On February 12, 1942, in a Lincoln’s Birthday speech in Boston, Wendell Willkie, the defeated Republican presidential candidate in 1940, urged that MacArthur be recalled to Washington and placed in charge of directing the global war. “Bring home General MacArthur,” Willkie thundered. “Place him at the very top. Keep bureaucratic and political hands off him. . . . Put him in supreme command of our armed forces under the president. Then the people of the United States will have reason to hope that skill, not bungling and confusion, directs their efforts.”25
