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Like his father, Douglas MacArthur could never quite make up his mind whether the Filipinos were to be considered pawns in America’s imperial policy or a people to be given democratic opportunities to achieve their true independence. And it was not, ironically, until Douglas MacArthur had become proconsul in Japan with absolute power that he finally achieved for the docile and hero-worshipping Japanese what he had never been able to give the more spirited Filipinos.

If Carol Petillo had pursued this kind of psychobiography with the rigid determinism of a Freud or a Marx, her portrait of such a complex character as MacArthur would have been unconvincing. Fortunately she writes with enough subtlety and compassion to add a dimension to MacArthur’s stature. But it remains true that, of MacArthur’s biographers, only Manchester, a romantic himself, truly appreciates the last of the tragic heroes and has what it takes to bring him to life.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Like his father, Douglas MacArthur could never quite make up his mind whether the Filipinos were to be considered pawns in America’s imperial policy or a people to be given democratic opportunities to achieve their true independence. And it was not, ironically, until Douglas MacArthur had become proconsul in Japan with absolute power that he finally achieved for the docile and hero-worshipping Japanese what he had never been able to give the more spirited Filipinos.

If Carol Petillo had pursued this kind of psychobiography with the rigid determinism of a Freud or a Marx, her portrait of such a complex character as MacArthur would have been unconvincing. Fortunately she writes with enough subtlety and compassion to add a dimension to MacArthur’s stature. But it remains true that, of MacArthur’s biographers, only Manchester, a romantic himself, truly appreciates the last of the tragic heroes and has what it takes to bring him to life.