American Caesar

by William Manchester

  He had not, of course, spoken extemporaneously. No one could improvise such rhetoric. The awed cadets thought that he was coining the phrases as he trod the platform before them, but what they had actually witnessed was the last performance of a consummate actor who always wrote his own lines beforehand, honed and polished them, and committed them to memory. Lou Sullivan recalls him pacing like a brooding hawk through his ten-room apartment, puffing a corncob as he rehearsed, his slippers flapping on the rugs and his long robe streaming behind him. In a way these scenes were more spectacular than the final production. An Oriental butler stood by with a glass of water, and the striding General was surrounded by evocations of the Far East: paintings, vases, urns, and other gifts from the Japanese. “In the vast splendor,” recalls William A. Ganoe, who renewed their acquaintance there after an interval of thirty-nine years, “I had the feeling that I had barged into a palace.”43

  Except on MacArthur’s birthdays, when his former officers gathered to honor him, not many others saw him. Hoover and James A. Farley, Waldorf neighbors, were always welcome; Red Blaik would bring diagrams of new plays; and West Point Superintendent James B. Lampert would escort delegations of first classmen to assure the General that the academy hadn’t changed and to hear his prophecies on the future of their profession. Strangers, however, were turned away by elaborate security precautions. Elevator operators wouldn’t take them above the thirty-fifth floor unless they could produce credentials; those who had them were met upstairs by Sullivan and, when his bodyguard duties ended after thirty months and he was transferred elsewhere, hotel security men replaced him. No one could phone the suite unless switchboard operators had been given their names. Even then, Jean took all calls, making very sure that the General wanted to speak to the caller before handing him the phone.44

  MacArthur with Cadet Colin P. Kelly II, January 1963

  President Lyndon B. Johnson visits MacArthur at Walter Reed Hospital

  Sullivan continued to visit him one or two times a week, and often he would spend the evening with the General and Jean, the three of them watching television. In the beginning his bodyguard had thought MacArthur cold and austere, but later he concluded that this was largely reticence; a MacArthur friend, he found, was a cherished friend. As they watched televised baseball—the General would always recite a player’s batting average before the man reached the plate—the old soldier would cover Sullivan’s hand with his own from time to time and say gently, “How are you doing, Sully?’ He gave the bodyguard pipes and a .32-caliber Smith and Wesson, and showed him the derringer he himself carried whenever he left the apartment; like Eisenhower during his years as president of Columbia, MacArthur never ventured into Manhattan unarmed. Once Sullivan revealed that he planned to enter a Randall’s Island track meet. MacArthur fired him up with a pep talk, ending: “Don’t come back unless you’re a winner.” Inspired, the bodyguard broke the track’s hammer-throw record and, though he was the oldest man there, he was voted the meet’s outstanding athlete. He recalls: “I think the General could talk anybody into anything.”

  Neither MacArthur nor his wife had expected to end their lives in a New York hotel. During the Tokyo years she had dreamed of retiring to a little white house in the South; the house he had then had in mind was the same color but somewhat larger. (“I should have lived here,” he had wistfully told Kennedy.) But the Waldorf was centrally located, within short distance of both Saint Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church—she and Arthur joined the congregation there—and First Army headquarters at 90 Church Street, where, in a four-room corner suite which had been cleared for him, the General read the cable traffic each morning. Fifth Avenue’s smart shops were just two blocks away from the Waldorf; Jean could find endless displays of the clothes and jewelry she loved: matched pearls, head-hugging caps (she felt that anything larger overpowered her), and black opera pumps in her rare size, 5 1/2 AAA. Black had become her favorite shade, but now, to keep abreast of the mid-century trend toward pale colors, she added dresses of gray, white, and a mauve-pink. Her husband also became something of a clotheshorse. Debonair in a homburg and herringbone suits, he often visited at the menswear department of Saks Fifth Avenue. The manager was ecstatic: “What a figure to work with! Wonderful! A tailor’s dream!”45

