During the last days of June and the first week of July 1948, America teetered on the precipice of war with the Soviet Union. The flashpoint was Berlin. The fuse had been ignited months earlier by questions concerning the future of Germany that begged for prompt answers and decisive action. Should the U.S. abandon hope that Germany would be reunited? Did it have any alternative but to accept the east-west division and to work to integrate the economy and politics of West Germany with Western Europe? Did the Soviets intend to draw the western zones of Germany into their orbit? If so, this would pose “the greatest threat to security of all Western Nations, including the US,” wrote Secretary Marshall in February 1948.1 He would risk war to stop them.
By June, U.S. policy makers and their Western European counterparts finally made some choices. They agreed to merge their three zones into a single West German state. Their plan was to integrate the new state into the Western European community of nations, fit it into the Marshall Plan, and stabilize its economy through currency reform. As if these moves were not provocative enough, Marshall assigned Undersecretary Bob Lovett to help Senator Arthur Vandenberg draft and pass the so-called Vandenberg Resolution, the precursor of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Vandenberg Resolution, officially designated Senate Resolution 239, authorized the U.S. under Article 51 of the UN Charter to enter into regional and other collective “self-defense” alliances, provided its national security was threatened.2 On June 11, 1948, the Senate, after a single day of debate, approved the resolution by an overwhelming bipartisan vote. It was obvious to Joseph Stalin, his comrades in the Kremlin, and the rest of the world that the Vandenberg Resolution was aimed at a military alliance of the United States with the non-communist nations in Europe.
It was currency reform, however, not the Vandenberg Resolution, that pushed the Soviets and the U.S. to the brink of war. “Currency,” as Daniel Yergin wrote in Shattered Peace, is a “symbol of sovereignty and a mechanism for exercising sovereignty.”3 On June 18, General Lucius Clay announced that the Western allies would begin circulating the “west mark” (eventually the deutsche mark) into West Germany, but not the western sectors of Berlin. As expected, the Soviets retaliated, declaring that they would introduce their own currency, the “ostmark,” into East Germany and all of Berlin, including the western zones of the city that had been allocated to the Allies. This attempt to exercise sovereignty over West Berlin could not be tolerated. On June 23, the western allies announced that they would circulate the west mark in their sectors of Berlin. The next day, the same day that Governor Dewey accepted the Republican nomination, Stalin made a decision that he would later regret. He ordered that all overland access to West Berlin from West Germany via roads, rail, and canals be blockaded. Electricity from East Berlin was shut off. With little more than a month’s supply of coal and food, 2.4 million West Berliners were threatened with a complete lack of electric power and, much worse, starvation.
The west mark triggered the crisis. But it was clear that Stalin intended to force the Americans and their allies out of Berlin and perhaps out of West Germany as well. The situation was fraught with danger. In Berlin, Clay regarded the blockade as an act of war. Though the Red Army in and around Berlin far outnumbered Allied ground forces, Clay repeatedly recommended that the Western allies should try to break the blockade by sending armored convoys by rail or autobahn into West Berlin. This risked a shooting war with little prospect of success. The alternative was to mount a humanitarian airlift to supply the beleaguered Berliners with food, fuel, and other necessities. An airlift was less likely to be challenged by the Soviets because access by air through three twenty-mile-wide air corridors was guaranteed by a written agreement, whereas overland access was pursuant to an oral understanding that the Soviets claimed was no longer operative. Accounts differ as to who originated the airlift idea—Clay, Lovett, and an RAF officer named Reginald Waite were the main claimants—and who in Washington approved it. Suffice it to say that Clay prevailed upon General Curtis LeMay, commander of U.S. air forces in Europe, to assign his entire fleet of C-47 transports to what became known as the Berlin airlift. When Clay asked LeMay whether his planes could carry coal, LeMay replied, “We can haul anything.”4 On June 26, Clay ordered the first flight of 32 C-47s, collectively carrying eighty tons of milk, flour, and medicine, to fly more than one hundred miles from airfields in West Germany over Soviet-occupied East Germany and drop off their cargoes at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin. Shortly thereafter British Yorks and Dakotas (Douglas DC-3s) joined the airlift, flying their cargoes into the British sector of Berlin from airports near Hamburg.
Two days after the Berlin airlift began Marshall was again out at Walter Reed being examined by kidney specialists. At a meeting with Lovett and Forrestal in the White House, Truman essentially confirmed the policy regarding Germany that Clay and LeMay had already implemented. According to Forrestal’s diary, Truman cut off all further “discussion” as to whether or not the U.S. and its allies would stay in West Berlin. We are “going to stay, period,” he reportedly said.5 That evening Lovett briefed Marshall on the president’s decision.
The doctors permitted Marshall to attend the cabinet meeting on Friday, July 2, the first time in several days that he had seen the president. Marshall reported that B-29 strength in West Germany was being beefed up “from one squadron to a group” and that the British had accepted the U.S. offer to send “two additional B-29 groups” to the UK. At the time a single group of the B-29 heavy bombers consisted of approximately thirty planes. The rationale for substantially increasing the number of B-29s in England and Germany was deterrence. The Soviets knew that the high-altitude, long-range superfortresses could easily reach Moscow and other targets deep within Russia and that they were the type of plane that delivered atomic bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki (they might not have known, however, that the B-29s sent to Germany and the UK had not been fitted to carry atomic bombs). Marshall believed that the presence of the B-29s would deter the Red Army from trying to shoot down the C-47s or otherwise prevent them from landing in Berlin. At the same time the arrival of the huge bombers at bases in England and West Germany would quickly become known to the public. There was a risk, Marshall warned Truman, that the presence of the B-29s would be regarded as a “provocative act” that might backfire and cause the Soviets to initiate hostilities. It was a delicate balance, said Marshall. Truman raised no objection.6
Shortly after the cabinet meeting broke up, Marshall met at the State Department with the print press and network radio reporters. It was time to try to dispel rumors about his health that had been flying around Washington. He began with a lame attempt at humor, saying he had learned, presumably through press reports and the rumor mill, that he “was supposed to be seriously ill or approaching death—I don’t know which.” At that point Marshall went off the record, a technique he frequently used to bring reporters into his confidence, trying to make them feel that he was about to disclose deep state or personal secrets. His so-called secret was that he had undergone a “physical examination,” at “doctors’ urging” that was “not yet finished,” that he was going back to the hospital that afternoon, and that he would have to “report in again” during the following week. He said nothing about his enlarged kidney or the renal tumor.
A reporter interjected. “Mr. Secretary, while you are talking OFF THE RECORD . . . one report which was widely circulating was that your health had turned out to be not so good and that you were resigning because of it.” Marshall’s answer: “Well, I had no thought of resigning now. I felt very well when I went into the hospital and I feel very well now.” He continued, reminding the press that he was still off the record. “I got out on Saturday [June 26], so I did a six-hour day out in the hot sun . . . real work, not pleasant . . . and I did the same on Sunday from nine o’clock to half past one . . . The temperature was 92. I challenge anybody after two hours to do what I was doing . . .”
“What sort of work was that?” asked another reporter. “It involved pick-ax, shovel, wheelbarrow,” responded Marshall, “and I believe, some back seat driving,” the last another attempt at humor.7
Marshall may not have flat-out lied. But he certainly didn’t tell the whole truth. By the time of the press conference he knew that the doctors had recommended that the large tumor and perhaps all or part of his enlarged kidney would have to be surgically removed (though they went along with his request that the operation could be postponed so he could deal with the Berlin crisis and attend the UN meetings in Paris in the fall). On the other hand, he was probably being truthful when he said he worked hard the previous weekend in ninety-degree heat. The day of his press conference Marshall wrote Rose Page about how, like the Indians, he had buried fish heads under the corn he planted the past weekend and that “every cat in Leesburg descended on me . . . and practically dug up the foundations of the house getting at the fish heads.” On “second thought,” he joked to Rose, “the corn was sent to me by Henry Wallace, so perhaps the cats were after that.”8 Marshall loved to make fun of Wallace, FDR’s eccentric vice president who had made millions developing hybrid corn, and was running for president that year against Truman as a far-left Independent.
