Supreme Commander by Jr. Seymour Morris Page A

home at such time [as] you feel you can safely leave your duties.” The president even offered an enticement: Would the general like to address a joint session of Congress? Again MacArthur passed, citing “the extraordinarily dangerous and inherently inflammable situation which exists here.”
    From the president’s point of view, only a man of MacArthur’s oversize ego could dare such effrontery—a slight the president would not forget. Truman could only wonder how MacArthur would have reacted if one of his subordinates had said he was too busy to see him.
    Except that Truman totally missed the point. Japan was conquered, but was it really? MacArthur was the commander of a hostile nation known for kamikazes. At any moment a bomb could go off or someone prominent be assassinated, and the war on Japan would resume in a second. Guerrilla bands of terrorists could strike anytime. To suggest (“order”) your general in Japan to come home for a week of celebration was pipe-dreaming, in MacArthur’s view. He had no choice: He must stay on duty. He had a job to do, and he could not afford to leave, much though he might have relished returning home to a hero’s welcome. In Japan, MacArthur was beginning the role of a lifetime, an opportunity few people ever get, one that must be seized and savored in its fleeting fullest. For Douglas MacArthur, the key operating words out of the numerous instructions he got from Washington came from the president himself: “Your authority is supreme.”
    Supreme .
    Now, when a word like that is attached to a man, especially a general, it can quickly go to his head (one thinks of Mussolini in this regard). For someone who had spent his entire life cloistered in the bowels of the military, his every expense and personal whim paid for by the government, MacArthur—most curiously—had a fervently negative view of socialism and big government. Consider an argument he once had in the Philippines with his chief of staff, Lt. Col. Richard Sutherland. They were at a dinner party, and Sutherland was espousing strong views about the advantages a dictatorship had in waging war. According to one of the other officers present:
    General MacArthur told Sutherland he was wrong; that democracy works and will always work, because the people are allowed to think, to talk, and to keep their minds free, open, and supple. He said that while the dictator state may plan a war, get everything worked out down to the last detail, launch the attack, and do pretty well at the beginning, eventually something goes wrong with the plan. Something interrupts the schedule. Now, the regimented minds of the dictator command are not flexible enough to handle quickly the changed situation. They have tried to make war a science when it is actually an art.
    In a democracy, MacArthur was saying, there will be hundreds of free-thinking people to spot a dictator’s errors and devise better methods. A democracy may be at a disadvantage at first when war comes, but eventually it will win. It may be inefficient and wasteful, but in the end it always will perform best.
    By “democracy” he did not mean a chorus of voices having equal weight regardless of their merits. Leadership in a democracy meant being first among equals, and if he didn’t consider the people he had to deal with to be equals, he could be ruthless in cutting them off. To appease the feelings of other nations, and fearful of what it regarded as MacArthur’s dangerous appetite for power, the State Department had created two advisory organizations. However, if President Truman thought these organizations would rein in MacArthur, he was mistaken.
    The first was the Far Eastern Commission (FEC), consisting of the United States and the eight other signatories to the surrender document, plus China and the Philippines (with Burma and Pakistan added later, in 1948). Formed in the gallant spirit of the United Nations,