Uneasy biographical bedfellows

The dust jacket of this book shows two heads confronting one another: General MacArthur, aggressive, arrogant, defiantly puffing cigar smoke at the world at large; the Emperor Hirohito, impassive, phlegmatic, quietly obstinate. The subtitle, ‘MacArthur, Hirohito and the American Duel with Japan’, similarly suggests that within the book a double biography will be found. The formula can work effectively. Hitler and Stalin, Wellington and Napoleon, were titanic figures whose careers meshed closely, each having the other frequently in his thoughts, each consciously or unconsciously adjusting his behaviour in reaction to the other. The trouble about this book is that MacArthur and Hirohito do not relate to each other in this way. They are ships that pass in the night, meeting fleetingly at a moment of high importance but for the greater part of their lives in no way concerned about or relevant to each other. Hirohito would probably not have survived as emperor if MacArthur had wanted to bring about his abdication or put him on trial for war crimes; but even this is uncertain: MacArthur’s authority was great but the powers-that-be in Washington had concluded that the preservation of the Japanese empire was on balance in America’s interest, and the General’s vice-regal powers were constantly checked by his political masters. Beyond this, the two men had remarkably little impact on each other. Robert Harvey’s object, he tells us, is to ‘weave the story into a single whole’. The task is probably impossible; what we in fact get is two stories in somewhat uneasy juxtaposition.

MacArthur himself was a truly titanic figure. Immensely brave, a brilliant fighting soldier, a leader of charismatic quality, in some ways genuinely an idealist, his character was marred by excessive pride, vanity and a megalomaniac rejection of anything he saw as hostile criticism. He was in some ways extraordinarily lucky; twice his career seemed to have ship-wrecked and he found himself relegated to sterile backwaters, twice chance plucked him forth to attain fresh glories.