By the second week of July the Anglo-American airlift gathered strength, delivering an average of 1,000 tons per day to the U.S. and British sectors of Berlin. General LeMay scraped together about 70 C-47s. Clay and LeMay persuaded Chief of Staff Omar Bradley and others to dispatch two groups of the newer four-engine C-54 Skymasters to airfields in West Germany. The British added Short Sunderland flying boats to their fleet of Yorks and Dakotas. It was an impressive beginning, but it was hardly enough. To sustain a population of more than two million through the winter, it was estimated that an average of about 5,000 tons of food, medicine, coal, gasoline, and other supplies would have to be landed each day.
Several top officials in Washington doubted that the airlift would work. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, assistant secretary of the air force, told the NSC on July 17 that “the airlift was doomed to failure.”9 Lovett called it “unsatisfactory” and only a “temporary expedient.”10 Forrestal worried that the airlift would stall in late October when winter weather would cause flights to be canceled. Marshall disagreed. At a meeting with Truman and Forrestal in the White House on July 19 that Forrestal summarized in his diary, Marshall calmly advised the president to stay the course. If we remain firm, the Soviets will back down, he counseled, just as they had done when the administration’s policies managed to contain them in Greece, France, and Italy. Forrestal reminded Marshall that available American ground forces were inadequate to defend Berlin. Marshall responded by saying that the U.S. was “much better off” than it was in 1940.11 In his diary that night, Truman wrote that Forrestal “wants to hedge—he always does.” The president agreed with Marshall. “We’ll stay in Berlin—come what may,” he wrote. “I don’t pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make.”12
The July 19 meeting in the Oval Office that had begun at noon lasted less than an hour. Marshall and the others had to rush across Memorial Bridge to Arlington National Cemetery. A horse-drawn caisson bearing General Pershing’s flag-draped casket was already leaving the Capitol, slowly leading a massive procession in the rain down Constitution Avenue toward Arlington. At age eighty-seven, Pershing had died at Walter Reed Army Hospital, where he had been a patient since 1941. Born less than two months before Lincoln was first elected president, “Black Jack” Pershing was Marshall’s mentor, one of his closest friends. Marshall visited him regularly, sometimes weekly, during the years he lived at Walter Reed. At Pershing’s request Marshall was in charge of the funeral plans—a “purely military one as Pershing had insisted.”13
After a brief stop at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and an Episcopal funeral service at the Memorial Amphitheater, Marshall accompanied the procession to the gravesite on what later became known as Pershing Hill. There, as Pershing requested, the General of the Armies was buried beneath a simple white stone near the identical markers of the troops he had served with thirty years before.
Two days later Marshall publicly challenged the Soviets. At a press conference a reporter asked him to comment on “widespread fears of war” over the Berlin blockade and airlift. “We will not be coerced or intimidated in any way,” he responded. “. . . I repeat again, we are not going to be coerced.”14
Marshall spent the rest of the summer of 1948 working at the State Department. On weeknights he stayed in DC on Volta Place with Allen’s widow, Madge, and her son Tupper. During most weekends he was out at Dodona with Katherine. By the end of August the Berlin airlift appeared to be succeeding. Each day about 1,500 flights were disgorging more than 4,500 tons of cargo in West Berlin, not quite enough to sustain Berliners through the winter but getting close to the target of 5,000 tons per day. There were snafus, accidents, and setbacks along the way, but overall it was a spectacular success, a masterful combination of logistics, teamwork, and coordination with the British.
Throughout August and into September, talks in Moscow between the three allied ambassadors and Molotov and Stalin to settle the Berlin crisis went nowhere. According to Chip Bohlen, the State Department’s expert on Soviet affairs, Stalin would not lift the blockade unless the Allies agreed to “abandon the idea of forming a West German government.” This was a price that the secretary and the president “would not pay.”15 Forrestal pressed both Marshall and Truman for “resolution of the question” of whether the U.S. would use the atomic bomb if war broke out. The answer he got was conditional. The president “prayed that he would never have to make such a decision,” wrote Forrestal in his diary, but said that “if it became necessary” he would not hesitate to use it.16
While Katherine was at Oyster Bay on Long Island with Belle Roosevelt (widow of Kermit Roosevelt, who had committed suicide), Marshall spent four days in an air-conditioned suite at Walter Reed for “the continuation of tests.”17 X-rays showed his right kidney to be pear-shaped, with a large tumor and multiple cysts. Again, there is no indication that the doctors were concerned about possible malignancy. They concluded that surgery to remove Marshall’s kidney could be delayed until after he returned from the UN General Assembly meetings in Paris that were scheduled to begin in late September. He was discharged from the hospital on August 30. It is probable that around this time Marshall let Truman know that he intended to resign as secretary after the election, due in part to the need to recover from his planned operation. In a September 2 letter to actor Walter Huston, who Marshall had befriended during the war, the secretary indicated that he had an agreement with Truman that he would stay until the end of 1948.
At the beginning of September, with the election only two months away, pollsters and pundits had already concluded that Governor Dewey, the Republican nominee, would easily win the presidency. Elmo Roper announced that his latest poll showed Dewey with a 41 percent to 33 percent lead in the popular vote over Truman. “Only a political convulsion,” he said, would keep Dewey from the White House.18 At the Democratic convention in July, the “Dixiecrats” had walked out to protest the civil rights platform that Truman supported. The candidate of the southerners’ newly formed States’ Rights Party was Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Former vice president Henry Wallace was the standard-bearer for the left-leaning Progressive Party, the party of “peace and the common man.” Split three ways, the Democratic coalition that elected Roosevelt four straight times was a shadow of itself.
Truman’s only hope was to relentlessly attack the Republicans for the high cost of living and take his “party of the people” case directly to the voters. A crowd of a hundred thousand had turned out to see him on Labor Day in Detroit’s Cadillac Square. Truman was confident that he could continue to draw tremendous crowds right up to election day if he had the time, stamina, and wherewithal to crisscross the country and talk to the people at every whistle-stop.
The only thing holding him back was money. The DNC was virtually broke, having encountered difficulty raising funds for what most Democrats regarded as a losing ticket. Seventy-seven-year-old Bernard Baruch infuriated Truman when he politely but firmly refused to help raise funds for the president’s campaign. By today’s standards it is hard to believe, but in early September 1948, just sixty days before the election, no one had stepped forward to chair Truman’s finance committee. Finally, at the suggestion of several supporters, Truman persuaded Colonel Louis Johnson of West Virginia to serve as chairman. (As will be recalled, Johnson began an up-and-down relationship with Marshall before the war when, as FDR’s assistant secretary of war, he claimed credit for promoting Marshall to deputy chief of staff.) Johnson was an experienced fund-raiser, wealthy in his own right. He immediately put his own assets on the line by signing a personal note for $100,000.
Thanks to the efforts of Johnson and other major donors, Truman’s soon to be famous whistle-stop campaign began on schedule. On Friday, September 17, the Ferdinand Magellan, the president’s 142-ton private railroad car, pulled out of Washington’s cavernous Union Station, coupled at the end of a seventeen-car train. Standing on the rear platform, Truman posed for photos with vice presidential nominee Alben Barkley. “I’m going to fight hard. I’m going to give ’em hell,” he reportedly said.19 Six stops and six speeches later Truman spoke before a crowd of 75,000, mostly farmers, at the National Plowing Contest in Dexter, Iowa.
