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Reviews
| Douglas MacArthur: Statecraft and Stagecraft in America's East Asian Policy, by Russell D. Buhite. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008. 208 pages. $26.95, paper.
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| Douglas MacArthur serves as both enticing and elusive quarry for Russell Buhite in this compact and readable volume, the latest in the Biographies in American Foreign Policy series. On one hand, MacArthur's outsized ego appears to offer a case study in the importance of personality in diplomatic relations; on the other hand, the legendary general's forays into foreign policy were marked far more by self-interest than strategic coherence. Buhite effectively separates the posturing from the policymaking in this biography, and offers a harsh but fair assessment of MacArthur's contribution to American policy in East Asia. |
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Buhite does not uncover any substantive new biographical information in this short work, but he does set forth a new appraisal of MacArthur's personality. MacArthur's egocentrism was so profound, in Buhite's view, that it merits a special place in the annals of self-centeredness and very well may qualify as what psychologists describe as "narcissistic personality disorder." Neither a psychologist nor psychiatrist by training, Buhite recognizes the fragile analytical territory on which he treads, but nevertheless argues that such an explanation should at least be considered in the context of MacArthur's well-documented history of grandiosity, arrogance, paranoia, and compulsive need for adulation. |
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There is certainly plenty of fodder for psychological rumination, which Buhite explores in the first and last chapters. MacArthur's father, Arthur, served as military governor of the Philippines and propelled Douglas toward his Pacific-centered army career, but Buhite makes clear that MacArthur's mother was the more dominating force in his life. A Southern belle known as "Pinkie," she made Douglas, her youngest son, wear skirts and long curls until the age of five. She stayed close even when he left for the United States Military Academy, relocating to lodge in a hotel in West Point so that she could regularly counsel him. A first marriage initiated him into sexual experience at age 42, but soon gave way to divorce, a dalliance with a Filipina nightclub entertainer named "Dimples," and finally, a second marriage to a woman who willingly subsumed herself within his aura of heroism. The "socially maladroit" MacArthur had few friends, and never really sought close companionship (p. 13). |
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Despite the temptations of Freudian reductionism, Buhite wisely lets MacArthur's character emerge over the bulk of the book through a more conventional analytical narrative with a clear contextual basis. The central chapters of the biography are indeed a crisp and well-paced gallop through an extraordinary life. Buhite gives MacArthur credit where it is due, commending him on his bravery in World War I (p. 10), his "genuine" successes in his Philippine campaign in World War II (p. 55), his "efficient and effective" administration of the postwar Japanese occupation (p. 90), and his "stunning" landing at Inchon during the Korean War (p. 122). Toward the end of his life, MacArthur even presciently warned Presidents Kennedy and Johnson against American involvement in Vietnam. |
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But as Buhite makes clear, MacArthur's moments of sagacity must be placed in the context of a lifetime spent conflating the best interests of the United States with his personal desires. MacArthur's willingness to accept an illegal $500,000 gift from the Philippines president in 1942 and his subsequent attempts to gain the Republican presidential nomination were some of the more ugly manifestations of an unseemly self-regard, one that only grew over the years. By the time MacArthur publicly challenged President Truman's policies in the Korean War in 1951, he fully merited his dismissal as United Nations commander and certainly earned the appraisal contained in one of Buhite's later chapters, "Hubris Unbounded." |
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Such a controversial and self-dramatizing figure such as MacArthur is a natural starting point for a discussion of American policy in East Asia; this particular short biography would be especially useful in an introductory-level undergraduate course on the subject. The fact that Buhite invites his readers to wrestle with his tentative, psychologically-based thesis is welcome; his judgments come across not as final pronouncements, but as an opening statement in a conversation. Students interested in further research will find especially useful a bibliographical essay at the end of the book that covers recent historical literature on World War II, the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, and Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. |
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| University of Texas at Austin |
Michael R. Anderson |
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