The Making of a Leader: The Formative Years of George C. Marshall - Hardcover

Bunting III, Josiah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400042585 ISBN 13: 9781400042586

Publisher: Knopf, 2024

Synopsis

A portrait of one of the greatest leaders of modern history, George Catlett Marshall (1880–1959), and a distillation of the essential lessons his formative years offer to the leaders of today and tomorrow

George Marshall’s accomplishments are well known: after helping to guide the Allies to victory during World War II, he set Europe on the postwar path to recovery with the plan that bears his name and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. But how did he become such an effective leader?

By eschewing the years and accomplishments for which Marshall is most often remembered and focusing instead on the decisive moments that preceded them, The Making of a Leader provides the most detailed look yet at the mettle of Marshall’s character, from his arrival as a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute and his Fort Leavenworth days—where he “learned how to learn”—to his instructive time as John J. Pershing’s aide-de-camp and his critical experiences during World War I. Josiah Bunting III, a lifelong educator and former superintendent of Marshall’s alma mater, highlights the importance of Marshall’s activity between the wars, when he led “the single most influential period of military education” at Fort Benning, eventually culminating in his appointment as Army Chief of Staff in 1939.

In this illuminating portrait, Bunting cuts through the legend of Marshall to the man—his frustrations, passions, loves, and brilliance—revealing a humble commander who knew not only how to lead but how to see the leader in others.

About this title

About the Author

JOSIAH BUNTING III is an author, educator, and military historian. A graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and former Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, he served as a major in the United States Army and later as the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute. His previous books include The Lionheads (one of Time’s ten best novels of 1973) and Ulysses S. Grant (published as part of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s American Presidents series). In recognition of his many accomplishments and lifelong devotion to higher education, Bunting was appointed to the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities by President George W. Bush. He lives with his wife in Newport, Rhode Island.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

My Youngest and My Last

Although he was one of four children, and the youngest among them, George Catlett Marshall Jr. was raised essentially as an only child. The first of his brothers had died in infancy, and the second, Stuart Bradford Marshall, born in 1875, and almost six years George’s senior, kept his distance. Chronology, temperament, and family chemistry isolated the surviving brothers from each other all their lives. There was a sister, Marie, four years older than George. They became attached to each other, as brother and sister normally do—but only after both had passed through adolescence. Thus, while Stuart and Marie were at school and his father at work, building a prosperous business in the manufacture of coke ovens, George Marshall had his mother to himself. A handsome woman of placid disposition and a sensibility amused rather than exasperated by childish misbehavior, she was the sustaining influence on Marshall’s early life. A later age might have called her nonjudgmental; the later age would have been wrong. Laura Marshall embodied rather than asserted the things she thought important. She was the strength of the family.

Stuart bore the full freight of his ambitious father’s expectations. He bore them successfully, in school particularly, where early success always gratifies an ambitious parent. He was well behaved and guarded his own turf with vigilance. Some years later, about the time Stuart was graduating from the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), George overheard him pleading with their mother: do not allow George to follow me to VMI. The imputation was that George, slow in his academic work, would disgrace the Marshall name. Family records disclose no expression of affection or act of fraternal solicitude between them.

Marshall’s parents had been settled in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, for six years when George Catlett Marshall Jr. was born on the last day of 1880. It was a bustling village of about three thousand, and still, in the days before automobiles, sufficiently remote from Pittsburgh not to have been drawn into the ambit of the larger city. Though founded in the 1770s, it became an important waystation a generation later because of its proximity to the National Road, the early federal highway promoted by Thomas Jefferson. Eventually, this turnpike linked Cumberland, Maryland, with Vandalia, Illinois, and today, with a few S curves straightened out and several bridges replaced, is known as US Route 40.

The county near Uniontown is rich in colonial history. The first skirmishes of the French and Indian War occurred nearby, and the English general Edward Braddock, killed on his famous expedition to capture Fort Duquesne in 1755, is buried only a few miles from the town. George Washington’s Fort Necessity, the scene of his early, if gallant, defeat (now rebuilt and moved a few miles), remains testimony to the area’s strategic importance in the earliest years of western migration. As an adult, George Marshall Jr. was sometimes unable to conceal an irritated pride when his Virginian wife’s family asserted the importance of their own heritage. He would not deny it, but he was uncomfortable with its corollary, not always unspoken: Albemarle County, Virginia.

In the years of Marshall’s boyhood, Fayette County appeared a stage fitted out perfectly for the idyllic pursuits and pastimes of an unhurried age: a rich and gentle landscape of fresh green meadows, orchards, and forest; clotted rolling hills and two important crossecting rivers (the Monongahela and the Youghiogheny). The rivers and forests became the sometime habitat of George Marshall and his younger son, both devoted hunters and fishermen. All his life, George Marshall Jr. would be a lover of remote green places: they came to represent surcease, renewal, and, most of all, the healing balm of a remembered pleasure in his father’s too occasional companionship. The town itself, typical of the communities along the National Road, was quiet and amiable: this was just before the beginning of contentious hyperactivity—most of it rooted in the various labors connected with the extraction of coal from the earth—that followed.

