![]() ![]() He has, however, assembled massive evidence of how the MacArthur legend grew, cannily nurtured by its subject and persistently mocked to his detriment. ![]() But then Manchester, constantly tolling the knell of doom, would not have his tragic Greek hero to range alongside his Napoleon (the favorite comparison) or, more aptly, his Winfield Scott. Young MacArthur learned everything from his father, it appears ("It's the orders you disobey that make you famous," he said in World War I), except what his paranoia perhaps did not permit him to learn how to escape his father's fate. He was, ineluctably, his father's son: at 18, Arthur MacArthur dashed up Missionary Ridge to plant the Union flag and win the battle-and later, his insubordination as military governor of the Philippines cost him his pest and his career. ![]() But this "great thundering paradox," "the best of men and the worst of men," is not without his manifold, if more life-size, fascinations. American Caesar, no less: from the title onward, Manchester has produced a biography of MacArthur so grandiose and so singleminded as to satisfy even the giant ego of its subject. ![]()
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