Engineers From The United States

"Not since the beginning of the war has a story been so overplayed and commercialized as General MacArthur's defense of Bataan. It is natural and desirable that we should play up the activities of our own generals and especially a general of the caliber of MacArthur. But in the interests of a well-informed public opinion it is essential that we maintain some semblance of proportion. What was gained by giving the impression that the arrival of General MacArthur in Australia foreshadowed the beginning of a great offensive against Japan? What is the point of carrying dispatches about Australia's being "built into a great Allied fortress"? How does one build into a "great Allied fortress" a continent almost exactly the size of continental United States? This kind of editing merely plays into the hands of our enemies... The defense of Bataan was doomed from the start, as every responsible newspaperman knew, yet many papers raised up the hopes by failing to put the story in its proper perspective. The defense of Bataan and the siege of Corregidor were comparable in this war to the siege of Tobruk, and they did not compare in importance to the defense of Malta. Yet who can tell the name of the commander who held Tobruk or the leader of the men at Malta?"

"On April 12, 1951, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the Pacific, was relieved of his command, stripped of all authority and ordered to leave Japan. He was dismissed with as little consideration as though he had been a new office boy found pilfering pennies from the cash register. Apparently it was intended that he be humiliated and that he return disgraced. General MacArthur had to his credit 52 years of loyal and unquestioned service. He was a soldier. He obeyed orders. He returned to his native land, but not as a broken, beaten soldier. He was a "Daniel come to judgement" — with a vibrant message that thrilled, inspired and re-created hope in the hearts of his countrymen. He began the task of revitalizing the nation."

"During the year just past there came to this country from across the sea a man — a leader of men. He was a tall man, clear of eye, imposing in stature and lofty in mien who had met and wrestled with this "greatest scourge of mankind" and who understands fully the determining concepts and the motivating forces of international Communism. He shapes his every utterance, act and deed in consonance with this understanding. He is a man of such broad vision and knowledge that the Atlantic Ocean becomes merely a peaceful lake, although enclosed by the shores of continents, and the broad Pacific, a benign moat but on which can be carried the thriving commerce of billions of men. This man has such a knowledge of the historical past and such an insight into a divinely ordained future that he fashions the deeds of today to mesh with a tomorrow of one thousand years from now. This man is known to the world as General of the Army Douglas MacArthur."

"Douglas MacArthur was the last great 19th century soldier, while George Marshall was the first great 20th century soldier."

"Even allowing for the failures, the disappointments, the scorn and rebuffs, wasn't MacArthur, as William Manchester claims, the greatest soldier in American history? Not in my view. MacArthur was too difficult a subordinate to be an entirely successful commander. He created far more problems for Marshall, Stimson, Roosevelt and Truman than any general has the right to make, especially in time of war. He also spent time and energy toying with political ambitions when everything that was in him should have gone into fighting the enemy. At best he was probably the second-greatest soldier in American history, second only, that is, to Ulysses S. Grant. And along the way he did lead the most adventurous and dramatic life in American history, which makes him a gift to biographers and a subject of enduring interest to Americans."

"MacArthur's most obvious trait was his vanity, which is often seized on as if it were the key to the man. It seems to me, however, that while MacArthur was infuriatingly vain, was egotistical, was fascinated by himself, he was not in the deepest sense ego-driven. The motor that powered his ascent was his amazing willpower, the same willpower that made him control his body under fire, that made him study his way to the top at West Point, that made him impose his strategy on a reluctant government in World War II. MacArthur's parents had planted a vision of himself in the deepest, richest soil of his character. That vision never changed from childhood to old age. He had a destiny to fulfill. The thirst for medals, trophies, publicity, flattery and an adoring staff was vanity, but more than vanity. These were his compass bearings, the way he confirmed that he was on the right track to his destination. But it was implacable, inexhaustible will that was the engine taking him toward his goal. it was that will that made him a difficult subordinate and distanced him from other men — at times even distanced him from himself — yet it finally got him where he intended to go."

