Army & Navy – COMMAND: Man Behind MacArthur

The Chief of Staff is the unemotional genius who must translate the general’s strategic visions into plans and orders that kill enemies. And being Chief of Staff to visionary General Douglas MacArthur is the job of one of the hardest-working men in the U.S. Army: quiet, lean, handsome Major General Richard K. Sutherland, whom the War Department last week rewarded with an Oak Leaf Cluster “for gallantry in action” to add to his Silver Star. His staff work at Corregidor had already won him the coveted D.S.M.

Between the time he finished Yale in 1916 (and enlisted in the Connecticut National Guard as a private) and the day he flew over New Guinea last September to win his latest decoration, Dick Sutherland had followed the diverse career that makes a good Chief of Staff. In World War I, as a captain, his company commands ranged from M.P.s to front-line infantry. He was an early student at the antediluvian tank school in England. In 1941, three years after he left Tientsin to join MacArthur in the Philippines, he learned to fly. From his Republican father, U.S. Senator (1917-23) Howard Sutherland of West Virginia, Dick Sutherland even acquired a smattering of politics. He redesigned the Army-Navy Country Club course in Washington, won the Army golf championship. Once in a service baseball game he brought in a ringer: his brother-in-law, Bucky Harris, manager of the Washington Senators.

As one of MacArthur’s close confidantes (the other: German-born Brigadier General Charles A. Willoughby of Intelligence). Dick Sutherland is rarely out of the General’s sight. His prodigious memory holds the details MacArthur pours upon him during their walks and talks. Last week in Washington his pretty, Tennessee-born wife guessed that her husband was with MacArthur in New Guinea: ”He wrote that he was sorry he could not send me a Christmas present, because where he is he cannot even buy a paper of pins.”