Chapter One

Douglas MacArthur idolized his father, Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur, and for good reason. The elder MacArthur was intelligent, possessed high professional standards, and—most appealing to an impressionable young man with military ambitions of his own—General Arthur MacArthur was fearless in combat. Although largely forgotten today and certainly overshadowed by his famous son, the senior MacArthur was one of America's greatest soldiers. Douglas believed that he could never equal his father, but he looked to him as a role model. And throughout his own career Douglas certainly emulated his father, for better and for worse.

Tracing the MacArthur lineage is complicated and some of the facts passed down through the years are questionable. Arthur's father, also named Arthur, and later known as Judge MacArthur, was the patriarch of the family. He was born on January 26,1817, in Glasgow, Scotland. Coincidentally, his mother's surname was also MacArthur. As the story goes, the earliest MacArthurs descended from Highlander nobility and a rich Scottish military heritage that dated to the sixth century.

Arthur Jr. never knew his father or his sister. They both died just days before he was born, and relatives looked after mother and son. His mother, Sarah, remarried in 1824 and a few years later the family immigrated to the United States to join one of Sarah's sisters in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, a booming textile town about sixty miles south of Boston. Arthur attended the one-room Uxbridge Academy until an economic downturn forced it to close and he transferred to a boarding school in