Which biography do you suggest starting off with?

There is a four volume biography of Marshall by Pogue that seems to be the latest definitive work. I am still working my way through it. So far, it is outstanding. I also came across today a one volume biography by Roll that I just ordered off of Amazon. It has excellent reviews as well.

Even the four volume biography doesn't really do the man justice. How is it possible to summarize a life as rich and deep as Marshall's in only four books? I bought the one volume work simply to see if it provides a different perspective.

Quote:

---

His middle name is Catlett

---

Thanks for the correction.

I don't know. I read the Debi and Irwin Unger biography recently and came away with the distinct opinion (which was not the authors' intent) that he was profoundly overrated.

He was actually not that visionary, he was lazy (he took long mid-day naps even during wartime, which I kind of do myself, but isn't exactly a great trait), he was very old-school in his thinking, and a lot of his "great achievements" including the Marshall Plan, were not even his ideas.

From 1945-47, Truman sent him to China to negotiate some kind of agreement to end the Chinese Civil War. He had served in China very briefly, never really understood it, and never seems to have learned much about it. The mission, as defined, may have been impossible, and failure was possibly more Truman's than his, but it was a complete waste of time.

As has been noted above, he made structural decisions that helped build up the army in WWII, and this is an achievement, but I just don't see too much here that is great, meaning, some other guy could never do it. He was, like Ike, a good political general who managed to navigate that side of affairs, I just don't see him as visionary. He was, in fact, a rather middling Pennsylvanian-turned-Virginian who was old school and not too future-leaning. The thing that makes him seem that way, again, the Marshall Plan, was developed entirely by his staff, and he accepted and promoted it almost without much thought put to it, and how it got his name attached to him is actually an odd footnote to history that I think makes him overrated.

Interesting take, and you may well be right.

Why is the ultimate test of his place in history whether he was "visionary" or not? Could not extreme competence in his position also place him in the ranks of the great? For example, he oversaw an almost incomprehensible growth of the Army in just a few short years and ensured that that growth took place fairly darn well.

And who cares if the idea of the Marshall plan was originally his or not? Virtually no leader comes up with the original idea of the plans that bear their names. Almost all of it is done by staff, but the leaders deserve the credit because they are the ones who take the risk and put their names on the plan.If the plan fails, they bear all of the responsibility for its failure.

And although I am not even halfway through the four part biography, I have seen that Marshall was visionary at the beginning of World War II in at least one respect. He got rid of the system of promotion based on seniority. He relieved hundreds if not thousands of senior colonels and generals to clear the path for the next generation of military leaders.

In addition, throughout his military career he was viewed by his peers and superiors as being a true genius at planning and logistics. Those were traits that were called upon heavily in his role as chief of staff during World War II. It might be argued that he was better suited as chief of staff then he would have been as a battlefield or theater commander.

Finally, his admirers seem to value not simply his vision, but moreso his character and integrity. They praise his ability to see correct policies created, pushed through and protected in the political snakepit that is Washington DC. They argue that he was able to do so In large part because he was perceived as a man of character and integrity.

I think Marshall, like Ike, was the leader of a very large team and it's always difficult to separate the leader from the team, but even so, there's no point in his career that I can see where it HAS to be Marshall. He was competent, capable, all that. But there are other competent, capable leaders who could serve in that position.

The one thing he was not - and this too is to his credit - is vainglorious. I suspect that MacArthur, in his position, would have made a mess of it. Marshall had the right personality for the job. And maybe other bios might give me a different perspective, but the sense I got after that one was that we would have done just fine with a half a dozen other guys.

Really interesting perspective. I will continue reading his biographies with that in mind and if I find anything corroborating or contradicting the perspective I will add to the thread from time to time.

Thanks for sharing it. Really love these kinds of discussions with different takes on history. My dad was a history prof and that's how he taught history. He had students read two or three different authors with widely differing perspectives and expected the students to filter and distill those perspectives.

He is an interesting and complex study. Organizational genius. Clearly did some great things. However the deeper you dig and the more gets declassed the more serious, serious questions arise.

The bottom line is, he created a post ww2 world worse than the pre ww2 world. Chinese communists, soviets running major parts of our government, soviets, who basically started ww2 and prompted pearl harbor, in control from germany to japan,

Ironically, the marshall plan propped up germany and japan by locking in for them the resources they went to war for in the first place, because of the greater danger and evil of the soviet union.

The question is - why and what were his real motives. There is a lot of well-documented literature out there that argues for the proposition that if marshall was not an actual soviet spy, that he couldnt have done more for the soviets than he did.

I'll try to dig up some of those titles. I recommend reading both them and the mainstream. I know president hoover considered him an enemy of the state, and though history ignores or vilifies hoover, the more i learn about him the more i wonder if he wasnt a great man, turned on by a leftist media and academic spin machine.