Marshall: Hero for Our Times
Mosley, Leonard
MARSHALL: HERO FOR OUR TIMES Leonard Mosley/Hearst Books/$18.50 Eliot A. Cohen JLn November 1943, shortly before the Cairo conference with Churchill, President Roosevelt had a talk with General...
...FDR was referring to Henry W. Halleck.] Eliot A. Cohen is Assistant Professor of Government and Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Quincy House at Harvard University...
...What made Marshall such an indispensable man...
...He combined these soldierly qualities with an element of cunning...
...In action faithful, and honor clear...
...Admittedly, it wasn't very heroic," said Eban, "to stand on one side and back the winner . . . Marshall was rather like a blue cold light in a refrigerator, pragmatic, unsentimental, empirical: If you survive, you survive...
...When he tangled with the Navy or his British allies there was no question in his opponents' minds that he was motivated by anything but a desire to win the war as quickly and cheaply as possible— not by pique or desire to protect bureaucratic position...
...His personality was austere and even forbidding: Marshall always professed to be surprised when his senior aides told him about it, but in fact, his manner often terrified junior officers who came to see him, and there was even a rumor around—which wasn't true—that a frightened lieutenant had collapsed and died of a heart attack when summoned into his presence...
...Your military people feel they can make it...
...Mosley reproduces the letter sent by the British chiefs of staff to Marshall on his retirement, which includes the following lines from Pope: . . . friend of truth...
...of soul sincere...
...Once one of them dropped his papers and fled from the room in a panic...
...FDR later reneged, saying to Marshall, "Well, I didn't feel I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington...
...Still, he offers a peculiar challenge to today's biographer, for he exerted his influence through a personality whose force was as obvious to his contemporaries as it is elusive for those two generations removed from its presence...
...You will probably be recognized by us...
...Equally important, he would recognize a mistake and correct it, for he had an invaluable streak of ruthlessness in his dealings with military incompetents...
...if you don't it's not my business...
...Who broke no promise, serv'd no private end, Who gain'd no title, and who lost no friend...
...But fundamentally, it is your decision...
...Few men—even Roosevelt, that notorious disrespecter of persons— dared call him by his first name...
...You did feel a sort of chill...
...He showed not a sign of passion or emotion over what was a very dramatic moment for us...
...An unabashed admirer of Marshall, he does not conceal his hero's flaws or attempt to pass over his mistakes...
...Mosley's book draws heavily on the massive official biography (three of whose four or five volumes are now complete) being compiled by Forrest C. Pogue—a debt that Mosley openly and generously acknowledges...
...The candor he used with peers and superiors he expected and endured from subordinates...
...His attitude toward the embryonic Israeli state is revealing...
...A great merit of Leonard Mosley's Marshall is that it brings alive "the soldier and statesman whose ability brought only one comparison in the history of this nation"—the words not of Mosley, but of Harvard's citation of Marshall when he received an honorary degree in June 1947...
...That is one of the reasons why I want George to have the big command-^he is entitled to establish his place in history as a great general...
...It is a tribute to Mosley's skill as a biographer that we understand why Marshall merited this epitaph.d why Marshall merited this epitaph...
...He knew how to talk to politicians even if, as Mosley suggests, he mistrusted or even despised them...
...Marshall was a brilliant administrator...
...For instance, in 1944 he wheedled an honorary degree out of Yale for Sir John Dill, the British military representative to the United States, in order to dissuade Churchill from recalling the field marshal, who provided the American Chief of Staff with valuable insights into the workings of the British high command...
...The selection of a brilliant cadre of generals was perhaps his most important contribution to the war effort...
...Who me...
...He could present his vision of the war concisely and clearly to others, particularly congressmen, Presidents, foreign politicians, and, of course, fellow soldiers...
...Quite often normally bright young men were turned into stuttering or tongue-tied idiots when confronted by the gaze from Marshall's cold blue eyes...
...The little black book that he carried around with him during the 1920s and 1930s contained the names not of poor officers, but of those with great promise, most of whom found themselves promoted with breathtaking speed once war broke out...