  One of his acquisitions at Saks was a dinner jacket, for Broadway’s theaters had been one of the MacArthur’’ incentives in settling down here. They saw Oklahoma!, the Hollywood Ice Review, and the rodeo in Madison Square Garden; Ethel Merman and Judy Garland entertained them backstage; when they tired of plays and musical comedies, there were concerts, lectures, the New York City Ballet, and, of course, the movies at Radio City, where their favorite stars were John Wayne and Ward Bond. Ever the athlete manque, MacArthur never missed a fight. At Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and Ebbets Field, he usually sat in the owners’ boxes. No matter how far behind his team was, he always remained to the bitter end, an intent, fragile old man with thin white hair, eyes gleaming and fist clenched, demanding a comeback against all odds. In time he came to know many of the players personally. The one he admired most, and liked most, was Jackie Robinson.

  Ah Cheu never accompanied the MacArthur’ on their outings. One room in the suite was hers, and she became something of a recluse there. Arthur no longer needed her; he was at school, or taking piano lessons, or visiting the Statue of Liberty with Sully and his son Bobby—roaming the homeland which he was learning to know and love at last. Like the General, Jean had assumed that he would attend West Point. Shortly after they had unpacked at the Waldorf, they took the boy up the Hudson. He watched a parade and tried on a cadet’s shako. It didn’t fit then; it never would; he wasn’t meant for a military career. Instead he attended Columbia, graduating in 1961. The old soldier insisted that he approved because, he told Bunker, “my mother put too much pressure on me. Being number one is the loneliest job in the world, and I wouldn’t wish it on any son of mine.” Apparently being a MacArthur was too much; after his father’s death Arthur moved to the other side of Manhattan and took an assumed name. His identity thus concealed, he lived for his music, a fugitive from his father’s relentless love.46

  “People grow old only by deserting their ideals,” MacArthur had written, paraphrasing another writer. “Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. . . . You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair. In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young. When . . . your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then and then only are you grown old—and then, indeed, as the ballad says, you just fade away.”

  He remained confident, hopeful, undespairing, optimistic, and free of doubt to the end, but on January 26, 1964, the day he turned eighty-four, it was clear that at long last he was ready to depart this life. He had just finished his 213,000-word memoirs; a soiled spot on the back of one chair marked the place where he had rested his head while covering pad after pad of fourteen-inch yellow ruled paper with his angular Victorian scrawl. To a writer, the manuscript is astonishing. There are almost no erasures or deletions; the prose flowed from him in an even, immutable stream. Soldiers’ memoirs are generally dull. MacArthur’s, which appeared after his death, are vivid and controversial—controversial both in substance and in style, because certain passages seemed to have been lifted from earlier books by Whitney and Willoughby. It is difficult to see the General as a plagiarist, and in fact there may be other explanations. They may all have been drawing on a common source, notes made in the past, or it is possible that the General wrote those paragraphs shortly after his dismissal, holding them for future publication, and that his officers took them from him. At all events, the rest of the text was certainly his, and it testified as nothing else could that his mind was penetrating and lucid to the end. But his
body was failing fast. Dr. Egeberg believes that he might have survived for years had he sought medical attention earlier. He disliked physicians as such, however, perhaps because they reminded him of infirmities he preferred to ignore. The Army eleven, arriving in early December to discuss last week’s Navy game with him, had been shocked to find him shrunken in height and weight and jaundiced. So were the officers who filed in, wearing all their ribbons as they always did because he liked that, to congratulate him for having reached another birthday. Some of them sensed that this would be his last, and so, it developed, did he.47

