Where in the World is Douglas MacArthur?
When Douglas MacArthur was born in 1880, trains were the transportation mode of choice: it had been just eleven years since the transcontinental railroad had opened up the vast western American interior for development. His father, a Civil War hero, instructed troops in the use of the breech-loading, single-shot, Springfield ’73 rifle. And no one had ever heard of the phrase “World War.” When MacArthur died in 1964, the jet airplane made travel intercontinental, not transcontinental, with travel time measured in hours rather than days. The United States and the Soviet Union, among other countries, threatened each other with vast arsenals of hydrogen bombs, each one capable of destroying a city. And the stage for this “Cold War” had been set by two World Wars within thirty years. Douglas MacArthur fought in both. MacArthur’s career was extraordinary in so many ways. As biographer Geoffrey Perret notes in the opening of his book “Old Soldiers Never Die,” in his eighty-four years MacArthu
