Rating: 
Summary: An insightful, empathic biography of an enigmatic leader
Review: Manchester always writes a great book--he is a superb stylist and has an unusual knack for placing a historical figure in the context of his times. (I have previously read his biographies of H.L. Mencken and Churchill as well as Death of a President and The Arms of Krupp.) In this book, he really attempts to explore what motivated Douglas MacArthur, an extremely complex warrior-statesman. Especially good is his review of the famous Truman sacking of the general during the Korean War; in Manchester's eyes, this incident evolved out of ambiguous directions from the Joint Chiefs and the Chiefs' unwillingness to confront a powerful, winning senior officer. Especially amazing is the breadth of experience MacArthur had throughout his life--from Wild West stations with his general father through the post-Spanish-American War period in the Philippines, then the trenches of World War I, and finally the general's phenomenal recoveries after early disasters in the Philippines in World War II and in Korea. This is a balanced though sympathetic review of MacArthur's life--Manchester concedes that he was both a vain popinjay with a touch of paranoia, but also a brilliant military strategist and a true old-style liberal democrat in his viceregency in Japan after World War II. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in World War II and is a good companion to Manchester's personal account of his own experiences as a Marine in the South Pacific.
Rating: 
Summary: Hero worshipful, but still gripping
Review: Manchester began this examination of the flamboyant MacArthur with the intent to write a critical biography. Yet he became so enamored with his subject that the book turned into an extremely pro-MacArthur book, nearly devoid of criticism. Yet his gifts as a writer/researcher are so pronounced that the reader overlooks this problem. Manchester is in the same league with the brilliant David McCullough, and both historians are able to hold a reader's interest through 800 pages.Manchester's infatuation with MacArthur is evident is his unwillingness to criticize Mac for any military decision. Why is no blame attached to MacArthur leaving his planes on the Manila airstrip in December, 1941? What about his gross insubordination towards his Commander in Chief, Harry Truman, throughout the Korean War? Though Manchester examines these issues in depth, he fails to throw much blame on MacArthur, who remains resplendent, fascinating and brilliant throughout. A particular strength of the book is the examinations of the private relationships in MacArthur's life. Manchester explains in depth Mac's two marriages, the suffocating love he displayed towards son Arthur, and his competitive relationship with Ike, "the best clerk I ever had." This is the standard MacArthur biography and by a wide margin the most readable. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, exciting portrayal of a great warrior
Review: Mr Manchester makes General MacArthur live in the pages of the book. It is like reading the events from today's newspaper. The author's vivid detail of the battles during the World War I and especailly World War II make the book hard to put down. Mr Manchester reveals the great general's strategic gifts for seeing the big picture and the turning point of each struggle. The author details the political struggles that General MacArthur fought to liberate the Phillipines and later Korea. The book reveals why General MacArthur is considered a genius of war. Mr Manchester also details the general's childhood and especially his mother's influence upon him. The book provides a wonderful explanation of the general's background which helps to explain his actions later in life. I highly recommend the book to everyone.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book:
Review: Niles review made me smile to say the least. At least he is honest. He states, "He reminds me of everything not to be in a man: a phony, self-important, idiotic, posing, clownish, arrogant, amoral, self-centered, publicity hogging, insubordinate half ass. I see everything in the man I never want to be." Reads like a recipe for greatness. And "( I was probably a lot like the man not too long ago...)" Do we ever really change at our core?
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I learned many things about the man and the legend. I found most interesting that, contrary to what I had always heard (I am a reader, not a historian), McArthur did not cross over the 38th parallel against orders, but was in fact following orders. The argument between he and Truman was whether all out war should be waged against China. McArthurs only mistake/character flaw (Niles) was continuing to run his mouth (which of course only made Truman mad and look bad), when he should have kept it shut. He would not accept or failed to recognize at this point in time that his power (which was indeed great) was limited. He lost.
I see him as a great man no matter the flaws;one of those of whom it can be said there really is no recipe. His greatest strengths which supplied him with the tenacity to forge ahead where ordinary men would not, were also his greatest weaknesses. It has been a while since I read the book so examples do not readily come to mind, but there are many where this tenacity paid off greatly in lives saved and victories won.
Ultimately, because of his losing battle with Truman, and subsequently his famous "fade away" speech at West Point , he seems to be remembered, by most, as a tragic figure. While, his efforts in the reconstruction of Japan are mostly forgotten. For me, this book went a long way toward setting the record straight on both McArthur's grandiosity and his genius.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic portrayal of a study in paradox
Review: One of the best books I have ever read. I recommend it for any student of history, regardless of your feelings on MacArthur.