Out on the hustings Truman said little about the Berlin airlift and the possibility of war with the Soviet Union. Likewise, Dewey was largely silent. Henry Wallace, however, had a good deal to say about Truman’s foreign policy. He accused the president of deliberately creating a climate of fear in the world and leading the nation toward war. Branding Truman a warmonger, Wallace denounced the Truman Doctrine, the multibillion-dollar Marshall Plan, and Marshall’s pet proposal for universal military training, which had been endorsed by Truman. Albert Carr and David Noyes, two of Truman’s aggressive speechwriters who were on the president’s train during his whistle-stop tour, believed that Wallace’s promises to deliver a “century of peace” were resonating with voters. They knew that Wallace’s appeal to a significant slice of Democratic voters could cause Truman to lose the election. Carr was an economist, educated at the University of Chicago, Columbia, and the London School of Economics. Noyes was a journalist, small-town newspaper publisher, and advertising executive. Near the end of September, as the campaign train was heading back toward Washington, the two speechwriters hatched the idea for an election-winning “October surprise.” Although Truman had narrowed the gap with Dewey, fifty of the most prominent newspaper editors and columnists and most everyone else who paid attention still thought he would lose. Carr and Noyes were convinced that Truman needed to make a bold move and that he needed to do it soon. As will be seen, Truman agreed to help orchestrate their explosive surprise.
While Truman was in the first stages of his sixteen-day whistle-stop tour, George and Katherine were settling into the American Embassy residence in Paris, courtesy of Ambassador and Mrs. Jefferson Caffrey. “We are luxuriously established and have great privacy, eating most of our meals in our sitting room,” wrote Marshall to Madge.20 The secretary and Mrs. Marshall arrived in Paris on the morning of September 20 after an overnight flight from Washington, accompanied by a young doctor assigned to monitor Marshall’s health. Though Marshall was there to represent the U.S. at the third convening of the UN General Assembly and at overlapping sessions of the Security Council, he and his wife made arrangements for some private road trips. Marshall knew that this would probably be his last trip abroad as secretary of state, or perhaps ever. He and Katherine planned to relax as much as possible and enjoy their time together.
First, however, the secretary had to deal with his counterparts, Ernest Bevin and Robert Schuman, the foreign ministers of Great Britain and France. Over the past three weeks the temperature of the crisis in Berlin had risen. The secretary was at the point where he wanted to break off the fruitless talks with Stalin and Molotov aimed at ending the blockade. Since the crisis threatened the peace, he believed the issue should be submitted to the UN for debate and settlement. Bevin and Schuman insisted on a more cautious approach. They worried that a sudden break, coupled with a threat to take the matter to the UN, might provoke a shooting war. Marshall felt that yet another round of talks would send the wrong signal to the Soviets, but he could not afford to part ways with his two main allies. At a meeting at the Quai d’Orsay on September 21 with Bevin, Schuman, and their aides, Marshall was direct. The Berlin blockade was no longer the “fundamental issue,” he declared. Due to the success of the airlift, “[w]e have broken the blockade.” Throughout Eastern Europe, he argued, “the Russians are retreating . . . We have put Western Germany on its feet and we are engaged in bringing about its recovery in such a way that we can really say that we are on the road to victory.” This was an obvious but deliberately unstated reference to the success of the European Recovery Program, the so-called Marshall Plan. Stand firm with me, Marshall pleaded. We have them on the run.
Bevin and Schuman were still not persuaded. They insisted on making one more “approach to the Russians” with the hope of achieving a settlement.21 Marshall had no choice but to accede. However, he extracted a concession. If the Soviet reply was not satisfactory, the British and French governments would agree, along with the U.S., to submit the Berlin matter to the UN Security Council. As expected, the Soviet reply was unsatisfactory. In identical letters delivered to the UN secretary general on September 29, Marshall, Bevin, and Schuman requested an early meeting of the Security Council. By a vote of 9 to 2, with the Soviet Union and Ukraine voting no, the Berlin question was placed on the Security Council agenda (because it was a procedural matter, it could not be vetoed).
Meanwhile, during one of the free moments at the end of September, probably when Truman’s campaign train was in Kentucky or West Virginia on the way back to Washington, the two speechwriters, Carr and Noyes, huddled with Matt Connelly, Truman’s appointments secretary. They had a daring and unorthodox idea that could swing the election in the president’s favor. The president, they recommended, should announce via nationwide radio broadcast that he was sending Chief Justice Fred Vinson to Moscow to meet face-to-face with Joseph Stalin. And he should say to the American people that the purpose of the mission is to persuade the Soviet Union (and show the world) that the United States would spare no effort to achieve peace. The speech and the mission, they told Connelly, would convince Wallace-leaning voters that the president was committed to peace, calm fears that the Berlin crisis would result in war, and demonstrate that Truman was the commander in chief best able to deal with Soviet aggression.
Connelly passed the Carr/Noyes idea on to Truman who, according to Clifford, liked it “from the moment he heard it.”22 Three years earlier Truman had sent Harry Hopkins to meet face-to-face with Stalin. Since Hopkins succeeded in easing tensions, albeit briefly, Truman thought Vinson stood a good chance of achieving a breakthrough as well. On Sunday, October 3, the president asked Vinson to drop by the White House for a talk. When Truman explained what he had in mind, it left Vinson breathless. In the first place, as he reminded Truman, he was chief justice of the Supreme Court, bound by his personal code of ethics to confine himself to matters relating to the court and to steer clear of politics, particularly in an election year. Moreover, he had no background in Soviet affairs and diplomacy and little knowledge of the Berlin crisis. No one knows for sure what Truman said, but by the end of the day Vinson agreed to go to Moscow, perhaps having been ordered by his old friend the president. As soon as the chief justice left, Truman instructed Charlie Ross, his press secretary, to arrange for the radio networks to set aside a half hour on the evening of October 5 “for a public statement of major importance.”23
Incredibly, it was not until the morning of Truman’s proposed address to the nation that the White House notified the State Department of its plans. Bob Lovett, who was in his Foggy Bottom office, was the first to get the word. A teletype message from one of Truman’s aides asked Lovett to review and comment on a draft letter from Truman to Stalin explaining the purpose of Vinson’s mission and to make arrangements with the Kremlin for Stalin to meet with Vinson. As Lovett recounted later, he immediately “picked up the White House phone” and said, “‘Mr. President I’ve got to see you right away, urgent.’” For the first and only time, said Lovett, he asked his driver to turn on the “red light” mounted atop the car roof, activate “the siren,” and get him to the White House as fast as he could.24
According to Lovett, as soon as the president received him that morning, he bluntly declared that what Truman was proposing was “utterly impossible.” When Truman asked him to explain, Lovett told him that if he went ahead with the Vinson mission, it would undermine Marshall’s efforts to reach a solution to the Berlin crisis via the UN, alienate the British and French governments, and might precipitate Marshall’s resignation. Perhaps for the first time Truman understood and appreciated at least some of the diplomatic machinations in Paris that Marshall was overseeing. He concluded that Lovett was right. He told Charlie Ross to cancel the airtime that he had arranged with the radio networks.
Before he knew for sure that the Vinson mission was canceled, Lovett either telephoned Marshall or radioed a message to the embassy in Paris alerting the secretary and his aide, Marshall Carter, of what the president was proposing. Marshall and Carter went to the embassy’s communications center, where they read the same messages that caused Lovett to race to the White House. As Carter recalled to his interviewer, like a “good staff officer” he began writing a reply that Marshall could send to the president. His first sentence began “Never in the history of diplomatic negotiations in the United States has a more fatal proposition been proposed for the peace of the world . . .” Marshall took “one look” at Carter’s draft reply, “threw it aside,” and wrote down his own reply. It said, as Carter recalled, “I understand what’s worrying you Mr. President and I am coming home immediately.”25
There are few moments in Marshall’s long career that could match the magnanimity that he revealed in this simple message. He could have expressed resentment and outrage, in accordance with Carter’s suggestion. He could have threatened to resign, as Lovett warned. Instead, he was forgiving. He thought not about himself but about all of the burdens, domestic and foreign, that Truman was shouldering as he struggled against all odds to win the presidency in his own right. George Marshall was generous, “a great-souled man.”26
In addition to informing Truman that he would be returning to Washington, Marshall explained during a teletype conference on October 5 the reasons why he opposed the Vinson mission. Truman assured him that the mission had been or would be canceled. It was decided that the president would send his own plane, the Independence, to pick Marshall up in Paris and bring him to Washington on the weekend of October 9.
