Category Archives: George C. Marshall

“. . . the world situation is very serious.”

05 Friday Jun 2020

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Harry S. Truman, Style

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Seated from left: J. Robert Oppenheimer, unidentified, George C. Marshall, Harvard University President James B. Conant, Omar N. Bradley, T. S. Eliot, unidentified

The above quote comes from the opening lines of the speech Secretary of State George C. Marshall delivered at the Harvard University graduation commencement on July 5, 1947. Marshall had been the Secretary of State for all of about ten weeks when he showed up in Cambridge, Massachusetts to give the graduation commencement and receive an Honorary Doctor of Laws. As one can see from the list of names in the caption, a disparate mix of men received honorary degrees that day. George Marshall’s appointment was more controversial at the time than one might realize today; many Americans were concerned that a military man would be a bad fit to run American diplomacy. Menswear often coveys a message and Marshall is transmitting one here. In the photograph above we see the onetime five-star general sitting third from the left, pointedly wearing a crisp suit and avoiding any display of military display.

The war had been over for more than two years by this time but Europe was hardly at peace. V-E Day had been both and end and a beginning. Millions of Europeans now faced civil war, religious and ethnic strife, refugeeism, food insecurity, unemployment, homelessness, and other issues. Men like the late FDR, Marshall, Truman and others understood the failures of Versailles and what that led to in the 1920s and 1930s. This speech was the germination of Marshall Plan; the following April President Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act, one of the most generous and forward-thinking achievements in American statecraft.

(image/Los Alamos National Lab)

 

D-Day plus seventy-five years

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by in Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Harry S. Truman, New York City, WW2

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Rally in New York City’s Madison Square on D-Day, June 6, 1944

Good morning, everyone. I could not let the 75th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion go unnoticed. Anniversaries such as this are an opportunity to pause and reflect on what we have gained and stand to lose in our current troubled times. Coalitions are difficult to build and easy to destroy. We would do well to remember the lessons taught to us by Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, Harry Truman, and the many others who helped create the world we cavalierly take for granted today.

Last night one person did mention to me the 75th anniversary of D-Day. We’ll see how many, if at all, do today. Here is a post I wrote in 2011. The major D-Day anniversaries have followed me over the course of my adult life.

There are many striking images of New York City taken on June 6, 1944. People obviously had a need to be out publicly, anxious as they were for news from England and France. D-Day was a lonely time for Eisenhower himself, who by that time had done all he could and thus spent his hours chain-smoking and waiting for news at his headquarters in England. Here in the States, ball games were cancelled, shops closed, and things in general came to a halt as the fate of the war hung in the balance.

(image/photographed by Howard Hollem, Edward Meyer or MacLaugharie for the Office of War Information; Library of Congress)

NATO at 70

04 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in Dean Acheson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George C. Marshall, Harry S. Truman

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Secretary of State Dean Acheson joins eleven other foreign ministers in signing the proposal of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) while President Truman and Vice President Alben Barkley look on, 4 April 1949.

Continuing on in a sense with yesterday’s post about the creation of the Marshall Plan, today marks the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The scene we see above is Secretary of State Dean Acheson signing the agreement with President Truman and Vice President Alben William Barkley looking on over Acheson’s shoulder. Acheson was one of a dozen foreign ministers in Washington on 4 April 1949 who signed on in the creation of NATO. President Truman spoke to those assembled.

From here the measure went to the U.S. Senate, where passage of the NATO Treaty was by no means a given. Senator Robert A. Taft was just of many who had his concerns. Eventually the Senate ratified the NATO treaty in June. Eisenhower was the natural choice to lead NATO. The supreme allied commander in the Second World War at this time was the president of Columbia University and would take a leave of absence from the school in 1950 to lead the NATO troops in Western Europe.

Again, the more we understand the difficulties in creating such complex mechanisms as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Marshall Plan, the better we might see the wisdom in treading lightly on the hows & whys of tearing asunder their hard won gains.

(image/Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer)

The Marshall Plan turns 71

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by in Dean Acheson, Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Harry S. Truman, Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill), WW2

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President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State George C. Marshall shake hands as the chief executive sees Marshall off on the secretary’s way to the London Conference of Foreign Ministers on 20 November 1947. Marshall had given his Harvard commencement speech advocating aid for Europe five months previously and Truman would sign the bill creating the Marshall Plan five months later.

