After leaving Foggy Bottom, Marshall spent much of his time at Dodona Manor, in Leesburg. In the mornings he would plant his cabbages, radishes, peas, beans, and flowers and launch his aggressive campaigns against Japanese beetles. Until his death the handsome two-story dwelling and its surrounding four acres would be his permanent home, his time there interrupted by stays at the winter cottage in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and occasional vacations in the Adirondacks and in Michigan.
In late June 1949 the New York Times Washington reporter William S. White came to Leesburg to see how the retiree was faring. White was impressed by the dwelling. It was “old and . . . beautiful,” though “in an impersonal way.” But that suited the man it sheltered, for he seemed to the reporter to be a “remote great gentleman,” who appeared more “British” than American, by which he meant, White explained, “laconic and honorably strong and distant.” White noted that in their interview Marshall avoided any talk of battles. In none of his remarks about the past was there any “war drama.” The war to him was, rather, “an enterprise almost inhumanly complex and exasperating, primarily an enterprise of so many million tons of munitions, so many hundreds of miles of inertly resisting terrain, so many temperamental subordinate commanders to cajole.” However tight-lipped, Marshall uncharacteristically complained at length about the burdens public office had imposed on him. Selling the ERP to businessmen had been truly irksome. But he reserved his bitterest complaints for the grilling over Pearl Harbor he had endured from the congressional joint committee in December 1945. That experience he summarized in one sarcastic phrase as “a charming week.” “The net impression,” White concluded as he left to return to Washington, “is of a man to whom duty and honor are as real as the oak trees that stand with such sure strength about him here, a hard just man with an inner life which, surely, few have ever really known.”1 All told, White’s was as frank and accurate a portrayal of the essential Marshall as any in his lifetime.
Marshall may have found it easy to leave public life, but Truman found it hard to let him go. Yet if he had to leave, the president felt, he would ease his retirement financially. Marshall had severed his official connection with the army when he accepted the post at State. Now the president arranged to restore his formal five-star military rank, providing him with considerably higher pay as a retiree than he would otherwise have received.
Truman and Acheson also continued to turn to him for advice and help. As a private citizen Marshall continued to speak to influential groups on policy matters. On May 6 he addressed the Foreign Policy Association in New York on the subject of public education in the field of international affairs. His speech to ninety prominent business leaders at the Waldorf-Astoria acknowledged the difficulty of awakening Americans to the importance of overseas events to their safety and prosperity. He recalled the isolationist excesses of the years preceding Pearl Harbor that had ill fitted the nation to face the threats and dangers, including the military hazards, from abroad. The war had of course helped break down Americans’ sense of insulation from foreign events, he noted. “In the last ten years, public opinion . . . has progressed a long way toward maturity,” as reflected by support for the UN, the Berlin airlift, ERP, and other programs and acts.2 Although his role in creating NATO had been secondary, Acheson urged him to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to help push for final adoption of the treaty, signed on April 4. Marshall accepted but the secretary of state, deferring perhaps to his predecessor’s infirmities, soon informed him that his help for passage would not be needed. After considerable debate the Senate approved the treaty on July 25.
In the fall of 1949 Truman found a civilian job for Marshall as president of the American Red Cross to replace its embattled head, who was preparing to resign. Enthusiastically seconded by Katherine, the offer seemed congenial. It was not full retirement; there was real work to do; and confined to accepting speaking invitations, receiving awards, answering his mail, and practicing microagriculture, he was restless. In any case, he pledged, it would be his “last public effort.”3
As president of the disaster-relief organization Marshall untangled its overcomplicated lines of authority and pushed for better funding for its blood-bank system and enhanced medical support for the families of servicemen. Though it left him relatively free of the pressures of the past, the job proved worthwhile, and he performed it successfully. But he could not help following events abroad with intense interest. And there was much to follow.
In China the months of late 1949 and early 1950 witnessed the final flight to Formosa of Chiang, his entourage, his treasury, and his remaining Nationalist troops, leaving the mainland uncontested to Chairman Mao and his Communist forces. On October 1, 1949, the victorious Communists announced creation of the People’s Republic of China, with its capital at Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party as its “vanguard.” This “loss of China,” the world’s most populous country, fanned the fury of the China Lobby. The evil outcome cried out for explanation; it could not be Chiang’s and his colleagues’ fault, the lobbyists insisted. Behind it must lie the mistakes—nay, the betrayals and treasonous acts—of high-placed Americans. Their outcry soon merged with the overwrought, sensational charges of the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, who in February 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, attracted national attention when he notoriously claimed that more than two hundred men in high positions in the State Department had betrayed their country to the Communists.
Marshall was no longer secretary; his successor, Dean Acheson, would bear the brunt of McCarthy’s reckless Wheeling charges. But Marshall had not been able to avoid totally the loyalty panic that seized the nation during the Truman administration. In June 1947, while still in office, he had been forced by the growing anti-Communist surge to establish within his department a Personnel Security Board to ferret out suspected spies and traitors. Under Conrad Snow, a department lawyer, in its first six months the board detected, and presumably fired, all of ten State Department employees out of thousands. Eventually the Wisconsin senator would take aim directly at Marshall, but even before the Wheeling speech, Senator Owen Brewster, one of the unfriendly Republican committee members on the joint congressional Pearl Harbor investigation, was accusing Marshall of responsibility for Chiang’s defeat.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in East Asia, another dangerous and divisive storm was brewing, one that would also draw Marshall into its vortex. The place was Korea, a large populous peninsula attached at its wide northern edge to both Chinese Manchuria and Soviet Siberia. A harshly exploited colony of imperial Japan from 1910 onward, following Japan’s defeat in 1945 it was occupied by Soviet forces in the north and by American troops in the south, with the border between the two jurisdictions set at the thirty-eighth parallel. As the Cold War emerged into the open, it proved impossible to unite the peninsula by peaceable means, and by 1948 two political entities had evolved—in the north a Communist regime, with its capital in Pyongyang, led by Kim Il Sung; in the south the Republic of Korea (ROK), led by Syngman Rhee, an authoritarian politician and determined anti-Communist, with its capital in Seoul.
In January 1950, in a speech to the National Press Club, Secretary Acheson made a point of excluding both Nationalist Formosa (Taiwan) and South Korea from the boundaries of a strategic defense perimeter in East Asia that the United States pledged to protect with its military forces. Kim Il Sung may well have seen this as an opportunity to forcibly unite the two Koreas under Communist rule, safe from U.S. intervention. Stalin gave Kim’s move his reluctant approval and on June 25, 1950, the North Korean army crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and thrust into South Korea intent on conquest and forced unification. With far superior numbers and equipment, it quickly overwhelmed the ROK defenders, including a few hundred American military advisers still garrisoned on the peninsula.
The American reaction was swift and vigorous. At home in Missouri when the news broke, Truman was swept by outrage. It was, he concluded, a case of naked aggression, an act that America and the non-Communist world could not tolerate. If left unchallenged it would assuredly lead to further Communist aggression, perhaps even in Europe. Even before he returned to Washington the president told his daughter, Margaret: “We are going to fight.”4 But in addition to his moral indignation and Cold War fears, the president was propelled by domestic politics. The China Lobby, led by McCarthy, had been screaming that he, and the Democrats in general, were “soft on Communism.” Whatever the diplomatic and moral dimensions of the Communist attack, then, the health of the party and the administration required that the United States not take it lying down.
