He remembered meeting Truman twice during the 1930s but could not have imagined that the new president had reached the startling conclusion that his predecessor had rescued the wrong general from the Philippines. “I don’t see why in Hell Roosevelt didn’t order Wainwright home and let MacArthur be a martyr,” Truman had privately written in 1945. “We’d have had a real general and a fighting man if we had Wainwright and not a play actor and a bunko man such as we have now.”