George’s parents were conscious of their Southern heritage and, in the case of Mr. Marshall, zealous in asserting the importance of ancestry. A prosaic destiny had led them out of Kentucky and into Pennsylvania; they brought with them “the manners and morals of their prewar youth.” (An American of the twenty-first century must remind himself that prewar meant the 1840s and 1850s: pre–Civil War.1)

Marshall Sr. watered these roots of ancestry ceaselessly, and with at least two consequences: first, that his youngest son would grow into what his official biographer called “a species of Virginian,” a man of dignity and reserve; and second, that even before that slow transformation had begun, the adolescent Marshall was already exasperated by what appeared to have been a long, arid period in the family genealogy.2 In a time and family in which books were the common currency of evening diversion (both father and mother read to their children), a volume especially honored was W. M. Paxton’s genealogy of the Marshall family. The boy learned its contents thoroughly. His father’s particular obsession was with his collateral ancestor Chief Justice John Marshall (his first cousin twice removed); and, less so, with another kinsman, Robert E. Lee’s brilliant aide, prominent at Appomattox and possibly the author of Lee’s Farewell Address to the Army of Northern Virginia, Charles Marshall. “It was about time for someone else to swim for the family,” George Jr. decided.3

The younger George Marshall’s father had participated in military action both farcical and tragic. He had grown to early manhood in Augusta, Kentucky, a locale described in the New York Times as “a gentle and pastoral land with a savage history. . . . ​[One of] rolling hills and fields in varying intense shades of green, limestone cliffs, red barns and blackened tobacco sheds.”4 At eighteen, in 1863, he served briefly with his own father—a member of the Home Guard of Augusta, Kentucky—commanded by a staunch Unionist, Dr. Joshua Bradford. With a few others they once rushed to the local wharf on the Ohio to warn Union gunboats that a large mounted Confederate detachment under Colonel Basil Duke was about to attack. The boats shoved off, firing an ineffectual volley for dignity’s sake. White flags of surrender appeared in the windows of the houses along the river, the citizens either realizing they were ill prepared to fight off an attack or glad to welcome the Rebels. Not everyone saw the flags, however. Many who did not opened fire. Fire was returned.

When the engagement was over, thirty men lay dead, Confederate cavalrymen and Augusta citizens alike. The two Marshalls were captured by the Rebels, detained for a few days, then paroled, according to the practice of the day. They pledged their word not to take up arms again for the duration of the war. Here at the very border of a border state, such small actions and clumsy efforts to preserve honor or to defend one’s town and kin or to intimidate enemies were common.

An unexpected consequence of the engagement was a partial repair of what had been an estrangement between Bradford’s family and the Marshalls. Soon after the war ended, George Marshall married Bradford’s niece, Laura. They then left Kentucky for Pennsylvania; again, a destiny less strange than ironic: the self-conscious heir to a resonant Virginia name leading his bride, via Kentucky, to Pennsylvania. Almost thirty years later, his son, George Catlett Marshall Jr. (to whom irony was an alien quality), would find himself explaining his Yankee accent to senior cadets at VMI.

Though its course has been anxiously scrutinized by two generations of scholars and historians, Marshall’s childhood yields few definitive clues to his later eminence. He appears a puckish little brother: enterprising, active, forgetful. He was called “Flicker,” a wheaten-haired boy with freckles and a pug nose. He conceived an early hatred of all schooling. There is a particularly vivid image of him, dating from 1885 or 1886, and still fresh in his own memory in the mid-1950s: he is being held to the side of a rocking chair, and his great-aunt Eliza Stuart is teaching him the Episcopal catechism and rudiments of arithmetic. From his vantage he can see his friends playing outside in the sun.

•••

The Uniontown Marshalls lived in a two-story brick house on West Main Street, just at the edge of town. There was a large garden behind it—​an arbor of pear trees, sycamores, and honey locusts. A clear shallow stream ran across the property, Coal Lick Run, the site of an early Marshall episode. With his best boyhood friend, Andy Thompson, George Jr. constructed a raft and offered ferry service across the stream, taking two or three girls aboard for the passage of ten feet. When the girls failed to produce the tickets George had printed, he flooded the vessel, causing it to sink midstream.

Just as the Marshall house lay at the edge of Uniontown, so too the town itself, barely seventeen miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, subsisted at an edge, or rather limit, of a fading culture: the American Gilded Age, defined in popular memory as a languid drifting time of broad verandas, stout bewhiskered presidents, idle recreations, and spacious vistas. But the popular memory, however satisfying or sweet, remains dim. Crossecting currents, some still subterranean, had begun the remorseless work of transformation decades earlier. Uniontown was to be changed fundamentally over the next twenty years by the coal and coke industries. Among these early indicia were coke ovens in the nearby hill (many manufactured by Mr. Marshall and his partners), seen at night through gales of gaseous smoke. Soon, Uniontown began to attract immigrant laborers, hundreds of them, many who huddled near the town, living in boxcars, eking out a dreary subsistence living in the mines and factories nearby.