Back in Washington, Truman called a meeting at Blair House of his chief State Department and Pentagon advisers. Their conclusions were unanimous: The United States must act promptly and decisively. The Soviet Union was undoubtedly behind the invasion; the Russians were testing America’s Cold War resolve. South Korea must be defended to show Stalin and the free world that the United States would not be intimidated. A second Blair House meeting determined that U.S. air and naval forces would be deployed to stop the invaders, but, with the weakness of the South Korean army not yet apparent, it was decided that no ground forces would be sent. MacArthur, from his proconsular base in nearby Japan, would be placed in overall command of all U.S. forces to be engaged.
The catastrophic rout of the ROK army quickly ended the ban on U.S. ground forces. American infantry combat units from Japan soon landed in Korea to help the faltering Republic of Korea troops. Meanwhile, the American military operation received the sanction of the United Nations. In the temporary absence of Soviet representatives, who could have vetoed the resolutions, the UN Security Council ordered an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of all North Korean forces from the south and urged UN member nations to assist militarily efforts to restore peace to the peninsula. Soon after, the UN endorsed MacArthur as a single commander for the forces to defeat the invaders. The UN’s actions made it possible thereafter for the United States to depict the intervention as a joint UN-U.S. operation and call it a “police action” rather than a war. And in fact seventeen nations ultimately sent troops to defend the beleaguered South Koreans, though the major military punch was always American.
The arrival of American forces changed the course of the military struggle. But not at first. The initial units were composed of ill-trained, out-of-shape occupation troops from garrisons in Japan who were unable to stem the Communist advance. By early August the North Koreans had captured Seoul and crowded their adversaries into a pocket around the southeastern port of Pusan. There, reinforced by new, better-trained army and marine units, the ROK and the Americans beat off strong enemy attacks. On the North Korean side, meanwhile, losses had been high, many times the American casualty list, though their weakening effect was not yet apparent and the survival of an independent South Korean entity seemed doubtful.
It was at this point that Truman once again sought Marshall’s help. With his enthusiastic support, in July 1947 the president had succeeded in inducing Congress to pass the National Security Act, creating a new Department of Defense to replace the separate War and Navy Departments that had coexisted—and squabbled—since the early days of the republic. His choice as first secretary of the unified services was James Forrestal, the neurotic former secretary of the navy, whose differences with Truman over Palestine and the military budget triggered clinical depression and his suicide in March 1949. His successor was Louis Johnson, who had been assistant secretary of war when Marshall became deputy chief of staff in 1938. Johnson was a combative and unstable man, and he and the president did not get along. In early July, just days after the North Korean army crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, Truman motored down to Leesburg and told Marshall of his dissatisfaction with the West Virginian. Would he be willing to succeed him? He was content with his present status, Marshall responded, but he was a soldier and would obey the president’s wishes if so ordered. On September 6, 1950, after the Marshalls returned from a vacation in northern Michigan, the president directly offered him the post and he accepted, with the sole condition that Lovett be simultaneously appointed his deputy.
The Senate confirmed the new appointment, but this time not without dissent. Times had changed since 1947. Marshall retained a substantial reservoir of goodwill but was no longer beyond attack. The tensions and setbacks of the Cold War had created resentments and frustrations that now spilled over onto the appointee-designate. In the Senate confirmation hearings Indiana senator William Jenner, a right-wing Republican, blasted Marshall along with Truman and Acheson. Referring to a wide range of his actions as chief of staff and China negotiator, Jenner declared he was “not only willing” but actually “eager to play the front man for traitors.” It was no new role for him, Jenner insisted, for rather than being “the greatest living American,” as Truman had said, Marshall was “a living lie.”5 Shocked by Jenner’s venom, Democrats and several moderate Republicans came to Marshall’s defense. Massachusetts Republican senator Leverett Saltonstall, for one, denounced the charge that Marshall’s life had been a lie. Indeed, if “ever there was a life spent in the interests of our country . . . it is the life of George C. Marshall,” he declared.6 Despite Jenner and his supporters, the appointment was confirmed by a Senate vote of 57 to 11, with the support of fifteen Republicans, but Marshall had been wounded, and in later months more blows would follow.
Marshall moved into his Pentagon office on September 19 just in time to see the tide turn in Korea. For six weeks the fighting at besieged Pusan had raged on. Then, on September 15, UN forces under MacArthur’s command made a risky but successful end run, landing at Inchon, far to the north on the peninsula’s west coast, opposite Seoul. Soon the Pusan defenders to their south broke out of the besieged perimeter. The North Koreans, now outgunned and outnumbered, failed under the combined assault and retreated in panic northward toward the thirty-eighth parallel, whence they had come. On September 26 MacArthur announced the reoccupation of Seoul. UN forces were soon approaching the old border between the two Koreas and facing the problem of whether to cross the line and occupy Kim Il Sung’s Communist domain. Anticipating a successful outcome, on the day of the Inchon landing the Joint Chiefs told MacArthur to look ahead “for a possible occupation of North Korea.” On September 27, with the approval of Truman, Marshall, Acheson, and Bradley, they directed him to “conduct military operations . . . north of the 38 Parallel” for the purpose of destroying the North Korean armed forces.7 Three major constraints were imposed, however: He must not cross either the Manchurian or Soviet borders, order American planes to fly over Russian and Chinese territory, or allow UN—as opposed to ROK—troops to reach the Yalu River on the Korean-Chinese border. If either the Soviet Union or Red China introduced troops into Korea, he should immediately refer the matter to Washington.
Marshall’s reactions to the tumultuous events in the Far East before his return to office are unknown. Korea had seldom won his attention in the past. During the closing months of his China mission he had become aware of difficulties with the Soviets over establishing a trusteeship for the former Japanese colony. He was also, of course, conscious of political differences between the opposing Communist and anti-Communist camps within each part of the divided country. As secretary of state, at the Moscow foreign ministers’ conference, he had clashed briefly with Molotov over the future disposition of the peninsula. Marshall disagreed with his State Department policy planners, who believed Korea of no strategic importance to the United States and advised that it be abandoned. Such a course, he feared, would lead to a Communist takeover. But later, as a civilian between posts, like most other Americans he thought little of the issues so far away, in such an obscure corner of the world.
As he moved into his new office at the Pentagon, Marshall was painfully aware of problems he now faced. Besides Korea, the first to confront him was the dearth of military manpower to fight the hot war now raging in the Far East and to make credible U.S. foreign policy in the new era of superpower rivalry. His plan for universal military service in peacetime had already been rejected by Congress, but he hoped that he could meet the country’s needs by better management of the manpower available under the now-renewed wartime draft law. It was at this point that Marshall asked the president to appoint Anna Rosenberg, an expert on human resources, as assistant secretary of defense for manpower, and it was on this occasion (see chapter 10) that he fought successfully for her confirmation in the face of opposition that included a substantial dose of anti-Semitism.