Rating:
Summary: A Magnificant Biography
Review: One wonders if American society would tolerate, let alone produce, another MacArthur. Bigger than life, vain and conceited, this American Caesar understood power and how to use it. He was a soldier, a politician and an egomaniac. In an age of political correctness where sensitivity is valued over leadership men like MacArthur are not well tolerated. Manchesters superb biography of MacArthur shows us that great men often have great flaws, a fact that many today are not willing to accept. Like any great biography this is a story of not only a man, but of the times he lived in. Manchester takes us back to frontier army post where MacArthur was born in 1880 and with a lucid style and follows his stunning career until his death in 1964. What is especially interesting is MacArthurs understanding of drama and the power of the press which he used with great efficiency. Unlike George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur was much more of a political general going none-to-nose with both Roosevelt and Truman. If you are not familiar with General MacAuthur, this book will introduce you to perhaps the greatest soldier-statesman his country has produced.
Rating:
Summary: Ardennes through to Inchon
Review: Some subjects are a gift to the biographer: such a man is Douglas MacArthur, General of the Armies, conqueror of Japan and arch-nemesis to President Truman. As Manchester himself notes in his preface, everything MacArthur did was done with an eye to posterity: there was not a single photo in which he didn't conciously affect a pose; he uttered not a single word, not a single speech and not a single memo, that could be called "off the cuff" or candid. He created his own self-image: rigid, correct, brave, proud, uncompromising, and he unfailingly sought to fulfil it. Many (if not most) of these characteristics were to haunt him in the aftermath of President Truman recalling him from the Korean theater; even in the face of the disastrous retreat from the Yalu, he was loathe to concede a single strategic error. Manchester examines the Korea years with all due thoroughness, yet much of the real fascination in this book comes from his early life, including his debut in the Mexican War of 1916, his distinguished campaigns in World War One, his superintendency of West Point an his suppression of the 1930s veterans march on Washington. From there, MacArthur is transferred to the Phillippines in the mid-1930s, where he serves as virtual proconsul. As Manchester points out, MacArthur's career was in virtual sunset in the late 1930s. Then, in December 1941, disaster: in 24 hours the Japanese attack and destroy the main Phillippines airbases and soon overrun the archipelago, leaving MacArthur sealed off at Corregidor. Escape to Australia, and redemption: the masterful conquest of New Guinea and his famously promised reconquest of the Phillippines. Manchester is quick to stress the lives that were constantly saved by MacArthur's shrewd planning and attention to detail; he also makes no attempt to mask MacArthur's unattractive traits, including his (eventually fatal) insubordiation to superiors and tendency to histrionics. In many ways Douglas MacArthur brings to mind not Julius Caesar, but Arthur, Duke of Wellington, another gifted commander who won the public's love and respect for his ability to win battles economically, who also defeated a great tyrannical enemy, yet who sank into the political morass in later years for his rock-hard political conservatism.
Rating:
Summary: Ardennes through to Inchon
Review: Some subjects are a gift to the biographer: such a man is Douglas MacArthur, General of the Armies, conqueror of Japan and arch-nemesis to President Truman. As Manchester himself notes in his preface, everything MacArthur did was done with an eye to posterity: there was not a single photo in which he didn't conciously affect a pose; he uttered not a single word, not a single speech and not a single memo, that could be called "off the cuff" or candid. He created his own self-image: rigid, correct, brave, proud, uncompromising, and he unfailingly sought to fulfil it. Many (if not most) of these characteristics were to haunt him in the aftermath of President Truman recalling him from the Korean theater; even in the face of the disastrous retreat from the Yalu, he was loathe to concede a single strategic error. Manchester examines the Korea years with all due thoroughness, yet much of the real fascination in this book comes from his early life, including his debut in the Mexican War of 1916, his distinguished campaigns in World War One, his superintendency of West Point an his suppression of the 1930s veterans march on Washington. From there, MacArthur is transferred to the Phillippines in the mid-1930s, where he serves as virtual proconsul. As Manchester points out, MacArthur's career was in virtual sunset in the late 1930s. Then, in December 1941, disaster: in 24 hours the Japanese attack and destroy the main Phillippines airbases and soon overrun the archipelago, leaving MacArthur sealed off at Corregidor. Escape to Australia, and redemption: the masterful conquest of New Guinea and his famously promised reconquest of the Phillippines. Manchester is quick to stress the lives that were constantly saved by MacArthur's shrewd planning and attention to detail; he also makes no attempt to mask MacArthur's unattractive traits, including his (eventually fatal) insubordiation to superiors and tendency to histrionics. In many ways Douglas MacArthur brings to mind not Julius Caesar, but Arthur, Duke of Wellington, another gifted commander who won the public's love and respect for his ability to win battles economically, who also defeated a great tyrannical enemy, yet who sank into the political morass in later years for his rock-hard political conservatism.