George C. Marshall Sr. appears as a kind of genteel Babbitt. He was tall, somewhat stout, sandy-haired, and gregarious. This George Marshall was a congenital joiner of clubs, an active Mason, a vestryman at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church, and a committed Democrat in a town and state warmly allegiant to the party of Abraham Lincoln and U. S. Grant. His younger son was christened at Saint Peter’s in 1881 and would remain a nominal Episcopalian all his life. An early experience in the church, however, was not auspicious: it led to mild public humiliation, perhaps less embarrassing to the son than to the father. One Sunday morning, George Jr., tucked away behind the manual church organ (he had been retained to pump it for the hymns), had so immersed himself in reading a Nick Carter novel that he failed to note the end of the rector’s sermon and the premonitory creaks and coughs signaling the expected beginning of the offertory hymn. The organist began to play, but the instrument emitted no sound. The boy’s inattention was instantly known in Uniontown, and he was no longer chosen to pump the organ.

Nick Carter’s adventure stories aside, Marshall also read the Frank Merriwell stories, then coming into fashion, and, soon after, the robust tales of the Victorian novelist G. A. Henty—writer of historical fictions set in classical and medieval venues. In 1943, visiting the ruins of ancient Carthage in Tunisia, Marshall told his protégé Dwight D. Eisenhower that all he knew of Carthage and Hannibal he learned by reading Henty as a boy. He also read Rudyard Kipling, and either read or was read to Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe was his favorite), James Fenimore Cooper, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Ouida; and from historical romances like Don Orsino and narratives like History of the Conquest of Mexico. Much of what he learned in this way lingered in his memory, testimony to the utility of an earlier era’s family diversions—activities that demanded children participate, working their imaginations—even, perhaps, thinking. Great-Aunt Eliza Stuart might cultivate Marshall’s attention with small bribes for learning catechism, but her labors, and those of the two private tutors who succeeded her, “so soured me on study and teaching that I like never to have recovered from them,” Marshalled once remarked.5

Marshall, who was to later earn a reputation as perhaps the best and most devoted teacher in the army, can be forgiven for a mildly disingenuous explanation of his scholastic abilities. It is reasonable to infer that hearing Cooper and Scott read aloud was infinitely more useful to the adult soldier than the unhappy labors demanded of him by schoolmasters. By such means did Marshall and his generation learn and cultivate a taste for reading history and biography that nourished their imaginations and informed their judgments over a lifetime: the generation that embraced wartime colleagues like Lord Alanbrooke, Winston Churchill, John Dill, George Patton, and Eisenhower.

At seven years of age, Marshall was taken to meet the superintendent of local schools to determine his fitness and placement in an appropriate class. The superintendent posed rudimentary questions in English and mathematics. Marshall was unable to answer any of them. His father was mortified. Marshall, as he readily admitted, did not like school. Worse, he sensed the paternal humiliation caused by the distance between his scholastic abilities and the unspoken academic success of his older brother. Over the next few years, George Jr. would earn and sustain an honest reputation for being a mediocre student at best.

•••

In 1890 George Marshall Sr. and his business partners, looking for working capital for new projects, decided to sell certain holdings to Henry Clay Frick, by now a coal magnate of fabulous wealth. Frick demanded that the partners throw in one of their subsidiary businesses, formed in 1888, the Kyle Coke Company. The partners realized a large profit from the sale, of which Marshall’s share was $150,000, a huge sum for those days. Immediately (and ignoring Laura Marshall’s counsel) he committed almost all this windfall to a mid–Shenandoah Valley land and realty venture near Luray, Virginia. A large tract would be subdivided and sold for vacation properties near the famous Luray Caverns; the lots would be advertised in cities of the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states.

The venture failed almost immediately. In the volatile economy of the early 1880s, demand had simply collapsed. The company folded—indeed its showplace, the Luray Inn, a kind of Greenbrier or Homestead for its time, burned down. Marshall lost nearly all his money, not excluding personal loans he had taken out to help shore up the company’s finances. Of all his substance, he was barely able to salvage enough to sustain the family. George Jr. recalled: “We had to economize very bitterly.”6 At an age when children are notoriously sensitive to such things, the Marshall family had to make severe changes in the way they lived.

Surely a consequence of George Marshall Jr.’s lifelong solicitude for his own family finances was his refusal to even countenance the appearance of some idle luxury or indulgence. All his life he would keep detailed accounts of allocations from his monthly army salary. He would remain particularly sensitive to the financial burden—often amounting to outright penury—borne by enlisted men in the lowest grades. In 1947, as secretary of state, finding that the State Department had rented him a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, he insisted on being moved at once to the far less grand Hotel Pennsylvania, near Grand Central Terminal.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400042585
• ISBN 13: 9781400042586
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272