A new, definitive life of an American icon, the visionary general
who led American forces through three wars and foresaw his
nation’s great geopolitical shift toward the Pacific Rim—from the
Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Gandhi &
Churchill
Douglas MacArthur was arguably the last American public figure
to be worshipped unreservedly as a national hero, the last
figure to conjure up the romantic stirrings once evoked
by George Armstrong Custer and Robert E. Lee. But he was also one
of America’s most divisive figures, a man whose entire career was
steeped in controversy. Was he an avatar or an anachronism, a
brilliant strategist or a vainglorious ebank? Drawing on a
wealth of new sources, Arthur Herman delivers a powerhouse
biography that peels back the layers of myth—both good and
bad—and exposes the marrow of the man beneath.
MacArthur’s life spans the emergence of the United States Army
as a global fighting force. Its history is to a great degree his
story. The son of a Civil War hero, he led American troops in
three monumental conflicts—World War I, World War II, and the
Korean War. Born four years after Little Bighorn, he died just as
American forces began deploying in Vietnam. Herman’s magisterial
book spans the full arc of MacArthur’s journey, from his
elevation to major general at thirty-eight through his tenure as
superintendent of West Point, field marshal of the Philippines,
supreme ruler of postwar Japan, and beyond. More than any
previous biographer, Herman shows how MacArthur’s strategic
vision helped shape several decades of U.S. foreign policy. Alone
among his peers, he foresaw the shift away from Europe, becoming
the prophet of America’s destiny in the Pacific Rim.
Here, too, is a vivid portrait of a man whose grandiose vision
of his own destiny won him enemies as well as acolytes. MacArthur
was one of the first heroes to cultivate his own public
persona—the swashbuckling commander outfitted with Ray-Ban
sunglasses, riding crop, and corncob pipe. Repeatedly spared from
being killed in battle—his soldiers nicknamed him “Bullet
Proof”—he had a strong sense of divine mission. “Mac” was a man
possessed, in the words of one of his contemporaries, of a
“supreme and almost mystical faith that he could not fail.” Yet
when he did, it was on an epic scale. His willingness to defy
both civilian and authority was, Herman shows, a
lifelong trait—and it would become his undoing. Tellingly,
MacArthur once observed, “Sometimes it is the order one disobeys
that makes one famous.”
To capture the life of such an outsize figure in one volume is
no small achievement. With Douglas MacArthur, Arthur Herman has
set a new standard for untangling the legacy of this American
legend.
Praise for Douglas MacArthur
“This is revisionist history at its best and, hopefully, will
reopen a debate about the judgment of history and MacArthur’s
place in history.”—New York Journal of Books
“Unfailingly evocative . . . close to an epic . . . More than a
biography, it is a tale of a time in the past almost impossible
to contemplate today as having taken place, with MacArthur
himself as a figure perhaps too remote to understand, but all the
more important to encounter.”—The New Criterion
“With Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior, the prolific and
talented historian Arthur Herman has delivered an expertly
rendered, compulsively readable account that does full justice to
MacArthur’s monumental achievements without slighting his equally
monumental flaws.”—Commentary