George C, Marshall: Statesman, by Forrest C. Pogue
O'Lessker, Karl
W hen President Truman in 1950 nominated General George C. Marshall to be Secretary of Defense, the most virulent attack on the 69-yearold former Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of State was...
...There was not the slightest chance in 1947 or thereafter that this country would have gone to war in China to save the Chiang regime: Having just demobilized after World War II, we would have required nothing less than a Soviet invasion of Western Europe to take up arms again...
...In an October 1 report, its members favored continuance of the air lift, but not belligerence...
...Chief of Staff Marshall's unswerving advocacy of the policy earned him, for the first time, the bitter enmity of most strong conservatives outside the East Coast...
...The five agreed on only two men: Winston Churchill and George C. Marshall...
...All of these great events receive detailed treatment from Pogue: too detailed, perhaps, for the interested layman (the 60 pages on the Marshall Plan seem more like 600...
...Just over eight years later, at the age of 78, he died in Walter Reed Hospital...
...Like just about every other American on the scene, Marshall was convinced that the Nationalists could survive only if they undertook root-and-branch reform...
...And then came the Mission to China, with which Marshall's postwar career begins...
...But for MacArthur's passionate supporters from World War II days, when Marshall was perceived as the principal architect of the Europe-first strategy, it was the culminating betrayal . of America's greatest soldier by moral and intellectual pygmies, if not traitors, in the Pentagon and White House...
...Jenner...
...And here, really, is the crux of the great...
...But even Pogue's exhaustive portrait lacks some facts of great interest...
...Statesman is full of treasures...
...Covering the crucial years of Marshall's civilian service, 1945-1951 (and thence to his death in 1959), the book recounts in great detail all of the world-shaping controversies in which Marshall played a lead role...
...Should the U.S...
...He did not succeed, of course, and by the time he returned to the U.S...
...One not included in this volume (it was covered in Volumes II and III) but vital to the anti-Marshall fervor was America's World War II Europe-first strategy, which kept General Douglas MacArthur on subsistence rations while concentrating on the defeat of Germany...
...These were the years that encompassed the creation of the Tillman Doctrine of aid to Greece and Turkey, the European Recovery Program (the "Marshall Plan"), the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the founding of Israel, the Berlin Blockade, the formation of NATO, and the expulsion of Chiang's Nationalists from the Chinese Mainland...
...As Pogue rightly notes (and provides many quotations to prove), "In later years, General Wedemeyer was to criticize Marshall for his failure to back Chiang Kai-shek during the days of the China mission...
...Many people at the time thought our possession of the atom bomb would have prevented that catastrophe, but those in the inner circles of the Administration (including, certainly, Marshall) knew we had so few such weapons that they would have been inconsequential in a U.S.-Soviet war...
...have declared the defeat of the Chinese GEORGE C. MARSHALL: STATESMAN 1945-1959 Forrest C. Pogue/Viking/$29.95 Karl O'Lessker 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 Communists a vital national interest...
...Secretary of Defense Marshall had of course taken part in the decision, following a unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...In August 1950, President Truman summoned him back to duty, this time as Secretary of Defense...
...For my part, I remain agnostic on the first question...
...Under the circumstances, there was nothing to stop the Russians from sweeping through Western Europe...
...But this they were unwilling, or unable, to do, no doubt counting on the inevitability of American aid offered in pursuit of America's own interests...
...So he called in Eden, his predecessor, for a private conversation, and Eden urged him to do what Bevin later said he did do: "I grabbed the offer with both hands...
...Under Secretary Robert Lovett "warned against taking any provocative step until the Berlin issue was clarified in the United Nations...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 47...
...The result of these hapless efforts was the fall of the Nationalist regime in 1949—and the destruction of Marshall's reputation among many conservatives...
...It was this nomination that precipitated Senator Jenner's frenzied attack on the Senate floor and only slightly less savage denunciations in the Chicago Tribune and other organs of the right...
...Now, this is not a fact of decisive importance to the history of the Marshall Plan...
...These culminated in Senator Joseph McCarthy's famous speech in June 1951, in which he accused Marshall of participating in "a conspiracy so black that its principals shall forever be deserving of the maledictions of all honest men . . ." The proximate cause of this smear was Truman's dismissal, two months earlier, of Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander of United Nations forces in Korea...
...So shot through with corruption was it, so ineptly led, the morale of its troops so low, that increased arms shipments alone would have done no more than fill Communist arsenals...
...If there were repeated incidents involving loss of planes, an immediate report to Washington should be made by the military governor, discussing defensive measures to be taken and requesting instructions on putting them into effect...
...Great, that is, in strength of character, foresight, achievement and nobility of purpose...
...military involvement could have saved the Chiang regime...
...They were, and 86 percent of Berlin's eligible voters cast their ballots for the West...
...Yet when he returned to America in January 1947 to assume his new duties as Secretary of State, he was still widely regarded, in the words of conservative publisher and columnist David Lawrence, as "just the kind of man who ought to be President . . . one of the great statesmen of our time...
...and final volume of Forrest C. Pogue's biography of Marshall is that it helps us understand how a man so idolized by a generation of policy makers could have aroused such violent hatred on the part of a few...
...If Marshall had so argued, bringing all his great moral and military stature to bear, would we have done so...
...Marshall moved into their home at Leesburg, Virginia...
