Free Memories of The Great and The Good by Alistair Cooke

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