"No man of our time is more authentically the voice of real America than Douglas MacArthur. To the millions who lined the streets of our great cities to cheer and weep as he passed by, he is the personification of the American tradition and history. As he rode up great avenues 'midst vast throngs, the people through misty eyes saw in him the noble leaders of the past- Washington, Lee, Grant. And when he addressed the Congress of the United States, once again Americans heard the great truths which many, starved for them, never expected to hear again, and those who never heard them before wept unashamedly. In this stalwart, romantic figure, the great hopes, dreams and ideals of our country come to life again. He stimulates renewed faith that the land of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln still lives in the hearts of the people. I shall never forget the light on General MacArthur's face and the deep feeling in his voice when he said to me — "They are a wonderful people — the American people — quick, impulsive, generous, whole-hearted! You can always trust in them and believe in them, for in their hearts they are good and true; in a crisis, they will do the right thing.""

"He carried a different level of prestige. I don't think anybody would fool with him. MacArthur was MacArthur and everybody was subordinate to MacArthur. For his part and with regard to leadership, MacArthur commanded a theater, and of course his responsibilities far transcended those of my dads. He was a superb leader and was probably the greatest general this country has ever produced."

"I was still in Europe at the time. Truman said he had the authority to relieve him and he did it. I have never made up my mind whether he was right or not, but I happened to be with a British unit the night we learned of MacArthur's dismissal. The British had a brigade in Korea at the time and the British officers in the Mess were very anti-MacArthur and celebrating his demise. I think MacArthur was a magnificent general, but he became more and more insulated from the world by his staff, many of whom had been with him since the Bataan days. I think that was part of the problem. He was not a young man at the time of Korea. I think, perhaps, he got too dependent on his staff officers and certain things happened which were not in MacArthur's best interest... Even after MacArthur was relieved by the President of the United States he had a tickertape parade in New York City and he made two great speeches, one to Congress and one about Duty, Honor, Country. The Duty, Honor, Country speech is one of the greatest ever made by a military man, and he made it without a note at the age of seventy-five. I believe Douglas MacArthur in 1945 could have come home and run for president and won going away. He was worshipped at the end of the war."

"But he was still not finished. If his body was weakening, his mind remained strong, and in October he began to compose his memoirs. Sitting in he same chair, he filled hundreds of legal pads with virtually no cross-outs or erasures before he was finished the following August. The result of the ten-month marathon, Reminiscences, was pure MacArthur, and also an excellent summary of his life, if you weren't interested in his first marriage, which he left out entirely. But that didn't bother conservative publishing magnate Henry Luce, who bought the rights to be serialized in seven installments for Life magazine and then presented in book form, for a cool $900,000 (almost $8,000,000 in 2022). Reviews were predictably mostly anti-Mac, but the book sold well and probably earned Luce his money back. It was MacArthur's last kudo. Lifelong good health had taught him to avoid doctors, and by this time his liver was shot. There was nothing left but the one-way ticket to Walter Reed in early March 1964. he lasted just over a month, dying of biliary cirrhosis on April 5. No surprise, Doug left elaborate instructions for his funeral, which Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, only elaborated on, leading to a three-stage event. It began in Manhattan with a public viewing and televised procession wheeling the coffin to a special train, which then took it to Washington. There it lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, with 150,000 people filing past, before it was taken to Pinky's hometown, Norfolk, Virginia, where the old city hall had been turned into the Douglas MacArthur Memorial. Here, in an elaborate sepulcher, he was laid to rest, joined finally by Jean, who continued living in the Waldorf Towers until she died at the age of 101."

