June 18, 2016

A Twentieth Century Custer

To read about Douglas MacArthur, to think about the life and achievements of the American general, is to be forced to two conclusions. First, that he really was a great man. And second, that the nation was lucky to survive him.

Perhaps it's a testament to the strength of America's republican traditions, at least through those mid-twentieth-century years in which MacArthur flourished, that we didn't collapse into constitutional crisis simply from the fact of his outsized existence. Or perhaps the nation's survival is a testament to MacArthur's own deeply American character and political virtues. The popular historian Arthur Herman certainly thinks so, and to prove his point, he's penned a 900-page biography, Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior.

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