If the Vinson mission had been launched as planned, the term “October surprise” might have entered the political lexicon in 1948. According to New York Times language expert William Safire, the term was not coined until twenty years later when William Casey, then a Nixon aide, mused that President Lyndon Johnson might pull off an “October surprise” by agreeing to a last-minute Vietnam peace deal in order to give Hubert Humphrey a leg up in the presidential race against Nixon.
While Marshall was flying to the U.S. capital and Katherine was touring the “Normandy landings,” the tale of the botched Vinson mission was leaked, possibly by one of the radio networks that had been asked to air (and then cancel) the president’s announcement.27 The press had a field day, accusing Truman of staging a desperate election-eve gambit that had to be aborted when Marshall found out about it. Rumors ran rampant that Marshall was coming home to resign as secretary of state. In his memoir, Clifford, who claimed that he had opposed the Vinson mission, wrote that “it was the worst mistake of the Truman campaign.”28 Fortunately, however, Dewey did not exploit the blunder, apparently confident that he was far ahead and would easily win the election.
Truman greeted Marshall at National Airport when he landed shortly after ten a.m. on Saturday, October 9. Marshall and Lovett met with Truman in the Oval Office at eleven and again at three in the President’s Study. To the president Marshall presented an overview of the Berlin crisis as well as the Security Council proceedings, and a broader analysis of the state of U.S.-Soviet relations. He explained in some detail why he opposed the Vinson mission. He graciously apologized for not keeping Truman better informed and took some of the blame for contributing to the president’s belief that a direct approach to Stalin, such as the Vinson mission, was more likely to achieve results than the multilateral efforts being pursued at the UN by Marshall and his British and French allies. Contrary to some press reports Marshall did not offer his resignation, although he may have reiterated his plan to step down after the election.
At 5:45 that afternoon, Marshall gave a press and radio news conference, the apparent purpose of which was to dispel rumors and press reports that there was a growing rift between him and the president on U.S. foreign policy, particularly the Berlin crisis and other matters before the UN. “There is no foundation” for these claims, he said. “Such statements can do no good and they certainly can do a great deal of harm and I deplore them.” Going off the record, as was his wont, Marshall told the reporters that he doubted they even vaguely appreciated the “red hot” tension that pervaded the UN meetings in Paris and the “delicacy of the situation.”29
The day before Marshall returned to Paris, he demonstrated what Chip Bohlen called “his great human qualities.” While meeting with Beetle Smith at the State Department the secretary heard that Bohlen’s two-year-old son, Charlie, was in the building with the woman who was taking care of him while Bohlen and his wife were in Paris. Sensitive to the fact that the Bohlens had not seen their son in several weeks, Marshall arranged for a State Department photographer to take a snapshot of Charlie sitting on the secretary’s knee. As soon as Marshall returned to Paris he handed the photo to the Bohlens. According to Chip, he said, “This is how Charlie looked yesterday.”30
The Berlin blockade was eventually resolved not at the UN but by the success of the massive airlift conceived and managed by the U.S. and Great Britain. After Marshall returned to Paris, a resolution proposed by “neutral powers” aimed at resolving the crisis was debated at the Security Council. This resolution, supported by the United States, the UK, and France, was put to a vote on October 25. It received nine affirmative votes, but was vetoed by the Soviet Union.31 In 1949, after Marshall resigned as secretary of state, Stalin began to realize that the blockade was doing the Soviets more harm than good. His regime was viewed by the world as heartless and the blockade as feckless. The airlift made a laughingstock of the Red Army’s attempt to strangle the city. Stalin signaled that he was willing to negotiate. The four powers began talks in April. The Soviet blockade ended on May 12, 1949, almost a year after it began. When they heard the news, Chip Bohlen and Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor as secretary of state, broke out a bottle of champagne.
Following passage in June of the Vandenberg Resolution, which authorized the U.S. to enter into self-defense alliances, Marshall assigned Undersecretary Lovett to conduct “top secret exploratory talks” in Washington with representatives of Britain, France, Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands concerning, among other things, “estimates of Soviet intentions” and an association by the U.S. with existing “European security arrangements” (meaning the so-called Brussels Treaty between the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg that Marshall had lent his encouragement and support to in March).32 Over the summer and into September, Lovett’s group put together an outline and guiding principles for a North Atlantic mutual security agreement.
Marshall was kept apprised of these developments by Lovett. Within a day or two after returning to Paris from his weekend in Washington, Marshall tasked himself with the job of persuading additional Scandinavian members to join the proposed North Atlantic alliance. On October 13, he sat down with Foreign Minister Bo Undén of Sweden. As recorded in the minutes, Marshall’s arguments to Undén reveal his perception of the existential threat posed by the Soviet Union and why he believed a strong alliance to meet the threat was necessary. He said that because the Soviet Union was “utterly ruthless and devoid of all human decencies,” the Swedish people and those throughout the rest of the world were confronted with the prospect of being ruled against their will by a “police state.” The key to stopping this “ruthless force,” he argued, was unified “military assistance,” just as a unified approach by the Western European states was essential to the success of the European Recovery Program.33 To put it another way, Marshall was arguing that because of the Soviet threat a North American military alliance was a necessary complement to the economic recovery of Western Europe.
By the end of October the five nations that had signed the Brussels Treaty agreed in principle to negotiate a North Atlantic pact with the United States and Canada. They proposed that talks take place in Washington on a date set by the U.S. In light of the elections on November 2, everyone understood that negotiations would not begin until a new Congress was convened and a new president—either Truman or, more likely, Dewey—was inaugurated. Because Marshall officially stepped down in January, he did not oversee the negotiations or participate in the deliberations leading to approval of the North Atlantic Treaty and the formation of NATO in 1949.