President Harry S. Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act on this date in 1948. Better known as the Marshall Plan after the Secretary of State who helped bring it to fruition, the initiative was one of the great successes of the Cold War. In April 1948 Europe was entering its fourth spring of peace, such as peace was; if you were living in Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe, or many other locales at the time you might have seen things differently. The most immediate crisis after V-E Day was relocating displaced persons and feeding the starving. Much of the latter task fell to Fiorello H. La Guardia, the former mayor of New York City who took the job of Director General of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in spring 1946 and worked his characteristically indefatigable schedule for nine brutal months until resigning in poor health and passing on in September 1947.

Great as the work of La Guardia and his staff of almost 25,000 workers was, it was apparent that their endeavors were insufficient on their own and that a longer term strategy was necessary. On 5 June 1947, now two full years after the war’s end, Secretary of State George Marshall gave the Harvard University commencement address in which he laid out the case for an assistance plan to aid Europe. He called for a policy not to aid any particular country per se but a policy “against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos” more generally. The Soviets themselves could have participated had they wished. Events moved quickly after that, with bipartisan support coming from both houses of Congress. The bill passed 69-17 in the Senate and 329-74 in the House. All that was left was for Truman to sign the measure into law on 3 April 1948.

People often take initiatives such as the Marshall Plan for granted, in large part because they were conceived so well and executed so efficiently that we take their benefits for granted. Men like Truman, Marshall, Dean Acheson, and the late Franklin Roosevelt understood the mistakes of the First World War. They had seen the Bonus Army in Washington and the rise of Hitler and fascism in Europe. That is why they created such measures as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill) and Economic Recovery Act (Marshall Plan). We would do well to remember just how difficult it is to execute good policy. It is extraordinarily difficult to solve problems well, and all too easy to undo good diplomacy through arrogance, carelessness, and ignorance.

(image/National Archives and Records Administration)

 

The ETO turns 75

08 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by in Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, George S. Patton (General), John J. Pershing (General), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), William McKinley

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Colonel N.A. Ryan, acting chief of transportation, U.S. Army European theater of operations, and Major General D.J. McMullen, D.S.O., C.B.E., director of transportation, British Army, Great Britain circa 1942

General Pershing’s arrival in first England and then France one hundred years ago this week is often understood to mark a turning point in American-European relations. The coming of the A.E.F. certainly signaled the arrival of the United States on the world stage, a process that had begun almost two decades earlier during the Spanish-American War. The evolving American relationship with Europe dates back to then too; it was John Hay, Secretary of State in the McKinley and Roosevelt Administration from 1898-1905 and, just prior to that, Ambassador to the Court of St. James, who had done so much to build the “special relationship” with Great Britain. Hay and Pershing laid the groundwork diplomatically and militarily for the Allied victory in the Second World War. Pershing’s protégés included George Marshall, George Patton, and Dwight Eisenhower. Today, 8 June 2017, marks another significant moment: the War Department created the European Theater of Operations on this date in 1942.

Dwight Eisenhower, at fifty-one now a major general, took over at director of the European Theater of Operations (ETO) in London on June 24. Joseph Stalin had been pressing for a second European front for some time, and now it appeared he would get that some time in 1942. That of course did not come to pass. Roosevelt and his planners decided to make North Africa the first Atlantic offensive. Two years later came the invasion of Normandy and V-E Day less than on year after that. Ike was now a hero and came home to assume the presidency of Columbia University. He was back in Europe as the head of NATO in 1950. For the past three quarters of a century we have taken the work of the U.S. Army in the European Theater of Operations granted. It was in Germany as part of the ETO where Elvis was stationed after getting drafted in the late 1950s.

We would do well to remember in our current moment that building alliances is much more arduous and time consuming than tearing them apart. Diplomacy is a funny thing: when done well one does not see it; when done poorly it is all one sees. I only saw one reference to the creation of the European Theater of Operations today. Here is to remembering the work that Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower, and millions of anonymous American uniformed service persons have done over the past seventy-five years.

(image/Library of Congress)