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Describes how MacArthur in late 1945 and early 1946 saved Hirohito from trial as a war criminal. Contacted by imperial advisers, MacArthur became convinced that Hirohito would cooperate in democratizing, and perhaps Christianizing, Japan (MacArthur believed that Christianity was essential to democracy and encouraged American missionaries to fill Japan's “spiritual vacuum”). The emperor's New Year's statement supported this view. When Washington signed the Moscow agreement, which gave the Allies control over political reform in Japan, and warned that Hirohito might be indicted, MacArthur defended the emperor in a long telegram to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ordered his staff to draft a “model constitution” for Japan with the emperor at the head of the state.

Analyzes The Far Eastern Commission's objection to MacArthur's arbitrary approval of the March 6 draft and his plan to elect a new Diet in April to approve it. The FEC challenge threatened MacArthur's intricate plot to preserve the imperial institution in Japan's new constitutional order. The Army's Chief of Staff, Dwight Eisenhower, and the State Department defended MacArthur, contending that his actions were consistent with the Moscow Agreement of December 26, 1945, because the draft was the product of a process initiated by the Japanese government in the fall of 1945. The FEC continued to spar with MacArthur during the summer of 1946 and eventually persuaded him to order minor amendments to the draft.

Introduces the book's main argument: that it is too simple, and ultimately misleading, to say that SCAP (that is, General MacArthur and officers of the American Occupation) “imposed” a Constitution on postwar Japan. Rather, in this book, Japan is treated as a case study of democratization. The chapter also introduces the principal players (MacArthur, Whitney, and Kades on the American side; Shidehara, Yoshida, and Kanamori on the Japanese side). It then describes, in terms that invite comparison with other cases of democratization, the main features of the context (cultural, social, economic, and international) in which they worked to lay the foundation for constitutional democracy.

Begins by noting that, early in the Occupation period, General Douglas MacArthur (SCAP) told Japanese leaders that their country could not fulfill the terms of the Potsdam Declaration without revising its Constitution. It analyzes seminal documents from Washington (particularly JCS 1380 and SWNCC 228), emphasizing their warning that Japan should take leadership of this project. It shows that, by the end of January 1946, MacArthur, pressed by Allies on the Far Eastern Commission, had determined that Japan could not accomplish this goal without active American intervention.

The Conclusion notes that Japanese political leaders are currently considering whether to amend their Constitution, particularly article 9, renouncing war and armed forces. In this light, it is important to recognize that the postwar Constitution emerged from a collaboration – one might almost say a conspiracy – between American and Japanese leaders, personified by General MacArthur and Prime Minister Yoshida.

Truman's decision to fire MacArthur in April 1951 initially threatened to make the domestic situation even worse. Indeed, Republicans hoped to exploit the opportunity to challenge the administration's whole Asian policy, and perhaps even impeach one or two senior officials. Within weeks, however, the MacArthur controversy worked to the administration's benefit. For the first time in months, senior officials engaged in a sustained and coordinated effort to make the case for war. MacArthur was thus outgunned. He was also placed on the defensive, having to rebut the official claim that his vision would result in a disastrous world war. More broadly, crucial figures in Congress, both southern Democrats and internationalist Republicans, rallied behind Truman's position, ending the disastrous prospect that had loomed so large in the winter—the prospect that the broad bipartisan Cold War coalition would soon collapse.

As soon as the first U.S. troops reached Korea, the U.S. military established guidelines for dealing with war correspondents. MacArthur set the tone. Convinced that he could control media coverage through a mixture of optimistic communiqués and blunt threats, MacArthur rejected a formal censorship regime. But it was a decision that soon caused problems. MacArthur's command was upset by much of the early reporting, which focused on the brutal realities of battlefield defeat. Correspondents, for their part, protested at the lack of official cooperation in all areas, from inadequate briefings to antiquated communications. And back in Washington, officials were deeply worried by the stories emanating from the front, especially the claims that the government was hiding the true level of casualties, not to mention the allegations that it had left the country dangerously exposed to the military challenge from the communist world.

