George Marshall: A Soldier for Democracy

Along with Alfred P. Sloan, president and chairman of the board of General Motors, Peter Drucker, theorist and lifelong student of the science and art of management, extolled Marshall as an exemplar of its most successful practices. He was, in short, an austere prince of the Industrial Age. Like Sloan, Marshall was responsible for the transformation and extraordi­nary growth of his organization. How he effected that transformation and oversaw that growth, and how the American army fulfilled the purposes for which he was preparing it, constitutes an unexampled testimony to Marshall’s leadership.

But this was management – leadership – of a singular kind. Like Drucker, Winston Churchill praised Marshall’s managerial skills. At war’s end, he called him the Organizer of Victory. He had not led the mighty armies his country sent forth to the battlegrounds of the greatest war in history. He had built them. It is a heartfelt tribute, very far in spirit from the condescension that tinctured Churchill’s own army chief’s – Field Marshal Alan Brooke’s — appreciation of Marshall’s achievement. Brooke had been quick to point out that Marshall’s experience in war had been limited, remote from battle. As much might have been said of the experience, up to World War II, of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and Matthew B. Ridgway. But Churchill had watched as Marshall organized and prepared his army, as he directed the formation of its many and varied components, and as he redesigned its principal maneuver element, the division. 

Churchill had also watched as Marshall selected and monitored the work of his nation’s leaders; in fact, he had devised and supported the legislation that enabled him to appoint gifted younger leaders to high positions that the earlier purblind processes of “seniority” would have denied them. Churchill had watched as Marshall integrated the labors of the army with those of sister services and, most important, with those of the Allies. Marshall was the principal agent in the fulfillment of Fox Conner’s prophecy: the next time the American army fought, it would be as a member of a powerful coalition. Churchill admired equally Marshall’s service as principal military counselor to the president and the president’s administration. This is also not to mention Marshall’s effectiveness as the army’s spokesman and advocate before the American people and their representatives in Congress.

Marshall prepared and built this army. His qualities of mind, temperament, and character, in fusion, proved perfectly apt for the purpose. Contemporary commentators and latter-day historians have striven laboriously to define other elements of that character that surely includes dutifulness, selflessness, self-discipline, and a palpable sense of honor. Like his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginian forebearers, and like George Washington, he had trained himself to live according to a creed that he would “follow all his life. It valued self governance, discipline, virtue, reason and restraint.”

David Hackett Fischer uses the phrase “moral stamina” in defining the core of Washington’s character. It might accurately be applied to George Marshall. Marshall’s accomplishment bears comparison, in a human enterprise as remote from the management of people as it is possible to be, with a great finished work of sculpture in marble. That is to say, its distinction is very much the consequence of its having been wrought in a medium singularly difficult and unforgiving. So, if the familiar American label of distinction “CEO” is to be applied to Marshall, its usual connotations demand significant amendment, as do those of simple “management.” Drucker saw in Sloan and Marshall trained qualities of disinterestedness, utter devotion to the mission of the whole without calculation of benefit or debit to the leader. Drucker also saw aloofness, ruthlessness, discernment in delegation. 

Such things explain much of the success of their organizations’ work. For example, since neither Sloan nor Marshall could manage all the components of his organization, each must have found, hired, promoted – and fired, when necessary – those best suited to the function each component demanded.

In looking for these leaders, Marshall was interested fundamentally in whether he can do well the thing required – whatever his other duties that had no link to what they were asked to do now. Marshall was not looking for great men; he was looking for the right men. Marshall based promotions and assignments of leaders on their ability to achieve missions assigned, and to attend to the welfare of their soldiers. It was not ruthless to remove a leader from command if he failed in such duties. It would be an exercise of moral weakness and poor professional judgment not to relieve such leaders. To fire an old friend, or to fail to promote an old colleague who did not measure up – these were simply the commonsense requirements of the job. [check this graph]

Marshall was a CEO encumbered by a thick variety of requirements to explain and to justify certain actions, decisions, and plans – not to a sole (and compliant) board, but to many superiors. Moreover, until Pearl Harbor, he was working to prepare a growing organization for work as yet unknown, and on behalf of citizens who often opposed the use of that organization in the work for which it was being trained.
 
