It was a fateful moment. By dint of his arrogance, foolishness, and vainglory MacArthur was about to take a smaller war that was already winding down and expand it to include as an adversary a Communist superpower thereby adding more than two years to its life; he was to damage profoundly America’s relations with China; and he was to help start a chain of events that was poisonous in terms of domestic politics—feeding political paranoia, giving the paranoics what they needed most: a tangible enemy.
