But, my dear wife, when I know that with my own joys I lay down nearly all of yours, and replace them in this life with cares and sorrows—when, after having eaten for long years the bitter fruit of the orphanage myself, I must offer it as their only sustenance to my dear little children—is it weak or dishonorable, while the banner of my purpose floats calmly and proudly in the breeze, that my unbounded love for you, my darling wife and children, should struggle in fierce, though useless, contest with my love of country?…
Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield…. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar—that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield it will whisper your name.
Of course, Ballou did fight the next day at Bull Run, and he did die. Like Marshall, he did have the sense that he couldn’t find fulfillment outside of his obligations to community and country.
We live in a society that places great emphasis on personal happiness, defined as not being frustrated in the realization of your wants. But old moral traditions do not die. They waft down the centuries and reinspire new people in new conditions. Marshall lived in the world of airplanes and the nuclear bomb, but in many ways he was formed by the moral traditions of classical Greece and Rome. His moral make-up owed something to Homer, to the classical emphasis on courage and honor. It owed something to the Stoics, with their emphasis on moral discipline. But particularly later in life it also owed something to the ancient Athenian Pericles, who embodied the style of leadership that we call magnanimity, or great-souled.
The magnanimous leader of Greece’s golden age had a high but accurate view of his own virtue. He put himself in a different category from most people around him, understanding that he had been blessed by unusual good fortune. This understanding strained his relations with those around him. He could seem solitary and detached, reserved and dignified, except with a few close friends. He navigated the world with a qualified friendliness, genial to people but never quite exposing his inner feelings, thoughts, and fears.38 He hid his vulnerabilities and detested the thought that he might be dependent on others. As Robert Faulkner writes in The Case for Greatness, he is not a joiner, a team player, or a staffer: “He does not put his shoulder to any ordinary wheel, especially if he must take a secondary role. Neither is he eager for reciprocity.”39 He is fond of granting favors but ashamed to receive them. He was, as Aristotle put it, “Not capable of leading his life to suit anyone else.”40
The magnanimous leader does not have a normal set of social relations. There is a residual sadness to him, as there is in many grandly ambitious people who surrender companionship for the sake of their lofty goals. He can never allow himself to be silly or simply happy and free. He is like marble.
The magnanimous leader is called upon by his very nature to perform some great benefit to his people. He holds himself to a higher standard and makes himself into a public institution. Magnanimity can only really be expressed in public or political life. Politics and war are the only theaters big enough, competitive enough, and consequential enough to call forth the highest sacrifices and to elicit the highest talents. The man who shelters himself solely in the realms of commerce and private life is, by this definition, less consequential than one who enters the public arena.
By the time of Pericles, the great-souled leader was supposed to carry himself with steadiness and sobriety. He was supposed to be more judicious and self-disciplined than the hot-tempered Homeric heroes. Most of all, he was supposed to provide some public benefit on a grand scale. He was supposed to save his people in a time of peril or transform them to fit the needs of a new age.
The great-souled man may not be a good man—he may not always be kind, compassionate, considerate, and pleasant—but he is a great man. He wins great honors because he is worthy of them. He achieves a different style of happiness, defined by the popularizer of Greek thought, Edith Hamilton, as “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.”
Death
In 1958, Marshall checked in to Walter Reed Hospital for the removal of a cyst on his face. His goddaughter, Rose Wilson, came to visit, stunned at how old he suddenly looked.
“I have so much time to remember now,” he told her, recalling a time when as a boy he went tobogganing with his father in Uniontown. “Colonel Marshall,” she replied, “I’m sorry your father didn’t live long enough to know what a great son he had. He would have been very proud of you.”
“Do you think so?” Marshall answered. “I’d like to believe he would have approved of me.”
Marshall continued to weaken. Every corner of the earth seemed to respond to the general’s illness. Messages arrived from Winston Churchill and General Charles de Gaulle, Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stalin and General Dwight Eisenhower, Marshal Tito and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.41 Thousands of letters from ordinary people poured in. President Eisenhower came to visit three times. Truman visited. Winston Churchill, then eighty-four, also visited. Marshall was in a coma by then, and Churchill could do no more than stand in the doorway weeping as he looked at the small body of the man he had once known.
He died on October 16, 1959, just shy of his eightieth birthday. General Tom Handy, his old deputy chief of staff, had once asked him about the arrangements for his funeral but Marshall cut him off. “You don’t have to worry about it. I’ve left all the necessary instructions.”42These instructions were opened after his death. They were remarkable: “Bury me simply, like any ordinary officer of the U.S. Army who has served his country honorably. No fuss. No elaborate ceremonials. Keep the service short, confine the guest-list to the family. And above everything, do it quietly.”43
At his express order, there was no state funeral. There was no lying in state in the Capitol rotunda. His body lay in state at the Bethlehem Chapel of the National Cathedral for twenty-four hours so friends could pay their respects. In attendance at the funeral were family, a few colleagues, and his old wartime barber, Nicholas J. Totalo, who had cut the general’s hair in Cairo, Teheran, Potsdam, and later at the Pentagon.44 Then there was a short, plain service at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, using the standard Order for the Burial of the Dead from the Book of Common Prayer, with no eulogy.
CHAPTER 6
DIGNITY
The most prominent civil rights leader in America at the time Command Performance aired was A. Philip Randolph. He was the African American leader who organized and called for marches, who met with the president, and whose fame and moral authority helped shape the movement.
Randolph was born in 1899, near Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a minister in an African Methodist Episcopal church, but the church paid so little that he made most of his income as a tailor and butcher, while his wife worked as a seamstress.
Randolph, who was not a religious person, recalled, “My father preached a racial religion. He spoke to the social condition of his flock, and always reminded them that the AME church was the first black militant institution in America.”1 The elder Randolph also took his two boys to political meetings run by blacks. He introduced them to successful black men. And he told and retold the stories of black exemplars throughout history: Crispus Attucks, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass.