A sympathetic account of his life by one of his senior staff officers.

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

The two-year search for General Douglas MacArthur's speeches and reports was truly a labor of love. My Administrative Assistant, Ellen Schaefer, and I culled over 1,000 sources including memories, biographies, histories, military magazines such as the Army and Air Force Journals, unit histories, commercial magazines and newspapers. Magazines included such publications as National Geographic, Life Magazine and many esoteric less circulated literature such as Military Magazine, Retired Officers Magazine, Air Force Magazine and so many others. We received guidance and assistance from such sources as the U.S. Military Academy, the Engineering School at Ft. Leavenworth, the Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth, the Army War College, the MacArthur Archives Director James Zobel, the Library of Congress, the War Department; the sources seemed endless. We do believe we were able to capture all the major public speeches and reports covering MacArthur's truly productive years from 1908 through 1964. Contains more than 125 speeches/reports. It will be interesting to note, MacArthur established his personality early in his military career and never veered from this. His admonition from his Mother when MacArthur was a student at West Point was, never cheat, never lie, never tattle"". Adhering to this edict MacArthur offered to resign from the Academy rather than answer questions from the Academy panel investigating hazing and harassment by a group of fellow students. MacArthur continued to develop his hard line against political and military intrigue by resolving to always do what he believed right even if he knew no one was watching. Further he was determined never to refuse to carryout the order of a senior officer - never be insubordinate to constituted authority. ""

Buhite offers a trenchant evaluation of Douglas MacArthur's career in east Asia and his role in some of the most important military and diplomatic issues of the twentieth century. Concise and highly readable, this biography considers diplomatic fact in light of psychological insight, and asks us to look anew at both MacArthur and American involvement in the region. From Manila to Washington, with Tokyo and Seoul in between, readers follow the course of American foreign diplomacy in East Asia via MacArthur's own career. This fascinating intersection of personality and policy would make for newsreel footage and newspaper headlines, such as when he waded ashore Luzon Island in the Philippines and sent Washington provocative communiqués about the People's Republic of China. Yet, as Buhite shows, grand gestures are not the substance of great foreign policy, and MacArthur's reputation merits critical reassessment. This is a must read for those interested in diplomatic and military history.

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 military 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 mountebank? 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 military 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 military 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

"MacArthur's Spies reads like Casablanca set in the Pacific, filled with brave and daring characters caught up in the intrigue of war—and the best part is that it's all true!" —Tom Maier, author of Masters of Sex A thrilling story of espionage, daring and deception set in the exotic landscape of occupied Manila during World War II. On January 2, 1942, Japanese troops marched into Manila unopposed by U.S. forces. Manila was a strategic port, a romantic American outpost and a jewel of a city. Tokyo saw its conquest of the Philippines as the key in its plan to control all of Asia, including Australia. Thousands of soldiers surrendered and were sent on the notorious eighty-mile Bataan Death March. But thousands of other Filipinos and Americans refused to surrender and hid in the Luzon hills above Bataan and Manila. MacArthur's Spies is the story of three of them, and how they successfully foiled the Japanese for more than two years, sabotaging Japanese efforts and preparing the way for MacArthur’s return. From a jungle hideout, Colonel John Boone, an enlisted American soldier, led an insurgent force of Filipino fighters who infiltrated Manila as workers and servants to stage demolitions and attacks. “Chick” Parsons, an American businessman, polo player, and expatriate in Manila, was also a U.S. Navy intelligence officer. He escaped in the guise of a Panamanian diplomat, and returned as MacArthur’s spymaster, coordinating the guerrilla efforts with the planned Allied invasion. And, finally, there was Claire Phillips, an itinerant American torch singer with many names and almost as many husbands. Her nightclub in Manila served as a cover for supplying food to Americans in the hills and to thousands of prisoners of war. She and the men and women who worked with her gathered information from the collaborating Filipino businessmen; the homesick, English-speaking Japanese officers; and the spies who mingled in the crowd. Readers of Alan Furst and Ben Macintyre—and anyone who loves Casablanca—will relish this true tale of heroism when it counted the most.