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End of a Campaign. Battleground and antagonist were now clear to all the world. George Marshall pursued the campaign. One day in September, while the hushed, nervous General Assembly of the United Nations listened, the grey-haired man with the lined face and the dry, unresonant voice placed directly on the Soviet Union the blame for the world's woes: "In place of peace, liberty and economic security, we find menace, repression and dire want."
He demanded that the nations of the world unite in a coalition against Soviet obstruction.
In the debate, no quarter was asked or given. From the Assembly rostrum, Soviet Delegate Andrei Vishinsky counterattacked with a 92-minute diatribe; the Soviet-controlled press rolled out its thunder of slander. The violence of their reaction attested to the effectiveness of Marshall's blow. Three months later, in the cream-and-gold salon of Lancaster House in London, the Secretary delivered the coup de gráce to the last false postwar hopes. Barely suppressing his anger through Molotov's interminable dialectics, he finally, impatiently, called for an adjournment. A campaign had ended.
A campaign had also begun, and the U.S. people were in the middle of it. They had not been put there by George Marshall alone. Their decision had been shaped, in part, by the pressure of events —starvation and despair in Europe, the cynical and ruthless policies of Joseph Stalin, the stubborn, mendacious methods of Molotov, the calculated rantings of Andrei Vishinsky.
George Marshall had had further help from such men at home as Robert Abercrombie Lovett, his able Under Secretary; Massachusetts' Congressman Christian Herter, who had organized the congressional fact-finding trip to Europe; and, above all, from Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg, whose services have never been fully acknowledged by the Administration.
Vandenberg's personal contribution was threefold. As a parliamentarian he guided the Greek-Turkish and interim aid bills through Congress almost singlehandedly. As a policymaker, he prodded and pushed the State Department into recognizing the hopelessness of dealing with the Russians.
As a politician, and as the Republican spokesman on foreign policy, he warded off sniping attacks from members of his own party and preserved the bipartisan foreign policy. Without him, indeed, there probably would not have been a bipartisan policy. And without such a policy, George Marshall could never have led his nation into its new world role.
Guests from Russia. Much had been written about George Marshall, but even to his own countrymen he was more a figure than an intimately known personality —a homely, reassuring man with compressed, unsmiling lips and deep-set, searching eyes, a man who was curiously unimpassioned and unimpressive when heard on the radio. As Chief of Staff of the Army, he had established a reputation for brilliance. Congressmen and others who dealt with him in Washington also knew him as a man of stubborn, unswerving honesty—a good man. His countrymen generally knew him as admirable and let it go at that.