In fact the postwar military manpower shortage may have been Marshall’s fault, or at least it so seemed to retired admiral Arthur Radford, a military-preparedness zealot. According to the admiral, Marshall’s fight for UMT, however wise for the future, had ignored immediate short-term American defense needs. “In the years,” he declared, “when General Marshall might have tried to convince the president that our military strength was so dangerously low that it might invite attack, he elected not to do so.”8 In any event, like many other Cold War planners, Marshall changed his mind when confronted by Korea and signed on to the recent National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68), calling for aggressive American rearmament to meet Communist challenges. The report, written under the direction of Paul Nitze, Kennan’s successor as head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, extended his predecessor’s notion of containment to embrace a wider range of places considered essential for American security. It also called for an aggressive expansion of U.S. defense spending to meet the new commitments, to as much as $35 to $40 billion a year, three times the amount under current plans. Marshall would remain a voice of caution in the Cold War chorus, but as secretary of defense not by very much.
In his new post Marshall could count on the help of one of his favorite generals, Omar Bradley, now head of the Joint Chiefs. J. Lawton Collins, another successful ETO general, would be presiding as his deputy. He would also have the services of his good right hand, Robert Lovett, who now, as scheduled, returned to government as deputy secretary of defense to his old chief at State.
Marshall arrived at the Pentagon soon after the Inchon landings and the headlong northward retreat of the Communist invaders. He congratulated MacArthur on his brilliant stroke at Inchon in a handwritten letter on September 30. MacArthur responded with the false bonhomie that often characterized the public exchanges between the two men. “Thanks George, for your fine message,” he wrote. “It brings back vividly the memory of past wars and the complete coordination and perfect unity of cooperation which has always existed in our mutual relationships and martial endeavors.”9 The issue of what to do when the rapidly advancing American and ROK forces reached the thirty-eighth parallel had presumably been addressed by the Joint Chiefs’ directive of September 27. But how would the Chinese respond when the UN’s forces reached the Yalu, their border with Korea? Would they and/or the Russians perceive the advance as a threat and massively intrude, transforming the UN police action into a great-power war? Marshall had approved the September Joint Chiefs’ directive that placed limits on MacArthur’s actions. But he soon muddied the issue. On September 29, having heard that ROK divisions would halt at the thirty-eighth parallel “for regrouping,” he cabled MacArthur: “We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th Parallel.”10 Ten days later the Joint Chiefs warned the general against taking any action on actual Chinese territory without prior authorization from Washington. But whatever the Secretary of Defense and his colleagues intended, MacArthur chose to interpret the Pentagon’s position as releasing him from the Joint Chiefs’ restrictions and would cite Marshall’s September 29 directive in his later defense following his removal from command.
In fact, during the whole cacophonous controversy over Korea between MacArthur and his superiors in Washington, the secretary of defense would waver and delay and generally fail to take firm positions on his subordinate’s actions. As his most scholarly biographer, D. Clayton James, has noted, MacArthur was indeed “guilty of insubordination toward his commander in chief,” but “his guilt must be mitigated by the imprecision and contradictory nature of his orders.”11 And James has a point. If the general’s actions after Inchon were the record of a would-be “American Caesar”—a man with dangerous political ambitions—they were nourished and fortified by the hesitations and vacillations of his bosses, including Marshall and the Joint Chiefs.
Why was Marshall’s voice so tentative and ambiguous? In part his dithering reflected his long-standing command philosophy: Choose the best men as local commanders and give them free rein. But as in the past, it also represented fear of MacArthur’s stature in the public mind, and the power and influence of his many political friends.
Be that as it was, by the early fall the possibility of uniting the entire peninsula under a pro-Western regime seemed to MacArthur an irresistible option. Arguing that there were not enough effective ROK troops available to do the job alone, on October 17 he informed the Joint Chiefs that he intended to ignore their limit on which UN forces would be allowed to advance to the Yalu border. Neither the Joint Chiefs nor the Defense Department protested at first, and when the chiefs finally did, their response was a feeble admonition: “Your action is a matter of some concern here.”12
MacArthur’s decision would awaken a sleeping tiger. By early October UN observers were detecting suspicious movements of Manchurian-based Chinese troops along the North Korean border. Yet at the meeting with the president and his military and civilian advisers at Wake Island in midmonth, a confident and cheerful MacArthur brushed aside the dangers of Chinese intervention. The Korean War was won, he declared. Formal Communist resistance would end by Thanksgiving; American troops would be back in Japan by Christmas. As for the Chinese Communist troops, they would not cross the Korean border, he said, because they lacked the airpower to protect their forces against UN attack should they invade. The Russians did have the airpower, but, he believed, they could not coordinate it with the Communist troops on the ground. In his impressive performance MacArthur praised the president and the Defense Department for their unstinting support: “No commander in the history of war has ever had more complete and adequate support from all agencies in Washington than I have.”13
Marshall did not come to the Wake Island meeting. It had been arranged by the president ostensibly to impress the Korean commander with the administration’s views of the war as a limited conflict. But Truman obviously had political motives as well for the long trip across the Pacific. The Democrats faced a chancy midterm congressional election in November, and at Wake Truman hoped to demonstrate to the voters his party’s command of events. In the event, the meeting revealed the clash of personalities among the men leading the first hot war of the Cold War era. Resentful of Washington’s efforts to hold him back, MacArthur, in the view of some of Truman’s party, was rude to the president. Like Marshall, Truman in turn seemed wary of MacArthur. Deservedly or not, he was a war hero. His reputation as a masterful proconsul in Japan, dragging the defeated nation from the Middle Ages into the modern, democratic world, was formidable. Public opinion on Korea, moreover, was on his bellicose side, making it difficult to defy him. During the war Marshall himself had found his relations with the commander of the Southwest Pacific theater a distasteful balancing act, and in the end had often been forced to defer to his wishes. The two men had always been vivid contrasts in military type, and Korea highlighted the differences. According to William Manchester, MacArthur’s popular biographer, the commander in Korea had “a warrior’s mind,” and “preferred the warlike spirit to the military spirit.” Marshall, on the other hand, “was more of a martial administrator.”14 Marshall’s absence from the weekend mid-Pacific conference was excusable on the grounds of his brief time in office. But it was probably also rooted in his desire to avoid the stigma of political partisanship. Perhaps, too, as Army Secretary Frank Pace would claim, it was out of disdain for MacArthur or, alternatively, in the opinion of a hostile MacArthur partisan, it was because Marshall’s “fine Virginia [sic] patrician nose does not tolerate the daily smells of Asia.”15
In any case the meeting at Wake Island settled nothing; MacArthur had become, and would remain, the proverbial loose cannon. No one, it seemed, could tell him what to do. The military historian Russell Weigley writes of a Pentagon meeting that included the Joint Chiefs, along with the president, Secretaries Acheson and Marshall, and others, where Gen. Matthew Ridgway, then deputy chief of staff, asked why MacArthur could not be bluntly told to do what his superiors demanded. His question was greeted, Ridgway reported, by “a frightened silence.” Then, on leaving the meeting with air force head Hoyt Vandenberg, Ridgway asked why the chiefs did not give MacArthur categorical directions. The general responded: “What good would that do? He wouldn’t obey the orders.”16