The long military retreat that followed the Chinese intervention sparked a new round of recriminations between the military and media in the Far East. This chapter examines MacArthur's claims that war correspondents exaggerated the scale of defeat. It then explores the pressures that finally forced MacArthur to accept the need for formal censorship. Yet censorship was no panacea. Although many in the media believed they needed more guidance from the military, formal censorship was instituted in a clumsy, even brutal fashion. Matters only started to improve when Ridgway assumed control of UN forces in Korea. This energetic new commander not only introduced new tactics and a new fighting spirit, which forced Chinese troops back toward the 38th parallel, but he also introduced a more publicity‐conscious ethos, which soon helped to ease the enormous resentment that many war correspondents felt toward the military.

The massive Chinese intervention also led many Americans to question the wisdom of the Korean War: in January 1951, one Gallup poll even found that two‐thirds of the public wanted to withdraw from Korea altogether. Although the administration had successfully defused the broader debate over Cold War mobilization, it had far more trouble explaining why it was necessary for Americans to continue fighting and dying in faraway Korea. In fact, the government's mobilization campaign was part of the problem: in the first months of 1951, senior officials spent so much time trying to win the “great debate” that they said very little about Korea. But even efforts to reach out to the mass public by using emotive letters or the power of Hollywood movies largely backfired.

Generals also depart in a style marked by forcible exit. Here, the chief executive leaves office reluctantly, but plots his return and quickly comes back to office out of retirement in order to rescue the company from the real or imagined inadequacy of his or her successor. The general enjoys being the returning savior and often hopes to remain around long enough to take the firm and himself towards even greater glory. In this chapter, three well-known military generals—Douglas MacArthur, George S. Pattern, and Charles de Gaulle—will serve as models for the corporate general. The leaders reviewed in this chapter are considered as generals because, like the three military generals discussed, they came to rely upon the corporate battlefield for their primary adult identity. This chapter also illustrates how their need for successful heroic mission is not as motivating as their need to retain their heroic stature.

This chapter details Douglas MacArthur's various encounters with the Philippines. The first point of contact was through his father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., who was the military governor of the Philippines and was engaged in the occupation of Manila and the suppression of rebellions following the Spanish–American War. After graduating from West Point in June 1903, Douglas applied to the elite Army Corps of Engineers, and in October he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and assigned to the Philippines. He served in the Manila military district, where he was engaged in the improvement of Manila Bay, the construction of fortresses on Corregidor Island, and road construction on the Bataan Peninsula. The remainder of the chapter covers Douglas' appointment as the youngest general on record in the U.S. Army at age 50; his position as military advisor to Emanuel L. Quezon; and his initiation of a plan aimed at enhancing the defensive powers of the Philippine Army.

This chapter begins by discussing President Manuel L. Quezon's withdrawal to Corregidor. The Philippine government had moved from Manila on MacArthur's recommendation, with Quezon himself continuing to lead the government from Corregidor in cooperation with the U.S. commander of the Far East. Quezon had originally declined MacArthur's request to withdraw from the capital, claiming that his first duty was to take care of the civilian population and maintain public order while MacArthur was fighting the enemy. MacArthur's real intention was to make sure that Quezon was not captured, thus preventing the Japanese from using the head of the Philippine government as a symbol of their glorious triumph. The chapter goes on to detail the proposed evacuation of Quezon and High Commissioner to the Philippines Francis B. Sayre from Corregidor; and MacArthur's authorization to evacuate.

The massive Chinese intervention in the Korean War in late November 1950 created a new sense of crisis in Washington. Attempting to learn from the mistakes they had made in June, senior officials tried to provide a more forceful lead, reaching out to figures from across the political spectrum in order to foster a new sense of unity. But, initially at least, the administration's public efforts were little short of disastrous. The military situation was partly to blame. With events in Korea so murky, officials were unable to provide a clear sense of the scale of the defeat. In Tokyo, MacArthur soon stepped into the vacuum, issuing a string of statements that suggested a major catastrophe was in the cards. In Washington, Truman compounded matters when he told reporters that the A‐bomb was “under active consideration,” a phrase that suggested Korea was about to escalate in a truly terrifying fashion.

