Memories of The Great and The Good

by Alistair Cooke

  Imagine now a sturdy, well-knit man, stiff-necked it would be fair to say, certainly in the physical sense, with sandy hair and mild blue eyes and a homely, underslung mouth from which issued unspectacular remarks in a throaty voice. A student of war, from the books and the maps but also from the arms contracts and the quartermaster records, and from a personal knowledge of the battlefields picked up on private walks when the bones of the dead were long overgrown.

  It is possible—we shall never know—that in his private imagination he was another Robert E. Lee who dreamed dreams of high deeds in the cannon’s mouth. But for almost fifty years he was fated by his superiors and, in the crisis of his career, by his own conscience to return as always to the drawing board, to revise the training methods of a tank corps, to compute the comparative tactical efficiency of a 55 mm machine gun in close combat and in desert warfare, to gauge the competing need for antiaircraft of the slums of Chungking or the docks and ports of Iceland. A high subordinate who worked with him assures me that in the history of warfare Marshall could not have had his equal as a master of supply: the first master, as this West Point colonel put it, of global warfare. I suppose we must defer to this expert judgment. It was enthusiastically seconded by the three or four senior British generals during the Second War. But to most of us, unifying the command of an army outpost or totting up the number of landing barges that could be spared from Malaya for the Normandy landings is hardly so flashing as Montgomery’s long dash through the desert, or MacArthur’s vigil on Bataan, or even the single syllable by which General McAuliffe earned his immortality: “Nuts!”

  A layman is not going to break out a flag for a man who looks like a stolid golf-club secretary, a desk general who refused an aide-de-camp or a chauffeur and worked out of an office with six telephones. Even though 1984 comes closer every day, this is not yet an acceptable recipe for a hero. Though no doubt when Hollywood comes to embalm him on celluloid, he will grow a British basso, which is practically a compulsory grafting process for American historical characters in the movies. He will open letters with a toy replica of the sword of Stonewall Jackson (who was, to be truthful, a lifetime’s idol).

  But in life no such color brightened the gray picture of a man devoted to the daily study of warfare on several continents with all the ardor of a certified public accountant. In a word, he was a soldier’s soldier. Nor, I fear, is there any point in looking for some deep and guilty secret to explain his reputation for justice and chivalry. There is, however, one voice that has been silent. No syllable of praise or criticism has come from a soldier who can coin resounding epitaphs when he so chooses. General MacArthur has said nothing, and I dare to wonder about his silence only because it reflects a conflict of character and temperament that was conducted on both sides with shattering dignity. It will by now be no surprise to learn that on Marshall’s side it was a most undramatic quality: the gift of making at fateful times sensible decisions that elevate another man and swing the spotlight away from you.

  We have to go back to February 1956 for the last public word about Marshall written by General MacArthur. “General Marshall’s enmity towards me,” he wrote, “was an old one.” Discounting the word “enmity,” let us say that the original row—the sort of thing that elephants and politicians never forget—goes back to the First World War, when Marshall, a colonel on the Operations Planning Section of the American Expeditionary Force, was planning the recapture of Sedan, the historic town which three German armies in the last century have broken through to lay waste the lands of France. Marshall’s plans did not allow for the impetuous ambition of a young brigadier general to summon his own division and take Sedan at a bound. The brigadier general was, need I say, MacArthur. He leaped through a loophole in the Marshall Plan and took Sedan in his dashing stride. From then on he vaulted ahead of Marshall in everything but prudence. By 1930, when he became chief of staff, you would have had to scan the army lists with binoculars to see what happened to Marshall.

  After the First War, you might have thought that his appearance at the side of General Pershing as a personal aide would have assured a flashier or more enterprising type some quick preferment, but it was downhill again for another fifteen years. As late as 1933, for instance, he was appointed senior instructor to the Illinois National Guard, an appointment that would have thrilled a scoutmaster. But for an able soldier, fifty-two years of age, it was the pit of his career. Once MacArthur retired, in 1935—and it may be no more than coincidence—Marshall had his feet on the ladder again. Two days before the Germans swept into Poland he was made chief of staff.