The crisis of Korea came to a head as UN troops approached the Chinese border. In late October advancing South Korean and American units encountered soldiers of the People’s Republic. Judged at first as “volunteers,” it soon became apparent that they were regulars from Mao’s vast army. To check further infiltration, MacArthur ordered his air arm to bomb the bridges across the Yalu. Fearing that the enemy was planning to launch a full-scale Asian war to distract the United States from potential aggressive Soviet moves in Europe, the alarmed Joint Chiefs directed MacArthur to cease all air attacks within five miles of the border, including raids on the Yalu bridges. MacArthur, who would later blame Marshall for the order, predictably protested. To cease such attacks would threaten the “ultimate destruction of the forces under my command,” he wrote the chiefs. He agreed to suspend the raids this time but refused to “accept the responsibility” for the consequences without assurance that the president understood the circumstances.17 At this point Marshall and the Joint Chiefs backed down. The secretary remained skeptical of MacArthur’s tactics and troop dispositions, but displayed what Acheson later characterized as a “curious quiescence.” On November 7 he sent MacArthur a conciliatory, if uncandid, letter reassuring him that Washington still had confidence in him. “Everyone here, Defense, State, and the President, is intensely desirous of supporting you,” he wrote. But expressing the administration’s fears of triggering a world war with the Soviet Union, he warned: “We are faced with an extremely grave international problem which could easily lead to a world disaster.”18
Still not convinced that the Chinese intended a full-scale intervention, in late November MacArthur launched a major offensive designed to end remaining North Korean resistance and, as phrased in the popular press, to bring “the boys home by Christmas.” Instead he brought the full weight of the People’s Republic army down on his head. On November 25, 260,000 Chinese troops, led by Gen. Peng Dehuai, counterattacked across the frozen Yalu, hitting hard at Walton Walker’s Eighth Army and Edward Almond’s Tenth Corps. On the twenty-eighth the president called an emergency session of the National Security Council to consider the dangerous turn of military events and how to prevent it from exploding into a full-scale world war. At the meeting a grave Marshall declared that America must not get “sewed up in Korea” but find a way to “get out with honor.”19 He endorsed the views of his three undersecretaries and the Joint Chiefs, whom he had consulted before the NSC meeting. These men had argued that the Chinese invasion was “dictated in large measure by the [Soviet] Politburo.” To get “involved in a general war with China,” Marshall announced, “would be to fall into a carefully laid Russian trap.” To avoid such a possibility, he continued, the recent proposal by Chiang Kai-shek, seconded by MacArthur, that the United States deploy three hundred thousand Nationalist troops from Taiwan against the enemy in Korea, should be categorically declined. Finally, in light of the Chinese Communist intrusion, the United States must beef up its military budget and war preparations. Congress should be urged to pass a supplement to the 1952 budget to meet the increasing costs of the police action in Korea.20
Meanwhile, the massive Chinese offensive proved devastating. Caught flatfooted, UN and ROK forces retreated southward in disarray after suffering painful losses from both bitter cold and Chinese bullets. In January the Communist army retook Seoul and pushed south with every prospect of ejecting their UN enemies entirely from the Korean peninsula and making good Kim Il Sung’s original goals of uniting it under Communist control. Truman refused to consider evacuation of Korea and even defended MacArthur’s decision to divide his forces for what was to be the final attack. On December 3 the president met with his closest military and foreign policy advisers to reassess the status of the war, which now seemed teetering on the edge of disaster. But little new came out of the meeting. No one seemed able to rally the American commander, who was now at a loss how to prevent collapse except to drag Chiang and his Nationalist forces on Taiwan into the battle. Marshall seemed as irresolute as the others. According to General Ridgway, “Much of the time the Secretaries of State and Defense participated in the talks, with no one apparently willing to issue a flat order to the Far East Commander to correct the state of affairs that was going from bad to disastrous.”21
But if unfocused on how to extricate the UN forces from collapse, MacArthur was resolute in defending his reputation. He refused to take responsibility for the defeat and was soon playing the media to excuse his mistakes and blame the administration. The president and the Pentagon, he informed the editors of U.S. News & World Report, had imposed on him “an enormous handicap without precedent in military history.” No “authoritative source,” he told Arthur Krock of the New York Times, had suggested to him that “the command should stop at the 38th parallel or Pyongyang.”22 Angered by the misstatements, Truman now seriously considered firing the general but, fearing a public uproar, settled for the feeble order requiring that military officers and senior civilian government officials clear with appropriate officials in their departments all statements intended for the press.
Fortunately for the UN cause, on December 23, General Walker, a mediocre commander at best, died in a jeep accident, allowing the brilliant Matthew Ridgway to take over as UN combat commander. In February, Ridgway launched a counterattack that checked the enemy’s advance and soon forced them to retreat. In early March UN and ROK forces retook Seoul once more. At this point, in defiance of the president’s gag order of December 6, MacArthur told the head of United Press that the U.S. Eighth Army must be allowed to push north of the thirty-eighth parallel again to destroy the Communist menace. Truman reprimanded MacArthur for violating the recent directive and commanded him to report to Washington any request by Communist leaders for an armistice. He now determined to fire MacArthur but postponed the official act until he could bring Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs aboard without dissent.
Meanwhile, whatever his superiors’ wishes, the general’s defiance became even more blatant. By now MacArthur had gotten wind of the administration’s plan to open negotiations with the enemy for a cease-fire. The move seemed to him defeatist, and he determined to sabotage it. Following a brief trip to Korea, he issued from his Tokyo office a blustering communiqué declaring the Chinese incapable of sustaining for long their forces on the Korean peninsula, especially if the UN should expand its operations to mainland China itself. In the eyes of Lovett, Acheson, and Dean Rusk, this statement—the fifth defiance of Truman’s gag order—was a deliberate attempt to undermine the administration’s peace initiative by goading the enemy into a more intransigent mood. At a meeting of the three, Acheson labeled the statement “a major act of sabotage of a Government operation.” The angry Lovett insisted that the general “must be removed and removed at once.” The president himself was probably the most furious of all. MacArthur’s communiqué was “the lousiest trick a commander-in-chief can have done to him by an underling,” he told his daughter, Margaret.23
Worse was to follow. On March 20, in a private letter to House Minority Leader Joseph Martin, a conservative Asia First congressman, the general had endorsed “unleashing Chiang Kai-shek”—that is, using Chinese Nationalist forces against the Communists. Two weeks later, on April 5, Martin made this statement public, setting off a firestorm. The “General’s letter was front-page news on every continent,” Manchester has noted.24
To Truman this was the last straw. “The general,” he later wrote, “was not only in disagreement with the policy of the government but was challenging this policy in open insubordination to his Commander in Chief.”25 MacArthur must finally go. But the president still retained a residue of caution and turned once more to the quartet, Marshall, Acheson, Harriman, and Bradley, for support. He did not get it; or at least not enthusiastically. In a meeting on April 6 with the four leaders Marshall advised caution. Rather than fire him. bring MacArthur back from Asia for discussions. Or perhaps he, his Pentagon boss, should write personally to warn the general of the serious nature of his actions. Marshall was especially concerned lest the administration jeopardize the military appropriations bill currently pending in Congress or hurt troop morale in Korea by offending the general and his partisans. The others, too, for their various reasons, urged delay. But opinion among the president’s advisers soon firmed up. The next day Marshall met with Bradley and the Joint Chiefs and asked each to state his individual opinion of MacArthur’s insubordination. All now agreed that it was unconscionable and he must be relieved of his duties. The next morning, at still another meeting of the president with his four close advisers, those present concurred that the contumacious commander be dismissed. Truman sought to inform the general of his decision before it became public, but delivery of his message to Tokyo was delayed by a communication glitch. On April 11, at a late-night White House press conference triggered prematurely by a news leak, the public was officially informed that MacArthur was coming home with full honors, to be succeeded by Matthew Ridgway as overall commander in the Far East. On the thirteenth Truman gave a radio address, emphasizing his determination to prevent spread of the war and informing the public of his reasons for the relief of the general.
