The quintessential Marshall moment came in the middle of the war. The Allies were planning Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, but still no overall commander had been selected. Marshall secretly craved the assignment and was widely accepted as the most qualified for it. This would be among the most ambitious military operations ever attempted, and whoever commanded it would be performing a great service to the cause and would go down in history as a result of it. The other Allied leaders, Churchill and Stalin, told Marshall that he would get the job. Eisenhower assumed Marshall would get the job. Roosevelt knew that if Marshall asked for the job, he would have to give it to him. He had earned it, and his stature was so high.
But Roosevelt relied on Marshall to be nearby in Washington, whereas the Overlord commander would go to London. FDR may also have had doubts about Marshall’s austere personality. Commanding Overlord would mean managing political alliances, and a warm touch might come in handy. The controversy flared. Several senators argued that Marshall was needed in Washington and should not get the job. From his hospital bed, General Pershing pleaded with FDR to give Marshall a command in the field.
Still, everyone presumed that Marshall would command. In November 1943, Roosevelt visited Eisenhower in North Africa and nearly said as much: “You and I know who the Chief of Staff was during the last years of the Civil War, but practically no one else knows…. I hate to think that fifty years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was. 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.”
Still Roosevelt had doubts. “It is dangerous to monkey with a winning team,”29 he said. He sent Harry Hopkins to gauge Marshall’s feelings about the appointment. Marshall would not be drawn in. He told Hopkins that he had served with honor. He would not ask for anything. He would “go along good-heartedly with whatever decision the president made.”30 In an interview with Forrest Pogue decades later, Marshall explained his behavior: “I was determined that I should not embarrass the President one way or the other—that he must be able to deal in this matter with a perfectly free hand in whatever he felt was the best interest [of the country]…. I was utterly sincere in the desire to avoid what had happened so much in other wars—the consideration of the feelings of the individual rather than the good of the country.”31
FDR called Marshall into his office on December 6, 1943. Roosevelt beat around the bush for several awkward minutes, raising subjects of minor importance. Then he asked Marshall if he wanted the job. If Marshall had simply uttered the word “Yes,” he presumably would have gotten the job. Still, Marshall refused to be drawn in. Marshall told Roosevelt to do what he thought best. Marshall insisted that his own private feelings should have no bearing on the decision. Again and again, he refused to express his preference one way or the other.
FDR looked at him. “Well, I didn’t feel I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.” There was a long silence. Roosevelt added, “Then it will be Eisenhower.”32
Inwardly, Marshall must have been crushed. Somewhat gracelessly, Roosevelt asked him to transmit the decision to the Allies. As chief of staff, Marshall was compelled to write the order himself: “The immediate appointment of General Eisenhower to command of ‘Overlord’ operation has been decided on.” He generously saved the slip of paper and sent it to Ike: “Dear Eisenhower. I thought you might like to have this as a memento. It was written very hurriedly by me as the final meeting broke up yesterday, the President signing it immediately. G.C.M.”33
It was the greatest professional disappointment of Marshall’s life, and it came about because he refused to express his own desires. But that, of course, was the code he lived by.
When the war in Europe was over, it was Eisenhower, not Marshall, who returned to Washington as the triumphant conqueror. Still, Marshall was overcome with pride. John Eisenhower remembered the scene of his father’s return to Washington: “It was on that day that I saw General Marshall completely unbend. Standing behind Ike and eschewing the glare of the photographers, he beamed on Ike and Mamie with a kindly, fatherly expression. There was nothing of the normally aloof George Marshall in his demeanor that day. Then he faded into the background and let Ike take the stage for the rest of the day—a motorcade down the streets of Washington, a visit to the Pentagon.”34
In a personal letter, Churchill wrote to Marshall, “It has not fallen to your lot to command the great armies. You have had to create them, organize them, and inspire them.”35 Outshone by the men he had promoted, Marshall had become known simply as the “organizer of victory.”
Final Tasks
Marshall spent his postwar life trying to retire. On November 26, 1945, there was a simple ceremony at the Pentagon and Marshall was released from duty as the army chief of staff. He drove to Dodona Manor, the home he and Katherine had bought in Leesburg, Virginia. They walked through the sunny yard, looking forward to years of leisure and retirement. Katherine went upstairs to rest before dinner and heard the phone ring as she climbed. An hour later, she came downstairs to find Marshall stretched out ashen-faced on a chaise longue listening to the radio. The news broadcast announced that the U.S. ambassador to China had just resigned and that George Marshall had accepted the president’s request to take his place. The phone call had been President Truman asking Marshall to leave immediately. “Oh, George,” she said, “how could you?”36
The job was thankless, but he and Katherine remained in China for fourteen months, trying to negotiate away an inevitable civil war between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists. On the return flight home from his first major failed mission, Marshall, now sixty-seven, was asked again by the president for another favor—to serve as secretary of state. Marshall accepted and hung up.37 In his new position, he enacted the Marshall Plan—although he never called it anything but its official name, the European Recovery Plan—and President Roosevelt’s wish that Marshall be long remembered by history came true.
There were other duties that followed: president of the American Red Cross, secretary of defense, chair of the U.S. delegation to the coronation of Elizabeth II. There were highs—winning the Nobel Prize—and lows—becoming the object of a hate campaign by Joe McCarthy and his allies. As each job was offered, Marshall felt the tug of obligation. He made some good decisions and some bad ones—he opposed the formation of the State of Israel. He was continually accepting assignments he did not want.
Some people seem to have been born into this world with a sense of indebtedness for the blessing of being alive. They are aware of the transmission of generations, what has been left to them by those who came before, their indebtedness to their ancestors, their obligations to a set of moral responsibilities that stretch across time.
One of the purest expressions of this attitude is a letter sent home by a Civil War soldier named Sullivan Ballou to his wife on the eve of the first battle of Bull Run, early in the war. Ballou, an orphan, knew the pain of growing up without a father. Nonetheless, he wrote to his wife, he was willing to die to pay the debt he owed to his ancestors:
If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for my country, I am ready…. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, to help pay that debt.