Nevertheless, Marshall assured MacArthur that “every day” he could hold out brought the army closer to an answer. In the meantime, MacArthur could take pride that his defense of the Philippines had become, as Marshall put it, “an epic of this war.” Still astonished at how fast the fight-them-on-the-beaches strategy had collapsed, Eisenhower found the praise sickening but saw its purpose. “MacArthur is as big a baby as ever,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary. “But we’ve got to keep him fighting.”
