MacArthur

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."

Kid General. If MacArthur had a vision of his own greatness, he had better reasons than most men. His father was Arthur MacArthur, "the Boy Colonel of the West." Arthur joined the Union forces in his home state of Wisconsin, became one of the youngest regimental commanders of the war. At 18, he led an assault on Missionary Ridge, and for his courage won the Medal of Honor. As a lieutenant general, he put down the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of the century, became commanding U.S. general in the Philippines and U.S. military governor of the islands.

Douglas, born in Little Rock in 1880, traveled with his family to posts in the Pacific and the raw West. He entered West Point at 19, graduated at the head of his class in 1903. Commissioned in the Corps of Engineers, he served a hitch in the Philippines, was his father's aide-de-camp in 1905 when Arthur MacArthur was sent to Japan as an observer during the Russo-Japanese War.

By 1917, MacArthur was a seasoned officer. He conceived the idea of creating a division made up of National Guard units from various states. He dubbed it the Rainbow Division (the 42nd), was appointed chief of staff, helped hone it into a tough fighting force and went with it to war. The famous 42nd fought its way through the bloody St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives. MacArthur himself was gassed and wounded, but led his men in those actions and half a dozen others. When the Armi stice came, he was division commander and known as the "Kid General."

After serving with the occupation forces, he returned to the U.S. for a stint as superintendent of West Point, and two more assignments in the Philippines. By that time, he was already a man of towering repute. President Hoover appointed him Army Chief of Staff and made him a full general in 1930. He reorganized the U.S. continental forces into a viable four-army fighting machine. He was also something of a legendary character who (it was said) wielded the longest cigarette holder in the Army. But his reputation suffered in the bitter 1932 "Victory of Anacostia Flats," when he flourished a riding crop and with a military force routed the bonus-marchers from Washington.

Destiny! MacArthur was convinced, despite America's obsession with neutrality, that war would inevitably come to the Pacific. The Philippines, he felt, were the key outpost in the U.S. Pacific line of defense. MacArthur's long association with the islands and with their people drew him once more to the Philippines. In 1937, after he had become Field Marshal of the Philippine Commonwealth's army, he gave up his U.S. commission. Americans on the Islands called him "the Napoleon of Luzon," but he single-mindedly pursued his goal. "By God!" he told a newsman in 1940, "it was destiny that brought me here!" In July 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt recalled MacArthur to service, gave him command of the U.S. Army forces in the Far East and transferred the newly built Philippine army into the U.S. forces. It was too late. The Philippines were doomed under the Japanese attacks in early 1942.

The memory of the fall of Bataan and Corregidor drove MacArthur through a brilliant Pacific campaign. He was one of the first Army generals to be sold on the potential of strategic air power. With Lieutenant General George C. Kenney as his No. 1 air strategist, he mounted furious assaults upon the Japanese land and naval forces that had smothered the Pacific islands. "It doesn't matter how much you have, so long as you fight with what you have," he said. "It doesn't matter where you fight, so long as you fight. Because where you fight, the enemy has to fight too, and even though it splits .your force, it must split his force also. So fight, on whatever the scale, whenever and wherever you can. There is only one way to win victories. Attack, attack, attack!"

Supported by naval and air power, MacArthur attacked constantly, leapfrogging through a series of coastal assaults on key islands that isolated the Japanese chunk by chunk. In October 1944, he landed on Leyte; three months later he was back on Luzon; and 25 days after that, he claimed Manila. Cried MacArthur: "On to Tokyo!" On Sept. 2, 1945, as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, he accepted the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

Wrong War? MacArthur capped that great achievement with still another. For nearly six years he was U.S. commander of the Occupation--in effect, the Yankee Emperor of Japan. He gave the Japanese a constitution and a will to create a new life, and for that he was idolized as much as if he had been a god. MacArthur himself enjoyed his new job immensely. Efficient, indefatigable, imperious in everything he did, he struck outsiders as a benign but egocentric despot. MacArthur hardly bothered to listen to what others had to say, for he liked to talk himself. But when he spoke, he exhibited an uncommon grasp of a wide variety of non-military subjects, from economics to politics. Even the most skeptical of his visitors went away murmuring incredulously about "that amazing man!"

