1952 to Death

In the 1952 Republican presidential nomination contest, MacArthur was not a candidate and instead endorsed Senator Robert Taft of Ohio; rumors were rife Taft offered the vice presidential nomination to MacArthur. Taft did persuade MacArthur to be the keynote speaker at the 1952 Republican National Convention. The speech was not well received. Taft lost the nomination to Eisenhower; MacArthur was silent during the campaign, which Eisenhower won by a landslide. Once elected, Eisenhower consulted with MacArthur and adopted his suggestion of threatening the use of nuclear weapons to end the war.

In 1956, Congressman Joseph William Martin, Jr. introduced a proposal to elevate MacArthur to six star rank. This caused problems for President Eisenhower, and the issue died in the Senate. MacArthur became head of Remington Rand Corporation and spent the remainder of his life in New York.

MacArthur and his second wife, Jean Marie Faircloth MacArthur, spent the last years of their life together in the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers (a part of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel), a gift from Conrad Hilton, the owner of the hotel.

The Waldorf became the setting for an annual birthday party on January 26, thrown by the general's former deputy chief engineer, Major General Leif J. Sverdrup. At the 1960 celebration for MacArthur's 80th, many of his friends were startled by the general's obviously deteriorating health; the next day he collapsed and was rushed into surgery at St. Luke's Hospital to control a severely swollen prostate.

After his recovery, MacArthur methodically began to carry out the closing act of his life. He visited the White House for a final reunion with Eisenhower. In 1961, he made a "sentimental journey" to the Philippines, where he was decorated by President Carlos P. Garcia with the Philippine Legion of Honor, rank of Chief Commander. MacArthur also accepted a $900,000 advance from Henry Luce for the rights to his memoirs, and began writing the volume that would eventually be published as Reminiscences.

President John F. Kennedy solicited MacArthur's counsel in 1961. The first of two meetings was shortly after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. MacArthur was extremely critical of the Pentagon and its military advice to Kennedy. MacArthur also cautioned the young President to avoid a U.S. military build-up in Vietnam, pointing out domestic problems should be given a much greater priority. Shortly prior to his death he gave similar advice to the new President, Lyndon Johnson.

In 1962, West Point honored the increasingly frail MacArthur with the Sylvanus Thayer Award, an award for outstanding service to the nation; the year before, the award had gone to Eisenhower. MacArthur's speech to the cadets in accepting the award had as its theme Duty, Honor, Country:

The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country. Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps. I bid you farewell."

MacArthur spent the last years of his life finishing his memoirs; he died on April 5, 1964, of biliary cirrhosis, before their publication in book form - they had begun to appear in serialized form in Life Magazine in the months just prior to his death. After he died, his wife Jean continued to live in the Waldorf Towers penthouse until her own death. The couple are entombed together in downtown Norfolk, Virginia; their burial site is in the rotunda of a museum (formerly the Norfolk City Hall) dedicated to his memory, and there is a shopping mall (MacArthur Center) named for him across the street from the memorial. General MacArthur chose to be buried in Norfolk because of his mother's ancestral ties to the city.

MacArthur wanted his family to remember him for more than being a soldier. He said, "By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder—infinitely prouder—to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentiality of death; the other embodies creation and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will remember me not from the battle but in the home repeating with him our simple daily prayer, 'Our Father who art in heaven."MacArthur's nephew, Douglas MacArthur II (a son of his brother Arthur) served as a diplomat for several years, including the post of Ambassador to Japan and several other countries.