This chapter chronicles Kennan’s pivotal and successful role in redirecting US policy toward Japan during 1947-48. Kennan largely engineered the “reverse course” in US occupation policy away from a postwar punitive approach and toward economic reconstruction and stabilization, which was aimed at making Japan the centerpiece of the US security posture in East Asia. This required Kennan to personally confront occupation commander General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo to secure his support for the shift in policy. The chapter discusses the subsequent policy deliberations that ultimately approved the “reverse course,” and assesses the division of labor between Kennan and Undersecretary of the Army William Draper in effecting the policy change.

American occupation authorities insisted that Japan adopt a democratic constitution, but Japanese political leaders were reluctant to revise the undemocratic prewar constitution. So General MacArthur tasked two dozen GHQ officials with ghostwriting a model constitution that would, with Japanese and Allied input, become the Constitution of Japan. It established a system of parliamentary democracy modeled after Britain’s Westminster system. Yet the cabinet failed to assume its expected role as the foremost organ of executive influence, and remained a loose collection of individual ministers acting as advocates for the interests of their respective ministries. During this period Japan was ruled by an American military dictatorship that governed through a civil bureaucracy that remained essentially intact from prewar times. Although Prime Minister Yoshida and other Japanese leaders – who played a role similar to that of the nineteenth-century comprador-merchants, who served as intermediaries between Chinese and foreigners – sometimes got what they wanted by exploiting factional differences within a bipolar GHQ, ultimately they danced to an American tune. Meanwhile, sensational scandals sullied cabinets and confirmed the popular perception that parliamentary democracy and political corruption go hand-in-hand, thus assuring that cabinet government did not become established in practice.

On January 27, 1942, having obtained the agreement of high-ranking army and navy officers, Secretary of State Cordell Hull suggested to Roosevelt that he should urge MacArthur to evacuate from Corregidor. On February 2, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall additionally proposed that MacArthur's wife and son and one “other person” (presumably MacArthur) should be added to the evacuation group. On February 15 and again on the night of February 21, Marshall insisted that MacArthur should make a clear decision, referring to a presidential order and citing the name of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Through these twists and turns, MacArthur came to accept the evacuation of himself and his family, but it is not clear when he made the final decision. This chapter discusses the means of evacuation and the accompanying persons; selection of evacuation dates and route; and the journey from Corregidor to Tagauayan, from Tagauayan to Mindanao, and from Mindanao to Australia.

In the Korean War, the U.S. attempted to “roll back” communism on the Korean Peninsula by seeking the destruction of North Korea in the fall of 1950. By widening its war aims from the restoration of the status quo ante to that of unification, the U.S. convinced China that its physical security was under threat, and China intervened in force. America's initial war aims in the Korean War were to defeat North Korea's armed forces and to avoid the forcible intervention of either China or the Soviet Union. Neither of these war aims was achieved. This chapter argues that because of General Douglas MacArthur's near-monopoly over strategic intelligence, top policymakers were unable to alter the strategic direction of the war in any significant fashion. America's truncated information institution prevented the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council from positively influencing the strategy prior to China's intervention.

This chapter examines the dynamic of American imperialism in the Philippines since 1898 and the role played by the United States in determining the values, practices, and institutions that constitute democracy in the islands today. It first explains why the United States decided to sponsor democracy in the Philippines after defeating Spain in the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. It then considers the political and socioeconomic dimensions of the United States' democratization of the Philippines, focusing on its introduction of the trappings of modern government such as political parties, elections, and the rise of a Filipino landed class whose wealth was based on the production of export commodities. It also discusses the negative effects of a landowning oligarchy on Philippine democracy and concludes with an assessment of the reasons why General Douglas MacArthur did not mandate land reform for the Philippines.