Soon enough, Marshall would become a grand strategist (a role for which his English friend Field Marshal Sir John Dill thought him less well prepared than for his other responsibilities). But, again, Marshall would be a strategist whose understanding of his nation’s defense requirements had to be adjusted continuously to those of his supporters, and, after December 7, to those of allies. To build and prepare an army was one thing; to determine where, and how, and for what ends it was to be employed was something else again.

To achieve the tall task set for the United States in World War II, Marshall relied on what might aptly be described as the pedagogy of experience. At every point in his life, beginning in his boyhood, Marshall seems to have encountered peers, superiors, and experiences that shaped him into the man that the nation would rely on to defeat enemies of democracy abroad. From his involvement in the Great War to his administration of CCC programs, Marshall not only developed the logistical capabilities that would be central to the United States’ victory in World War II, but he also learned how to understand (and thus, motivate) the everyday men and women who would be responsible for effectuating the grand strategy he and others developed behind closed doors.
 
The near providential set of experiences and relation­ ships that shaped Marshall were especially important to his leadership in this second great war because the army over which Marshall assumed effective command in midsummer 1939 was a shriveled, pathetic thing, palpable testimony to the settled ascendancy of indifference and hope over common sense. The army comprised 174,000 soldiers and 14,000 officers (in size, among the world’s armies, it ranked with Bulgaria’s and Portugal’s.) Furthermore, it represented, in numbers of troops, ¼stb [check] of the country’s adult male population. The army’s units, detachments, headquarters, some 130 in all, were distributed around the country, many occupying “forts” whose raisons d’etre were nothing more than that they had always been in their present locations. There was no deployable division. (There were in fact five divisions, “little sketchy things,” but only two comprised major combat elements.)

In 1933, Marshall, then a lieutenant colonel, had commanded a battalion at Fort Screven. A battalion, Marshall told a colleague, was – virtually the world around – a tactical maneuver element of eight hundred men. Marshall’s, however, had two hundred. Remarkably, most American battalions were of the same size six years later. Their soldiers carried 1903 Springfield rifles from the last war, and their only anti-tank weapon was the .50-caliber machine gun. In 1939, the whole army could field only twelve American-built tanks. Soldiers training in the field still wore the familiar kettle-shaped helmet of the Great War, and in colder parts of the country, when training in the field, puttees – the doughboy’s calf-covering against the cold of the trenches in France. Private soldiers were paid $21 a month. Horse cavalry still trained on large posts in Texas.

The course of the army’s transformation from a tiny force of less than 175,000 soldiers in 1939 to that of an army of 8.3 million in 1945 represents a prodigy of improvisation, planning, and public advocacy. The army’s development and growth, somewhat but not wholly synchronous with the escalating dangers and threats to the country (down to late 1941), as they were perceived, faced many obstacles. For as desperately as the army needed funds, soldiers, and armaments, neither the president nor the Congress was prepared to authorize such things in ways that seemed responsive to rational requests carefully rooted in argument and data. 

President Franklin Roosevelt responded to the army’s entreaties in frustratingly unpredictable ways – as did the congressional committees before which Marshall made his case. Roosevelt, “equipped with numberless sensitive antennae which communicated the smallest oscillations of the outer world in all its unstable variety,” never allowed himself to get very far ahead of the country, or where he thought the country “was.”  Especially frustrating was to be his determination to arm Britain at the expense, so Marshall came to believe, of the needs of the American army.

Here, of course, the president was anxious to demonstrate to the American people that the country’s role was going to be one of supply, support, counsel, and encouragement, in return for which Britain’s military and naval successes would serve to keep German arms away from the United States and her interests in the western hemisphere. The United States would be the Arsenal of Democracy. Roosevelt was far more sanguine about Britain’s survivability in 1940 than Marshall and most army opinion. He was certain that his decision to respond to desperate British pleas for weaponry – almost anything the country could spare – would be vindicated in Britain’s desperate labors to defend itself and, eventually, to defeat Germany. Congress was soon to insist, however, that General Marshall as chief of staff of the army and Admiral Harold Stark as chief of naval operations, certify that any weaponry or materiel sent to Britain was truly surplus: unnecessary to the defense of the United States.