  They stiffened at attention as he entered the living room. He began, as always, with a ringing: “Comrades at arms!” Then, putting them at ease, he said, in much the same words of previous years, “You probably don’t realize how much I look forward to these gatherings, bringing back vivid memories of the experiences we shared. These are milestones in my life, as it were, and I look forward to each one hopefully, and accept it gratefully.” This time, however, he said he wanted to depart from custom and tell them a story about a Scotsman who was riding a crowded train from London to Edinburgh. “At the first stop,” he said, “he worked his way over the knees of the others in the compartment, and they saw him run into the station and get back on board just as the train was pulling out. At the next stop he did the same thing, and when he just barely caught the train on the third stop, one of the passengers said, ‘Jock, why are you running into the station at every stop? We have conveniences on the train. Stay aboard.’ And Jock looked up and around the group and said, I’ll tell you. I’m a very sick man. Yesterday I went to see my doctor and the doctor told me that my days were few. He said: “Jock, if you want to see your old Scotland again, you’d better start right out and go up there—and, mind you, even though you start now, you may not get there.” So I’m buying my ticket from station to station.’ “ Everyone started to laugh and stopped when they saw that the General’s face was grave.48

  By March 1 his weight was down to 140 pounds. He was suffering from nausea, constant headache, and what he described as “abdominal complaints.” The yellowish pigmentation of his skin and eyes was deepening; a physician diagnosed his jaundice as “moderately severe.” Informed of this by the surgeon general, President Johnson phoned the Waldorf that evening and told the General that an air-force transport would pick him up at La Guardia Field in the morning to fly him to the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington. Superintendent Lampert and a group of other officers rode to the airport to see him and Jean off. MacArthur, walking shakily to the plane, said: “I’ve looked that old scoundrel death in the face many times. This time I think he has me on the ropes. But I’m going to do the very best I can.”49

  On March 6 army doctors performed exploratory surgery to find the obstruction in his biliary system. They feared malignancy, but there was none. Liver damage and several gallstones were discovered, however, and the gallbladder was removed. His condition was described as “satisfactory.” Nevertheless he was weak; blood transfusions began, and Jean and Arthur settled into a three-room suite at the hospital for a long vigil. Two more major operations followed, to remove a duct and intestinal obstruction with perforation and to relieve esophageal bleeding. In critical condition, he clung to life for four incredible weeks, regaling physicians, nurses, and orderlies with reminiscences until the night of Friday, April 3, when he sank into a peaceful coma. He died at 2:39 P.M. Sunday from acute kidney and liver failure.50

  At 5:07 P.M. a twelve-car autocade left Walter Reed for New York—there was a touching scene between Jean and a nurse, both red-eyed, consoling each other—and a police escort led the hearse and the rest of the cavalcade through the dank evening to Manhattan’s Seventh Regiment Armory at Park Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street. By 10:47 P.M. when the coffin was carried into the armory’s Clark Room, the tributes had begun to pour in. President Johnson ordered nineteen-gun salutes fired on American military posts around the world, and flags flown at half-staff until the burial Saturday in Norfolk.51

  The plain, gray steel, government-issue casket rested on a catafalque between four flickering candles; it was half open, the bottom half covered with the Stars and Stripes. The General’s own flag, five white stars on a field of red, stood alongside. He wore twin circlets of stars, but no ribbons on his breast; his instructions on that point had been explicit. Also at his direction, he was dressed in his most faded suntans, worn and washed to softness. Smoothing this uniform, he had once told Mydans: “I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I’ve done that really matters, I’ve done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in these that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?”52

  The setting was appropriate: five men, representing the five services, stood around the catafalque at parade rest. The armory had been built in 1880, the year of the General’s birth, and the Clark Room had an air of old-fashioned elegance. The ceiling was lofty, the paneling was of polished oak; one wall was dominated by a massive fireplace which was all but obscured Monday afternoon by masses of fragrant flowers. Some of them came from MacArthur’s first wife, who told reporters that her years with him had been “the happiest of my life.” That, too, seemed fitting; he had always relished superlatives. What was inapt was the appearance, in the Scripps-Howard and Hearst papers, of the Lucas and Considine interviews, now ten years old and unreflective of his later convictions. Whitney called them “fictional nonsense,” and Lucas called Whitney a liar. Life said: “Worse than a specter at a feast is a loud-mouthed gossip at a funeral.” The Saturday Review said: “They demanded for him the highest honors but they saw to it that he was deprived of a decent burial. Who are ‘they’? Only superficially are ‘they’ the scoop-hungry newsmen. More basically ‘they’ are the extremist supporters who never really understood him.” Max Ascoli wrote in the Reporter: “Throughout his life, he had the gift or the curse of being a storm center. May his soul rest in peace, for here on earth his memory will never know peace.”53

