General MacArthur Comes Home: Sort Of

Douglas MacArthur was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He commanded Allied forces across the Pacific in World War Two. He accepted Japan's surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September second, nineteen forty-five. He led United Nations forces in Korea. He was relieved of command by President Truman in April nineteen fifty-one, the most public firing of a general in American history.

He is buried in Norfolk, Virginia.

The reason is somewhat indirect. MacArthur's mother, Mary Pinkney Hardy MacArthur, was born and raised in Norfolk. As a boy, Douglas had spent time visiting her family's home there, a house called Riveredge. When Norfolk invited him back in nineteen fifty-one to dedicate a park honoring his mother, the general came, and decided, apparently on that visit, that Norfolk was where he wanted to be buried.

The memorial that houses his tomb and his archives occupies the former Norfolk City Hall building at Bank Street, a domed nineteenth-century structure repurposed into a museum and mausoleum after MacArthur reached an agreement with then-mayor W. Fred Duckworth in nineteen sixty. It opened in nineteen sixty-four.

Inside, nine galleries trace his career from the Philippines to Japan to Korea. His tomb, and that of his wife Jean, lies in the rotunda. The archive of his papers is available to researchers by appointment. Outside, the city moves around the memorial as cities do around the graves of generals, with a certain respectful inattention, day after day.