Supreme Commander
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* The marriage lasted seven years. MacArthur’s second marriage, in 1937 at the age of fifty-seven, lasted until his death in 1964.
* George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, and Benjamin Harrison. Another president who was prominent for his military exploits was Theodore Roosevelt in Cuba, though he was never a general.
* This propaganda bluff boomeranged after the Americans bombed Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. In 1946 a U.S. Army lieutenant conducted a survey asking Japanese people how they felt about the battering their cities took from American bombs. Were the attacks savage and unnecessary? Almost unanimously they said: “Oh no. Because first we bombed your cities that way.”
* Haber’s wife certainly thought so. Ashamed of her husband’s work, she begged him to stop. He refused. The next day, she committed suicide.
* The number has continued to grow over the years as more research has been conducted. The commonly accepted figure, according to the International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare held in China in 2002, is 580,000.
* The exact same words—by pure coincidence—were used by the highest-ranking member of the Soviet mission. According to Courtney Whitney, Col. Gen. S. A. Golunsky was arrested by the American military police for traveling outside the twenty-five-mile zone. The Russian general was outraged and demanded a written apology. For the supreme commander the issue was very simple: Could any foreigner travel around Russia without correct papers and not be arrested? Of course not. You tell the general, MacArthur instructed his aide, “There will be no apology, oral or written.” When Golunsky got the message, he had only one thing to say: “What a man! . . . A real leader.”
* In an October 1947 memo marked “secret” from SCAP’s William Sebald to the State Department’s deputy director for Far Eastern affairs (obviously seen by Kennan, the recipient’s boss), Sebald wrote:
Dr. Wang stated that the Chinese are most desirous of obtaining a larger share of reparations out of current production. In rebuttal of this statement, General MacArthur drew two parallel horizontal lines, the lower line representing Japan’s present 45% production and the upper line a theoretical 100% production. He said the space between the two lines could be reached only at the expense of the United States and that the Chinese must consider us very stupid if they believe that we would fill in the gap only to have production turned over to the Chinese in the form of reparations.
* It was just as well she was not invited to the meeting. Women in those days were not allowed in the Harvard Club (except in a “Women’s Dining Room,” with its own separate entry next to the main entrance).
* Given to him no fewer than three times: by the president’s directive of September 6, 1945, by the Joint Chiefs’ directive of November 3, 1945, and by the FEC’s directive of June 19, 1947, all telling him to dissolve the zaibatsu (see brief excerpts in the endnotes).
* It is difficult to provide a dollar equivalent because there was severe inflation during the early years of the occupation, plus there was a substantial variation in the cost of dollars used for import as opposed to export, depending on the particular commodity being bought/sold. In August 1945 the estimated average value of the dollar was 13.6 yen; in June 1949, when Joseph Dodge created a fixed rate, he set the dollar at 360 yen.
* The Japanese award for the best pitcher of the year, equivalent to the American Cy Young Award, is called the Sawamura Award.