The Marshall-Roosevelt relationship, like that of an arranged marriage that works out, would grow to a solid partnership based on mounting respect and mutual confidence. This was a partnership, though, without the felicitous grace notes of warmth and delight that characterized the president’s friendship with the prime minister or with friends like Harry Hopkins or General Edwin “Pa” Watson. For its part, the American people subsisted in a perfect state of cognitive dissonance: dreading what seemed likely to come to them, but hoping that it would not come, and therefore refusing to acknowledge that preparations for that response to its coming were truly necessary. It was strange, especially given the fact that, by the spring of 1940, Americans sensed that the German triumphs in Europe would one day threaten the United States and draw their country into war.

The army needed soldiers. It needed leaders at all levels. It needed money, and it needed both to prepare and train itself for every military eventuality. It needed to persuade the president and the American people that to ignore or to refuse to respond to these imperatives was irresponsible, perhaps calamitously so. Whatever Marshall’s achievements as a manager or CEO were to be, they were achievements wrought against desperately complicated, possibly intractable, difficulties.

Over the next seven years (beginning with the July 29, 1940, issue), Marshall appeared on TIME magazine covers six times, usually in stylized, head-and-shoulders depictions that bear the stamp of labored effort. Marshall may have been, as Air Marshal Sir John Slessor called him, ”a magnificent-looking man ... superbly confident in himself and the rightness of his opinions,” but his was a countenance that resisted compelling articulation, his “heavily handsome face expressionless save for a permanent suggestion of disappointment at the world’s failure to match his own Olympian qualities of mind and comportment.” The “veriest newsboy” might see in him the incarnation of authority, but that authority confounded common expectations of what a general ought to look like.

Americans had not seen many generals in the1930s; their memories were populated with warrior heroes like Washington or Lee, Grant, Pershing, MacArthur – the only American military men of whom they retained a clear image. In Marshall, there was no visible vainglory, no bone-and-gristle ferocity. The countenance reflected the character. (At Marshall’s alma mater, there are three large statues: George Washington, Stonewall Jackson, and George Marshall. Marshall’s lack of pretension, the quiet functionality of his character, are in striking contrast to the sculptural depictions of his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century military forbearers.)

The best of the TIME cover renderings is the first. It was a simple black-and-white photograph taken around the time of Marshall’s appointment as chief of staff. He seems a trifle young for his station; he is slender and not yet careworn; his expression bespeaks hope as well as confidence. It is the expression an ardent young officer hopes to find on the face of his commanding general. For once he is wearing a full array of decorations, including medal ribbons for the French Legion d’honneur and the American Distinguished Service Medal. There is a little touch of elegance in a thin gold collar bar. Under the photos are the words MARSHALL: CHIEF OF STAFF. Under this, the TIME tagline, neither ironic nor arch: “Soldiers have always said there’s no one like him.”

The army of 1940, on the lip of a seismic change, was still unto itself. This was the army that understood there was no one like Marshall. Harry Hopkins’s counsel and John Pershing’s devoted admiration (and General Hugh Drum’s foolish campaigning for the chief of staff’s job) powerfully influenced President Franklin Roosevelt’s educated instinct in selecting Marshall, but the army had all along known that he was its summa. Whether he was a colonel or brigadier, tucked away in Chicago or in the Pacific Northwest, he remained at dead center in the conscious memories of all who had served with him or who knew of his work in France, in China, at Fort Benning.