Then, in June 1950, destiny beckoned again. Communist-trained North Koreans invaded the Republic of South Korea. The United Nations, urged by the U.S., gathered its armies to throw them back, and MacArthur once more turned to battle, this time as Supreme U.N. Commander in Chief for Korea. In a bold, perilous and perfectly executed amphibious flanking stroke, he landed his forces behind enemy lines at Inchon, drove a wedge through the Red armies, and turned the tide of the war. His announced "win the war" offensive was evidently a success; the troops, he said, would "be home for Christmas." And then the roof fell in. Out of the north swept swarms of "volunteer" Chinese Communist soldiers. Pouring across the Yalu River, they enveloped U.S. Marine contingents at Chosin Reservoir. Swiftly the Chinese pushed the U.N. forces back; MacArthur dug in for a bloody, stalemated, seesaw battle for little pieces of real estate. It was a new war. Christmas came and went.

MacArthur was convinced that he could win the war only by throwing Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese forces into the fight on the Chinese mainland and by carrying the war across the Yalu River into Manchuria. President Harry Truman and his Joint Chiefs of Staff argued that such tactics would inevitably bring Communist China into the Korean war. It would be, explained General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong enemy."

Through various messages sent to the States, MacArthur set forth his strong opposing views. Then, in March 1951, just four days after he was notified that the U.N. planned to proclaim its willingness to discuss a Korean settlement, MacArthur himself declared that he was ready to meet the enemy in the field to talk about peace; implied was a threat that otherwise MacArthur would extend the war beyond the Korean border. On April 11, Truman, after consulting the Joint Chiefs, fired MacArthur because he felt that the General was "unable to give his wholehearted support" to the policies of the Administration and the United Nations.

MacArthur returned to the U.S. and one of the wildest hero's welcomes ever accorded an American. With him came his wife Jean (a first marriage, to Louise Cromwell Brooks in 1922, had ended in divorce seven years later), and his son Arthur, who was born in the Philippines in 1938. MacArthur made his eloquent farewell address to the Congress, testified before a congressional joint investigation committee. Both he and Truman continued to have their say --in tendentious statements, in books and in articles. Neither budged a whit from his position--and neither, probably, could ever be proved wrong.

Nostalgia & Splendor. Thus Korea brought MacArthur's military career to a dramatic but unhappy end. Named board chairman of Remington Rand Inc. (now the Sperry Rand Corp.), he lived in lonely splendor high in Manhattan's Waldorf Towers. He made a nostalgic trip back to the Philippines three years ago, attended Arthur's 1961 graduation from Columbia University, otherwise rarely appeared in public.

Last year his longtime aide, Major General Courtney Whitney, found MacArthur writing in precise, Victorian handscript across page after page of ruled paper. MacArthur explained that he was writing his "reminiscences." The memoirs, completed in six months' time, ran to more than 200,000 words; three installments have appeared in LIFE Magazine so far.

With the memoirs out of the way, MacArthur resumed his quiet, circumscribed routine. At 84, he was still a fine, bayonet-straight specimen of a soldier. Then, early in March, doctors at Washington's Walter Reed Hospital operated on him and removed his gall bladder. He appeared to progress fairly well after that, but soon he began to fail. For four weeks he fought tenaciously to live. Doctors performed two more major operations. It seemed that no ordinary man could withstand such punishment, but incredibly, MacArthur clung to life. Then at last he let go, drifted into a coma. His great will was no longer a match for his old body.

When he lay dying, he sent word to the men who grieved: "I am going to do the very best I can." He always did. He was MacArthur.

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