Late in life Marshall claimed, with an uncharacteristic lack of modesty, a large slice of credit for the origination of NATO. In 1956, three years before his death, Marshall told his interviewer, “I started NATO, actually, from the first jump.”34 Actually, the “first jump” toward NATO was a general suggestion by British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin to Marshall on December 17, 1947, as to which Marshall, according to the minutes of their conversation, gave only mild encouragement and did not affirmatively support.35 It was not until March 1948 that Marshall, at Bevin’s urging, seized on the idea of a North Atlantic military alliance. From that time forward, he was a strong proponent of NATO. “I got every living soul,” Marshall recalled, “one after the other, in [sic] talk to me personally on the thing [NATO] and to get them stirred up to do this business.”36
For George and Katherine, the side trips during the nine weeks they were headquartered at the embassy in Paris were memorable. On the first weekend in October they drove out to see the northernmost Meuse-Argonne battlefields, “a glorious trip,” wrote Katherine. “He wanted to show it all to me. I never saw anyone enjoy a trip more.”37 The highlight was a return on a peaceful Sunday morning to Gondrecourt, where then captain Marshall had lived for six gloomy months during the Great War with a family headed by Madame Jouatte, who Marshall described in his World War I memoir as “a rather homely, vigorous French woman of forty-five years,” and her husband, “a little weazened fellow, who looked like a scoundrel—and later proved to be one.” While billeted through the winter of 1917–18 in a tiny room on the second floor with a “Napoleonic type bed” and eating downstairs with three other messmates (one of whom was the son of Victor Hugo), Marshall and Mme. Jouatte formed a close friendship. He was endeared to her and she to him.38 They kept in touch by occasional letters, but had not seen one another in thirty years. George and Katherine arrived unannounced in the square in front of her house. He stepped out of the car. “She came out of her doorway in an old wrapper and carpet slippers,” recalled Marshall. When she recognized him, “she dashed at me and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me on both cheeks. So I embraced her and I kissed her, and we had a great scene out there with all the people in the square cheering.”39 Katherine wrote that Mme. Jouatte kept saying, “Mon dieu, it can’t be, it can’t be.”40 Marshall described it as “a very affecting meeting,” a phrase which for him meant freighted with emotion.41
There were other enjoyable side trips in the fall of 1948—a two-day jaunt to the Picardy region and another to London that included lunch with the Churchills—but the one that meant the most to Katherine was the trip to Italy. On the afternoon of October 18, Marshall asked the pilot of the Sacred Cow, FDR’s old plane with its broad picture window, to fly low over Monte Cassino, up the Liri Valley, over the hills to Anzio, and then into Rome. As they flew, George pointed out and described for Katherine the places where Allen lived and fought. Early the next morning the two of them drove south to the Alban Hills for a twenty- or thirty-minute audience with Pope Pius XII at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo. Interestingly, Marshall brought up the atomic bomb, its value as a deterrent to Soviet aggression (the Russians did not yet have a serviceable atomic bomb), and the fact that Truman had the sole responsibility for deciding whether to actually use it. Marshall expected that the pope might comment on the morality of using this awesomely powerful weapon to instantly incinerate hundreds of thousands of human beings. However, the pope said nothing. In fact, according to Marshall’s memorandum of the conversation, he “seemed to indicate general approval” of all that Marshall said. Turning to Katherine, the pope expressed condolences with respect to the death of her son. In a letter to Madge (Allen’s widow) about their papal audience Marshall wrote that when the pope “learned that Allen had been killed in the approach to the town and hill on which the [Castel Gondolfo] is located he was very impressive in his attitude and statements to her.”42
After their audience, George and Katherine motored south, stopped for a time at the approximate place where Allen was killed, and continued down into Anzio. In his letter to Madge, Marshall wrote that the town had been “rehabilitated into a lovely sea side resort,” though the “cemetery was in a state of reconstruction . . . but not too bad in appearance.”43 Marshall, of course, had already been to Allen’s gravesite, but Katherine had not. He knew how emotional it would be for her to see the marker bearing the name “Allen Tupper Brown,” the sweet boy she called Beau. And he knew that she was still considering whether to have Allen’s remains disinterred and brought back to Dodona, where he had nailed the horseshoe points down, then up, the evening before going off to war.
A few years later Katherine described what she saw and felt when she approached Allen’s grave. “As I knelt down to place a wreath, two soldiers stood beside me. They laid a blanket of roses over his grave . . . I felt resigned for the first time that he should remain so far from the land he loved. It seems to me that it was as it should be. I felt that his last resting place should be with his comrades where his life had counted the most, for they had given a country liberty and a people freedom.”44
Back in Paris, the UN General Assembly reconvened at the Palais de Chaillot. Secretary Marshall spent hours sitting in plenary sessions with plenty of downtime to write letters to Madge and his sister. When not at the General Assembly, he met with Bevin, Schuman, and Shertok and sent messages to Lovett concerning the Berlin crisis, UN truce resolutions designed to stop the fighting in Palestine, and whether Italy would decide to join the North American security pact. Marshall and the other U.S. delegates to the UN were careful to avoid saying or doing anything that might tip the elections in America one way or the other. Truman’s aides in the White House, as well as Dewey’s team in Albany, were keeping close watch over developments in Paris.
A photograph of Marshall, UN ambassador Warren Austin, and Republican delegate John Foster Dulles, taken in Paris the day after the election, shows them sitting around a radio listening to the election returns. The photo op must have taken place in the morning because Dulles looks elated, no doubt believing that Dewey was on the verge of victory and that he would become the next secretary of state. When Dewey conceded the race to Truman at 11:14 a.m. East Coast time it was late afternoon in Paris. By then, the expression on Dulles’s face was anything but elated.
Truman’s come-from-behind victory in 1948 was astonishing, arguably the most surprising in the history of presidential politics. Donald Trump’s narrow electoral win in 2016, though shocking to many, was not as surprising as Truman’s. In the days leading up to Trump’s election, virtually all pollsters concluded that Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory had narrowed considerably and that it was almost a dead heat. By contrast, in Truman’s case none of the experts predicted that he had come close enough in popular or electoral votes in the final days to actually pull off a win, particularly because the Democratic party was split three ways.
As it turned out, Truman was victorious in 28 states with a total of 303 electoral votes, three less than Trump, while Dewey carried 16 states, Thurmond captured 4 southern states, and Wallace did not win a single state. If it is true, as many suspected, that Truman recognized Israel in order to garner New York’s 47 electoral votes, the strategy failed. Though he came very close, the president lost New York because of Wallace’s strong showing, which enabled Dewey to score a narrow victory. Clark Clifford commented later that it was a “mistake” for Truman not to spend more time in New York.45
The next day Marshall wrote Truman that he “put over the greatest one man fight in American history. You did exactly what you told me and what nobody else believed possible.”46 It is evident from this telegram that Marshall had great respect for Truman’s courage and political acumen. It is also apparent that by this time he had set aside his misgivings about Truman’s integrity that had spilled out during the angry confrontation in May when he accused the president of choosing to recognize Israel for domestic political reasons—that is, the Jewish vote. Did this mean that Marshall came to believe that Truman was right to immediately recognize Israel on May 15? It’s possible. After all, five months had gone by and all efforts to end the fighting had failed. Marshall might have decided that truce or trusteeship was never in the cards. Or he could have taken the long view, concluding that the country was simply better off with Truman as president. Perhaps he came down from his high horse of righteousness, persuaded that there are times when political expediency is excusable in order to achieve an objective that best serves the national interest.
Given Marshall’s unpleasant encounters with Dewey in 1944, he was clearly pleased that Truman won the presidency. But from a personal standpoint the fact that the Democrats recaptured both houses of Congress—with fifty-four seats in the Senate and an overwhelming majority in the House—was even better news. Up until the election Truman counted on Marshall’s reputation as a nonpartisan to steer matters through the Republican-dominated Congress. Now his presence in the Truman administration was nowhere near as important. He could retire as secretary of state without feeling that he was letting the president down.
Truman had other ideas. Marshall thought he had an understanding with the president that he would not resist his resignation. However, on November 6, in the second sentence of a letter to Marshall thanking him for his congratulatory telegram, Truman wrote, “Please don’t go out on a limb about the future until you and I can have a heart to heart conversation. I have some things in mind that need your advice and judgement.”47 Marshall claimed that he did not receive Truman’s letter until November 13. In the meantime, he made a remark at a press conference in Paris suggesting that he was sticking to “his original intention to resign from the Cabinet by January 20.” The day he received Truman’s letter about not going out on a limb, he issued a press release saying that he was misinterpreted. “I would never take a decision of this nature without discussing it with the president,” said the release. The concluding clause—“and he and I have never discussed the matter”—was almost certainly untrue.48
While Marshall wasn’t sure what the president had in mind for him, he told Truman that he would be returning home to Washington on November 22. And he went ahead with plans for surgery to have his diseased kidney removed at Walter Reed shortly after Thanksgiving. In a letter to Madge, Marshall wrote that the operation would either give him a “permanent ‘out,’” with the hope that his successor would be named in December, or at least “a pleasant period of convalescence” before having to return to Paris as secretary of state or whatever else the president wanted him to do. “My future plans remain in doubt,” he lamented.49
Truman was waiting at National Airport when the Sacred Cow landed on the Monday of Thanksgiving week. Katherine went directly out to Leesburg, while George rode with the president across the Potomac to the White House. At some point during the next three days, Truman must have had the “heart to heart” talk about Marshall’s future that he had insisted upon. But there is no contemporaneous record of whether he pressed Marshall to stay on as secretary or to accept another post and how Marshall reacted. All that is known is that Marshall spent nights at Walter Reed so the doctors could conduct tests and examinations in preparation for his kidney operation and that he was terribly busy, “the busiest [time],” he told reporters on Wednesday, that he had “ever had in Washington.”50 On Thanksgiving Day, he took a break with Katherine. They traveled in a private car of the Southern Railway to Roanoke, where Katherine had attended Hollins College. There they saw VMI beat VPI (predecessor of Virginia Tech) in football. In a letter to his sister, Marshall proudly wrote that he had played for VMI (left tackle) against VPI “on Thanksgiving Day forty-eight years ago—and we won.”51
Four days before his operation Marshall received a distinguished visitor in his suite at Walter Reed: Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wrapped against the cold in her beaver coat. During the year since he last saw her the military situation of the Nationalists had deteriorated. The Communists controlled much of the north and west. In the last four months they had seized 75 percent of Chiang’s U.S.-financed weapons and neutralized half of his fighting forces. Communist armies had swept south and were approaching Nanking. American Embassy personnel in the capital were beginning to leave. Marshall was under the impression that more than thirty Nationalist divisions had surrendered to the Communists. It was only a matter of a few weeks before Mao Zedong would rule all of China north of the Yangtze.
