(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978).

FIRST EDITION OF THIS IMPORTANT HISTORICAL WORK ABOUT ONE OF AMERICA'S MOST REVERED MILITARY FIGURES. Manchester wrote of MacArthur that "[he] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform. Flamboyant, imperious, and apocalyptic, he carried the plumage of a flamingo, could not acknowledge errors, and tried to cover up his mistakes with sly, childish tricks. Yet he was also endowed with great personal charm, a will of iron, and a soaring intellect Unquestionably he was the most gifted man-at-arms this nation has produced."
MacArthur the military genius was capable of masterpieces of strategy (the Bataan retreat, Hollandia, the landing at Inchon) and inexplicable lapses...a man so economical of human life in his campaigns that his total casualties from Australia to V.J. Day were fewer than Eisenhower's in the single Battle of the Bulge. In his years as American viceroy in Japan, he introduced the Japanese to civil liberties, labor unions, equal rights for women and land reform, and as he said of himself, "I am a one hundred percent disbeliever in war" and who, on his deathbed begged Lyndon Johnson to stay out of Vietnam. Item #31563

First Edition. Profusely illustrated with photographs and maps throughout. 8vo, publisher's original black cloth, blocked and lettered in silver and gold on the spine panel and in blind on the upper cover, in the decorated dustjacket. xvii, 793 pp. A fine copy, the book is clean and tight and sound, the dustjacket shows only very minor evidence at the extremities of age or use.