Despite the president’s efforts, as anticipated, MacArthur’s dismissal touched off a spectacular political explosion. Predictably, China Lobby Republicans furiously denounced the act. Senator Jenner raved that the country was “in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union.” He and his Ohio Senate colleague, Robert Taft, demanded that Truman be impeached. Senator McCarthy, in his coarse way, called the firing “a Communist victory won with the aid of bourbon and Benedictine.”26
The public reaction outside the Senate’s halls was equally intemperate and more worrisome politically. In Hawaii, where his plane touched down on the trip back to Washington from his Tokyo headquarters, a hundred thousand cheering citizens greeted the defrocked general. In San Francisco large approving crowds lined the streets as he drove from the airport to his hotel. In the days immediately following the recall Western Union delivered an estimated 75,000 telegrams to the White House and assorted government agencies, running 5 to 1 against the president. Some of these messages attacked Truman as an “imbecile,” a “pig,” a “judas,” a man who deserved impeachment. The press split over the dismissal, with the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the moderate Republican New York Herald Tribune praising Truman, but the conservative media moguls, with McCormick and Hearst in the lead, bitterly opposed.
On April 19 MacArthur appeared at the Capitol to address a joint session of Congress. In one of the notable speeches of the mid-twentieth century, he defended his goals and strategies in Korea and repudiated the administration’s. He denied any partisan or personal motives for his actions; he sought only to serve his country, he said. Aiming at Truman’s negotiated-peace plans, he attacked the administration for defending the failed policy of appeasement. He, too, disliked war, he declaimed, but once a nation was at war there could be “no substitute for victory.” The UN had failed to win the war in Asia, he insisted, because the American government was too politically timid and indecisive. MacArthur concluded with a bathetic review of his long public career, ending famously with the words of an old West Point barracks ballad: As he bade farewell he intoned the refrain: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.” His last word was a whispered “Good-bye.”27
The deafening applause that greeted MacArthur’s words in the House chamber was soon reverberating across the country. In New York he received a traditional Wall Street ticker-tape parade with several million citizens lining the nineteen-mile route along Broadway. Similar enthusiasm greeted him in Chicago and in his boyhood home, Milwaukee, when he went for a visit. On May 3 the Senate Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees opened joint hearings on the military situation in East Asia in the Senate Office Building. MacArthur was the first witness, and his testimony would last three days. Presided over by the respected Democratic senator from Georgia, Richard Russell, the testimony went on for forty-two days and included thirteen witnesses. The sessions were closed, but edited transcripts of each day’s events were released to the press.
Once again MacArthur defended his actions. He described the ongoing devastation in Korea as extraordinary. He admitted no mistakes. He denounced the concept of a “limited war,” calling it “appeasement.” Such a conflict would drag on indefinitely with mounting casualties and economic cost. Repeating an old theme from his days as wartime Southwest Pacific commander, he claimed that the administration, as marked by its NATO commitment, had displayed excessive concern for the wishes of America’s allies in Europe and not enough for its own needs in Asia. Its preoccupation with Europe, he declared, amounted to “North Atlantic isolationism.”28 As for the talk of Soviet intervention, it was a chimera; the Russians would not go to war to defend Red China. MacArthur’s attack on Europe First implied criticism of Marshall, but he was more explicit as well. The secretary’s policy toward China—that is, abandoning Chiang—was, he charged, “the greatest political mistake we made in a hundred years.” It was a policy the United States would “pay for . . . for a century.”29
The administration’s supporters—Secretary Acheson, Chief of Staff Bradley, members of the Joint Chiefs, Democratic senators—spent seven weeks demolishing MacArthur’s arguments. Marshall’s testimony immediately followed the general’s and lasted for six days. It was perhaps the most effective in defense of the administration.
Marshall and MacArthur have been depicted as polar opposites, personal enemies as well as men drastically different in temperament and military ideology. But, in fact, the secretary of defense was deeply conflicted over his longtime associate. He admired his military dash and skill but deplored his vanity, his contentiousness, his political ambitions. He was not comfortable in his role as critic of “a brother army officer,” he stated at the outset of his testimony. The general was “a man for whom I have tremendous respect as to his military capabilities and military performances and . . . as to his administration of Japan.”30 But, in his view, like other generals he had known, MacArthur had succumbed to the sin of “localitis.” It was “completely understandable and . . . at times commendable that a theater commander should become wholly wrapped in his own aims and responsibilities, that some of the directions received by him from higher authority are not those that he would have written himself.” But that the mistake was common did not validate it. Marshall sought to place the Korean conflict in the broad Cold War context that the administration espoused. It was part of a larger struggle, one against “Communist aggression and, if possible, to avoid another world war in doing so.” Korea was only the latest point of conflict, though admittedly the most painful as it cost blood as well as treasure. But the general’s real offense was not his narrow focus on the Far East. Nor was it even simple disobedience to military orders. “What is new and what has brought about the necessity for General MacArthur’s removal,” Marshall stated, “is the wholly unprecedented situation of a local theater commander publicly expressing his displeasure and his disagreements with the foreign and military policy of the United States.”31
The hearings dragged on for almost twenty more days after Marshall’s testimony, ending with the transmission of a report to the full Senate but without the usual final recommendations for action. By this time the press and the American public had lost interest in the controversy, and MacArthur had lost his popular dazzle. Clearly, it now appeared to many Americans, the administration had been within its rights to fire him and clearly, too, his policies had been dangerous. Meanwhile, on the tumultuous Asian peninsula, the enemies argued over the where and how of armistice talks, with the Americans apparently more anxious for an end to the fighting than the Communists. As they talked, bloody platoon-size clashes, raids, and counterraids between the antagonists continued with few gains for either side. In early June, Marshall flew to Korea to view the stalled battle scene for himself. Appalled by the continuing bloodshed, according to one later report, he concluded that if the enemy did not yield on negotiations it might be necessary “to give them a taste of the atom.”32
The official armistice negotiations with the Communists finally opened in early July in Kaesong, just south of the thirty-eighth parallel. For the next two years the two sides would wrangle over terms. By the time the fighting finally ended with an armistice in late July 1953, without an official peace treaty and with the boundaries between North and South virtually unchanged, Marshall had returned to private life and could only be a distant observer of events across the Pacific.
Marshall had already become a target of the Republican right wing over his China policy. His role in the MacArthur affair, however, brought his entire career under broad attack, with the chief aggressor the emerging high priest of anti-Communism, Senator McCarthy.
