General Douglas MacArthur

Michael Schaller's biography of General Douglas MacArthur, MacArthur: The Far Eastern General, demonstrates a number of instances of leadership on the part of the general in two wars and in the period between those two wars in particular. World War II and the Korean War were important in MacArthur's story, and his leadership in Japan after World War II was a vital element in restructuring that country for the postwar economic boom that has resulted, whether that was his clear intention or not.

MacArthur is best known to the world today for his promise to return to the Philippines, his overseeing of the postwar era in Japan, and his being "fired" by Truman and brought home from the Korean War. His leadership tended to be charismatic. He also tended to be abrasive to his superiors and his colleagues and especially to politicians, which often created problems for him. Yet his charismatic leadership was evident to men such as Harold Ickes, who praised sending MacArthur to a theater in Asia, noting that he was the right man to send to Australia and that his pluck had a beneficial effect on everyone's spirits. However, MacArthur angered administration officials with his talk of a Pacific offensive (64).

The picture of MacArthur that emerges is of a man with public persona and a different personality behind the scenes. Yet his leadership style is often seen a mixture of the two, for relied heavily on his public persona to get people to follow him. The fact that he angered t

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ompared his own service in Tokyo to biblical accounts of Christ's agony on the cross. (126) Clearly MacArthur thought his leadership at this juncture tended to be charismatic even when others did not. From 1945 to 1947, there followed a period of demilitarization and democratization under the direction of General Douglas MacArthur as the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). At that time, Japan's navy and army ministries were abolished, munitions and military equipment destroyed, and war industries converted to civilian uses. Under pressure from SCAP, the government sought to amend the 1889 Meiji Constitution, and on May 3, 1947 the new Japanese Constitution came into force, often called the "MacArthur Constitution." This document embodied constitutional reforms as well as economic reforms, including agricultural land redistribution, the reestablishment of trade unions, and severe proscriptions of zaibatsu. Zaibatsu means literally "money clique," and these were powerful financial or industrial combines that merged during the Meiji era and that were implicated in the militarist regimes of the thirties and forties (124). MacArthur seemed always to project a charismatic view of himself and to use the news media

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