“I need not tell you that the world situation is very serious,” George C. Marshall said at the start of a short remarks, given at Harvard’s commencement in 1947.
After laying out the dire situation in Europe, Marshall, a former general then serving as US Secretary of State, discussed the broad outlines of a massive aid plan, that became known as the Marshall Plan. Then he ended his 12-minute speech by noting: “It is virtually impossible at this distance merely by reading or listening, or seeing photographs and motion pictures, to grasp at all the real significance of the situation. And yet the whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment.”
Marshall, who is pictured on a 20-cent stamp issued in 1967, strikes me as a particularly appropriate focus for this year’s last #stampoftheday. When I began this project in mid-April, I knew it would take me on a journey into Americana and American history. But, over time, I have been surprised by the ways that old stamps often illuminate current problems and sometimes even suggest promising ways to move forward. This is one of those stamps.
Though somewhat forgotten today, Marshall was a central, critically important figure at several perilous moments in history. In 1953, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work shaping the Marshall Plan, which, between 1948 and 1952 provided about $13 billion in reconstruction aid and technical assistance to 16 European countries.
As Army Chief of Staff from 1939 until 1945 he played a central role in transforming the relatively small US Army into a major fighting force. Winston Churchill called him “the organizer of victory” in Europe. And when President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose Dwight D. Eisenhower, not Marshall, to oversee the Allied invasion of France in 1944, he told Marshall he had been passed over because, “I didn’t feel I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.”
Because of its success, the Marshall Plan has become a symbol of how governments can, if they wish, successfully take on massive problems. While it’s right to view some or all of these initiatives skeptically, Marshall’s career shows there are times when a nationally directed massive mobilization is in order.
But Marshall’s career also shows the importance of paying close attention to the often overlooked question of “how” big tasks will be accomplished. Here Marshall may be a useful guide because, as Lance Morrow wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “Not martial flamboyance but logistics saved the world in 1939-45.” Put another way, “Marshall was the first genius of bureaucratic warfare, a Napoleon riding a desk.”
“Could anyone else have done the job as well as Marshall?” Morrow added. “No.”
“Was Marshall indispensable? The question has no answer, except perhaps a quotation from the Tao Te Ching: ‘The Master doesn’t talk, he acts, when his work is done, the people say, ‘Amazing: We did it all by ourselves!'”
A key part of Marshall’s genius was his ability to step back to assess situations. Marshall’s second wife, for example, recalled that during the dark days of early 1942,”it was as though he lived outside of himself and George Marshall was someone he was constantly appraising, advising, and training to meet a situation.”
Marshall also had a remarkable ability to identify and empower talented individuals, including many less senior officers he tapped for major roles in World War II. In an essay that appears on the George C. Marshall Foundation website, Col. Charles F. Brower, who taught at West Point and later the Virginia Military Institute, noted that in 1941, Dwight D. Eisenhower, then a then-Brigadier General working at the War Department, watched Marshall, and “noted the types of personalities that did not win favor with his boss.”
“Eisenhower believed Marshall viewed with particular distaste ‘self-seeking officers’ who sought to bring pressure to bear on their own behalf….Another category that vexed him, he told Ike, was officers who could do detailed work but would not take the responsibility for making decisions. Similarly, he objected to men who immersed themselves in minor details and so lost sight of general issues. The group in disfavor also included those who loved the limelight and those who had trouble getting along with others. Nor could he stand pessimists. He would never give command to an officer who was less than enthusiastic about the post or operation in question.”
And, Brower added, the leadership quality “most prized by Marshall and perhaps most reflective of his character was that of candor. Frankness of expression and the inability to quibble were in his mind directly related to trust and sincerity, elements that reached to the very core of one’s integrity. Simply put, Marshall gave-and expected to get-the unvarnished facts of a case and he developed early in his career a reputation for straightforwardness and integrity that in his later career gave him enormous credibility with Roosevelt, the Congress and the American people.”
Bower sites a telling story. Roosevelt supposedly told Marshall “I have it in mind to choose you as the next Chief of Staff of the United States Army” and then asked “What do you think of that?”
“Nothing, Mr. President,” Marshall is said to have replied, “except to remind you that I have the habit of saying exactly what I think….And that, as you know can often be unpleasing. Is that all right?”
Marshall later recalled that Roosevelt grinned and said, “Yes.” But, Brower, added, “Marshall remained persistent. ‘Mr. President, you said “yes” pleasantly. But I have to remind you again that it may be unpleasant.'” The President continued to smile and said: “I know.”
Making such a relationship work was Marshall’s respect for the decision-making process and for the importance of civilian control of the military. As Marshall later remarked, “I had early made up my mind that I, so far as possible, was going to operate as a member of the team, political and otherwise military; that while it would be difficult at times and [there] would be strong pressures for me to appeal to the public, I thought it was far more important in the long run that I try to do my convincing within the team, rather than to take action publicly contrary to the desires of the President.”
For these and other reasons, Morrow contends that Marshall belongs with George Washington in the pantheon of American military leaders. Both, he wrote, were soldiers of maturity and gravitas” and both were not only warriors but, after their wars, something more constructive than that.” Each, he added, was a “grown-up.”
Actually, Morrow went further, writing, in 1997, that compared to the national leadership of that time, “it was easy to think” of Washington as “the first” American grown-up and Marshall as “the last.”
I’m not ready to say that Marshall was “the last” grown-up. Rather, I’m hoping that 2021 will bring forward a new set of “grown-ups” with the courage, knowledge, skill, and integrity needed to meet this moment in history.
Because “I need not tell you that the world situation is very serious.”
Nor do I need to remind you that “it is virtually impossible at this distance merely by reading or listening, or seeing photographs and [YouTube videos], to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.”
And yet, we must, because “the whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.
And have a happy, healthy, and socially distanced New Year!