General Douglas MacArthur

On this day in 1951 General Douglas MacArthur retired over a difference of opinion with President Harry Truman about the way the Korean War should be fought. He was a controversial figure because of politics, not because of his military service, which was varied and outstanding. His retirement was announced before Congress in a joint session that included 30 breaks for applause. In this speech he said:


"Like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who has tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty."


In 1962, West Point honored MacArthur with the Sylvanus Thayer Award (an award for outstanding service to the nation). In accepting the award, MacArthur gave his last and possibly his best speech, in which he concluded:


"The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country. Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps. I bid you farewell."


As a military brat, however, in researching MacArthur as a junior high school student for a school report, this is what I remember and liked the best about MacArthur, who had one son:


"By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder—infinitely prouder—to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentiality of death; the other embodies creation and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will remember me not from the battle but in the home repeating with him our simple daily prayer, 'Our Father who art in heaven.' "