Mental Note: Gen. Douglas MacArthur--not all bad at all

I don't often read general's autobiographies. Perhaps it is my misanthropic streak but I tend not to enjoy reading about the formative years of famous people. Or perhaps it is that I am impatient, I keep wanting them to get to the action (ie., a first person account of whatever it is that they were famous for). Both Wes Clark's, Waging Modern War, and Tommy Franks, American Soldier, are cases in point. Essentially, I don't get much out of the genre on a personal level and being interested mainly in contemporary security it is only occassionally that I find them really useful for research purposes. I am aware that these things are the meat and bread of historians, but that's because they become more interesting the longer the person has been dead (and therefore the less likely they are to be gearing up a presidential election campaign).
Which is why I was surprised to find myself the other day while killing time before a meeting at the Royal United Services Institute engrossed by Douglas MacArthur's Reminiscences (1964). I was struck particularly, by this page describing a meeting between him and President Roosevelt in 1933 where they were discussing cuts to the National Guard's budget (Mac was Chief of Staff at the time):

The President turned the full vials of his sarcasm upon me. He was a
scorcher when aroused. The tension began to boil over. For the third
and last time in my life that paralyzing nausea began to creep over me. In my
emotional exhaustion I spoke recklessly and said something to the general effect
that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an
enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out
his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt. The
President, grew livid. 'You must not talk that way to the President!' he
roared. He was right, of course, right, and I knew it almost before the
words had left my mouth. I said that I was sorry and apologized. But
I felt my Army career was at an end. I told him he had my resignation as
Chief of Staff. as I reached the door his voice came with that cool
detachment which so reflected his extraordinary self-control, 'Don't be foolish,
Douglas; you and the budget must get together on this.'
Dern had shortly
reached my side and I could hear his gleeful tones, 'You've saved the
Army.' But I just vomited on the steps of the White House.

It takes a lot of courage to speak up like that, not physical courage which he also had but moral courage; I hope that if I were ever in a similar position I would do the same. In any case, it has slightly modified my opinion of MacArthur whom I have always seen as an overweening (and preening) ultra-egotist. Part of that, however, might be that the mental image of him in full dress uniform puking on the White House steps in some way balances this staged triumphal scene arriving ashore in the Philippines in October 1944: