George Marshall by David L. Roll

Author:David L. Roll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

* * * * *

On the afternoon of April 12, a message was delivered to the Pentagon for transmission overseas: “Darlings. Pa slipped away this afternoon. He did his job to the end as he would want you to do. Bless you. All our love. Mother.”101 This was Eleanor Roosevelt’s way of notifying her four sons in uniform that their father had passed. Marshall had left his office early and was on the porch at Quarters One when Frank McCarthy gave him the news that the president was dead. George and Katherine rushed to the White House and spent a few minutes with Mrs. Roosevelt in the family quarters before she left for Warm Springs. She asked Marshall to take responsibility for transporting the president’s body back to Washington, arranging a funeral service at the White House, and attending to the internment at Hyde Park. While Marshall was in the Cabinet Room with Harry Truman, who had just been sworn in as president, a reporter in the crowded hall asked Katherine to describe Marshall’s reaction when he heard the news. She replied, “I am sorry but I can’t answer that. If you wish to know you will have to ask General Marshall.”102

Perhaps someone asked Marshall then or later how he felt about the death of the president. If that happened, there is no known record of the question being asked or of Marshall’s response. Merrill Pasco, a member of Marshall’s staff, recalled to an interviewer more than forty years later that Marshall “seemed impassive and showed no outward emotion.”103 There is no basis for questioning Pasco’s recollection. For the past six years Marshall had made a point of intentionally maintaining an emotional distance from the president, refusing to laugh at his jokes or to spend leisure time with him at Hyde Park, at Warm Springs, or in the White House during “children’s hour.” Surely Marshall felt that the death of the president was a profound loss for the nation, especially in wartime. Setting aside FDR’s maddening tendencies to shift positions and meander off on tangents, by the end of 1943 Marshall came to believe that Roosevelt was a great wartime leader. But he was not greatly moved by his passing as he was when he learned of the deaths of Allen, Dill, and of course Lily.

The next day, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered alongside railway tracks and in adjacent fields as the long train bearing Roosevelt’s 760-pound casket slowly made its way north. Reporters wrote that it must have been like this eighty years earlier when Abraham Lincoln’s procession crept by rail across New York State before turning west toward Illinois. Both presidents had been struck down just days before the wars they fought had ended.

At noon in Washington Marshall and the rest of the military high command briefed President Truman on the probable collapse of the Third Reich by early May and the challenges that lay ahead in the Pacific. The atomic bomb was not mentioned,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.