his hands than when, relieved of his Korean command in 1951, he stood before a joint session of the Congress and said:
"I am closing my 52 years of military service. When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day, which proclaimed most proudly that old soldiers never die—they just fade away. And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye."