Books: Glorious Commander

AMERICAN CAESAR: DOUGLAS MACARTHUR, 1880-1964

by William Manchester;

Little, Brown; 793 pages; $15

Douglas MacArthur is one of the major embarrassments of American history. On one hand he was, without quibble or question, a military genius of the rank of Alexander, Hannibal and Napoleon. On the other hand, as this flawed but fascinating biography makes clear, he could be one of the pettiest and most arrogant men ever to have worn the uniform of the U.S. Army.

MacArthur's strategies helped to win three wars, but foreigners often appreciated him more than his own countrymen. Winston Churchill spoke of him as "the glorious commander." To the Japanese, whom he outwitted at nearly every turn, he seemed endowed with almost superhuman powers. Yet Franklin Roosevelt privately labeled him one of the two most dangerous men in America (the other was Huey Long), and Harry Truman called him "a counterfeit."

MacArthur was a man of maddening contradictions, half mamma's boy and half the warrior son of a warrior father. Arthur MacArthur was not yet 20 when he led a charge up Missionary Ridge in the Civil War, an action that won him the Medal of Honor. He went on to fight Apaches in the West and Spaniards in the Philippines, which he subsequently administered as military governor. Temperamental and occasionally insubordinate, he was publicly rebuked by Teddy Roosevelt for predicting war with Germany. "Arthur MacArthur," his aide later said, "was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen, until I met his son."

Mary Pinkney ("Pinky") MacArthur should have worn stars herself. Few mothers have fought harder for their sons than she fought for Douglas, or dominated them so completely. When he was about to take his exams for West Point, she gave him a pep talk that he never forgot: "You must believe in yourself, my son, or no one else will believe in you." Naturally, he passed and, just as naturally, his mother moved to Craney's Hotel near his dormitory, where for four years she could see the lamp in her son's window and tell whether he was doing his homework.

He was, of course. Only two other cadets, one of them Robert E. Lee, had ever received higher grades at the Point. His contemporaries regarded him with awe, and pictures from the time show why. Lean and handsome, with a beaklike nose, he radiated confidence and authority. But peacetime Army life made MacArthur restless and insubordinate. "It's the orders you disobey that make you famous," he told one officer.

World War I gave him his chance, and he distinguished himself as second-in-command of the famous Rainbow Division. He had already begun to disregard dress regulations. He walked through the trenches in riding breeches, a turtleneck sweater, and a 4-ft.-long muffler knitted by his mother. The doughboys, unlike the G.I.s a generation later, adored him and called him "the fighting dude."