Magazines: The Old Soldier’s Memoirs

The sight of his boss writing intently across page after page of lined yellow notebook paper moved Major General Courtney Whitney to mild curiosity.

“What are you writing?” he asked. The answer was an unexpected surprise. “I am writing my reminiscences,” said General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. With that casual admission, the articulate hero of Corregidor and Bataan and a host of other evocative place names scattered along the land scape of three wars first announced his personal contribution to the written history of his times.

Whitney had been well aware of MacArthur’s avowed reluctance to add his own words to the growing MacArthur legend. And now here was the old soldier already halfway through the job. Three months later, with an aide’s alacrity and a friend’s care, Whitney slipped the manuscript into a box and carried it to LIFE Magazine. Last week, in the publishing coup of the year, LIFE purchased all rights — publishing, movie and television — to the memoirs of Douglas Mac Arthur, 83.

The book, said Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief Henry R. Luce, ranks “with the greatest historical writings of any age.” It is, he said, “a very full run-through of 50 or more years of American his tory.” At a press conference in MacArthur’s honor, the old soldier was more modest about his own work. “The reminiscences,” he said, “are not a history, they are not an autobiography, they are not a diary. But they have something of all those elements in them.

They cover the span of a very long and checkered life.” It was his hope, said the old soldier, that the story would be “of some interest to the general public and some help to the future historian.” Written in a firm and clear hand, from his own recollections and his own papers, MacArthur’s 220,000-word manuscript was completed in six months. It takes the full measure of his illustrious career—World War I, his service in the Philippines, the 1932 Bonus March on Washington, which MacArthur, then Army Chief of Staff, stemmed at “the Battle of Anacostia Flats,” the heroic triumphs of World War II, and his final recall by President Truman from command in Korea in 1951. “I felt that a mass of misinformation and lack of information required some further exposition of the facts,” said the general.

His memoirs also trace the MacArthur clan back to its origins in Scotland seven centuries ago, and dip lovingly into the 19th century to resurrect the figure of General Arthur MacArthur, whose military career, from Grant through Dewey, rivaled that of his son.

“No part of the work,” said MacArthur, “pleased me as much as doing that.” The MacArthur story will appear in LIFE soon after the turn of the year.

McGraw-Hill will also publish the book next year in a hard-cover edition.