On June 14, well after Marshall’s congressional testimony, McCarthy rose on the Senate floor and delivered a savage diatribe against the secretary of defense. He began with a grandiose, paranoid statement that “our present situation” could only be explained as the “product of a conspiracy . . . on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” He then identified Marshall, along with Acheson, as prime members of the conspiracy. This conclusion he backed up by a review of some of Marshall’s supposedly faulty past decisions—some valid, most imaginary—including his advocacy of a premature 1942 invasion of Europe (presumably Sledgehammer), his attempted veto of an invasion of southern Europe through Italy, his sacrifice of Allied interests to induce Soviet entry into the Far Eastern war, his “making common cause” with Stalin at Tehran, and his efforts to appease the Soviets at Yalta. His role in China and Korea received special condemnation. In collaboration with Acheson he had “created the China policy which, destroying China, robbed us of a great and friendly ally, a buffer against the Soviet imperialism with which we are now at war.” As for Korea, he had fixed the boundary between the North and South where the Soviet Union, not the United States, had initially established it, and laid down the strategy that had turned the Korean conflict into “a pointless slaughter.” And what was the purpose of all these dubious and conspiratorial actions? It was “to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East, and impair our will to resist.”33
McCarthy had spoken to a sparsely filled Senate chamber that shed still more listeners as he bulled his way through his hours-long rant. Yet the speech attracted wide attention if only for its outrageousness. Invited to respond, Marshall declined. “If I have to explain at this point that I am not a traitor to the United States,” he replied, “I hardly think it’s worth it.”34 But his partisans were not so reticent. General Wedemeyer, no champion of Marshall’s China policies, came to his defense on European strategy. Senator McCarthy was “absolutely wrong” in regard to the Normandy invasion. That plan, he wrote, was honestly aimed “at winning the war on preferential terms for the West.”35 Eisenhower, rightly claiming a special friendship, gave Marshall broader support. “Now look,” he told Newsweek reporters. “General Marshall is one of the patriots of this country. Anyone who has lived with him, has worked for him as I have, knows that he is a man of real selflessness.”36 Across the country a loud chorus of praise and defense rose to confront Marshall’s intemperate critic.
Marshall may have shrugged off the Wisconsin senator’s attack, but it may well have hastened his resolve to retire; that, and the partial success of his military preparedness campaign. Though he had failed to get the UMT legislation he sought, under the goad of Korea, Congress finally passed a bill extending the 1948 draft for four more years, lengthened the military service term to two years, and approved a universal service system in principle, if not in fact.
Marshall left office on September 12, 1951, almost exactly a year after first sitting at the secretary’s desk. There was a final staff meeting at the Pentagon that morning, but he had eschewed a farewell ceremony. Lovett would be taking over, and he felt confident that the department’s affairs would be well managed. He thanked his staff for loyalty and praised their integrity and competence. He had, he remarked, labored for a number of policies and programs with modest success. Now he expected to sit back and observe others at work on the defense issues of the day.
In retirement, as in harness, Marshall sought to ignore McCarthy. But the grand inquisitor’s malign influence continued to pursue him. In July 1952, after serving as supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe and then as president of Columbia University, Dwight Eisenhower won the Republican nomination for president. Marshall was quick to congratulate his protégé but noted ruefully that any communication from him earlier might have been “detrimental to your cause.”37 During the presidential campaign that followed, Ike was forced to confront the issue of Republican right-wing attacks on Marshall. At a press conference in Denver the reporter Murray Kempton asked him what he thought of “those people who call General Marshall a living lie?” Though previously alerted to Kempton’s intentions, Ike leaped up, his face red with anger, and retorted that no one had any right to “say such a thing about General Marshall,” a man who was “a perfect example of patriotism and loyal service to the United States.”38 The candidate went on to denounce Marshall’s detractors in general but carefully avoided mentioning the names of the chief guilty parties. During the remainder of the 1952 presidential campaign, candidate Ike endorsed the local Republican tickets even when they included one of his patron’s maligners. In Wisconsin, McCarthy’s home state, Ike initially intended to insert a strong defense of Marshall into his Milwaukee campaign speech, though the senator himself, running for reelection, would be on the platform, but when his advisers warned him that it would divide the Wisconsin GOP and perhaps undermine McCarthy’s bid for reelection, he deleted the paragraph. The press, however, had seen a copy of the unexpurgated speech and, to Ike’s everlasting chagrin, publicized the omission as a surrender to demagogic McCarthyism. Marshall never commented publicly on Ike’s weak surrender to expediency, though he told Rose Wilson, his young riding companion from his days as Pershing’s Washington aide, that “Eisenhower was forced into a compromise, that’s all it was.”39 In later years, in her nineties, Katherine was similarly forgiving. “Don’t attack President Eisenhower about the McCarthy thing,” she advised Forrest Pogue. “He did everything in the world to make it up to George and me.”40
Once more a retiree, Marshall would divide his time, as before, between Dodona and Pinehurst. He would turn down a second Truman offer of the presidency of the Red Cross, but accepted the assignment as chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, a post previously held by his revered mentor General Pershing, who had died in 1948. Offers of positions in the private sector came his way, but, with the exception of a brief stint as a director of Pan American World Airways, he avoided the sort of lucrative corporate board memberships so commonly available to retired high military officers in our more avaricious times. Determined to avoid malicious gossip, he also refused to accept large publishers’ advances to write his memoirs, though he eventually agreed, for the historical record, to provide Forrest Pogue with extensive accounts of his private and public life, later transcribed and eventually posted on the Internet. If the event seemed worthy, he and Katherine also traveled abroad to attend the occasion. One of these trips was to the coronation in London in June 1953 of the young British queen, Elizabeth, daughter of his wartime friend, King George VI.
The gala celebration in Britain was steeped in fond nostalgia for Marshall. Churchill, still vigorous at seventy-nine, a participant in the religious services, hailed him warmly in Westminster Abbey as he walked past the invited guests on his way to the church’s altar. Brooke and Montgomery, now both peers of the realm, also shook his hand at the ceremony. The British authorities singled out Marshall for special consideration among the foreign guests. “I received a very gracious and warm welcome on all occasions and was particularly favored in the seating at the great banquets—Buckingham Palace and Lancaster House,” he wrote in a long account of the coronation he composed for former president Truman’s eyes.41 Later in the week Marshall and Katherine sat in Churchill’s box at the fashionable Epsom Derby. They also visited the home of George’s deceased great British friend, Sir John Dill, now owned by one of Dill’s former military aides.
The Marshalls returned home and went to Pinehurst, cheered and immensely pleased by their experience. But then George came down with a cold that turned into influenza and required a stay in Walter Reed. Just before leaving for the hospital, Marshall learned that he had been chosen to receive the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize.
The award was for his authorship of the European Recovery Program, now universally called the “Marshall Plan,” not for his military achievements against Hitler’s tyranny. Recipients normally made a trip to Europe to receive it in person and to deliver a brief acceptance lecture. But the visit to Britain for the coronation had exhausted both Marshalls, and Katherine decided not to accompany him when he went to receive the prize in December.
Before returning to Europe, the general met briefly with reporters at the Pinehurst cottage. Disregarding the Nobel committee’s citation of the ERP, he declared that his greatest contribution to world peace was in reality his success in persuading the American government in 1940 to re-arm in face of the looming totalitarian danger abroad. That struggle, not the European recovery program, had been the “hardest thing I ever did.”42 But he modestly refused to accept full credit for even this; Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s help, he noted, had been vital for passage of the arms programs in Congress.
Marshall assumed that, like the awards for science and literature, the Peace Prize was conferred by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm and was surprised to learn that it was presented by the Norwegian king in Oslo. Despite his uncertain health he refused to accept the prize in absentia. But to please Katherine he took the Italian Line’s new luxury liner, Andrea Doria, by the southern route to Europe to avoid the cold and blustery North Atlantic in winter. Arriving in Naples after eight disappointingly frigid and damp days at sea, he had not written a line of his speech. In desperation he hied off to Paris and there, at NATO headquarters, took to his bed and, with the help of Gen. Alfred Gruenther and several of his staff, managed to piece together his lecture.
