HEROES: The Soldier

Let us cross the river and rest in the shade.

—Stonewall Jackson’s dying words

In September 1897, a gawky, 16-year-old youngster from Uniontown, Pa. entered, the tradition-hallowed halls of Virginia Military Institute. “Flicker” Marshall, shy, freckle-faced and bewildered, was quickly the biggest dunce among the rats (freshmen). Yet, bitten by V.M.I.’s tradition and by a proper reverence for the exploits of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, V.M.I.’s most illustrious professor (whose statue still rates a salute from passing cadets), George Marshall wanted above all to be a soldier.

Upperclassmen hazed him mercilessly, once forced him to stoop over the point of an upended bayonet until, after 20 minutes of agony, he toppled and gashed himself (but he never named his tormentors). By 1901, when he graduated 15th in his class, George Catlett Marshall, son of a well-off coke processor, collateral descendant of Chief Justice John Marshall, had become a legend: First Captain of the Corps of Cadets, all-Southern football tackle, tireless hiker, faultless in conduct and dress—soldier.

Polished at V.M.I., annealed by command responsibilities in two world wars and in heavy civilian duties, George Marshall was a citizen to whom duty, honor and country were no less meaningful to life than the air he breathed.

“He is a man almost unique in this generation,” said ex-Defense Secretary Robert A. Lovett, a longtime Marshall associate, “a man with a dedicated sense of duty, a unique sense of natural dignity, and an unwavering integrity.”

Genius & Understanding. As an infantry officer, Lieut. Marshall got a fast start. Outdistancing even his West Point rivals, he made his first big mark in the Philippines (1913-16). His ability to plan and execute maneuvers struck Commanding General J. Franklin Bell as something barely short of miraculous. “Keep your eyes on George Marshall,” Bell told his staff. “He is the greatest military genius of America since Stonewall Jackson.”

In World War I, Colonel Marshall, a GHQ operations officer attached to the First Army, planned and carried out a classic maneuver: at night, for two weeks, he transferred 500,000 troops and 2,700 guns from St. Mihiel to the Argonne front, caught the Germans flat-footed at the first shot of the Argonne offensive. Said tight-lipped General John J. Pershing, who later took George Marshall as his aide-de-camp: “He’s a man who understands military.”

The Warning. Shocked at the quick desiccation of the wartime Army after the armistice of 1918, recalling the agonizing bloodletting of American doughboys who had gone to war ill prepared, Colonel Marshall argued bitterly against the prospect of more unpreparedness. Fatefully, when the first flames of the new European conflict sputtered to life, he was a brigadier general in the War Plans Division in Washington. On Sept. 1, 1939, the day Hitler smashed into Poland, President Roosevelt jumped Marshall over 34 higher-ranking officers to Chief of Staff and four-star rank, handed him the job of getting an unprepared nation ready for war. Battling divided public opinion and an isolationist Congress, Marshall stubbornly, coldly, turned a sparsely trained Army of about 400,000 into a sharp, hard-fighting, brilliantly organized global weapon that numbered more than 8,000,000 men by 1945.

So commanding in character and performance was Marshall that even the supremely self-confident Franklin Roosevelt deferred to him, never first-named him. Marshall was at Roosevelt’s side at all the momentous Allied wartime meetings—Quebec, Cairo, Casablanca, Yalta. Roosevelt consistently backed his Army

Chief of Staff, rubber-stamped Marshall’s choices of top men for the top jobs—Eisenhower, Bradley, Clark, Hodges, Patton. He resolutely supported Marshall’s argument, over Douglas MacArthur’s, that the Allies had to win the European war first before going all-out in the Pacific—a turn of events that galled the spectacular MacArthur, who was Chief of Staff when Marshall was a lieutenant colonel. When F.D.R. succumbed to the prolonged arguments of Winston Churchill, who insisted on attacking the “soft underbelly of Europe,” it was Marshall who got him to change his mind in favor of an assault across the English Channel. Marshall’s fondest hope was that he could break out of the deskbound frustration of the staff planner to command the Normandy invasion, but Franklin Roosevelt turned him down: “I wouldn’t sleep at night with you out of the country.”

Marshall was weary at war’s end, 64 and anxious to settle down at his stately home in Leesburg, Va., where he could be with his wife Katherine (his first wife, whom he married in 1902, died of heart disease in 1927), and where he could work in his vegetable garden, read his favorite books—about Stonewall Jackson, Benjamin Franklin and Robert E. Lee. “We have tried since the birth of our nation to promote our love of peace by a display of weakness,” said he in his valedictory. “This course has failed us utterly.”

Integrity & Unity. Less than two weeks after President Truman accepted Marshall’s retirement from the U.S. Army after 50 years of service, duty again was thrust on him. Truman appointed him his special envoy with ambassador’s rank, sent him to China with orders to try to bring a peace between China’s Communists and the Nationalist forces under Chiang Kaishek. Never was a plan more tragically ill conceived, but Good Soldier Marshall did his best with it. Eleven months later he bitterly returned to the U.S. to admit the complete failure that he always suspected would attend his efforts in the Orient.

Twice again he retired, and twice again President Truman called him back. As Secretary of State (1947-49) in the growing skirmishes of the cold war, George Marshall helped formulate the Truman Doctrine, which thrust the U.S. for all time into responsibility for the peace and safety of the Western world. He enunciated the famed Marshall Plan, which rebuilt the economy of Western Europe, bolstered it against home-grown Communism; for this he won still greater fame and the Nobel Peace Prize. When the Korean war began, the Defense Department wallowed in confusion. For the last time, Harry Truman sought the man (“the greatest living American”) who could bring integrity and unity to a nation at war. Marshall could not refuse. He became Secretary of Defense. One of his most onerous chores: after President Truman’s long, frustrating tug of war with recalcitrant General MacArthur, Marshall signed the orders that relieved MacArthur of his job as United Nations and U.S. Supreme Commander in Korea (wrote MacArthur later: “[His] enmity was an old one”).

Services & Echoes. Worn with age and stooped a little, George Marshall retired at last in 1951, settled down at his winter home in Pinehurst, N.C., content once more to tend his tomatoes, strawberries and onions, to read, to correspond voluminously (he never liked the telephone) with such old friends as Manhattan Financier Lovett, Bernard Baruch and Harry Truman, and to watch old movies on television. The still strong sense of duty and honor kept him from the postwar pastime of selling his memoirs; once, when he was offered $1,000,000 for an autobiography, Marshall replied: “The Government of the United States has already paid me for all of my services.” Finally he relented, consented to cooperate in the writing of a biography, provided that it would not be published in his lifetime.

He had done some work on the book before he went to the hospital six months ago after a cerebral stroke. He lay there failing, fondly tended by his wife, as round the world the echoes of his selfless, soldierly achievements still reverberated. And then last week, he crossed the river.