The movie The Post is one of the most baffling failures in the history of cinema. Released in 2017 hot on the heels of Trump’s election, it had all of the ingredients present for a masterpiece. The story centered around the Washington Post’s efforts to hunt down the Pentagon Papers, the outcome of which led to the Watergate scandal. It was basically a prequel to All The President’s Men. Directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, written by Josh Singer (hot off his Best Picture win for the masterpiece that was Spotlight) and scored by the inimitable John Willams, The Post should have been a shoo-in for one of the best movies ever made.
And yet, it is one of the driest, most infuriating bores ever filmed on a camera. Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham will annoy anyone who dislikes passive female characters, the cinematography is filled with grey colors that are unpleasant to look at, the plot was incoherent because it couldn’t find a main character and there isn’t a classic John Williams melody to save the day either.
What went wrong? In short: everyone wasted their talents because it was rushed and trying to fit the zeitgeist. It also failed that most basic of tasks: tell a good story written by a first-class writer, directed by a first-class director and feature a rich cast of talented actors.
When I read the subject of today’s book review, I found myself saying almost exactly the same lines as written above. All the ingredients were there, what went wrong?
This is American Caesar by William Manchester.
Overview
American Caesar is a one-volume biography of famed World War II general Douglas MacArthur. Written by William Manchester and published in September 1978, the book is a hefty 793 pages so it leaves little by the wayside.
Before I go any further, I have to mention a few things about the author. William Manchester is one of the strangest characters in the history of American letters. Born in 1922, Manchester served in the Pacific Theater during World War II, eventually seeing combat at the Battle of Okinawa. After the war, he entered journalism and academia. He would become a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. American Caesar is among his notable works, but two other Manchester books are interesting because of the story around them.
Manchester knew President John F. Kennedy and after the president’s murder, the Kennedy family commissioned him to write an official account of the assassination. But then the president’s widow Jacqueline and his brother Robert Kennedy then backed out and sued to block publication. The Death of A President as the final book was called came out in 1967, but one wonders what Manchester excised…
The other Manchester book worth bringing up is his final, posthumous work, The Last Lion, a three-volume biography of Winston Churchill. Manchester only completed two volumes before writer’s block and failing health prevented the completion of the last book. Per Manchester’s request, journalist Paul Reid—who’d never written a book I hasten to add—was brought on to finish the project based on Manchester’s notes. It took nine years and was a strange read when it came out. When I heard this story, I had many questions for the publisher: Reid is a nice man and a good journalist, but he was absolutely unqualified to write a biography of Winston Churchill despite him being Manchester’s handpicked choice. Why not overrule the now-dead famous author?
William Manchester’s colorful life and eccentric author bio are clues to the shortcomings of American Caesar…
The Review
Ostensibly, this should have been a book that wrote itself. Douglas MacArthur was the consummate American soldier at the turn of the 20th century. Son of a famed Union general and distinguished service in France during World War I, MacArthur’s considerable military talents led him to The Philippines in 1935. For those unfamiliar, The Philippines was a de facto American colony in the Pacific until its independence in 1946. For the remainder of the 1930s until the outbreak of the Second World War, MacArthur was Field Marshal of The Philippines. And because the country wasn’t independent, MacArthur was as close to a Roman pro-consul the United States ever had, hence the title of Manchester’s biography.
Of course, when World War II broke out in the Pacific, the Japanese duly kicked MacArthur out and MacArthur famously vowed to return to liberate the country. In October 1944, he kept his promise and launched a successful invasion. After the Japanese surrender, MacArthur was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, an understated title given the power it awarded him. From 1945 until 1951, MacArthur effectively ran Japan and rebuilt it to considerable success.
Then, just when his star couldn’t burn any brighter, he overreached himself. When the Korean peninsula became a war-zone in 1950, President Truman called on MacArthur’s considerable military experience to rescue America’s beleaguered ally. He initially succeeded, but then he began criticizing President Truman’s policies. As this is expressly forbidden in a country whose armed forces are run by civilians, MacArthur was relieved of his command despite his enormous popularity with the American people.
He died in 1964 with a complicated legacy to say the least.
Manchester covers everything I just summarized but the problem is the way he did it.
Biography is not Literary Fiction
Reading American Caesar is a slow, laborious experience because Manchester tried to write his book the same way F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, which is to say as a literary novel. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this excerpt of age 203. I’ve copied it out exactly in line with the paragraph breaks as printed on the page.
‘We picture him on his favorite balcony as sundown in the late afternoon of Sunday, December 7. Here it is the blue hour, but nine thousand miles away at For San Houston Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower’s watch reads 3:00am. He is asleep, and still unknown to the American public; a recent newspaper caption has identified him as ‘D.D Ersenbeing.
‘MacArthur reaches one end of the balcony, wheels, and steps out briskly in the opposite direction.
‘Below him, in the spacious palm-lined hotel lobby, newspapermen have finished polling one another on the chances of peace; all but one are convinced hostilities are very close. In the bar Sid Huff, having just finished a round of golf, is in very good spirits. He has three torpedo boats afloat and two almost ready for christening; presently John “Buck” Bulkeley will join him and they will discuss combining PT forces. In the nearby hotel pavilion Torso’s popular band is tuning up. The hotel ballroom is preparing to receive the Twenty-seventh Bombardment Group, twelve hundred airmen who are throwing a party for Brereton. The committee of officers making the arrangements has promised ‘the best entertainment this side of Minsky’s and among those in the audience will be the crews of the seventeen B-17s still at Clark Field. Twice have been ordered to Mindanao, where they would be out of the range of enemy aircraft, but they have stalled and temporized with this evening’s festivities in mind. The guest of honor will be leaving early—he is scheduled to fly to Java in the morning—but the rest of the fliers, including the Flying Fortress crews, won’t start breaking up until 2am Manila time. That will be 8am, December 7, in Hawaii.
‘At the far end of the balcony the General finishes another leg in his endless journey. He turns and steps off again.
‘Some 4,887 miles to the east of him, north of the Phoenix Islands, eight U.S. ships packed with planes, tanks, and American infantrymen are plunging through heavy seas towards Manila, shepherded by the heavy cruiser Pensacola.
‘MacArthur halts, pivots.’
I stopped the excerpt there, but it goes on like that until the end of the chapter on the next page. If you got annoyed reading that excerpt, then congratulations: you’re an astute reader of non-fiction with excellent taste.
There are three problems in this excerpt that should be obvious to anyone who is dimly aware of how the biography genre works.
First is the bourgeois, self-indulgent phrase ‘we picture him…’ Actually, Manchester, we don’t picture him. Why? Because we have no documentary evidence that what we’re ‘picturing’ actually happened in the way you said it did on December 7th 1941. Unlike a fiction novel, where you can have a fictitious character based on MacArthur darkly brooding over the harsh premonitions of war, a biography demands a narrative based on concrete evidence. As there’s none, this literary rumination should have been cut.
Second, notice the bloated, turgid paragraph that comes afterward. Manchester devotes an entire third of the page to completely useless information. I get what he was trying to do: that in the hours before America changed forever, a scene of normalcy existed in Manila. That’s nice, but it is still completely irrelevant for a biography of Douglas MacArthur. It also should have been cut.
Third and most egregiously, after indulging in literary imagination and narcissistic purple prose, Manchester immediately jumps back to focusing on MacArthur. The whiplash is so severe that he’s in danger of breaking the reader’s neck. The paragraphs where we ‘picture’ MacArthur are in fact single sentences where the slow, slow action takes place in extremely real time. Those are in turn followed by a huge paragraph of purple prose before alternating back to the extremely slow action focused on MacArthur.
It’s an exhausting experience to read and all of it should have been deleted at a stroke.
Much of the book suffers from the three problems listed above, but Page 203 managed to cram all of these failures of prose communication into one excruciating page. Throughout the book, a pseudo-literary character with pseudo-shakespearean character flaws is running parallel to the life of Douglas MacArthur, leaving the reader with little understanding of this most American of generals.
Conclusion
Biography is not literary fiction. A good biographer would reject the literary detours polluting American Caesar as inappropriate and wasteful. Literature has all the space to indulge the writer’s wildest ambitions for improving the craft of the novel (though not really but that’s a story for another day). By contract, non-fiction is confined by the facts. The biographer’s job is to place chronology on these events and write smart prose that vividly moves the action along so the reader’s enlightenment widens. Manchester did neither.
The life of Douglas MacArthur is on the shortlist of one of the most fascinating in military history. A real historian not trying to prove a point should take another shot at this subject.