As far as Madame and the Generalissimo were concerned, the political landscape in America had also deteriorated. They had hoped that Dewey would win and that the Republicans would retain control of Congress. Indeed, through Madame’s brother-in-law, H. H. Kung, it was believed that the Nationalists contributed $2 million to the Dewey campaign. With the sweeping defeat of the Republicans, the odds of getting additional support and military aid from the U.S. had worsened. Truman had already declined to act on the Generalissimo’s plea for aid. And he refused to invite Chiang to come to Washington to make his case in person. His wife took it upon herself to make an unofficial visit.
Marshall knew that Madame Chiang had come to his hospital room to make a desperate appeal for aid on behalf of her husband. Premised on the argument that if Communism prevailed in China, the rest of the Asian states would follow like cascading dominoes, Madame quickly got to the point. She asked that the White House issue a statement of support for the Nationalist government in its fight against Communism in the Far East; that the U.S. send a “spark plug” in the person of an outstanding American general to take control of the war against Mao; and that it provide upward of $1 billion of emergency aid for each of the next three years, plus military advisers. Marshall listened politely, showing (or more likely feigning) sympathy and concern. But he was far from encouraging. Marshall told Madame that Truman had already ruled out making a public statement of support for the Nationalists because it “would have to be so watered down that it would do more harm than good.” Referencing his “own experiences” in China, Marshall said that the idea of sending a prominent U.S. general to run the war against the Communists was a nonstarter because such a person would have to virtually take “over the Chinese Government.”52 Finally, there was little chance, he told her, that a Congress controlled by the Democrats would pass a substantially increased economic aid package, let alone one that came remotely close to $3 billion over three years.
After four hours of discussion, Mayling returned empty-handed to Dodona. At Katherine’s invitation, she lived there as a houseguest along with her two secretaries for the next month while lobbying Marshall and sympathetic members of Congress and waiting for an invitation to meet with Truman. The two women had become fast friends when they spent the summer and fall of 1946 together on the mountaintop at Kuling. They had remained in touch by letter after Katherine and George left China in early 1947.
The operation went well, reported Colonel Clifford Kimbrough, the surgeon who removed Marshall’s right kidney on December 7. Half of his enlarged kidney was found to be “occupied and destroyed by cysts” and “there was no evidence of malignancy.”53 A week later, he was still not up and walking. In a letter to his sister, Marshall remarked that his convalescence was satisfactory, but “a rather painful business at times.” He seemed more concerned about the strain on Katherine, who felt the need to visit him at the hospital every other day while looking after Madame Chiang and also suffering from painful shingles. Katherine “always does get the short end of the deals,” he wrote.54
To cheer George up, Mayling wrote him a mock battlefield report from the “Dodona front.” Addressing Marshall as “General Flicker,” his boyhood nickname that suggested fecklessness, she accused him of “lolling in ‘silken sheets’” while she was forced to dig “trenches” in the garden and spend “harrowing hours” doing “kitchen duty” under the “Deputy Commander,” who Marshall knew from years of experience was his wife.55
Madame Chiang’s last conversation with Secretary Marshall was dead serious. It took place three weeks after his operation when he was still at Walter Reed. By that time Marshall knew that Madame had already met with the president at Blair House and that Truman had promised her nothing. Marshall was prepared for a desperate gambit. She didn’t disappoint. Madame told Marshall that she had just received a message from her husband. Unless American aid was promised immediately, the message said, the Generalissimo was going to “step aside” and make way for members of his government to negotiate “peace with the Communists” through the offices of the Soviet Union. Marshall calmly explained that while he was recovering from surgery he was not “officiating” as secretary of state.56 If she wanted Chiang’s message and any of her other requests to be given serious consideration she should make sure they were all in writing and delivered to Bob Lovett.
That afternoon, December 27, Madame Chiang met with Lovett. She showed him her husband’s message and handed him a memo setting forth her requests for U.S. support. Lovett agreed to discuss the Generalissimo’s message and her requests with Truman. Otherwise, he made no commitments. Neither the president nor Marshall, in his official capacity, met with her again. In early January, Madame left Washington for her brother-in-law’s estate in Riverdale, New York. Her plan was to try to mobilize pro-Chiang support in the U.S. by appealing to journalists, sympathetic politicians, members of the military, and church leaders—the so-called China Lobby. She would never return to her native land.
On January 21, Chiang resigned as president, though he held on to the essential reins of power by remaining head of the KMT (the Nationalist political party) and commander in chief of the armed forces. He was obviously hedging his bets. Chiang retreated to his ancestral village south of Shanghai, telling his wife he needed a rest. The Nationalist government, under acting president Li Zongren, moved from Nanking south to Canton.
Marshall was released from the hospital near the end of December. He and Katherine immediately flew to Pinehurst. His letter of resignation was reluctantly accepted by the president. “I had hoped,” wrote Truman, “that with medical treatment and rest and recuperation you could continue in office. I am, however, unwilling to assume the responsibility of further jeopardizing your health.”57 At a press conference on January 7, Truman announced the resignations of both Marshall and Lovett and the appointments of Dean Acheson as secretary of state and James Webb as undersecretary, all effective on January 20, 1949.
Acheson, who had served for six months as Marshall’s undersecretary and was about to be his successor, paid tribute to Marshall as only he could. “To say what makes greatness is very difficult,” he wrote. “But when one is close to it one knows. Twice in my life it has happened to me. Once with Justice Holmes and once with you. Greatness is a quality of character and is not the result of circumstances. It has to do with grandeur and with completeness of character.”58
Marshall’s convalescence was unexpectedly slow and painful. A press photograph taken at Pinehurst on January 7, the day Truman announced Marshall’s resignation, shows him standing unsteadily, his face much thinner and his buttoned suit coat looking two to three sizes too large. As he remarked in a letter to Madge, his “feeble appearance” was accentuated by the fact that he was gripping a wooden cane.59 For almost three months, as Marshall recuperated at Pinehurst, on the beach in Puerto Rico, and at a guesthouse in New Orleans owned by his VMI roommate, he complained of painful swelling on his right side—“about six inches”—which Dr. Kimbrough assured him was “normal anticipated neuritis of the twelfth nerve.”60
In Washington, as Inauguration Day approached, the president laid the groundwork for another change in his cabinet that would have fateful consequences for Marshall—but not until the summer of 1950. Truman had come to the conclusion that James Forrestal, the nation’s first secretary of defense, had to be replaced because, as he wrote several months later, “Forrestal was cracking up under the pressure of reorganizing the defense departments.”61 A year and a half earlier the National Security Act of 1947 abolished the old War and Navy Departments and merged their functions and responsibilities—army, navy, and air force, each with a separate secretary—into a single umbrella entity. Given the grand title “Secretary of Defense,” Forrestal’s job was to manage the reorganization and unify the formerly separate branches of the nation’s armed services. This turned out to be an almost impossible task because the legislation deprived him of chain-of-command authority over the secretaries of the three branches, who were permitted to report directly to the president. Forrestal’s logical replacement was big, bald Louis Johnson. Unlike Forrestal, he was decisive, tough-minded, and mean, qualities that Truman believed were needed to get the unification job done and to help him cut the defense budget. As assistant secretary of war under FDR, Johnson had extensive experience managing military brass. Having just finished raising the money that enabled Truman to win the election, Johnson made it known personally and through White House surrogates and reporters that he badly wanted the job.
