I LEARNED AS A CHILD that Douglas MacArthur was a hero. He had, after all, rescued my mother, Leanne Blinzler Noe (and her sister Ginny and father Lee and thousands of other Allied civilians), from Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila at the end of World War II. My mother wrote a letter of gratitude to the general in 1957, to which he responded briefly but sincerely on his official letterhead—and which she has gifted me.
On a recent trip to the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, I tell the chief archivist, James Zobel, about that letter. “Wait a minute,” he says, clacking frantically on his computer. He dashes inside a mammoth vault of boxes containing millions of MacArthur-related documents and pulls one out. He lifts a pile of papers, and there, on top, my heartbeat quickening, I glimpse my mother’s schoolgirl-perfect penmanship.
