American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964

"This book is a great example of how long the idea of Caesar lived in the minds of people writing about soldiers and politicians. MacArthur was an extraordinary figure. He prided himself on his superiority to everybody else, to his speed and imagination. He didn’t like trench warfare or anything that was slow. He prized the unexpected. He was an egomaniac—not for nothing claimed by Donald Trump as his favourite general—and often cited by people who want to fight the establishment, who want to argue that the establishment is always plodding and slow and wants to do things the way it’s always done them. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Donald Trump liked to compare himself to Douglas MacArthur just as MacArthur’s biographer liked the comparison to Julius Caesar. They were people who did things differently, who subverted the ideas of the elite to really work for the people. This is a continuous strand of thought since the death of Caesar—and the background to a big bit of Donald Trump’s mind. Yes, he did, in many different respects. Caesar’s writings were designed to make him a hero back home, even when fighting a long way away. And MacArthur in the Pacific Islands was a master of making sure that everybody back home knew what he was doing and who was setting the big policies. He was never in retreat—only ‘advancing in another direction’, a very Julius Caesar-like thought. When MacArthur said, ‘the most important rules are the ones you break’, he was also echoing Caesar. He ruled postwar Japan like a Caesar. Eventually the American president at the time, Harry Truman, got fed up with this, decided that he was risking a war with China over Korea and, in April 1951, ordered him home. He made a lot of fuss for a long time, stamping up and down the country. He made a fortune speaking. And it was a long time before he gave up the idea that he might have political ambitions of his own. He was an egomaniac. He did have political ambitions, but he was thwarted. He died just a very short few months after the assassination of President Kennedy . One of his great lines was that old soldiers never die, they just fade away. Douglas MacArthur, once President Truman had sacked him, did fade away—until Donald Trump brought the American Caesar back. That might have been the Roman Caesar’s fate, too, but because he was assassinated, a certain idea of Caesar was propelled thousands of years ahead."