27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE FINEST REVIEW OF MAC ARTHUR, January 11, 1999
By A Customer
Manchester has produced a book that covers the entire life of the controversial five star general, from his infancy to his death, in the finest of detail and in a lively literary style. - If you want to know about MacArthur, this is the book for you. The author very carefully presents facts about the general and lets you the reader make up your mind on where the truth lies. Manchester does not appear to "take sides" in this book; he does not take the general and make him a god, nor does he denigrate what the general has done. He presents the many sides of this mysterious general and lets you, the reader, put it all together which is not difficult, since Manchester provides you the tools to do it: plenty of rich detail, plenty of quotes, excerpts of memos and messages, much detail on his private family life. Again, Manchester does not tell the reader what to think. For example, with the fall of the Philippnes, it seems that the general has made up his mind to stay and, along with his family, expects in a matter-of-fact way to commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner by the Japanese. You wonder about his wife and child, but Manchester doesn't tell you what they want to do: he lets them speak. - An excellent biography and significant historical account. Probably the best ever on MacArthur whether you like the general or not.
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48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Aptly Titled, August 6, 2005
John Gunther wrote, "General MacArthur took more territory, with less loss of life, than any military commander since Darius the Great." To which I'll add...there've been a lot of commanders between the great Persian potentate and the great SCAP.
William Manchester's incisive "American Caesar" is an 800-page argument that the Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area was, for all his numerous personal faults and jarring pomposity, the most brilliant, compelling commander in American history. For every GI killed under MacArthur, thirty Japanese were killed, a ratio Eisenhower or any other commander could only dream of. A scant fifty years after his Inchon landing, historians of even the most measured ilk, are proclaiming that radical move one of the most daring and decisive in history. The numbers alone are staggering. When the dust had settled from an amphibious assault that was discouraged by nearly every officer around him, just 500 Americans had died to 40,000 North Koreans, and the entire complexion of the war had completely changed.
So why is MacArthur's name largely forgotten in a popular culture that still holds iconic names like Patton and Bradley, Eisenhower, and Doolittle? First, it's a discouraging inevitability that only the worst battlefield tragedies are remembered. Gettysburg, Antietam, the Battle of the Bulge, the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Terrific loss of life was the uniting feature in all these battles; not commanding excellence.
When 500 Americans die landing in a remote Far Eastern locale, what's the chance that ground will be hallowed and memorialized?
MacArthur also suffers at the expense of his politics, which were unabashedly conservative. Eisenhower might have been conservative and a vociferous private critic of FDR's New Deal, but he had the sense to measure his statements and then, only as the need arose. After the war, MacArthur took out his proverbial Dear Diary of Political Pet Peeves and shared his most personal views on every possible issue...certainly within the realm of his rights but not necessarily his legacy's best interests (especially when considered that historians and the academia that imprints history on John Q. Public is generally liberal.).
As impressive as MacArthur's military career is, his legacy as Occupation Commander and virtual post-war Potentate of Japan stands out not only for its remarkable success but the fact it's nearly forgotten. Maybe it's because of critics like noted Far Eastern "expert" Michael Schaller whose vicious screed "The Far Eastern General" strips MacArthur of any credit for nearly anything he ever did. It's more likely that unable to refute the power of MacArthur's imprint upon the world, the more liberal establishment is bent on ignoring it. I tend to think that MacArthur would rather have been attacked than forgotten.
What sets apart Manchester from Schaller or, to a certain extent, Schlessinger is that he doesn't allow his personal politics to interfere with what is his subject's objective legacy. Nor does Manchester's obvious appreciation for MacArthur's military accomplishments cloud his judgment on the General's personal excesses and rank paranoia.
MacArthur was constantly convinced the world was out to get him, even those on his own side. In retrospect, it's obvious that while Eisenhower and FDR held MacArthur in very little personal regard, their apparent lack of attention regarding his Pacific Plight was due to their very real intention to follow through on Rainbow Five and strike the Germans first.
It's also a disappointment that some of MacArthur's finest field commanders including Robert Eichelberger never got the public acknowledgment they were due, thanks to MacArthur's titanic ego. Eisenhower made every effort to spread the credit, but apparently, MacArthur thought battlefield glory a zero-sum game.
MacArthur was a very great man, whose personality, thirst for power, and idyllic view of the world as his personal stage was perhaps suited for an earlier time. His intellect was unparalleled. After meeting with him in Hawaii, FDR told his doctor, "Give me an aspirin before I go to bed. In fact, give me another aspirin to take in the morning. In all my life nobody has ever talked to me the way MacArthur did."
Eisenhower, who was forever disenchanted with his former boss after their time together in the Philippines, said, "He did have a hell of an intellect. He had a brain."
He was the General you always dreamed of being as a little boy...until you grew up and realized that history is reserved for very rare men and those reservations were booked a long time ago.
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