Free Memories of The Great and The Good by Alistair Cooke Page A

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)

    O n 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