Perhaps you should take your own advice for once. Having read a rather solid biography on De Gaulle in French, I was well aware of this. It's nothing new, contrary to what you seem to think: "this has been recognised for decades", your own words. From your own quote of my words it should have been obvious that these contacts were known.
So you concede the point that De Gaulle had a hand in planning a military coup to place himself in power in 1958?
I'm sure you are aware that the Allies only grudgingly accepted De Gaulle as representative of the free French - in part because of his own undiplomatic behaviour, which has remained his trademark when president. I'm not sure how De Gaulle, being De Gaulle, deciding to set up the French government for himself amounts to a coup. But if setting up democratic government instead of military occupation represents a coup in your judgement, than I have little problem with that. (De Gaulle himself soon regretted his actions, withdrawing from active politics within a few years of his reorganizing civil government.) His behaviour towards the French republic - which he held in very high regard, contrary to the Vichy dictatorship - has, in fact been rather consistent. In '58 he returned and solved by instituting the present day presidential republic, the Algerian crisis. and when confronted by a downvote to his own referendum after '68, he retired for the last time from active politics. Contrary to the peculiar idea of French military being prone to military coups (which ones? one might ask), De Gaulle represents the spirit of the French military in support of democratic government. It takes some rather twisted arguing to arrive at the opposite conclusion.
This is a strawman. Multiple strawmen, to be exact. I never once said that De Gaulle wasn't a democrat, nor did I say the French were particularly prone to military coups. He planned a coup in 1958 - the leglislature recognised that changes needed to be made, and recalled him to power before the coup, as it was obvious what would happen if the did not - to avert a civil war caused by the very weak democracy of the Fourth Republic, and his effective coup - in reality, it was mostly his supporters on the ground - against the American occupational authority in 1944 was replacing two unrepresentative regimes; a military occupational authority which often dealt with Vichyites, and the unconstitutional, dictatorial, quisling government of Vichy itself.
These are both pro-democracy coups, which are attempted from time to time in dictatorships, but almost never as successful as in France last century. A few Latin American coups spring to mind, but there were far more of the opposite, and most dictatorships fall through evolution or revolution, rather than coups.
And once again I'll ignore your personal innuendo.
Then please stop being overly pedantic and using strawmen. I'm not using either tactic on you, nor did I use any
ad hominems earlier, which, as you didn't pursue the argument here, I guess you have conceded.
How unfortunate that in part politically motivated and politcally thwarted attempts came to naught. One wonders how such a man could have risen through the ranks in the first place - and given the task of reorganizing Japan's democracy. At any rate, as your own resume explains, there was no court martial.
He did an excellent job reorganising Japan. He organised it too well, in fact; he instituted the idea of a peaceful Japan so well that when the Korean War broke out, and many American officials wanted to re-arm the island nation, the Japanese weren't interested. Many of the conservative politicians MacArthur barred from office, and even imprisoned, were also recalled to power by his replacement, due to their clout with vested business interests, which the US needed now. MacArthur was also very lenient on the Japanese Socialists and Communists, which caused him problems in his quest for the Republican Presidential nomination.
MacArthur rose through the ranks through a combination of his father' name and genuine talent; the man was a pretty good mid-level officer, and had a talent for administration. Eisenhower was MacArthur's Chief of Staff in Manila at one point, and credited MacArthur with teaching him how to be a good administrator. He was also very brave; he often led his men fro the front during WWI, and tried to do the same during WWII, only to be talked down by his own men, who knew that the most-senior general in the East Asian region was too valuable to risk on he front lines.
MacArthur's positive attributes got him promoted. His negative attributes far outweighed those attributes, but in peacetime they were largely ignorable; he was hardly the only general to have a huge ego, he was safely tucked away in the Philippines for most of the inter-war period, he obeyed the orders of the Republican Administrations of the time without question - leading to the much-maligned Bonus Army incident - and his too-close relationship with various Philippines officials went unnoticed by his superiors.
Once war broke out, however, he was hopelessly out of his depth, and his huge ego led him to try to disguise this through lies, fabrications, and obfuscations. I he'd spent his career as a staff officer, he'd have likely been a very good one. The same as a noncom. But he was not cut out to be a general, and certainly not a five-star general in charge of the entire Pacific War. He was able to hide his faults long enough to make himself irreplaceable, however, and this led to his appointment as SCOP-J (Supreme Commander Occupying Powers - Japan) immediately after the war. By then his superiors knew of his faults, but it would have been politically difficult to remove him; as soon as he slipped up with Truman, he was ousted, and rightly so.