"For Douglas MacArthur, exile was more Elba than Saint Helena, not Washington and the White House but the Waldorf and New York City- both certainly bearable. He never meant to stay, yet settled in comfortably. First Army Headquarters in Lower Manhattan gave him a four-room office suite, and each morning he arrived to read the cable traffic. Later in the day he and Jean might be seen prowling the smart shops along Fifth Avenue, lunching at someplace elegant, followed, perhaps, by a night on Broadway or at a sporting event, seated in the owner's box, cheering on Gotham's teams with the intensity of a teen, especially if it was Jackie Robinson, his favorite and most admired athlete. On the other hand, nanny Ah Chue never went out, becoming a Waldorf recluse, while little Arthur quietly drifted into his own world of music and anonymity, choosing Columbia, not West Point, and eventually living under an assumed name, his father's persona too much for him."

"MacArthur always knew he was at the center of the world stage, and he had no intention of allowing the Philippines to fall without a struggle of legendary proportions. The very real difficulties he faced were daunting enough, and it is doubtful that he or any other American general could have saved the islands, but his own and others' errors put his forces at grave risk from the very first day of war."

"If the disaster at Malaya discredited the British Empire, the doomed defense of the Philippines turned an American general, Douglas MacArthur, into an international hero and ensured that the future war with Japan would be fought under his influence. It was one of the most bizarre twists of World War II, for MacArthur made a defeat look like a victory of sorts, largely because of the dogged resistance of his common soldiers against what appeared to be overwhelming odds. A pioneer in army public relations even before World War I, MacArthur had already established his credentials as a hero of the Republican Party, an opponent of American subversives from the Right and Left (mostly left), a champion of the Chinese and Filipinos, and an outspoken critic of the British influence on American foreign policy. One of his contemporaries characterized him as the greatest actor ever to serve in the U.S. Army, and another observed that MacArthur did not have a staff but a court. His behavior under stress- including combat- confounded worshipers and detractors alike; he could be absolutely insensitive to danger, yet he also shrank from direct contact with combat troops, especially the sick and wounded. He had a habit of becoming ill at times of crisis, and his behavior even when he was young (and in 1941 he was sixty) suggested chemical depression and a tendency to hyperventilate and vomit. He always kept a physician in close attendance, and he observed his meal and rest schedule with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. Without doubt, he understood American politics and the role of the media in shaping policy. FDR once characterized MacArthur as one of the two most dangerous demagogues in American politics, the other being Huey Long."

"King remained unconvinced that the Philippines should be the principal force of a Central Pacific campaign. He, in fact, agreed with MacArthur that the original War Plan Orange made little sense, since there was no beleaguered American force in Manila Bay to rescue. The only thing in need of rescue was MacArthur's beleaguered reputation, and King saw no point in doing that either, since liberating Luzon would simply kill thousands of Japanese and Filipinos, not to mention American soldiers, without any important impact on Japan's air and naval power or industrial activity. King expressed his doubts by challenging the selection of Palau as an objective and pointing instead to Formosa as a safer place than the Philippines to interdict Japanese overseas trade."

"The U.S. Navy hated MacArthur, really hated him. Early in the Pacific War it began agitating for an overall command in the area, the idea being to get MacArthur and his troops under its control. Believing Marshall to share their antipathy, the Navy enlisted his support and was delighted when he appeared to give it. "But on one condition," he said. "If we're going to have an overall commander in the Pacific, there isn't any question about it, you will have to pick MacArthur- on the basis of pure competence alone." The Navy abruptly abandoned the idea. Later, when the Navy wished to bypass the liberation of the Philippines in favor of operations against Formosa, it was Marshall who again intervened to insist MacArthur be allowed to fulfill his pledge to the Philippine people, to whom he had vowed, "I shall return." He was given the go-ahead to do so, and, of course, was hailed as the greatest hero of the Pacific war."

