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George Marshall's admirable career began in Uniontown, Pa. 67 years ago. He was the son of a coal operator, and a collateral descendant of Chief Justice John Marshall. He grew up to go to Virginia Military Institute and become a soldier. He served in the Philippines, fought in France in World War I; as operations chief of the First Army, he won the commendations of his superiors for the way he moved half a million men into the Argonne offensive. General John J. Pershing called him the best officer in the U.S. Army.
Elizabeth Coles, his wife, to whom he had been married for 25 years, died in 1927, leaving him childless. He married a widow with three children—Katherine Boyce Tupper, the daughter of a minister. He performed a soldier's between-wars chores, teaching in officers' schools, doing routine military housekeeping, and, wherever he happened to be, cultivating the vegetable gardens which were his hobby. In 1937 he was in command of the sth Infantry Brigade at desolate Vancouver Barracks, Wash., when three Russian aviators startled the world by flying from Europe to America over the North Pole. They landed at his field.
Katherine Tupper Marshall, who wrote a book (Together; Annals of an Army Wife) about life with George Marshall, recalled that the flyers had nothing but their thick fur parkas to wear at receptions. Marshall ordered civilian suits for them and "they appeared, immaculate in dark business suits . . . delighted by the double-breasted cut of the coats."
Time for the General. During those years, when Marshall also cultivated the unfashionable art of war, he fought for universal military training and an adequate defense establishment. But the weeds of complacency overran his efforts until, in 1939, when the nation became genuinely apprehensive, he was given the job of shaping an army. Two years before Pearl Harbor, he was made the Army's Chief of Staff.
He fought the war's first year in the nation's unprepared factories. Mrs. Marshall prayed: "Give him time, 0 Lord." When he talked to her, "I had the feeling that he was really talking to himself," she wrote. "It was as though he lived outside of himself and George Marshall was someone he was constantly appraising. ... He would say, 'I cannot afford the luxury of sentiment. ... It is not easy to tell men they have failed. ... I cannot allow myself to get angry. . . .'" But Mrs. Marshall also wrote: " [They] have never seen him when he is aroused. It is like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. His withering vocabulary and the cold steel of his eyes would sear the soul of any man deserving censure."
The public saw him as a reserved, almost gentle man who quietly repelled intimacy; even first-naming Franklin Roosevelt invariably called him "General." One day in 1944, he had to tell his wife that her son had been killed in Italy.