  I said that in the supreme crisis of his career it was his own conscience that sent him back to the commanding obscurity that was his habitat. Nobody has told this incident better than the late Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s secretary of war. In a letter to the president in August 1943, Stimson wrote, “I believe the time has come when we must put our most commanding soldier in charge of this critical operation [that was to be the invasion of Europe]. You are far more fortunate than was Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Wilson in the ease with which that selection can be made…. General Marshall already has a towering eminence of reputation as a tried soldier and as a broad-minded and skillful administrator.” The British had, in fact, suggested him. Churchill assumed he was already picked and Stalin had vouchsafed a wily nod of approval. There came a day in Cairo when President Roosevelt and Marshall lunched alone. It seems to be accepted among Marshall’s close friends that he had all his life yearned for a combat command. The most majestic command in history was his for the asking. Roosevelt had already made up his mind but, as usual, allowed himself room to maneuver (and lament) if things didn’t turn out his way. He asked Marshall whether he would prefer to stay in Washington as chief of staff or take the supreme command. Stimson kept some notes, made from Roosevelt’s account of the lunch, and in them he says that Marshall declined the gambit. It was, he said, entirely for the president to decide. He warned the president that if he was chosen to go to Europe, there was only one man he could think of to replace him in Washington. It was the new general Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had commanded the North African landings. The president decided that Eisenhower had neither Marshall’s grasp of worldwide strategy nor his familiarity with Congress. So he picked Eisenhower, and Marshall congratulated him, and the lunch was over. At the end of it, Roosevelt said, “I couldn’t sleep nights, George, if you were out of Washington.” (Roosevelt is the only known man who ever called General Marshall “George.”) When Stimson heard of this he was, he said, “staggered.” He gave to his diary the note that “at the bottom of his heart it was Marshall’s secret desire above all things to command the invasion of Europe.” But Marshall himself had advanced the deciding argument. Who else would oversee the war of supply, who would review the war in both oceans, from the necessary desk in Washington? He never by any sign showed that the president’s decision was not the perfect one. The British too were staggered and apprehensive, and it was a British official who put down in Adjournal: “In Marshall’s presence ambition folds its tent.” Stimson put down an older sentence he had once quoted about Marshall: “He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city.”

  When the dust and the glory came blowing up over the battlefields, Marshall was the father confessor and guru to Eisenhower. To MacArthur he was still a sullen office figure, smarting at long range over the humiliation at Sedan, but it was Marshall who urged on Congress the award to MacArthur of the Medal of Honor. Twelve years later, when Eisenhower was campaigning for the presidency in Wisconsin, he deleted—at the personal urging of Governor Kohier, of Senator McCarthy’s Wisconsin—a passage in praise of Marshall from a speech that he was about to give. Not a word ever passed the lips of Marshall about this dismal episode, and when McCarthy called him a traitor for the failure of his postwar mission to China, all Marshall said to a personal friend was: “The hardest thing I ever did was to keep my temper at that time.”

  There is a
final story about him which I happen to have from the only other man of three present. I think it will serve as a proper epitaph. In the early 1950s, a distinguished, a very lordly, American magazine publisher badgered Marshall to see him on what he described as a serious professional mission. He was invited to the general’s summer home in Virginia. After a polite lunch, the general, the publisher, and the third man retired to the study. The publisher had come to ask the general to write his war memoirs. They would be serialized in the magazine and a national newspaper, and the settlement for the book publication would be handsome indeed. The general instantly refused on the grounds that his own true opinion of several wartime decisions had differed from the president’s. To advertise the difference now would leave Roosevelt’s defense unspoken and would imply that many lives might have been saved. Moreover, any honest account might offend the living men involved and hurt the widow and family of the late president. The publisher pleaded for two hours. “We have had,” he said, “the personal testaments of Eisenhower, Bradley, Churchill, Stimson, James Byrnes. Montgomery is coming up, and Alanbrooke, and yet there is one yawning gap.” The general was adamant. At last, the publisher said, “General, I will put it on the line. I will tell you how essential we feel it is to have you fill that gap, whether with two hundred thousand words or ten thousand. I am prepared to offer you one million dollars after taxes for that manuscript.” General Marshall was faintly embarrassed, but quite composed. “But, sir,” he said, “you don’t seem to understand. I am not interested in one million dollars.”

  8

  Dean Acheson

  (1971)

  On a fall evening, as the twilight came on, the control tower at Kennedy Airport stacked up some incoming jets to allow a flight of wild geese to go on their way unharmed to the south. As they passed over tidewater Maryland, an old man with a noble head and a bristling guardsman’s mustache was sitting in his study on his Maryland farm. One minute he was a vigorous man, plagued however lately by a swollen eyeball. The next moment he slumped over, and at nightfall the news went out from Washington that Dean Acheson, President Truman’s champion, friend, and field marshal, was dead. A thousand miles away, Mrs. Truman got the word and said she would not give it just then to the old president, who was frail and pretty much over the hill. But she guessed that he would be “very disturbed.”

  For once, it is possible to avoid a cliché with conviction. Acheson’s going does not mark the end of an era. The era he dominated ended long before he died, and it took much fortitude and some humor to live serenely through the years when everything he had stood for was condemned or ridiculed or turned upside down, and when the European policy of the Truman administration was put down by a young generation of historians and columnists as a calculated effort to police the world and so bring on all our present woes. It is never possible, either when you’re looking back on history or living it, to say for sure that B happened on account of A, simply because B followed A. Post hoc, propter hoc was called, by the old Romans, the grossest error of elementary logic. Unfortunately, it is one of the axioms that most of us live by. Nobody knows this better than politicians, and while they dread having it used against them, they leap to the chance to use it against the opposition. Next year, a presidential year, we shall certainly be hearing again from the Republicans that they are and always have been the true “party of peace.” Because, when America went into the First World War and the Second World War, and into Korea, and into Vietnam—there was a Democrat in the White House. Ergo, the Democrats are the war party.

