How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

There was a single supreme commander for the Allied Powers, appointed by President Harry Truman. Truman picked Douglas MacArthur. Finally, MacArthur had a task that matched his sense of self. Simultaneously, he led the Japanese occupation, the U.S. military’s Far East Command, and the U.S. Army in the Far East. Later, while still holding all those positions, he would also take command of the United Nations forces in the Korean War. Though officially he answered to Washington and to the Allies’ Far Eastern Commission, in actuality MacArthur had, as he put it, “absolute control over almost 80-million people.” The U.S. ambassador to Japan gasped. “Never before in the history of the United States had such enormous and absolute power been placed in the hands of a single individual.”