...In the early stages of the Berlin Blockade (1948), for example, when the Western allies were trying to decide what to do, Marshall determined that, in Pogue's words, "The Soviets must refrain from violating Western rights or face an appeal by the Western powers to the United Nations...
...If an American plane were shot down, they should demand an explanation and say that the United States would have to take defensive measures...
...My emphasis, but it's only a setup for the next sentence: "The Secretary of State realized, however, that the British and the French were reluctant to go so far...
...We will not be traded out of Berlin," he told John Foster Dulles, who, at Marshall's insistence, had been named head of the U.S...
...Moreover, when a number of State Department officials discussed postponing or cancelling the scheduled municipal elections in Berlin lest the Russians find them "provocative," Marshall insisted that they be held...
...Pogue provides just enough historical background in one long chapter to make the scene comprehensible, then devotes the next five to detailing Marshall's efforts to ensure non-Communist control of China without a full-scale commitment of American military force...
...If there were incidents in Berlin, the military governors should protest...
...debate...
...There is a morbid fascination, for example, in being reminded of the stature the United Nations once had...
...or the purposes of this review the essential question is what Marshall could have done differently to help Chiang Kai-shek's government survive...
...But the answer to the second seems so obvious that the first becomes almost irrelevant...
...But in 1944-45 [when Marshall was chief of staff] he contributed decisively to convincing Marshall that Stilwell's [devastating] portrayal of the Generalissimo and China's weaknesses was accurate...
...One of the many virtues of the fourth Karl O'Lessker, a senior editor of this journal, is a member of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission and a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute...
...W hen President Truman in 1950 nominated General George C. Marshall to be Secretary of Defense, the most virulent attack on the 69-yearold former Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of State was delivered in "shouts and half-screams" by Senator William Jenner of Indiana: "General Marshall is not only willing, he is eager to play the role of a front man for traitors...
...It now seems clear that only a major U.S...
...Second only to the unspeakable Roosevelt, Marshall was the architect of thatheretical opposite policy, so blatantly wrong as to be explicable only in terms of a commitment to Communism...
...Thus Marshall could do no more than try to persuade Chiang...
...Today's consensus on George Marshall is perhaps best captured in the opening paragraph of Drew Middle-ton's foreword to the present volume: Not long ago three Britons, an editor, a Cabinet member and an historian, and two Americans, a diplomat and a foreign correspondent, sat in a London club discussing the great men of the century...
...Bevin would undoubtedly have seized the opportunity even without Eden's advice...
...In this poisonous atmosphere Marshall finally prevailed on President Truman to allow him to resign, and he did so in September 1951, after a half-century of public service...
...The Korean War had broken out two months earlier and Truman desperately needed someone of Marshall's reputation in the office...
...For reasons that remain mysterious, at least to me, Asia-first was not only the preferred but, among those conservatives, the canonical policy and MacArthur its one true Prophet...
...To his credit, Secretary Marshall, while supporting his (and the Defense) department's stand against military confrontation, remained adamant against any further concessions to the Soviets in Berlin...
...And indeed his reputation only grew during his two years in the State Department...
...Nevertheless, George C Marshall...
...This being the authorized biography, however, one recognizes the biographer's concern to present an account that will be useful to scholars...
...Under instructions to seek a negotiated settlement of the civil war, Special Ambassador Marshall had no leverage with Chiang other than to threaten to withhold badly needed arms...
...A civil war in China between a government widely understood to be corrupt and its antagonists widely, if fatuously, believed to be agrarian reformers could never have seemed to the American people worth the life of a single G.I., let alone full-scale mobilization and war...
...in January 1947, the cause—though no one yet knew it—was lost...
...When told of the attack he said, "Jenner...
...Pogue does an admirable job of summarizing the complexities of the China situation that Marshall confronted in 1945 when at President Truman's urgent request he ended his retirement the very day he and Mrs...
...The truth is this is no new role for him, for General George C. Marshall is a living lie...
...Also fascinating—and eerily familiar—was the State Department's reaction to the possibility of a military confrontation with the Soviets over Berlin...
...oreover, the policy makers in Washington were well aware that a war against the Chinese Communists carried with it an unacceptable risk of war with the Soviet Union...
...Regarding the Marshall Plan, for example, we now know from Robert Rhodes James's superb new biography of Anthony Eden that British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin was at first baffled by the implications of Marshall's Harvard speech and was uncertain how to respond to it...
...But it is certainly of greater importance, and interest, than which minor French functionary said what to which minor American bureaucrat—the sort of fact with which Pogue's account is replete...
...delegation to the United Nations...
...I do not believe I know the man...
...to undertake fundamental reforms and bring the Communists into a coalition government—which, of course, Mao and Chou were only too happy to agree to...
...Bill Jenner, in his hyperbolic fashion, was expressing a view of Marshall which, surprising as it seems almost forty years later, was passionately held on the far (I do not say extreme) right...
...Not to be outdone in sweet reasonableness, The Policy Planning Staff also urged caution...
...C ixty-eight years old now and recuperating from major surgery for removal of a kidney, Marshall retired (or so he thought) from public service in January 1949...
...Most important to recognize is that the Nationalists did not simply succumb to overwhelming military force...
...Marshall's response was characteristic...
...Even General Albert C. Wedemeyer, towering figure among the heroes of the Asia-first right, was bitterly critical of the Chiang regime and its war effort...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
