Marshall’s polite social manner matched his polite inner makeup. The French philosopher André Comte-Sponville argues that politeness is the prerequisite for the great virtues: “Morality is like a politeness of the soul, an etiquette of inner life, a code of duties.”21 It is a series of practices that make you considerate of others.
Marshall was unfailingly considerate, but his formality made it hard for him to develop friendships. He strongly disapproved of gossip, he frowned at off-color stories, and he never enjoyed the garrulous relationships with men that Ike specialized in.
Marshall’s early biographer, William Frye, wrote:
Marshall was one of those controlled and disciplined people who find both incentive and reward deep within themselves, who require neither urging nor applause from many men. Such people are terribly alone, without the release most find in the easy sharing of mind and heart with many people. For all their self-sufficiency, they are incomplete; and if they are fortunate, they find completion in one or two others. There are not more than two, usually—the heart opened to a lover, the mind to a friend.22
Reformer
Marshall finally found respite from his grief with an assignment that consumed his energies. At the end of that year, he was asked to lead the Infantry School program at Fort Benning, Georgia. Marshall was conservative in manners, but he was not a traditionalist when it came to operations. All his life he pushed against what he regarded as the stifling traditionalism of the army way of doing things. In his four years there, he revolutionized officer training, and since many of the most important officers of World War II passed through Fort Benning during his time there, he revolutionized the U.S. Army, too.
The lesson plans he inherited were built on the ridiculous premise that in battle, officers would have complete information about their troops’ positions and the enemy’s. He sent them out on maneuvers without maps or with outdated ones, telling them that in a real war, the maps would be either absent or worse than useless. He told them the crucial issue is usually when a decision should be made as much as what the decision should be. He told them that mediocre solutions undertaken in time were better than perfect solutions undertaken too late. Until Marshall, professors wrote their lectures and simply read them out to the class. Marshall prohibited the practice. He cut the supply systems manual from 120 pages down to 12, to make training a citizen force easier and to allow greater discretion down the chain of command.
Even his success and reforms did not speed his promotions. The army had its own seniority system. But as the 1930s wore on and the Fascist threat became clearer, personal merit began to count for more. Eventually, Marshall received a series of large promotions, leapfrogging senior but less admired men, all the way to Washington and the centers of power.
The General
In 1938, Franklin Roosevelt held a cabinet meeting to discuss strategy for an arms buildup. FDR argued that the next war would be largely determined by air and sea power, not ground troops. He went around the room, looking for agreement, and was met with general assent. Finally he turned to Marshall, the new deputy chief of staff, and asked, “Don’t you think so, George?”
“I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t at all.” Marshall made the case for land forces. FDR looked startled and called the meeting to a close. It was the last time the president would presume to call Marshall by his first name.
In 1939, FDR had to replace the outgoing chief of staff, the top position in the U.S. military. Marshall at that time ranked thirty-fourth in seniority, but the contest came down to him and Hugh Drum. Drum was a talented general, but also a bit pompous, and he organized a lavish campaign for the job, lining up of letters of endorsement and organizing a series of positive articles in the press. Marshall refused to campaign and squashed efforts by others to campaign on his behalf. But he did have key friends in the White House, the most important of whom was Harry Hopkins, an FDR intimate who was an architect of the New Deal. FDR went with Marshall, though there was little personal warmth between them.
War is a series of blunders and frustrations. At the outset of the Second World War, Marshall understood he would have to ruthlessly cull the incompetent from their jobs. By this time he was married to his second wife, Katherine Tupper Brown, a glamorous former actress with a strong personality and an elegant manner who would become Marshall’s constant companion. “I cannot afford the luxury of sentiment,” he told her. “Mine must be cold logic. Sentiment is for others. I cannot allow myself to get angry, that would be fatal—it is too exhausting. My brain must be kept clear. I cannot afford to appear tired.”23
The culling process was brutal. Marshall ended the careers of hundreds of colleagues. “He was once our dear friend, but he ruined my husband,” a senior officer’s wife observed after her husband had been shoved aside.24 One evening he told Katherine, “I get so tired of saying ‘No,’ it takes it out of me.” Organizing his department while war loomed, Marshall observed, “It is not easy to tell men where they have failed…. My days seem to be filled with situations and problems where I must do the difficult, the hard thing.”25
A vintage Marshall performance was given at a meeting with the press in London in 1944. He entered the room without any papers and began by instructing each reporter to ask a question while he listened. After thirty-plus questions, Marshall explained in detail the situation of the war, addressing the larger visions, strategic goals, and technical details, shifting his eyes deliberately to a different face every few sentences. Then he finished, forty minutes later, and thanked the reporters for their time.
World War II had its share of cinematic generals, like MacArthur and Patton, but most, like Marshall and Eisenhower, were anticinematic. They were precise organizers, not flamboyant showmen. Marshall detested generals who screamed and pounded tables. He favored the simple, spare uniform rather than the more decorated uniform favored by generals today, with their placards of ribbons forming a billboard across their chests.
During this time Marshall developed an astounding reputation. The general view was summarized by the CBS war correspondent Eric Sevareid: “a hulking, homely man of towering intellect, the memory of an unnatural genius, and the integrity of a Christian saint. The atmosphere of controlled power he exuded made one feel oneself a physical weakling, and his selfless devotion to duty [was] beyond all influences of public pressure or personal friendship.”26 Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn said no other American had equal influence with Congress: “We are in the presence of a man who is telling the truth as he sees it.” As Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson put it, “the thing that stands out in everybody’s recollection of General Marshall is the immensity of his integrity.”
That integrity did not win him immediate favor with everybody. He held a soldier’s contempt for politics and remembered his particular disgust when he once met with President Roosevelt to tell him that the plans for the North African invasion were ready. The president clapped his hands together in mock prayer and said, “Please make it before election day.”27 Marshall’s deputy chief of staff, Tom Handy, later explained in an interview:
It’s no use saying General Marshall was an easy man, because he wasn’t. He could be extremely rigid. But he had a terrific influence and power, especially over the British and Congress. I think FDR envied him this. I think that the basis was that they knew, in Marshall’s case, there was no underhanded or selfish motive. The British knew that he was not out to make American points or British points, but trying to win the war the best way. The Congress knew he was talking to them straight, with no politics involved.28