MacArthur Edited by Lawrence S. Wittner Prentice-Hall, 149 pp., $5.95 cloth; $2.45 paper Count Belisarius was a gifted, gallant commander. Princely and magnetic, he pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for Byzantium time and again. Justinian, a devious schemer of an emperor, used Belisarius but always resented him. Thanks to the Count, the Vandals were crushed in Africa, Rome was liberated from the Goths, and the Huns were turned back from an attack on Byzantium. A grateful people made a hero of Belisarius; a jealous emperor heaped disgrace on him repeatedly—always after the danger had passed.
In our times, Douglas MacArthur, a first-rate commander, suffered much the same fate at the hands of second-rate politicians. Little men on the Left always found him a tempting target. He was everything they feared and everything they despised—aristocratic, a hard-line anti-Communist, outspokenly religious, a career soldier with a popular following, and dangerously articulate. As a result, Mac-Arthur had hordes of enemies in the press and government (especially in our very Byzantine Department of State) sniping at him from behind the lines during most of his career.
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