  MacArthur would have gloried in his funeral. He had drawn up plans for it, of course—he planned everything—but his instructions, from the GI casket to the ribbonless blouse, had been uncharacteristically modest, intended, perhaps, to be conspicuous in their simplicity. President Kennedy, now four months in his own grave, had persuaded him of the need for “a suitable national tribute,” with West Point’s cadets playing a prominent part. Told of it, the General had smiled and said: “By George, I’d like to see that.”

  On Monday, in a chill rain, the twenty-five hundred men of the corps formed on the plain—MacArthur’s old room, 1123, provided an excellent view of the scene—and, facing the Hudson, saluted as six cannon roared in salute, the smoke mingling with the mists on the bluffs overlooking the river. Lampert told them: “The gallant battle which he waged in his last days symbolized to all of us the very principles to which he dedicated his living.” Later in the day, first classmen, their sleeves streaked with chevrons of authority, appeared at the armory, one of them taking his station by the five-star flag, which he would carry in the coming parade. On Tuesday thirty-five thousand New Yorkers, standing three abreast outside the brass-studded doors in a line that stretched north past Seventy-second Street, waited to pass by the bier, and at 8:00 A.M. Wednesday, as a bugle signaled ruffles and flourishes, the senior cadet commanded the procession, now ready to move: “For-ward harch!”54

  Flags stirred in a rising breeze, but the rain, still heavy, drenched them. The first units in the four-block-long order of march were the West Point band, a battalion of cadets, and an honor guard of generals and admirals. Then came the caisson, drawn by six Fort Myer horses and carrying the coffin, now fully closed and flag draped. Following it were the five-star standard; a riderless, caparisoned horse with reversed boots in its stirrups, the symbol of a fallen warrior since the days of Genghis Khan; and massed colors and marchers. Watched by millions on television, they proceeded down Park
Avenue, Fifty-seventh Street, Broadway, and Seventh Avenue to Pennsylvania Station. At 9:15 A.M. the funeral train pulled out, stopping briefly at Trenton and slowing at Odenton and Aberdeen in Maryland for military delegations to pay their respects. Bobby and Ethel Kennedy were aboard as official mourners. Informed that Johnson was waiting to meet them in Union Station, Bobby whispered to Blaik: “Wait until he lays an eye on me and you’ll see ice.”55

  The President, however, went straight to Jean and Arthur and embraced them. There was an embarrassing moment of confusion as they left for the Capitol, with Johnson’s and Kennedy’s chauffeurs jockeying for position and the President’s Secret Service men finally leaping in front of the Kennedy car (“I wish they’d been that alert in Dallas,” Bobby said), but the President seemed too moved to have eyes for anyone except the General’s widow and son. In the great rotunda, his face clenched with emotion, he placed a wreath of red, white, and blue flowers at the foot of the coffin. It lay in state there until the following afternoon, when the procession re-formed and took it to Washington National Airport. A government plane flew it to the naval air station in Norfolk, the third city in which the body lay in state for public mourners. On Saturday, after services in Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church—the congregation included Yoshida, who had boarded the first flight from Tokyo when he learned of MacArthur’s death—it was entombed in Norfolk’s 114-year-old courthouse, which was then dedicated as a memorial to the General. There he lies now, in a cool crypt beneath the silent calm of sepulchral stone.56