According to Forrestal’s biographers, Truman told Forrestal in a private talk on January 11 that he planned to replace him and nominate Johnson as secretary of defense. Forrestal was devastated. The next afternoon, Truman made a surprise visit to Pinehurst. It is likely that Truman asked Marshall’s advice about the appointment of Johnson, though there is no record of what they actually discussed. A week later Truman and Johnson agreed that the change would not be announced until around the first of March. Johnson needed time to familiarize himself with the duties of the defense secretary and to sever his ties with Convair, an aircraft manufacturer that was trying to sell B-36 bombers to the government.
Scarcely three months later, Forrestal shocked the nation when he tried to hang himself and then fell to his death from the top floor of Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he had been hospitalized for severe mental illness. Moments before his death he was copying Sophocles’s poem “The Chorus from Ajax,” in which Ajax, forlorn and “[w]orn by the waste of time,” contemplates suicide.62 At Arlington National Cemetery, Marshall served as one of James Forrestal’s honorary pallbearers.
When Marshall heard or read in early March that the president had actually decided to nominate Johnson as secretary of defense, he included a handwritten note to Johnson in an envelope sent to his secretary, Sally Chamberlin. The note to Johnson that Chamberlin typed up and sent out under Marshall’s name was eerily prophetic. “Congratulations on your appointment,” it began. Recalling his experiences with Johnson when he was assistant secretary of war, Marshall wrote, “I have always felt . . . that you produced much needed aggressive action along with an unusually clear understanding of what was needed. I felt then and still think that you would have been one of the great outstanding figures of the war years if you had confined yourself to the job . . . I have an earnest hope that you will give the country what is so urgently needed [italics added].”63 This was a blunt warning that Johnson should not use the secretary of defense post as a stepping-stone to the presidency, a political ambition that Johnson was known to have harbored ever since Roosevelt passed over him to nominate Stimson as secretary of war in 1940.
Unfortunately for Johnson, his ambition rendered him incapable of following Marshall’s advice. As a consequence, duty would eventually call Marshall back into his third shooting war.
Sometime in early March, recalled Marshall, the president “brought up the subject” again.64 The “subject” was whether Marshall would be willing to take over the presidency of the American National Red Cross, an appointment that Truman was empowered to make. Basil O’Connor, Roosevelt’s close friend who helped establish the Warm Springs foundation, had headed the Red Cross since 1944. After the war, hundreds of volunteers throughout the U.S. who ran the local chapters and did the fieldwork began complaining about the small number of elites that actually governed the Red Cross and O’Connor’s imperious management of the vast organization. In 1947, Congress responded by expanding the size of the governing board and requiring, among other reforms, that 60 percent of its members be elected by chapters and blood service regions. As a result of those reforms, the leadership of the Red Cross was broadened and those who labored in the hinterlands were given a greater voice in policy making and governance. However, O’Connor hung on as president, continuing to maintain a tight grip on the millions contributed to the Red Cross and deciding how the funds were spent. When he traveled it was always first-class, surrounded by aides as if he were a four-star general.
Truman was anxious to make a change. In light of Marshall’s support of the Red Cross during the war, his effectiveness in selling the Marshall Plan, and his stature in America, Truman believed Marshall was the perfect choice to tamp down dissension and restore morale among the ranks of the Red Cross volunteers.
“I told the President,” wrote Marshall, “that I appreciated the compliment he was paying me and that Mrs. Marshall and I would talk the matter over as we had done four years before.” (Truman first mentioned the Red Cross post as a possibility in November 1945, a few days before Marshall retired as army chief of staff.) George and Katherine talked it through. Both agreed that the Red Cross was “a great humanitarian organization” and that if Marshall were to take on any active engagement following his recuperation, the presidency of the Red Cross “was by far the most satisfying opportunity.”65 Marshall credited Katherine with making the final decision. Sitting on boards and commissions was not enough, she reasoned. He needed to be active and he needed a new challenge. She knew her man.
By letter dated March 15, Marshall told Truman he was prepared to accept the Red Cross appointment as early as May 1, or “whatever later date meets your convenience.”66 Truman did not respond. Six weeks later, Marshall begged off a request by the Episcopal Bishop of Washington that he become trustee of the National Cathedral, writing, “I probably will be appointed head of the American Red Cross in the near future.”67 Still no word came from the White House about the appointment. George and Katherine finalized plans to vacation for the month of August at a “camp” formerly owned by J. P. Morgan (renamed “Camp Uncas”) on Racquette Lake in the Adirondacks. Katherine had invited Madame Chiang to join them there.
Why the delay? Most likely because O’Connor wanted to mark his departure by making a splash at the annual Red Cross convention in Atlanta that was not held until the end of June. The theme of his keynote speech at the convention was an enthusiastic yes to the rhetorical question that served as the title of his address: “Can the Red Cross Survive?”68 If it were not for the record-breaking summertime outbreak of polio that demanded O’Connor’s full-time attention to his other vocation, fund-raising for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (the March of Dimes), he might have continued to resist the not-too-subtle hints coming from the White House that it was time to step down. As it was, he finally submitted his resignation in September, which allowed Truman to appoint Marshall to replace him, effective October 1, 1949.
The press releases announcing Marshall’s appointment were completely overshadowed by two developments that shifted the global balance of power and to this day have posed a threat to U.S. security. On September 23, Charlie Ross called the press corps into the Blair House briefing room and distributed a mimeographed statement from the president. (Due to reconstruction of the White House, Truman and his staff had moved into nearby Blair House on Jackson Square.) The words that jumped out were “We have evidence that in recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.”69 Truman didn’t use the word “bomb,” but everyone knew that the U.S. no longer had a monopoly on atomic bombs. Newsweek called it “the biggest news since the close of the Second World War.”70 Seven days later, in Tiananmen Square, Mao Zedong climbed the stone steps of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. To the crowd of revolutionaries below, including one of Madame Chiang’s sisters, who defied her family, Mao announced that “the People’s War of Liberation has been basically won . . . This government is the sole legal government representing all the people of the People’s Republic of China.”71
In Washington, across from the Ellipse, a crowd of staffers gathered around the entrance to the white marble headquarters of the American Red Cross. They sighted the general’s car as it came down 17th Street and slowed to a stop. Marshall stepped out, followed by O’Connor and James Nicholson, the executive vice president and general manager of the Red Cross. The general was tanned and relaxed, every strand of his whitening hair brushed and shining. His face broke into a broad smile as he briskly ascended the steps under the temple portico. Inside the building he was greeted with applause and the popping of flashbulbs. At the top of the landing leading to his second-floor office he quieted the crowd and simply said “Thank you” two or three times.72
Marshall went right to work. During the first three weeks he learned that the American Red Cross was actually a network of 3,700 local chapters and about two dozen blood service regions. The organization was originally founded in 1881 by Clara Barton. Its post–World War II mission was to provide domestic and international disaster relief, furnish various forms of support to the U.S. military, operate a national blood program, and render emergency relief abroad pursuant to the dictates of the Geneva Convention. In 1949–50, the Red Cross had about 5,000 employees, though the bulk of its work and its successes or failures were largely dependent on the services of tens of thousands of volunteers. Most of its financial support came from voluntary contributions by citizens and foundations and from cost-recovery charges for services, such as the provision of blood and blood products and health and safety training courses.
