On May 12, 1962, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, age 82, delivered his farewell address to the cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he had set academic records as a student that remain unsurpassed and where as superintendent in the early 1920s he brought the curriculum of the revered institution into the 20th century.
In accepting the school’s Sylvanus Thayer Medal for outstanding service to his country, MacArthur organized his speech around the sacred motto of West Point: “Duty, Honor, Country.” It was the last public act of a military career that spanned more than a half-century; that witnessed triumphs and tragedies, glory and disgrace.
To author and Pacific War veteran William Manchester, MacArthur was “the most-gifted man-at-arms this nation has produced.” To army veteran and military historian Geoffrey Perret, he was the America’s greatest soldier of the 20th century.
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