"In fact, however, the "antagonism" was entirely one-sided, and never once did Marshall harm MacArthur either as a man or as a soldier. On the other hand, MacArthur seemed to take pleasure in damaging Marshall's career. It was he, while Chief of Staff during the interwar years, who had deliberately blocked Marshall's advancement. It was he who had sneered at his appointment as Chief of Staff when WWII began. It was Marshall he blamed for starving him of supplies during the Pacific campaigns, sneered at him as a chairborne soldier, a Roosevelt stooge. Then he would add, "And no friend of mine." Marshall must have known all about these snide remarks on MacArthur's part. Not only did he ignore them, but he never once allowed them to influence the respect in which he held the Far East commander or to deflect him from giving him all the support and protection of which he had need. Twice during WWII he saved him from what, for MacArthur, would have been a fate worse than death- obscurity."

"Because Douglas MacArthur disliked, mistrusted, and resented George Marshall it should not be thought that his prejudices were reciprocated. They were not, and maybe that was the trouble. For almost the whole of these two men's lives and professional careers, they had shared the same vocation, served in the same Army, fought in the same wars. Wherever in the world GI boots had stamped to attention, they both had taken the salute, watched a regiment march-past, celebrated a soldierly anniversary. There was no battlefield where U.S. troops had fought on which they had not ducked the same shellfire, dodged the same bullets, faced the same setbacks, savored the same victories. It was true that fate had ordained that it was MacArthur who commanded the vast armies in the field and Marshall who stayed behind to manipulate the martial pieces on the global chessboard. But if any envy had been engendered as a result, surely it should have been on Marshall's part. Like the director who masterminds the movements of crew, cameras, and cast, it was Marshall, the "organizer of victory," as Churchill called him, who might have been expected to show resentment when the limelight was focused elsewhere. By no word of gesture had he ever done so."

"Many years before Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur, there was another prima donna general, the renowned John C. Frémont. For issuing orders authorizing the emancipation of slaves in Missouri without presidential permission, Lincoln fired him on the spot. As for MacArthur, he should have known better: the same thing had also happened to his own father. Back in the early 1900s, General Arthur MacArthur, military governor of the Philippines, made the stupid mistake of not recognizing the superior authority of the civilian governor, William Howard Taft, who later became president. Years later, when MacArthur's turn came to be promoted to Army Chief of Staff, Taft blackballed him."

"That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns..."

"As for whether Perl 6 will replace Perl 5, yeah, probably, in about 40 years or so."

"Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."

"Jesse Vincent: My dog is Web 2.0. Prove me wrong. Larry: Does your dog have a long tail? Damian Conway: If you enjoyed these practices, find 245 more like this in this book. Larry: Does your dog have a long tail?"

"When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?"

"Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon."

"…I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon."

"There's really no way to fix this and still keep Perl pathologically eclectic."

"The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other."

"The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris."

"...Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, "If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you." Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course."

"[Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby."

"The only reason I've managed to run this open source project, is that I have learned to delegate even the delegation to other people. (final words of the video)."

"As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language."

"Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals... And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them."

"But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like we were insane. Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid prototyping."

"I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right... But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncracies. I'm just better at it than most."

"Suppose you went back to Ada Lovelace and asked her the difference between a script and a program. She'd probably look at you funny, then say something like: Well, a script is what you give the actors, but a program is what you give the audience. That Ada was one sharp lady..."

"There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs."

"If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages."

"How do you type it? With your keyboard."

"Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things."

"I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. (laughter) But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works."

"So... Perhaps the Perl 6 slogan should be "All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us". We'll get to that."

"And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up."

"But I'm not here to talk about postmodernism. I tried to do that last spring, and afterwards I was thoroughly deconstructed by the deconstructionists for attempting to deconstruct deconstructionism. At least, that's the construction I put on their construction of it. I was talking about postmodern culture, and they thought I was talking about postmodern literature. Not at all the same thing!"

"People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves."

"When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi."

"The previous line contains the naughty word '$&'.\n if /(ibm|apple|awk)/; # :-)"

"The autodecrement is not magical."

"Remember though that THERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR."

"Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one."