Each institution comes with certain rules, obligations, and standards of excellence. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have certain methods they use to advance and verify knowledge one step at a time. Teachers treat all their students equally and invest extra hours to their growth. In the process of subordinating ourselves to the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are. The customs of the institution structure the soul, making it easier to be good. They guide behavior gently along certain time-tested lines. By practicing the customs of an institution, we are not alone; we are admitted into a community that transcends time.
With this sense of scope, the institutionalist has deep reverence for those who came before and the rules he has temporarily taken delivery of. The rules of a profession or an institution are not like practical tips on how to best do something. They are deeply woven into the identities of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to his or her sport, a doctor’s commitment to the craft of medicine, is not an individual choice that can be easily renounced when the psychic losses exceed the psychic benefits. These are life-shaping and life-defining commitments. Like finding a vocation, they are commitments to something that transcends a single lifetime.
A person’s social function defines who he or she is. The commitment between a person and an institution is more like a covenant. It is an inheritance to be passed on and a debt to be repaid.
The technical tasks of, say, being a carpenter are infused with a deep meaning that transcends the task at hand. There are long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out of them, but service to the institution provides you with a series of fulfilling commitments and a secure place in the world. It provides you with a means to submerge your ego, to quiet its anxieties and its relentless demands.
Marshall conformed his life to the needs of his organization. Very few people in the course of the last century aroused as much reverence as Marshall did, even in his own lifetime, even among people who knew him well. There were also few people who felt entirely comfortable around him—Eisenhower included. The cost of his perfect self-denial and self-control was aloofness. While in uniform, he never let his hair down or allowed people into the intimacy of his own soul. He maintained his composure in all circumstances.
Love and Death
Marshall did have a private life. It was starkly separated from his public role. Today we bring our work home, returning work emails on our phones. But for Marshall, these were two separate spheres, with different emotions and patterns of conduct. The home was a haven in a heartless world. Marshall’s home life centered on his wife, Lily.
George Marshall wooed Elizabeth Carter Coles, known to her friends as Lily, while in his final year at VMI. They took long carriage rides, and at night he risked expulsion by sneaking off grounds to be with her. George was six years Lily’s junior, and several other senior classmates and senior VMI graduates—including Marshall’s older brother Stuart—had done their best to win her fancy. She was a striking, dark beauty and the reigning belle of Lexington. “I was much in love,” he recalled, and it was for keeps.19
They married shortly after his graduation in 1902. He felt himself extraordinarily lucky to have won her, and he carried that gratitude with him forever after. His attitude toward Lily can be described as constant and extremely solicitous. Shortly after their marriage, he discovered that she suffered from a thyroid condition that gave her an extremely weak heart. She would have to be treated as a semi-invalid all her life. They could never risk having children. There would always be the possibility of sudden death by exertion. But Marshall’s devotion and gratitude to his wife only deepened.
Marshall was pleased to put himself in her service, supplying her with little surprises, compliments, and comforts, always giving the greatest attention to the smallest details. She would never be allowed to rise to retrieve that needlepoint basket she had forgotten upstairs. Marshall was playing the role of the chivalric knight in service to his lady. Lily sometimes looked upon this with wry amusement. She was more rugged and capable than he thought, but it gave him such pleasure to look after her.
In 1927, when Lily was fifty-three, her heart condition worsened. She was taken to Walter Reed Hospital, and on August 22 an operation was performed. Her recovery was slow but steady. Marshall was in his element, catering to her every need, and Lily seemed to be recovering. On September 15, she was told that she could return home the next day. She sat down to send her mother a note. She wrote the word “George,” slumped over, and passed away. The doctors said it was her excitement over returning home that elevated her pulse irregularly.
Marshall was teaching classes at the War College in Washington at that moment. A guard interrupted his lecture and called him to the telephone. They went into a little office where Marshall took the call, listened for a few moments, and then put his head on his arms on the desk. The guard asked if there was any way he could be of assistance. Marshall replied with quiet formality. “No, Mr. Throckmorton, I just had word my wife, who was to join me here today, has just died.”
The formality of that phrasing, the pause to remember the guard’s name (Marshall was not good with names), perfectly captured his emotional self-control, his self-discipline at all times.
Marshall was stricken by his wife’s death. He filled his home with photographs of her, so that she looked out at him from nearly every vantage point in every room. Lily had been not only his sweet wife but his most trusted confidante, and, it seemed, his only one. Only she had been privileged to see the burden he carried and help him bear it. Suddenly and brutally, he was alone and adrift.
General Pershing, who had lost a wife and three daughters, wrote a note of condolence. Marshall replied that he missed Lily desperately: “Twenty-six years of most intimate companionship, something I have never known since I was a mere boy, leave me lost in my best efforts to adjust myself to future prospects in life. If I had been given to club life or other intimacies with men outside of athletic diversion, or if there was a campaign on or other pressing duty that demanded concentrated effort, then I think I could do better. However, I will find a way.”20
Lily’s death changed Marshall. Once taciturn, he softened and became conversational, as if he could charm visitors into staying and filling the lonely hours. Over the years his letters became more thoughtful, more openly compassionate. Despite his commitment to the service, and several periods when work consumed him, Marshall had never been a workaholic. Careful not to strain his own health, he broke off work in late afternoon to garden, go horseback riding, or take a walk. Whenever possible, he encouraged, even ordered, his staff to do the same.
Privacy
Marshall was a private man. That is to say, he made a stronger distinction than many people today make between the private and public spheres, between those people he considered intimates and everybody else. He could be witty and tell long funny stories to people within the inner circle of his trust and affection, but his manner to the larger population was defined by courtliness and a certain reserved charm. Very rarely did he call anyone by their first name.
This code of privacy is different from the one that is common in the era of Facebook and Instagram. This privacy code, which he shared with Frances Perkins, is based on the notion that this zone of intimacy should be breached only gradually, after long reciprocity and trust. The contents of the private world should not instantly be shared online or in conversation; they should not be tweeted.