Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior

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Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior

A new, definitive life of an American icon, the visionary general who led American forces through three wars and foresaw his nationâ€™s great geopolitical shift toward the Pacific Rimâ€”from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Gandhi & Churchill

Douglas MacArthur was arguably the last American public figure to be worshipped unreservedly as a national hero, the last military figure to conjure up the romantic stirrings once evoked by George Armstrong Custer and Robert E. Lee. But he was also one of Americaâ€™s most divisive figures, a man whose entire career was steeped in controversy. Was he an avatar or an anachronism, a brilliant strategist or a vainglorious mountebank? Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Arthur Herman delivers a powerhouse biography that peels back the layers of mythâ€”both good and badâ€”and exposes the marrow of the man beneath.

MacArthurâ€™s life spans the emergence of the United States Army as a global fighting force. Its history is to a great degree his story. The son of a Civil War hero, he led American troops in three monumental conflictsâ€”World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. Born four years after Little Bighorn, he died just as American forces began deploying in Vietnam. Hermanâ€™s magisterial book spans the full arc of MacArthurâ€™s journey, from his elevation to major general at thirty-eight through his tenure as superintendent of West Point, field marshal of the Philippines, supreme ruler of postwar Japan, and beyond. More than any previous biographer, Herman shows how MacArthurâ€™s strategic vision helped shape several decades of U.S. foreign policy. Alone among his peers, he foresaw the shift away from Europe, becoming the prophet of Americaâ€™s destiny in the Pacific Rim.

Here, too, is a vivid portrait of a man whose grandiose vision of his own destiny won him enemies as well as acolytes. MacArthur was one of the first military heroes to cultivate his own public personaâ€”the swashbuckling commander outfitted with Ray-Ban sunglasses, riding crop, and corncob pipe. Repeatedly spared from being killed in battleâ€”his soldiers nicknamed him â€œBullet Proofâ€â€”he had a strong sense of divine mission. â€œMacâ€ was a man possessed, in the words of one of his contemporaries, of a â€œsupreme and almost mystical faith that he could not fail.â€ Yet when he did, it was on an epic scale. His willingness to defy both civilian and military authority was, Herman shows, a lifelong traitâ€”and it would become his undoing. Tellingly, MacArthur once observed, â€œSometimes it is the order one disobeys that makes one famous.â€

To capture the life of such an outsize figure in one volume is no small achievement. With DouglasÂ MacArthur, Arthur Herman has set a new standard for untangling the legacy of this American legend.

Praise for Douglas MacArthur

â€œThis is revisionist history at its best and, hopefully, will reopen a debate about the judgment of history and MacArthurâ€™s place in history.â€â€”New York Journal of Books

â€œUnfailingly evocative . . . close to an epic . . . More than a biography, it is a tale of a time in the past almost impossible to contemplate today as having taken place, with MacArthur himself as a figure perhaps too remote to understand, but all the more important to encounter.â€â€”The New Criterion

â€œWith Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior, the prolific and talented historian Arthur Herman has delivered an expertly rendered, compulsively readable account that does full justice to MacArthurâ€™s monumental achievements without slighting his equally monumental flaws.â€â€”Commentary

From the Hardcover edition.

Country	USA
Author	Arthur Herman
Binding	Kindle Edition
EISBN	9780812994896
Format	Kindle eBook
Label	Random House
Manufacturer	Random House
NumberOfPages	960
PublicationDate	2016-06-14
Publisher	Random House
ReleaseDate	2016-06-14
Studio	Random House

Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior

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