The general’s first move in his new job was a highly publicized cross-country “listening trip” with the aim of restoring morale among the volunteers and employees. On the morning of October 24, Marshall, along with two top officials of the Red Cross, departed National Airport in a converted Martin B-26 bomber. For the next six days he visited 15 cities, discussed Red Cross plans with the heads of 158 chapters, shook hands and broke bread with hundreds of employees and volunteers, and held press conferences at every stop. Several news articles expressed surprise at Marshall’s vigor—“the bounce in his step” that “left local Red Cross personnel and civic leaders spinning in their tracks.”73 At meetings with the chapter leaders, Marshall encouraged them to speak openly about their concerns. He listened and learned.
By all accounts, Marshall’s coast-to-coast blitz in October 1949 and another flying trip in 1950 (30,000 miles from mid-January to early March) were public relations successes. They boosted the morale of the volunteers, employees, and chapter leaders. Moreover, they provided platforms for Marshall to promote the value of the Red Cross and to respond to complaints from the media and servicemen about some of its shortcomings (e.g., delays in responding to disasters; charging servicemen for food, lodging, and donated cigarettes; breakdowns in providing overseas telephone services to servicemen).
During trips around the country and in nationwide radio addresses, Marshall used his bully pulpit as president to propose improvements in the operations and services of the Red Cross. For example, in speeches and articles aimed at chapter heads, Marshall pressed for a “much stronger volunteer effort” to recruit volunteers from the ranks of the Junior Red Cross (19 million members) and from the large pool of “young women” who he said represented “greatest potential for vigorous and enthusiastic action in the whole Red Cross scene.”74 Marshall told an American Legion audience that the Red Cross could and would do more to assist the Veterans Administration by visiting and counseling “mentally disturbed” veterans.75 And he cautioned chapters against weakening their fund-raising efforts and the “national status of the Red Cross” by partnering with local organizations like “community chests.”76 Yet there is no evidence that programs were instituted to accomplish any of these objectives. Nor is there a basis for claims made by two of Marshall’s biographers that he “put reforms in place” to “broaden the organization’s leadership” and “untangle overcomplicated lines of authority.”77 The reforms were legislated by Congress before Marshall arrived.
In one vitally important respect, however, Marshall engineered a reorganization that changed the face of the Red Cross. On July 11, 1950, two weeks after the outbreak of the Korean War, Marshall spent part of the day at Harvard Medical School with Dr. Edwin Cohn, one of the world’s foremost medical researchers on the components of human blood. With Marshall at Cohn’s elbow and asking questions, Cohn and his colleagues demonstrated a device that could rapidly fractionate blood into a number of new, potentially lifesaving derivatives. That evening, at the Harvard Club in Boston, Marshall addressed Dr. Cohn and a group of scientists, doctors, and representatives of government agencies with expertise in blood and blood derivatives. Referencing the growing danger to the “national welfare and security” posed by the Korean War and the Soviet nuclear threat, Marshall announced that the peacetime National Blood Program of the Red Cross had been made “a separate service,” reporting directly to him. The Red Cross, Marshall declared, was about to be officially designated by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson as the entity responsible for meeting the needs of the U.S. armed forces and civil defense for blood and blood derivatives. In effect, the relationship that the Red Cross had with the War and Navy Departments during World War II with respect to blood and blood products was being reestablished with the Defense Department. Marshall also reported that to “realize the goal of a truly national program,” an agreement had been reached between the Red Cross, other nonprofit blood banks in the U.S., and the American Medical Association—the “Boston Agreement”—whereby they would cooperate with one another on blood procurement, storage, processing, and preparation for shipment.78 Thus, it was on Marshall’s watch and probably due to his leadership that the mission of the Red Cross National Blood Program was greatly expanded to embrace not only the supply of blood and blood products for civilian purposes but also for military use in the Korean War.
Eleven days later, Marshall notified Johnson that the Red Cross would immediately increase its blood collections. Soon thereafter it began sending whole blood to a temporary processing laboratory at a U.S. naval hospital in Oakland, California. The first shipment of blood from the U.S. for soldiers wounded in Korea left the laboratory on August 26, 1950, and was flown to Japan. From then until February 1954, more than 340,000 pints were flown to Japan for transshipment to medical units of the United Nations in Korea. Near the end of the war, Dr. Melvin Carsberg, head of the Office of Medical Services, reported that the rate of death from combat wounds dropped from 4.5 percent during World War II to 2 percent in the Korean War. In addition, his statistics showed that 85 percent of the wounded in Korea returned to active duty, compared to 77 percent in the Second World War.79 Evacuation helicopters and advances in medicine and surgery obviously had much to do with these declines. Nevertheless, the availability of whole blood, plasma, and other blood derivatives supplied through the Red Cross National Blood Program had a significant role in saving lives and sending servicemen home.
On Saturday morning, July 1, 1950, before much blood had been spilled in Korea, Marshall received a call at Dodona. Dean Acheson, his successor as secretary of state, informed Marshall that the president had just approved a request by General MacArthur, commander of all U.S. forces in the Far East, to deploy army ground troops in South Korea for the purpose of mounting a counteroffensive against the North Korean invaders. America was thus committed to a land war in Asia, he said, a step that could lead to war with the People’s Republic of China or the Soviet Union, or perhaps even the two of them at once. Acheson needed Marshall’s advice.
Around one o’clock that afternoon Acheson arrived at Dodona, bringing with him Averell Harriman and Chip Bohlen, who had recently flown in from Paris, and George Kennan, who was about to leave the State Department, but agreed to stay on through August as counselor on Soviet affairs because of the outbreak of the Korean War. Out on the lawn, under the big oaks, the so-called wise men filled Marshall in on the events of the previous week, beginning with the first meeting at Blair House on Sunday evening, June 25, when Truman made it clear that while the U.S. would work through the UN he would not let the North Korean attack succeed. “By God, I am going to let them have it,” he was purported to have said.80 According to Kennan’s diary, Marshall “listened very attentively and silently, as he always does . . . and then gave us his views vigorously and without hesitation.” He began by saying that “there could be no doubt about the proper course for us to pursue . . . We had begun this thing; now we had to go through with it.” Marshall confessed that his “greatest worry” was Western Europe, the area of “real strategic importance,” but the wise men assured him that U.S. action in Korea would not cause the Soviets to attack in Europe nor would it weaken the North Atlantic alliance. As to MacArthur’s request for additional troops, Marshall observed that it was a “common failing for commanders to ask for more than they needed.” MacArthur, he said, “should be told to do this job with what he had.” Someone in the group, probably Harriman, suggested that the “defense establishment,” meaning Louis Johnson, had gone out of its way to undermine Acheson. Among other things, Marshall was told that Johnson and his supporters were spreading the word throughout Washington that when Acheson gave a speech declaring that Korea was outside the U.S. defensive perimeter and expressed his opposition to military assistance to Formosa, he encouraged not only North Korea but world communism itself to advance aggressively into the free world. According to Kennan, Marshall reacted by saying he was “deeply disturbed” to learn of Johnson’s “attitude,” though he could not have been surprised.81 At the time, no one came out and said it, but Marshall’s esteemed visitors must have conveyed the impression that they were on the verge of advising the president to fire Johnson and that they wanted Marshall to support them.
A few days later, in a chatty letter to Senator Vandenberg, who was in Grand Rapids battling lung cancer, Marshall referenced the identity of the four men who showed up for lunch at Dodona, without providing details. “You can imagine the character of the discussion,” he hinted, knowing that Vandenberg would probably guess what they talked about. “Now for a man who is trying to devote himself to Red Cross and keep out of governmental things,” wrote Marshall, “I certainly found myself up to the neck in this situation.”82