Rating:
Summary: Dugout Doug?
Review: The GIs dubbed him "Dugout Doug" for the horrible bloodbath he commanded at Buna. Rather uncalled for, since McArthur earned something like six silver stars in WWI, basically the hard way. He was so reckless; Pershing took him off the line.
But before you close the book on Dugout Doug, read "American Caesar" (written by William Manchester, a former Marine). Read it if only for the death scene of McArthur senior, Medal of Honor winner from the Civil War. Read just the first page; you will read the whole book.
McArthur should have been court-martialed for the Philippines debacle on 7 December 1941. Instead, he "escaped" and got the Medal of Honor. He found near chaos in Australia and restored order, and probably earned the Medal he'd been given for morale reasons.
Jimmy Doolittle, as lovable a general as McArthur wasn't, in the car with GEN Marshall, enroute to the WH to get the Medal of Honor from FDR for the Doolittle Raid, said, "I can't accept that." Marshall told Jimmy his views had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter, ending that discussion. Jimmy's wife held his hand and smiled broadly through the whole thing.
McArthur's aide in the Philippines in the 1930s, Eisenhower, later quipped he studied theater under McArthur. Ike's fine sense of his ex-boss led him to craft a "solution" at Plans Division for the "McArthur versus the Navy" tiff in the Pacific Theater that so impressed George Marshall and FDR that Ike got jumped over dozens of seniors to command TORCH. Theater lessons indeed.
Dugout Doug changed his whole strategy after "bloody Buna," becoming the epitome of joint and combined ops. GEN George Kearney, his air commander, was a sheer genius of combined air ops in a naval theater. McArthur took back the single largest chunk of real estate in WWII in the shortest time of any Allied commander, with fewer casualties in this entire campaign than Ike had in the Battle of the Bulge.
Doug had skills in deception, counter-deception, spec ops, insurgencies, and multilateral warfare that, lacking today in Iraq, are literally to die for. Would that we had his equal there.
McArthur's speech at the Japanese surrender is still a marvel of modern oratory-nobody reads it. Learning from his mistakes in the Philippines, Doug created a modern democracy in Japan out of a vicious feudal authoritarian theocracy.
He repeated his arrogant Pearl Harbor-like blindness to the North Korean threat. He then conducted one of the greatest amphibious ops of all time at Inchon.
McArthur got even more arrogant than usual, dissed the Chinese threat, and worse, treated President Truman like a underling at Midway. Captain Harry promptly fired his ass. Served him right too.
There are basically those who hate McArthur (the church I was raised in), or love him (his wife, his staff, some straphangers-I met them at the Memorial in Norfolk one afternoon-faithful acolytes decades after his burial-in a Navy town yet).
What Manchester does in his book is show both sides of our most Janus-like commander, an over-the-top hero, a mommy's boy, a genius at combined / joint ops, an inspired nation-builder, a horse's-ass of Olympian proportion, who basically forgot his Constitutional duty, if he ever really knew it.
A man you love to hate, and hate to love.
Any dad would have been as proud as punch of the boy.
Rating:
Summary: Great Biograpy, but I dislike the subject matter...
Review: This is an outstanding biography, I just can't deny it. The book is very well written and is chock full of fantastic information about Doug MacArthur. Manchester is truly a great writer, researcher and biographer. However, I have not finished this book, and I doubt I will in the near future. It has little to do with the book. I just can not stand Doug MacArthur. He reminds me of everything not to be in a man: a phony, self-important, idiotic, posing, clownish, arrogant, amoral, self-centered, publicity hogging, insubordinate half ass. I see everything in the man I never want to be ( I was probably a lot like the man not too long ago...) Anywho, I suppose the biography is that good, it is pretty objective and I still truly dislike the man. I don't think I will ever forget this book, it is about a man that should be esteemed as what never to become. There are some truly great men and women in this world. MacArthur demanded to be great, and for that reason, he never will be. I'll get out of the pulpit now...sorry, It really is a good book though, so if you're interested do read it. I just can't stand the subject matter. Enjoy.
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