Douglas MacArthur II


Douglas MacArthur II was an American diplomat. During his diplomatic career, he served as United States ambassador to Japan, Belgium, Austria, and Iran, as well as Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs.

Life

MacArthur was the son of Captain Arthur MacArthur III and Mary McCalla MacArthur; the daughter of Bowman H. McCalla, granddaughter of Col Horace Binney Sargent, and the great-granddaughter of Lucius Manlius Sargent. Named for his uncle, General Douglas MacArthur, he was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1909.
He graduated from Milton Academy in Milton, Mass., and from Yale College, Class of 1932. He married Laura Louise Barkley on August 21, 1934, the daughter of future U.S. Vice President Alben Barkley.

Diplomatic career

After serving as an Army officer, MacArthur began his Foreign Service career in 1935 with a post in Vancouver. He was assigned to Vichy France during the early years of World War II, served as secretary of the U.S. Embassy there from 1940 to 1942, and was interned in Baden, Baden Germany with other American diplomatic staff and civilians for two years after the US broke relations with the Vichy government. Following an internee exchange in March 1944, he served as part of General Dwight Eisenhower's political staff, and then led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Paris until 1948. He went on to become chief of the State Department's Division of Western European Affairs in 1949, where he assisted in the formation of NATO, and served as Counselor of the State Department from 1953 to 1956, where he led the U.S. negotiations for the SEATO treaty.

Ambassador to Japan

MacArthur was appointed as U.S. Ambassador to Japan in December 1956, and presented his credentials in February 1957.
During his four years in Tokyo, MacArthur oversaw the negotiation of the mutual security treaty between the United States and Japan, which was officially amended in January 1960 amid widespread public controversy and demonstrations in Japan. It was revealed in 1974 that MacArthur negotiated a secret agreement with Japanese foreign minister Aiichiro Fujiyama to allow the movement of American nuclear weapons through Japanese territory. It was also revealed, through documents declassified in the 2000s, that MacArthur pressured the Japanese judiciary, including Chief Justice Kotaro Tanaka, to uphold the legality of the United States military presence in Japan following a lower court decision that found it to be unconstitutional.
MacArthur appeared on the cover of the June 27, 1960 issue of Time magazine, in which he was characterized as "the principal architect of present-day U.S. policy toward Japan."

Other posts

Following his time in Japan, MacArthur served as Ambassador to Belgium, Assistant Secretary of State, Ambassador to Austria and Ambassador to Iran. While in the latter post, he escaped an attempted kidnapping by Iranian extremists in 1970.

Later life and death

MacArthur died in Washington, D.C. in 1997.

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