A Palliative for your Opinion of MacArthur
Stefan,
Read William Manchester's "American Caesar," which is a finely crafted biography of MacArthur. It gave me these two important perspectives:
1. Macarthur was very sparing of the lives of his soldiers whenever possible. He abhorred the tactics of island-hopping. Manchester's look at his 1944 Philippines campaign is enlightening.
2. MacArthur constantly admonished American presidents to avoid a war on the Asian land mass, particularly after his Korean War experience. I like Manchester's logic that, had Kennedy not been assassinated, the US might not have gotten sucked into Vietnam. Johnson hated Kennedy so much that he seems to have done the opposite of anything Kennedy did.
It has been awhile since I read "American Caesar," and new scholarship may have altered some of these perspectives, but they made god sense to me when I read them.
Bob
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