Entertainment, Books - Air Force Times

‘15 Stars’ examines legendary generals’ intersecting lives

Gen. Douglas MacArthur didn’t walk on water, contrary to the image his staff cultivated throughout his 51-year Army career. In Stanley Weintraub’s new history of three great Americans, MacArthur achieves something almost as miraculous: In a single aircraft flight, he takes off in a C-54 Skymaster and lands in a C-121 Constellation.

Weintraub’s unfamiliarity with everyday military equipment (every reference to an aircraft in this book contains an error) is a pinprick irritant that disrupts a superb narrative of sweeping scale. It’s an important narrative. It will entertain, inform — and perhaps disturb.

Weintraub’s book is an epic take of three five-star generals — MacArthur, George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower — whose lives intersected over decades and who shaped our world. Any of the three might have become president. One did.

Weintraub tells us what happened in these men’s lives. Subtly, he also lets us know his assessment of each.

MacArthur loyalists won’t like Weintraub’s portrayal of the general as a self-promoting, vain, at times incompetent, at times brilliant military leader who surrounded himself with toadies. Despite hours of warning that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, MacArthur allowed much of his air force and all of his troops to suffer a needless defeat when the Japanese attacked the Philippines on Dec. 8, 1941.

What most see as MacArthur’s shining achievement, the postwar occupation of Japan, was run by others, while the general remained in splendid isolation in his headquarters in Tokyo, according to the author.

It is not news that MacArthur mishandled the war in Korea. But Weintraub even downplays MacArthur’s legendary “duty, honor, country” speech to West Point cadets May 12, 1962. That speech is sacred to generations of American military leaders. But to Weintraub, MacArthur, then 83, “had little to say and had assembled [the speech] from mostly orotund passages he had used before.” (Yes, I had to look that one up, too. Orotund means “showy; bombastic; pompous.”)

Eisenhower was a different personality — flexible, genial and unpretentious, although he chain-smoked and had a temper. MacArthur often boasted that Ike had been “my clerk” in the Philippines before the war. Still, Weintraub credits Eisenhower with an extraordinary achievement in leading the multinational force that liberated Europe. Ike struggled constantly with resistance not merely from Adolf Hitler but also from British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, whom he despised, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was lukewarm about opening a second front by landing 176,000 men at Normandy.

Where Weintraub gets Ike wrong is in dismissing his presidency. Most historians think Ike’s stock has gone up in latter-day assessments of his 1953-61 tenure in the White House. Eisenhower wisely warned of the influence of a “military industrial complex.”

The real hero of this story is the self-effacing Marshall, who orchestrated U.S. war strategy and served in postwar years as secretary of state and, later, defense. Weintraub makes clear that Marshall deserves credit for many achievements routinely attributed to the other two five-stars.

In a lesson the Pentagon brass needs today, Marshall identified with no political party, spurned invitations to run for office and, upon retirement, turned down offers to serve on corporate boards. Offered $1 million to write his memoir, Marshall retorted, “I have no need for a million dollars” — this despite being a man of modest means.

Weintraub tantalizes us with speculation on how things could have happened differently: Missing one meeting may have cost MacArthur the European command job that went to Ike. Marshall could have had that job and knew it would bestow greater glory, but felt he could be more useful in Washington. A political miscalculation may have cost MacArthur the chance to become president in 1953.

“15 Stars” takes us back to an era when Americans avoided maintaining a standing army in peacetime, disliked intervening overseas and preferred a citizen army to a warrior ethos. Throughout much of the 20th century, contrary to myth, it was not the German but the American officer corps that was the envy of armies around the world. “15 Stars” tells us why.

15 Stars: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall — Three Generals Who Saved the American Century. By Stanley Weintraub. Free Press. 540 pages. $30.

Robert F. Dorr is an Air Force veteran who writes from Oakton, Va. A new edition of his book “Air Combat” will be published in November.