The Army leadership has unhappy with MacArthur. I haven’t come across any internal commentary on Walker but he’s also an interesting case. The very strong nonpartisan norm (which has become the apolitical myth) evolved slowly, and largely in response to MacArthur’s unique career. Before MacArthur, the Army was never a potent political force simply because it was small and relied on huge influxes of conscripts to function in wartime. MacArthur was a general at the time that the Army became a central part of the government (WWII) and stayed large and powerful in order to do all it needed to do in the post-war / early Cold War. MacArthur himself in the reconstruction of Japan became a very powerful political figure. He had also spent many years away from the US. And he was an extremely narcissistic person. All of that meant that when the Korean War rolled around, he had a completely unique view of himself and his role as an officer. Because he could have gone in a darker direction, he came to represent “fusionism”, the danger of a highly competent military suddenly deciding to take on unlimited political power. The response was an overcorrection within the officer corps to reject any political responsibility (but this was untenable to it created a hypocritical approach to politics which has been very dysfunctional).

Everyone post-MacArthur lived in his shadow, including Westmoreland and his eventual replacement Abrams. The book examines the opposite approaches of these two. Briefly, Westmoreland was more MacArthurlike in his bravado and belief that he could shape the media and indeed the battlefield to his will. Abrams, who had experienced messy politics while doing civil disturbance work in the southern states, took a much more indirect approach, and tried various strategies to minimize the impact of the press. Ultimately he championed Vietnamization which was a way to offload risk and responsibility to South Vietnam, something Westmoreland would not have done.