Douglas MacArthur

"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation."

Attribution: Title of speech to the people of Japan upon the first anniversary of the Japanese constitution.

Click here to listen.

Date: May 3, 1948

Douglas MacArthur

1880–1964

American general, born in Little Rock, AK. MacArthur graduated from West Point in 1903 and began his military career serving in the Philippines and Japan. In 1906 he was appointed as an aide to President Theodore Roosevelt. After the US entered World War I he was promoted (June, 1918) to brigadier general. MacArthur was superintendent of West Point from 1919–22. In 1932 he provoked much criticism by commanding the troop action ordered under President Herbert Hoover that evicted the Bonus Marchers from Washington. In 1935 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed MacArthur head of the American military mission to the new Philippine Commonwealth. MacArthur retired from the U.S. army in 1937, but later returned to duty in 1941 to command U.S. armed forces in East Asia. He was promoted in 1944 to the new rank of General of the Army (five-star general) and accepted the surrender of Japan on the U.S.S. Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945. In 1950, at the beginning of the Korean War he was appointed commander of UN military forces in South Korea, while retaining his command of Allied forces in Japan. After a dispute with President Harry Truman was made public, President Truman removed MacArthur from office in 1951.

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