Books: Possessed in Patience

GEORGE C. MARSHALL: EDUCATION OF A GENERAL, 1880-1939, by Forrest C. Pogue. 421 pages. Viking. $7.50.

Once, when George Catlett Marshall was offered $1,000,000 to write his autobiography, he stiffly replied: “The Government of the United States has already paid me for my services.” Three years before he died in 1959, the soldier-statesman agreed to tell his story for nothing. On the condition that his biography would not be published during his lifetime, Marshall gave 52 hours of interviews to a nonprofit foundation created for the sole purpose of documenting the remarkable career of the boy from Uniontown, Pa., who grew up to command more than 8,000,000 men in World War II.

Fascinating Turtles. This, the first of three volumes of Marshall’s life, takes him to the outbreak of World War II. His biographer is a former Army historian whom Marshall addressed with the precise reticence and austere modesty that shrouded his personality. The result is somewhat like a dossier. But amid the overabundance of facts is a handful of defeats, triumphs and revealing sidelights that help explain why Marshall was both beloved and baffling.

He was a stickler for detail, which sometimes made him seem petty. He was cautious about social entanglements, which made him seem cold. Despite five years as President Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff, Marshall politely rebuffed F.D.R.’s attempts to be amiable, visited Hyde Park for the first time to attend Roosevelt’s funeral. Even his kindness and humor were touched with irony. After a gracious hospital visit to the daughter of a friend, he wrote: “I round your company of fish, turtles and guppies quite fascinating—much more attractive than the average group I meet socially.”

Author Pogue writes with grave admiration but indicates that behind the soldier’s icy reserve was a capacity for friendliness sometimes oddly revealed. Marshall liked to unbend with practical jokes, once took the trouble to steal his adjutant’s watch just so he could solemnly present it back to him at a formal awards ceremony. Before marrying his second wife (his first wife had died) Marshall drove her home from a dinner but deliberately took an hour doing it. When she remarked that he must be lost, Marshall replied: Quite the contrary. If he did not know his way so well, he would have had trouble avoiding their destination so expertly.

Marshall, who never got to West Point, first took up soldiering at Virginia Military Institute, where his Pennsylvania twang immediately marked him as a stranger. The lowly “rat” was forced to squat over a bayonet; after 20 minutes Marshall fell and gashed his buttock but dutifully followed the code of silence. Marshall was a mediocre student but in his senior year was elected “first captain.”

Futile Protest. Throughout his early Army career, Marshall repeatedly had to fill jobs far more responsible than his rank. As a green lieutenant in the Philippines, leading 5,000 men on maneuvers, he was described by a superior as “the greatest military genius since Stonewall Jackson.” Though only a captain at the outbreak of World War I, Marshall was so successful as a staff officer that he ended up as the First Army’s chief of operations and then as “Black Jack” Pershing’s personal aide.

Nevertheless, because Marshall had not commanded troops in the field, he was passed over in promotions for such rivals as the dashing Douglas MacArthur. Between wars, Marshall’s intense ambition to succeed was bottled up in routine assignments. His only opportunity to exhibit his brilliance came as assistant commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga., where he drastically revised training methods.

When MacArthur, as Chief of Staff, assigned Marshall to Chicago in 1933 as chief instructor to the Illinois National Guard, the newly promoted colonel was bitterly disappointed. He protested to MacArthur without success; he confessed to Pershing that “I have possessed myself in patience, but I’m fast getting too old to have any future of importance in the Army.” Marshall was then almost 55, and his frustration seemed more than justified. Not until he went to Washington as chief of the War Plans Division did his professional life begin to come alive; three months later he became Deputy Chief of Staff. Then, on the day German troops seized Danzig, Franklin D. Roosevelt—mainly on the advice of Harry Hopkins—reached way down to No. 34 on the list of eligibles and made Marshall Chief of Staff.