Marshall flew to Norway on December 9 in a military plane to accept the award the next day at the University of Oslo auditorium. As the Norwegian presenter finished his tribute to Marshall, three men in the balcony jumped up and, while crying, “Murderer,” “Murderer,” tossed down leaflets accusing Marshall of ordering the pitiless atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II and authoring the scheme that had “contributed to dividing the world into two hostile camps.”43 Guards quickly seized and subdued the men, reporters for a Norwegian Communist newspaper, who had gotten into the hall by flashing their press cards. As Marshall stood nonplussed at the rostrum, King Haakon VII rose from his seat in the hall, bringing the rest of the audience to their feet with loud applause. It was the first time in fifty-two years that a Nobel awards ceremony had been interrupted.
Considering the circumstances of its composition, it is no surprise that the speech delivered the following day was a platitudinous hodgepodge. In it Marshall noted that achieving peace among nations had been a goal of many generations. He related how he had first learned about the famous Pax Romana of classical times in 1918 while holed up at Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force headquarters in France. This ancient experience, he said, demonstrated that the best insurance for peace had often been military preparedness—an old theme, of course, in Marshall’s thinking. And yet, he conceded, large armies were not the way to achieve a peaceful world. Rather, “the most important single factor will be a spiritual regeneration to develop good will and understanding among nations.” After this observation he continued with a rather naive declaration of faith in the value of teaching college and high school students about the causes of past wars so they might learn to avoid the mistakes made by their predecessors. The remainder of the address was a ramble through American ideals and international diversities, and a plea for improving the lot of the world’s poor. Marshall concluded apologetically. He was aware, he said, of the inadequacy of his prescription for attaining enduring world peace. But, alluding to the award (in absentia) that very day in Stockholm of the Nobel Prize for Literature to his old friend the silver-tongued Winston Churchill, Marshall acknowledged that he “had not made clear the points that assume such preeminence and importance” in his mind. He had done his best, however, and hoped he had “sown some seeds which may bring forth some good fruit.”44 The audience applauded politely, but no one present could have been inspired by the words. Marshall himself obviously was not proud of the lecture.
Marshall returned from Europe still suffering from the effects of his recent influenza. His health would never again be good. He spent his last years predominantly in Leesburg with Katherine, where visitors, often eminent men and women, noted either his remarkable resiliency or else his unhappy decline. His mind remained clear, however. Though he confessed to being mostly concerned now with “the blackbirds eating all my marigolds” he insisted that he was “absolutely all right from the neck up.”45
In December 1955 the New York Times reporter William S. White came to Pinehurst on the occasion of Marshall’s imminent seventy-fifth birthday to interview the general once again. He described the Pinehurst cottage as “rather small, with a faint touch of pleasant shabbiness.” Marshall himself was clearly an old man, “venerable in retirement,” though the photo accompanying the article shows a handsome, healthy-looking, strong-featured gentleman, wearing a tweed jacket and tie. Present at the interview was Katherine, “a lady of subdued, relaxed gaiety.”
Marshall was not on this occasion a good interview subject. He was laconic and cryptic and gave White little of interest to report beyond platitudes. He refused to acknowledge his right-wing detractors, dismissing the hostile Senator Jenner with a “Who? Jenner? Don’t know him.” When asked what was the “hardest job in public life,” he answered: “To keep my temper.” White discovered what he considered a paradox in Marshall’s personality. “An aloof, aristocratic, indrawn man,” he “nevertheless in his life expresses the democratic spirit as well as any person this political writer has ever known.” The general’s connection with his past seemed tenuous. He now saw few of his old associates. One exception was Omar Bradley, who had visited Pinehurst recently to join him on the golf links.
There was a certain air of pointless lassitude and finality hovering over the retiree’s life as White reported it. When he asked Marshall what he did with his time “most of these days,” he elicited: “sit quietly reading, contemplating the matters of life and watching television.” As confirmation of the TV devotion, the reporter noted on the arm of the general’s chair a newspaper clipping listing the evening’s TV programs. Marshall acknowledged that he had not been well lately. He was still feeling the effects of a flulike virus; they limited his writing the personal letters that he felt he owed to others. As White drove off he looked back at “the tall still figure under the darkening pines” and found it “impossible to put down the melancholy thought that the truly great ones” were “falling back now into irretrievable time.”46
In August 1958 Marshall entered Walter Reed again, this time for repair work on his teeth and to have a growth on his face removed. While in the hospital he fell and cracked a rib, delaying his discharge for several weeks. When allowed to leave he went with Katherine, earlier than usual, to the Pinehurst cottage, where he had agreed to be watched over twenty-four hours a day by an assigned Army Medical Corps sergeant. In October, Rose Page Wilson, now a married woman with three children, came for a visit. When the attentive orderly admitted her to his room she was shocked. Marshall was sitting up in bed clad in a handsome silk dressing gown, but he had aged badly. His “face was gaunt, . . . his skin stretched tightly across his jutting cheek bones and the sharp outline of his skull . . . clearly visible under his . . . hair,” which “had become dead white.” At that moment she realized the worst: “He’s not going to get well; dear God, he’s not going to get well.”47
And he did not. In mid-January the sergeant heard gasping sounds from Marshall’s room. He rushed in to discover that the general had suffered a stroke and was choking on his swallowed tongue. Marshall was rushed to nearby Fort Bragg military hospital. His life was saved, but then in mid-February he had a second, more severe stroke and in March was transferred to Walter Reed. Confined to bed and a wheelchair, Marshall could talk only in a whisper to the friends who came by to greet him and, in effect, to say good-bye. Truman visited, and Eisenhower came three times. On one of Ike’s visits he was accompanied by the aged Winston Churchill, who stood at the doorway of his room with tears in his eyes while Marshall lay under the covers on his hospital bed. All through this final ordeal Katherine stayed at a guest cottage on the hospital grounds to help in any way she could. By this time he had lost his hearing and sight and could not speak. The end came on October 16. In a coma for some weeks, in the early evening he peacefully slipped away.
Marshall did not want his death to be enveloped in pomp and circumstance. George Washington had spurned a “state funeral.” Marshall did, too, though he himself had organized one for Pershing in 1948. In 1956, in failing health, he had written down his funeral wishes. There should be no services in Washington’s National Cathedral, nor a funeral eulogy, nor special guest lists, nor horse-drawn caissons, and no lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Interment should be private. Katherine amended his wishes in some details. She allowed the public to view the flag-draped coffin for a day at the cathedral. But press coverage would be restricted and the simple services conducted at the Fort Myer chapel, with interment completed privately at Arlington National Cemetery. The evening of Marshall’s death President Eisenhower issued a proclamation expressing “profound grief throughout the United States” and ordering American flags flown at half staff.48
And so ended the life of a man whose acts, views, and decisions helped shape the course of twentieth-century world history. A man of far-ranging influence and power? Undoubtedly. He presided over the U.S. Army when it expanded from 275,000 to more than eight million men. He endorsed and vigorously promoted the strategy against the Wehrmacht that liberated Western Europe from Nazi slavery and kept it free after 1945. He skillfully managed and preserved the fragile wartime alliances and coalitions that joined disparate sovereignties and rivalrous service divisions. His own contemporaries and much later history would accord him an exalted place in the national pantheon. Few Americans, besides his own ideal, the first president, have received the dazzling encomiums Marshall did. His achievements have been summed up in Churchill’s oft-repeated tag: “Organizer of Victory.” Truman was even more unstinting. At his own birthday celebration in May 1948, he responded to Marshall’s toast with the remark: “He won the war.”49
Immediate praise notwithstanding, any attempt to measure Marshall’s merits must acknowledge certain facts. He never commanded troops in battle. Other generals selected by him did, of course. And Marshall has been lauded for perceptive choices of commanders and ruthless weeding out of incompetents. But in fact his protégés probably varied as much in leadership quality as any random selection among the list of available officers at the time of their assingments. Marshall’s “little black book”—if in fact it existed—turned up no Napoleons, Hannibals, or Alexander the Greats.