...IV1 arshalPs greatest assets were his integrity and his almost unnatural self-control...
...This book belongs to the genre often dismissed by the literati as "popular" biography, but it is very good biography indeed, and well worth the price...
...said Marshall...
...But we are not going to take any responsibility for the decision itself...
...When he became Secretary of State in 1947 he told his deputy Dean Acheson to be brutally frank with him: "I have no feelings except those I reserve for Mrs...
...Why, I was trying to be friendly...
...Marshall is not forgotten by today's schoolboys, but that is primarily because of the European Recovery Plan associated with his name, and not because of his most important service to his country, his six-year tour of duty as Army Chief of Staff shortly before and during World War II...
...What was the matter with him...
...His political judgment also lagged behind that of some of his contemporaries, as his refusal to grasp the intractability of the Chinese civil war in 1947 demonstrates...
...asked Marshall of his assistant General Tom Handy, who came in to rescue the papers...
...Army from a primitive organization of a quarter-million men to the most powerful armed force of its time, numbering some six million...
...My advice is don't take military advice...
...Mosley writes crisply and makes exemplary use of anecdotal material: he places Marshall in historical context, and gives us an adequate account of Marshall's personal life without indulging our prurient interests or taste for cheap psychologizing...
...Marshall...
...True, he believed himself to be apolitical, and indeed, occasionally failed to grapple with the political implications of the questions confronting him, as in his harsh treatment of General de Gaulle, for example, or his reluctance to fire Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War (this despite Mac-Arthur's malicious treatment of him during the 1920s and 1930s...
...When Eisenhower sacked one of Marshall's old friends, a well-known general, Marshall reduced the man to the rank of colonel and sent Ike a cable saying, "IF I'D BEEN IN YOUR PLACE I WOULD HAVE DONE IT SOONER...
...He lived among romantics— Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle, and others—but for better and worse, sentiment had no hold on him...
...He was a good judge of character...
...Such, however, is not his purpose...
...If you make the decision to go ahead, and succeed, then good luck to you...
...To those who lived through World War II, Marshall was almost as much a presence as Churchill or Roosevelt...
...MARSHALL: HERO FOR OUR TIMES Leonard Mosley/Hearst Books/$18.50 Eliot A. Cohen JLn November 1943, shortly before the Cairo conference with Churchill, President Roosevelt had a talk with General Eisenhower in Algiers, in which he explained to Eisenhower why he wanted to appoint Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall to be Supreme Commander for the great invasion of Europe: "Ike," Roosevelt said, "you and I know who was Chief of Staff during the last years of the Civil War, but practically no one else knows, although the names of the field generals—Grant, of course, and Lee, and Jackson, Sherman, Sheridan, and others—every schoolboy knows them...
...He could keep track of the myriad complexities of global war without drowning in detail, or meddling in the affairs of harried subordinates...
...As American soldiers and politicians could have told him, Eban was not the only one to feel a chill: in this as in other far more attractive respects, Marshall did indeed resemble George Washington...
...He despised yes-men and rewarded those who possessed the considerable nerve required to contradict him...
...I hate to think that fifty years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was...
...He could think on a grand scale, as was necessary for the man who supervised the expansion of the U.S...
...Rather, Mosley seeks to re-create Marshall for the generation born after the old General's death, and in this he has succeeded handsomely...
...You scared the fella out of his wits," Handy said...
...His military judgment was sound, but by no means infallible—in retrospect, for example, it is clear that his advocacy of a cross-Channel attack on Nazi-occupied Europe in 1942 or even 1943 was misplaced...
...That's what scared him...
...He has researched his subject well, though uncovering little new information...
...Mosley quotes Abba Eban describing Mar- . shall's talks with Moshe Sharett, the head of the Jewish Palestinian delegation in New York: [Marshall said] "I advise you not to go ahead...
...Still, he knew when and how to manipulate his civilian superiors...
Vol. 16 • March 1983 • No. 3
