Leadership in War by Andrew Roberts

Author:Andrew Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

GEORGE C. MARSHALL

1880–1959

On Tuesday, December 16, 1947, Winston Churchill’s wife, Clementine, gave a dinner party in honor of the U.S. secretary of state, General George Catlett Marshall, who was in Britain for the Foreign Secretaries’ Conference on Germany. The conference had opened the previous day, December 15, but had broken down almost immediately, over the Soviet government’s demands for debilitating reparations against Germany. (The Soviets had shipped over half of Germany’s heavy industrial plant to Russia in 1945, but that still was not enough for them.)

“The Conference had ended in dismal failure half an hour before,” Clementine reported to her husband, “but Mr Marshall did not refer to it once.”1 Churchill himself was taking four weeks off from his work as leader of the opposition at the time, staying at the Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakech, where he was painting pictures and writing his war memoirs. Clementine continued, “He talked much about you and Mr Roosevelt with whom it seems he often disagreed and whom sometimes he did not consult. He said that he—the President—would direct his mind like a shaft of sunlight over one section of the whole subject to be considered, leaving everything else in outer darkness. He did not like his attention called to aspects he had not mastered or which from lack of time or disinclination he had disregarded. Mind you he did not actually use those words, but the gist and I thought much more were implied.”2

Clementine was right and reporting Marshall accurately: He did sometimes fail to consult Roosevelt and certainly never slipped into the dangerous vortex of friendship with the president, as several other cabinet members and political cronies had, but instead always insisted on being called General rather than George. The first time he visited the president’s home at Hyde Park, New York, was for Roosevelt’s funeral. As a result of staying impeccably professional, Marshall had retained Roosevelt’s respect from the day that he was inaugurated as army chief of staff—coincidentally on the same day that Hitler invaded Poland, September 1, 1939—until Roosevelt’s death five and a half years later. He remained chief of staff until November 1945 and became secretary of state in January 1947.

At that dinner party, Marshall was abroad and among admirers and friends; he was relaxing immediately after the disastrous conclusion of the conference, a dangerous and depressing moment in the Cold War. He was reminiscing about the war as he and all the other surviving figures understandably did a great deal after that conflict, and of course he was speaking about someone who was dead and thus could not gainsay him, but who crucially never cowed him. He was possibly also changing the subject away from the demise of the conference. Churchill replied to Clementine eight days later, saying, “I am glad you had such an interesting dinner to meet General Marshall. I think we have made good friends with him. I have always had a great respect for his really outstanding qualities, if not as a strategist, as an organizer of armies, a statesman, and above all a man.

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