He was often admired for creating the American World War II army virtually out of nothing. And indeed the growth of the U.S. military forces between 1940 and 1945 seems almost to duplicate the cosmic inflation following the big bang. Marshall must also be commended for his effective Cassandra role during the “phony war.” His dire warnings of America’s unreadiness in the face of the growing international crisis undoubtedly accelerated America’s preparation for war. But then he stumbled. By limiting the army’s size to a spare ninety divisions he severely strained its ability to complete the job of defeating the Wehrmacht. Nor was the army he helped to create composed of highly skilled, well-trained troops, capable of taking on the veteran German enemy, though by 1944 that enemy was in the last stages of its strength. Admittedly, young American men were not ready to become soldiers. Neither the nation’s peacetime values, nor its individualistic, democratic culture, were equal to the brutal demands of mid-twentieth-century military engagement. Marshall understood this and sought to improve their morale and their understanding of the stakes. But his efforts were insufficient. Nor was Marshall directly in charge of the training process. Yet however explicable the failure to turn American youths into warriors, the chief of staff cannot be acclaimed, without serious qualifiers, as the “organizer of victory.”
And what should we conclude about Marshall as a military strategist, as a master planner of Allied global operations? The record is mixed. He was surely right to insist on Europe First, though it is difficult to see how, given Britain’s weight in Allied councils, particularly early in the war, any other course was possible. But he also fought against dogged British opposition for a premature cross-Channel operation. The British were correct to veto his Sledgehammer plan, the part of the early cross-Channel strategy that promised to create another Dunkirk in 1942. The same goes for the contemporary aerial warfare experts who found his mid-1944 proposal for a major Allied parachute and glider drop deep within France dangerous and unworkable. On the other hand his resistance to Churchill’s ambitious “underbelly” Mediterranean strategy was surely valid. The North African and Italian operations were held to provide a valuable first “blooding” to green American troops and their commanders. But those dearly won campaigns failed to prevent costly mistakes in France and Germany and failed to contribute appreciably to shortening the war against Germany.
And what about the Pacific and MacArthur? Marshall’s handling of MacArthur, the Pacific prima donna, was too deferential. He excessively indulged the headstrong, histrionic general. It could be argued that so, too, did the president and almost everyone else in authority. Yet however powerful and influential the Southwest Pacific commander, Marshall was his immediate boss and as such all too often failed to issue decisive orders. Further, he was mistaken to support, at least initially, Operation Downfall, the plan for invading the Japanese home islands. His estimate of probable casualties was ludicrously low; the bloodbath, both Allied and Japanese, would have been appalling. It is true that, when the success of the atom bomb was demonstrated, he changed his mind about invading the enemy’s home islands. But his response to the dropping of the bomb itself was vacillating and equivocal almost to the very end. And then there is the question of Pacific jurisdictions. Marshall’s successful advocacy of the unified command principle worked well for the Atlantic theaters. Indeed it was one of his major contributions to the war—a coalition war, it should be recalled. But however impassioned his defense of the formula, faced with King’s intransigence he abandoned it in the Pacific theater, with resulting costs in lives lost and time wasted.
Marshall’s record on the Atlantic fronts was less ambiguous. Despite cultural differences, jealousies, rivalries, and disparities in national wealth and experience, he managed to preserve a working coalition with the British. In Europe and North Africa, World War II was a cooperative effort of the two English-speaking nations. Here Marshall excelled. His insistence on a unified command, though at times challenged by the British and at times ignored, was widely adopted and proved to be a boon. Marshall was also able to maintain good relations with Churchill and, in the end, with Britain’s chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, with Dill serving as intermediary between the two sides.
Marshall’s record as foreign policy adviser to Truman after VJ-Day displays both debits and credits. His China mission of late 1945 and early 1946 did not succeed in reconciling the Nationalists and Communists. China’s problems admittedly were virtually intractable, but Marshall must take some, though by no means all, of the blame for failure to solve them. As for the Cold War, at the State Department during the crucial early months, when American policy toward postwar Russia was evolving, Marshall retained a misguided opinion of Stalin’s good intentions and sought initially to restrain the most aggressive impulses of the Cold War policy hawks. He ultimately embraced their anti-Soviet ardor, but at times, as in the case of the Berlin blockade, his moderation probably served the nation well.
Marshall was only one of the many authors—a cohort that included Acheson, Kennan, Bohlen, and Clayton—of the European Recovery Program, the key American response to postwar Soviet provocation. And, indeed, the fundamental idea of preventing Communist subversion of Western Europe by restoring hope and prosperity to its people was very much in the air by 1947. All told, the program—Marshall’s chief contribution to Truman-Acheson Cold War policies—was to be a shield to deflect the bitter neo-isolationist Republicans of 1946–47 and the years thereafter. Affixing his name to the ERP contributed unquestionably to that goal. And even more salient were his extensive and effective lobbying efforts in Congress and among influential citizens’ groups for the ERP. But as Marshall himself insisted, the “Marshall Plan” was misnamed.
Given what is known in the second decade of the twenty-first century—whatever our sympathies for the historic perils and hopes of the world’s Jewish people—it is hard to dismiss Marshall’s fears that the creation of an independent Jewish state would open a Pandora’s box of troubles for the United States. Assuredly there is no going back; Israel is America’s staunch Middle East ally. But, as Marshall anticipated, its existence at times has complicated America’s position and standing abroad, particularly in the Muslim world.
Marshall’s achievements in the new Defense Department that he briefly headed were meager. But in any case they faithfully complied with the president’s own wishes. It was he, even more than Omar Bradley and the other generals who testified to the congressional committee, who led to the administration’s vindication. To Harry Truman, that by itself was probably a sufficient payoff for the Defense appointment.
All told, the performance of George Marshall in many of his roles was less than awe-inspiring. Yet, the far right excepted, the paeans were incessant, the applause unrelieved. The discrepancy may well have originated in Americans’ yearning for a platonic ideal of a triumphant military leader above politics, deceit, and selfish ambition—in a word, a George Washington—which they located in a fallible man of sterling character but unremarkable powers. Only a very few keen observers saw beyond the conventional wisdom. In effect, the Olympian persona that Marshall himself created protected him, though imperfectly, from criticism, both in his prime and in his future historical reputation.
But whatever the reality, his life and work left a deep imprint on American life and the world during the mid-twentieth-century years of crisis and trial.