  Dean Acheson was alive and well while a new generation was becoming articulate—verbose, anyway—and looking back in anger to the Truman-Acheson years. I cannot forget the first time I felt the blast of this new indignation. It was the late 1960s and I was up in Minnesota during its perishing winter, dashing out of twelve below zero into the ninety-degree oven of a university auditorium. I was to talk to an audience of a thousand or more students. They were polite and even cordial until I started to recall the years just after the Second World War, the threadbare years when Europe was an invalid and a total dependent of the United States, an invalid greatly alarmed by the Soviets’ pressure first in northern Iran, then down in the Mediterranean, then during one terrifying summer in Berlin. I was not proposing a thesis, or even thinking to defend such blessings as we had come to take for granted: the Marshall Plan or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

  What I was appalled to discover was that the great majority of these students had apparently never heard of the Marshall Plan. There was, however, a minority that knew of it and were pretty cynical about it, as about the first grand installment of an American insurance scheme: I realized, a little late, that when the Russians had been huffing and puffing, when all these great and awful things were happening, these students were unborn, and therefore Azerbaijan and the siege of Berlin and the Marshall Plan lay, for them, in that dead zone that exists in every mind between what is too late to get into the books and what is too early for you to have lived through. From hot little speeches masquerading as questions, I learned two separate and opposing prejudices about Truman and Acheson. One, they were sleeping partners of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, quick to see Communism under every bed and reacting in panic with billions for arms. This opinion came, obviously, from students inclining visibly to the left. The other complaint came from the fewer leaners to the right: that on the contrary, both the president and his secretary of state were shameless “coddlers” of Communists. This charge sprang from the disdain that both men expressed for loyalty oaths, and for McCarthy’s trembling assertions that there were scores of Communists on active undercover service inside the State Department. In the presidential election year of 1952, the Republicans found this propaganda line too tempting to resist and, mostly actively, one Richard M. Nixon pictured Acheson as something very close to a traitor if not an underground Communist agent. There was a shabby scene at the Republican Convention in 1952 when somebody unfurled a banner inscribed with the legend: “Acheson—Twenty Years of Treason” and there was a thunderclap of cheers.

  It would have been easy, it would have been forgivable self-protection, for Acheson to throw a few sacrificial lambs in the State Department to McCarthy’s slaughterhouse. But he never did. And when a minor official, one Alger Hiss, was found guilty of passing on secret papers to the Soviet Union, Acheson was on the touchiest ground of his public life. He had been a friend of Hiss, and at his next press conference he was asked how he felt about Hiss now. The secretary had anticipated the question. He picked up the New Testament and said, ‘You will find the answer in the gospel according to St. Matthew.” Pressed to say that Hiss was well worth renouncing, he simply said, “I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss.” To the people who, like Acheson, probably thought Hiss innocent, this was a courageous act of friendship; to the rest, to the Republicans especially, it was a typical flourish of Acheson arrogance. In any case, it let off another national uproar. [It would take more than forty years for us to have access to the KGB and the Hungarian Communist archives, which revealed—what Acheson didn’t know, nor for that matter did McCarthy—that there really was at that time a small group of dedicated Communists in the State Department]

  During his last two years as secretary of state, Ache-son’s public appearances were frequently booed, he went in danger of physical harm, his telephone rang incessantly with threats and obscenities. I wondered at the time if he could survive all this without a breakdown. Somehow, under a strain his intimates agonized over, he managed. It is part of the common tragedy of the passing of time that those who know what such a man as Acheson did don’t need to be reminded of it, and the rest are either too bored or too skeptical to care. Nevertheless, we had better remind ourselves that whether or not our present troubles stem from Truman and Acheson or from earlier or later times, Acheson was the man who, with one other man in the State Department, brought forth the Marshall Plan. Will Clayton conceived it, and Acheson deliver
ed it.

  Will Clayton’s is a name you will not find in the almanacs or encyclopedias, though he came to play a great role backstage, away from the limelight, the great names, the powerful egos. A mild-spoken southerner, a businessman who had gone into diplomacy because he felt politicians were, on the whole, either ignorant of or indifferent to economics. He was not so much interested in how the war was to be won as how Europe was to renovate its shattered economy. Would it again manage a favorable balance of payments? Could there ever again in Europe be a prosperous commodity market? These are not concerns that inflame the multitude. Clayton was sent by President Truman to Britain and to the continent of Europe to look over the devastation. Behind the ruined cities he saw, to his consternation, a general lack of the simplest goods of everyday life. He came back and at once devised a grand plan to restore the economy of Europe by direct aid from America, not the promise of aid later on, but grants, loans, massive American investment in steel, coal, mining, construction—Now! He wrote many memoranda on this big theme, enlisted the intellect and enthusiasm of Dean Acheson, General Marshall’s second-in-command at the State Department, and brought in several economists, and the department’s Soviet expert, George Kennan.