For all the reverence that the army may have had for Marshall, he was not always an easy man to work for. There were episodes of temper – Colonel Harold Bull, later chief of operations in Europe under Dwight Eisenhower, remembered him angrily flinging a briefcase full of papers across an office. These cases, however, were not all that frequent; indeed, they grew rarer as the war went on: “I was never at ease when I made a presentation to him,” Omar Bradley wrote. Marshall’s standards were unvaryingly high, and he had a way of communicating both disappointment and irritation, particularly over written memoranda that the secretaries of the general staff and their assistants had prepared for his signature, that kept subordinates on the qui vive. A letter drafted or a memorandum prepared that contained no criticism or rewriting by the chief was celebrated and treasured as a small trophy.
 
The War Department itself, as the coming of war made plain, was in Marshall’s words, “the poorest command post in the Army.” Barely three months after Pearl Harbor, Marshall would make it an extraordinarily efficient instrumentality for the management of America’s global war, but until then, army headquarters subsisted as sclerotic congeries of superannuated bureaus, departments, semi-independent agencies, and offices “as jealous of their privileges as a clutch of feudal barons.” Marshall’s official biographer presented a striking example of its operation, quoting General Joseph McNarney, deputy chief of staff, who would be in charge of implementing this reorganization:

If a decision had to be made that affected an individual doughboy it had to be referred over to the Chief of infantry [to] get his recommendation on it, and [then] back to the General Staff section; it went up to one of the Secretaries, General Staff, and they had at least eight assistant secretaries ... who did nothing but brief papers so that they could be presented to the Chief of Staff.

Marshall called McNarney a merciless man. With General Henry Arnold, deputy for air, and with Marshall’s full backing, they carried through a root-and­-branch reorganization in March 1942 and allowed senior officers whose positions were being eliminated little time to protest. Marshall backed McNarney ruthlessly.
 
He had told him that getting a paper through the War Department bureaucracy, through a process called “concurrences,” was ridiculous: ‘‘About twenty-eight people had to pass on matters. I can’t stand it.”

Some sixty-one officers answered directly to the chief of staff; 30 major and 350 smaller commands were directly responsible to him. It is a measure of the president’s confidence in Marshall (and the secretary of war’s enthusiastic endorsement of the reorganization) that the process was carried through in less than a month. Under the new system, only six officers would report to the chief of staff and the army would be organized under three commands: Army Ground Forces (General Lesley McNair); Army Air Forces (General Henry Arnold); Army Service Forces (Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell). Descriptions of the characters and operating qualities of these figures bristle with adjectives like “ruthless,” “efficient,” “uncompromising,” “demanding,” “drastic.”

The president approved the reorganization on March 9 with a wave of his hand and a vigorous assent. Contemporaries noted that the US Navy, whose own organizational practices were often obscure and Byzantine, would have been far less susceptible, given the president’s lifelong interest in naval matters and his own service as assistant secretary of the navy, to such radical reorganization.

On July 1, 1941, Marshall published the first Biennial Report of the Chief of Staff. Its purpose was frankly polemical – it was an instrument of persuasion as much as an assembly of information. The report is a useful account of how the American army was transformed from its interwar inconsequentiality into a force almost, if not quite, ready to engage its country’s enemies in battle. Marshall considered this period, particularly the months between May 1940 and the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor, the most taxing of all his service for two reasons: first, because his superiors – the president and Congress – were either reluctant to appropriate the funds necessary for the transformation of the military establishment or were uncertain as to how those funds might usefully be committed; and second, each, and sometimes both, seemed unwilling to take the decisions – decisions other than financial ones – necessary to enable the chief of staff to prepare the army for its services abroad.

The demands of Marshall’s wartime duties and commitments would now come at him in full flood, in unremitting simultaneity. To the student of his life, the temptation to disentangle such demands and duties is almost irresistible. Marshall was responsible for grand strategy, organization, global command, public advocacy, coalition politics and diplomacy, counsel to the commander in chief. Great not only in their breadth but also their importance to the wartime effort, these duties required the knowledge, habits of character, and sense of leadership that Marshall had cultivated for all his life, sometimes intentionally, but certainly not always.

While many books have been written, and will continue to be written, on how Marshall approached each of his responsibilities, Marshall did not have the luxury of distinguishing one from another: he had to address and engage them all. But such was far from the ideal texture of the chief of staff’s way of working, of mastering his responsibilities.