"MacArthur, who died 50 years ago last month, returned to the United States to great acclaim—he was, after all, one of the nation’s most decorated officers—but his fight with Truman overshadowed what he had accomplished in both of the world wars. He defended his actions in Korea in a series of public congressional hearings, but his testimony was self-referencing, uncertain and ultimately unconvincing. He dabbled in politics (without success) and, after failing to win the 1952 Republican nomination for president, moved with his second wife Jean and their son Arthur—Arthur MacArthur—to New York City, where the family lived in a set of suites at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Jean and her husband would be seen, from time to time, at the opera or taking in a baseball game. But for the most part, they spent their days out of the limelight. MacArthur, once so popular that mothers named their children for him, just faded away.
History has not treated him well. A recent, if informal, Internet poll listed him as America’s worst commander; Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary War general who defected to the British and whose name is practically synonymous with the word “traitor,” was second. A popular nonfiction television series on the war has Marines on Peleliu, a small coral island where the Allies and the Japanese fought for more than two months over a single airstrip, cursing MacArthur for expending their lives needlessly. In fact, he had nothing to do with the battle.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/rethinking-douglas-macarthur-106397.html?hp=pm_1#.U4NUHPl5PAw
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