United States
agement and relations is interlaced with some semipopular history of the evolving science on which the
development of safe and effective vaccines depended.
Sketching in the broader scientific context would have
produced a more balanced picture.
This small volume is not the best place to learn
about the international history of vaccines, the technical complexity of efforts to regulate the biologicals
market under federal law, or the history of the pharmaceutical industry. But taken on its own terms,
Galambos and Sewell's well-documented book is a
valuable and unusual contribution to the history of
specialized pharmaceutical endeavor in America, with
emphasis on the "networking" required on the long
road leading to each new vaccine.
GLENN SONNEDECKER
University of Wisconsin,
Madison
GEOFFREY PERRET. Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of
Douglas MacArthur. New York: Random House. 1996.
Pp. xii, 663. $32.50.
Douglas MacArthur remains one of the most controversial characters in American military history, and
there is no shortage of studies of either the man or the
numerous events in which he played a major role.
There is, however, quite a shortage of decent full
biographies, especially at a popular level. Scholars
possess all three volumes of D. Clayton James's definitive The Years of MacArthur (1970-1985), and over the
past decade historians such as Carol Petillo and Michael Schaller have reanalyzed specific aspects of
MacArthur's personality and career. General readers
desiring a complete, one-volume biography have had
to rely on older and substantially weaker works, most
notably William Manchester'sAmerican Ceasar (1978).
Despite some problems, Perret's book is a substantial
improvement over Manchester's in terms of research,
accuracy, and conclusions.
Perret has written numerous works on U.S. military
and World War II history, including Days of Sadness,
Years of Triumph (1973), A Country Made by War
(1989) There's a War to be Won (1991) and Winged
Victory (1993). He bridges the gap between academic
and popular history with a combination of solid research and great readability, and his biography of
MacArthur clearly exhibits these characteristics. It is
extensively researched in unpublished manuscript, archival, and oral history materials as well as published
sources; up to date on the relevant secondary scholarship; comprehensive; and well-written.
Perret's MacArthur is primarily a nineteenth-century military romantic who spent virtually all of his life
in the U.S. Army and who was driven by an exceptionally strong will to fulfill what his parents had convinced
him was a special destiny. The result was an extraordinary series of accomplishments and an equally extraordinary series of blunders and failures, as his
values and perceptions clashed with twentieth-century
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289
American civilian and global realities. The accomplishments include an exceptional performance in World
War I, reforms undertaken as superintendent of West
Point, many World War II campaigns in the Southwest
Pacific, the postwar occupation of Japan, and the
Inchon landing during the Korean War, which Perret
considers his most brilliant military move. On the
negative side was a personality that became progressively intolerant and intolerable as he aged and advanced in rank, a tendency to surround himself with
mediocrities and sycophants, some major military
blunders and miscalculations (in regard to the Philippines in 1941-1942, the Buna campaign in 1942, and
Chinese intervention in the Korean War), such disastrous political blunders and miscalculations as the
Bonus Army episode in 1932, his campaigns for the
presidency, and the insubordination that led to his
recall in 1951. Perret examines all of these in detail
(most extensively the World War II campaigns) and
with fresh perspectives that held MacArthur truly
responsible for some of them but unfairly blamed for
others, most notably the Bonus Army episode and the
fall of the Philippines. I do not find such revisionism
convincing, and overall I believe that Perret tends
incorrectly to blame MacArthur's errors on others.
The book is far from a whitewash of MacArthur,
however, and Perret is often savagely critical of his
subject. Furthermore, even the analyses and conclusions with which I disagree are well-researched, wellargued, and worth reading.
The volume is weakened by minor factual, geographic, and typographical errors, such as the confusion of Tampico with Vera Cruz (p. 69), making
Woodrow Wilson a native of Georgia rather than
Virginia (p. 75), placing Dwight Eisenhower in the
Pentagon before that building was completed (p. 214),
and locating Inchon thirty miles east rather than west
of Seoul (p. 545). And while the writing overall is
excellent, Perret seems to have a fondness for unusual
words found only in unabridged dictionaries. Nevertheless, this is the best single-volume, full biography of
MacArthur available, and it is recommended for the
general reader as well as undergraduate courses. Serious scholars will prefer James's three volumes, but
even they might enjoy reading and arguing with some
of the author's conclusions.
MARK A. STOLER
University of Vermont
HOWARD BALL. Hugo L. Black: Cold Steel Warrior. New
York: Oxford University Press. 1996. Pp. xiv, 305.
$35.00.
Hugo L. Black's place in historical memory has undergone a curious evolution. Appointed by Franklin D.
Roosevelt in 1937, when the fate of New Deal liberalism remained in doubt, Black's public image was that
of a loyal, effective, and controversial New Deal U.S.
senator from Alabama, ill-suited for service on the
nation's most powerful court. The revelation that
FEBRUARY 1998