MacArthur returns

Gregory Peck is the kind of actor most of us think of as forever playing heroes. Like James Stewart, he made a career out of playing men who were upstanding, warm of heart and of strong principles, who stood for the little people, democracy and the American way. He won his one and only Oscar for playing the most famous of them, Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird.

So it is quite interesting to see him play a man who had none of those qualities - General Douglas MacArthur, in tonight's biopic MacArthur (World, 9.30pm). It is a decent, faithful, warts-and-all account of the life of a soldier who ended his career in disgrace.

MacArthur, who was fond of the expression 'old soldiers never die, they just fade away' was a megalomaniacal nuisance who ruled post-war Japan like a military dictator, and nearly triggered World War III in 1951.

It takes all Peck's acting skills to make him appear an even remotely sympathetic character because, by common consent, he was not an easy man to get along with.

Born into a military family (he served as adjutant to his own father, General Arthur MacArthur, in Tokyo) Douglas became chief of American forces in the Pacific in 1941, and, far away from his masters in the White House, grew more and more eccentric, and convinced that he alone had the right to decide American military policy in the region.

He led a controversial campaign against the Japanese, infuriating not just his fellow Allied military leaders in the region - who accused him of unnecessary grandstanding - but his seniors in the Pentagon, who felt he demanded men and resources to satisfy his ego rather than any military need. After the war, he ran Japan like a fief, with little control from Washington.

Maybe the US government deserved what was coming next for letting him get away with all this for so long. Whether the Korean War began with an invasion from the North - or whether it was the product of a tripartite conspiracy between MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek and South Korea's president Syngman Rhee to force the Americans into all-out war against the Chinese communists, with the aim of eventually allowing Chiang to return there - we will probably never know. What is certain is that MacArthur flouted president Harry Truman's orders, contradicted him in public, and threatened to bomb Manchuria.