WASHINGTON is the dreaming capital f America, stuffed with exiles who are al­ways saying it’s about time to go home but never go. The year’s turns into decades, and those who came for an extra year or two of school, or for some temporary job, tend at the last to be carried out feet first with, I am obliged to report, a grin on the face.

Let’s poke about the capital, you and I, with the understanding that I am no efficient guide, to insist that the only place you may eat is Old Keg-gut’s and the only place to stay is Dan­dydown’s Inn; the truth is, I have no idea the best places to eat or to stay. Newspaperfolk seldom do.

But I have indeed come to believe that the best place (as Eudora Welty said in a novel, through the character of a Mississippi schoolteacher herding kids about in a tornado) is here; we’re in the best place right here.

Assuming you arrive in Washing­ton at National Airport, the first thing to do, once one has thanked God the plane landed, is to admire the banks all fringed with willows like some sweet domesticated Babylon. The airport illustrates, by the way, the shortcomings of official high-priced wisdom and analysis. The next thing you should need is finding a place to stay. Finding an apartment in the capital is not that easy, nor cheap. The prices vary. You can find your place to stay at http://www.cosyrentals.com/london_apartments/en/. When I visited Brussels a while ago I found the perfect Cosyrental.com Brussels apartments and I enjoyed it during my visit.

Franklin Roosevelt, a forward-looking sort of man, immediately wanted five new hangars built. For that matter, back in 1937, he asked some of the powerful brains of the capital to prepare a forecast of tech­nology, and after suitable pondering they announced to him that people did not wish to fly any faster than they were doing in the 1930s, but people would indeed require far greater re­finements of service and luxury.

So much for the common crystal ball of Washington: After the airport opened in 1941, people said it was vastly too large, except for temporary war traffic. For decades, however, the same people have complained it is far too small. And it has turned out that we insist on going three times as fast and the only luxury we require in flying now is to get out of the plane without being permanently pressed into the shape of a sardine.

SINCE we should start somewhere, let’s start with Mr. Ernest Kroll, a typical Washington citizen to end all typical citizens, partly because he’s a trifle off the stan­dard curve. Let’s catch him as he exits from the Western Market, a neigh­borhood grocery, with two pears that he spent too much money for.

“Good pears,” he will greet us. “Cost too much, but they’re the kind they wrap in paper. I like to go in that grocery and buy some little thing to encourage them. I hate to see the city taken over by the giants. You ever deal with the Foggy Bottom grocery?

General MacArthur;leader and legend by William Manchester Born to the call of the bugle, fiercely grandiose and spectacularly brave, Douglas MacArthur has been dubbed the ‘American Caesar.’as a soldier-statesman—a general in three major wars, the architect of the Japanese constitution—he was a heroic and often controversial figure whose merciless ambition and overbearing pride eventually brought about his military downfall.

Here, William Manchester gives a forthright account of the man many regard as the greatest commander in American history.

E was a great thundering para‑dox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and out­rageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men. Flam­boyant and imperious, he could not acknowledge errors and tried to cover up his mistakes with sly, child­ish tricks. Yet he was also endowed with great personal charm, a will of iron and a soaring intellect. Unques­tionably he was the most gifted man-at-arms the United States has produced. He was also extraordin­arily brave. He seemed to seek death on battlefields, first as a lieutenant in the Philippines, then as a captain in Mexico, and finally as a general in three major wars.

Tall, lean, athletic, gentlemanly but firm, calm in crises, with tre­mendous reserves of physical and nervous energy, he became the apotheosis of leadership. Those clos­est to him venerated him, some of them comparing him to Alexander the Great—with Alexander a poor second—or saying, as General George Stratemeyer did, that he was “the greatest leader, the greatest commander, the greatest hero in American history.”

On the other side were those, far from his headquarters, who dispar­aged everything about him : his re­ligion, his rhetoric, even his cap. Nothing detrimental to him was too absurd to be believed. He used rouge, they said; he dyed his hair, he wore corsets and a wig. The cata­logue of myths about him is endless.

One of his difficulties was that he wasn’t a modern man. Like Church­ill and Roosevelt, both distant cous­ins of his, he was a Victorian, a nine­teenth century figure who spoke in the elevated manner but who, un­like them, never learned to mask his zeal with wit and grace.

Veterans of the First World War saw MacArthur very differently from veterans of the Second World War. Doughboys were proud to have fought under the General. Sec­ond World War GIs weren’t; by the 194os anti-authoritarianism had be­come dominant. MacArthur’s tur­gid communiqués, and his love of braid and ceremony, evoked mali­cious laughter all across the Pacific. His contemporaries then were far more impressed by his former aide Eisenhower, with his friendly nick­name and his infectious grin.

But judgement of him cannot end there. There was more to him than soldiering. On the level of folklore he had shown Americans how a champion’s life should be lived, and had invested new meanings in the concepts of honour, intrepidity and idealism. At his best, which is how he deserves to be remembered, he provided a legend which spans more than a century, for it germinated on an embattled Tennessee slope in 1863, 17 years before Douglas Mac­Arthur began his 84-year journey under the colours.

Reveille Douglas’s father, Arthur Mac­Arthur, fought heroically in the American Civil War. Beneath Mis­sionary Ridge, overlooking Chatta­nooga, the federal troops, including the 24th Wisconsin regiment, in which 18-year-old MacArthur was adjutant, were under siege. The ridge itself was in possession of the Confederate Army. On November 25, 1863, General Ulysses Grant or­dered a feint at the rifle pits at the base of the ridge to divert some of the enemy.

After the pits had been taken at bayonet point there occurred one of the most dramatic moves of the war. Exposed to plunging fire from above, the feinting federal troops were trapped, an exigency unantici­pated by their commanders. Logic suggested immediate retreat; they had fulfilled their mission. Instead they advanced upwards. In an act of magnificent insubordination, 18,000 blue-clad men, infuriated by the musketry scything their ranks, sprang at the heights on their own.

Grant wheeled on General Gor­don Granger : “Did you order them up ?” Granger answered, “No, they started up without orders.,” Fum­ing, Grant muttered, “Well, it will be all right if it turns out all right.”

The 24th’s first colour-bearer was bayoneted; the second was decapi­tated by a shell; then young Mac­Arthur grasped the flagstaff and leaped upward, crying, “On, Wis­consin ” His face blackened with smoke, his muddy uniform tattered and bloodstained, he reached the top of the precipice, and there—silhou­etted against the sky, where the whole regiment could see him—he planted the standard. Other blue-clad troops gained the crest at the same time, thus winning the battle and clearing the way for General Sherman’s march through Georgia.

Arthur MacArthur was promoted to major. During Sherman’ s drive to Atlanta, he fought in 13 battles, and was promoted again, becoming, at 19, the youngest full colonel in the Union Army.

After eight years he was temporarily ordered to New Or­leans. Here he fell in love with Mary Pinkney (Pinky) Hardy, a 22-year-old belle, daughter of a Nor­folk, Virginia, cotton broker. The couple were married in May 1875.

On January 26, 188o, Douglas MacArthur was born at what was then Fort Dodge, and is now part of Little Rock, Arkansas.