No, I’m not talking about Helen Thomas.  Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tom Ricks, who blogs at ForeignPolicy.com, recently identified General Douglas MacArthur as the worst general in American history.  This is quite a charge, considering that Ricks offers only a half-hearted, incomplete argument.  I think that a man who served his country for more than half a century deserves more respect–or a coherent argument, at the very least.  The real kicker is that Benedict Arnold, according to Ricks, was a better general than MacArthur.  Now I’m not sure what his metrics were for evaluating these officers–maybe their strategic, operational, and tactical acumen, I don’t know.  Clearly, loyalty to one’s country was not a criterion.  To put a traitor like Arnold before a patriot like MacArthur is more than unfortunate.  Here’s the original post:

That was the discussion I was having yesterday with several friends. Here is my ranking of their nominees:

1. Douglas MacArthur
2. Benedict Arnold
3. Ned Almond
4. Tommy R. Franks
5. William Westmoreland
6. George McClellan
7. Ambrose Burnside
8. Horatio Gates

It was my contest, so I declared MacArthur the No. 1 loser, because of his unique record of being insubordinate to three presidents (Hoover, Roosevelt and Truman) as well as screwing up the Korean War. Plus additional negative points for his role in the gassing and suppression of the Bonus Marchers in 1932. You can’t defend a country by undermining it.

It really is extraordinary how the Army has extirpated his memory. The influence of Marshall, Eisenhower and Bradley lives on, while MacArthur has been treated as a historical dead end. Kind of amazing, considering he was a general for 26 years, was the Army chief of staff, received the Medal of Honor, fought in three wars and was a senior commander in two.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that MacArthur was not guilty of insubordination in his prosecution of the Korean War.  MacArthur did a lot of great things such as reforming West Point and overseeing the reconstruction of Japan—not to mention fighting in three wars and being a highly decorated combat soldier.  Yes, he was an imperfect officer (and his role in the Bonus March was certainly not the high point in his career), but I think Ricks is way off base in flippantly putting him at the top of a list like this.  Maybe if Ricks was more precise in his criticism, arguing that MacArthur was a poor operational commander and citing specific examples, I wouldn’t have been so bothered by this post.

“The worst general in American history?”  That was the title of Ricks’s post.  Just for the record, I don’t think Ricks is the worst journalist in American history (as the title of this post suggests).  However, if I made such a charge against such as distinguished journalist, I would need to providing evidence to support my claims or else people wouldn’t take me seriously.  I realize this was a short blog post about a conversation Ricks had with some friends, but I was still surprised that his charge included such paltry evidence.