Word: macarthurs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Wrong War? MacArthur capped that great achievement with still another. For nearly six years he was U.S. commander of the Occupation-in effect, the Yankee Emperor of Japan. He gave the Japanese a constitution and a will to create a new life, and for that he was idolized as much as if he had been a god. MacArthur himself enjoyed his new job immensely. Efficient, indefatigable, imperious in everything he did, he struck outsiders as a benign but egocentric despot. MacArthur hardly bothered to listen to what others had to say, for he liked to talk himself. But when...
Then, in June 1950, destiny beckoned again. Communist-trained North Koreans invaded the Republic of South Korea. The United Nations, urged by the U.S., gathered its armies to throw them back, and MacArthur once more turned to battle, this time as Supreme U.N. Commander in Chief for Korea. In a bold, perilous and perfectly executed amphibious flanking stroke, he landed his forces behind enemy lines at Inchon, drove a wedge through the Red armies, and turned the tide of the war. His announced "win the war" offensive was evidently a success; the troops, he said, would "be home for Christmas...
...MacArthur was convinced that he could win the war only by throwing Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese forces into the fight on the Chinese mainland and by carrying the war across the Yalu River into Manchuria. President Harry Truman and his Joint Chiefs of Staff argued that such tactics would inevitably bring Communist China into the Korean war. It would be, explained General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong enemy...
Through various messages sent to the States, MacArthur set forth his strong opposing views. Then, in March 1951, just four days after he was notified that the U.N. planned to proclaim its willingness to discuss a Korean settlement, MacArthur himself declared that he was ready to meet the enemy in the field to talk about peace; implied was a threat that otherwise MacArthur would extend the war beyond the Korean border. On April 11, Truman, after consulting the Joint Chiefs, fired MacArthur because he felt that the General was "unable to give his wholehearted support" to the policies...
...MacArthur returned to the U.S. and one of the wildest hero's welcomes ever accorded an American. With him came his wife Jean (a first marriage, to Louise Cromwell Brooks in 1922, had ended in divorce seven years later), and his son Arthur, who was born in the Philippines in 1938. MacArthur made his eloquent farewell address to the Congress, testified before a congressional joint investigation committee. Both he and Truman continued to have their say -in tendentious statements, in books and in articles. Neither budged a whit from his position-and neither, probably, could ever be proved wrong...