Truman(38)

It is almost too good to be true, particularly as it was accompanied by what would in a lesser mortal have been considered a certain pomposity of parlance. He always announced himself on the telephone as ‘General Marshall speaking’. It was almost as though he had been christened ‘General’. As a result nobody—not even Roosevelt, certainly not Truman—except for Mrs Marshall and an obscure major-general who had presumably been at the Virginia Military Institute with him, called him anything else, not even ‘Mr Secretary’, let alone ‘George’.

Yet, on a wide range of testimony, no one found him pompous or priggish. Margaret Truman, meeting him for the first time when she was barely twenty and before her father was vice-president, wrote, ‘I fell in love instantly with this remarkable man … He was marvellous at making you forget his importance, while simultaneously making you feel that you and what you were saying were important to him.’1 Dean Acheson, who served under him for his first six months as Secretary of State, succeeded him, and then served alongside him when he returned as Secretary of Defense during the Korean War, wrote of him as ‘this noble and generous man,’2 and recorded the pleasure which he derived both from having him to very small dinners in Washington, when he arrived as precisely at seven as he left at nine, and from visiting him on Sundays at his house at Leesburg, Virginia.

Truman himself wrote of Marshall: ‘The more I see and talk to him the more certain I am he’s the great one of the age.’ This was within a month of his becoming Secretary of State, but the President never subsequently changed his opinion. He also enjoyed a day at Leesburg, although it did not correspond with his normal choice of a pattern of entertainment.

Marshall, although he was certainly not encompassed by military rigidity (Acheson was struck by the fact that even in wartime he thought about military problems, let alone political ones, in a broad political framework) had certain limitations of imagination. He did not create ideas. He needed them to be put to him. He was good at choosing between them. And although he played a major role in calling the old world back into being, not exactly to redress the balance of the new but to stand more or less upright alongside it, I know of no evidence that he ever had a friend amongst the leaders of Europe. Acheson was on close terms with at least three, maybe even five, of them; but not Marshall. Language was no doubt a barrier with some, but hardly much with the British. Yet, although Ernest Bevin’s reputation depends substantially upon his partnership with Marshall, and Marshall’s depends at least equally upon Bevin’s swift response to the Harvard Commencement Speech of June 1947, without which response the Marshall Plan might never have assumed reality, there was no hint of intimacy between them. Mainly through a misunderstanding Marshall thought that Bevin let him down at the London Conference of Foreign Ministers at the end of 1947, and subsequently held this against him. But even before that there had been no warmth. Acheson in 1949, for all his Groton and Yale style, immediately got on close terms with Bevin. He relished Bevin’s earthy jokes. Marshall, who did not make many jokes himself–for such a remarkable man there are few anecdotes about him, and those there are somewhat pale—did not have the same appreciation of Bevin’s humour. Despite what might have been thought his more promising provenance of union  town, Pennsylvania, Marshall always, I suspect, thought Bevin a rather coarse fellow. This showed a certain lack of imagination and narrowness of taste. But even at the superificial level of attraction of personality as opposed to the more important one of solidity of achievement, this is balanced by the near universality of affection as well as respect which Marshall commanded from a wide range of Americans (some of them of very critical temperament) who knew him well.

Marshall was very American. Not only was he unintimate with foreigners,3 he also had little taste for European life or travel. The paradox was that while he saw his duty as being to uphold the interests of his own country, he conceived of them in sufficiently broad terms that, with the possible exception of Acheson, he was objectively the most internationalist of all the 59 (then 49) Secretaries of State in the history of the Republic.

His return to Washington did four things. First, it gave a greater tautness to decision making in the State Department, even though Acheson as under-secretary (in which post he remained for six months with Marshall before leaving government for eighteen months of private law practice) had done his best while Byrnes perambulated the world. Second, on all issues except Palestine, he re-united the policies of the State Department and the White House. Third, he added the weight of his non-partisan authority to Truman’s partisan incisiveness in promulgating several major advances in the foreign commitments of the United States. Fourth, and not least important, his presence substantially increased the self-confidence of the President.