Sublime

For Secretary Hurley, MacArthur, and George Moseley, the Bonus Army was a ragtag assortment of radicals, aliens, criminals, and social misfits led by a Bolshevik cadre intent on storming the American equivalent of the Winter Palace. For the Army’s high command, overthrow of the government lay just around the corner.57

It was saddening to discover how many apparently honorable men would stoop to almost to anything to help their own advancement.

In an Army where Marshall depended on officers like Eisenhower and Bradley to do their jobs quietly, to conciliate, and to persuade, he required others like Smith who could hack a path through red tape and perform hatchet jobs.”

Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who someh