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                                                                              ╚January 5, 1948

Man of the Year:George C. Marshall

The Year of Decision



   No man knows his destiny, nor does any nation. The destiny
that lay beyond Yorktown and Appomattox and Manila bay, that lay
mockingly behind a slogan ("Make the World Safe for Democracy")
at Belleau Wood, took a new and decisive turn last year. It was
in 1947 that the U.S. people, not quite realizing the full import
of their act, perhaps not yet mature enough to accept all its
responsibilities, took upon their shoulders the leadership of the
world.

   Some Americans were still unaware of the step their nation had
taken. Some knew that it had to be taken; some, either through
fear or lack of imagination or lack of knowledge, were unwilling
to follow. But the central fact remained: if the 20th Century
world was to secure its freedoms, the U.S. would have to supply
leadership; doing less might even jeopardize its own freedom.

   No one man was responsible for 1947's great step. Like many
fateful decisions, it sprang only partly from the brain. It was
an act brought about by events, and their steady, unending
hammering on the U.S. sense of justice. But one man symbolized
the U.S. action. He was Secretary of State George Marshall. As
the man who offered hope to those who desperately needed it, he
was the Man of the Year.

   On history's calendar, the story of 1947 could be told through
three events in the official life of George Marshall. On Jan.7,
a disillusioned man, he returned from his unsuccessful mission to
China to take over the job of formulating and guiding the
nation's foreign policy. Near the year's end, on Dec.15, in
London's Lancaster House, he angrily and coldly ended the Foreign
Ministers' conference. These two events bracketed the year; the
second ended an era of false hopes and hopeful judgments.

   But it was the event of midyear that was the most significant.
On June 5, standing under the elms in the Harvard yard, George
Marshall, in almost casual terms, announced the beginning of the
program that was the become the Marshall Plan. Then & there the
U.S. at last set out to seize the initiative from Russia in the
cold war.

   Simple Concept. Looking back over the year, U.S. citizens
might wonder how their enlightenment had come about. Looking
back, Old Soldier Marshall might wonder himself. It was a
kaleidoscopic story of surprise, improvisation and counter-
attack. When he took over as Secretary of State, George Marshall,
despite his attendance at wartime conferences, was no skilled
diplomat. He had been sent to China as a special presidential
envoy to bring peace between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist
government and the Chinese Communists. He failed in his mission.
He came back denouncing the Chinese Communists as
"irreconcilable," the Nationalists as "reactionary."

   Unquestionably, Marshall had inherited some of his suspicion
of the Nationalists from his great friend, War Secretary Stimson.
But for years Chiang Kai-shek had stood implacably in Asia
against the Chinese Communists. George Marshall had caught a
glimpse of the same enemy that Chiang had long faced, but he
still did not recognize him as such.

   In February, the Greek crisis exploded. The new Secretary of
State was taken by surprise. He and the President had to meet the
emergency with an emergency measure: $400 million for Greece and
neighboring Turkey. With the sudden full sight of the enemy,
with, at last, an intimation of his aims and strength, Marshall
alerted his whole front. Harry Truman made the speech (written by
Marshall and his aides) which became known as the Truman
Doctrine.

   To a growing sense of realism in U.S. foreign policy, the
speech added a much-needed note of resolution: "One of the
primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is
the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be
able to work out a way of life free from coercion . . . . We
shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing
to help free peoples . . . against aggressive movements that seek
to impose on them totalitarian regimes."

   The Roadblocks. But basically the Truman Doctrine was a
defensive move. George Marshall still hoped that peace by
agreement was possible, that patience, firmness and common
honesty would be enough to bring to the world council table. He
flew off to Moscow for the conference of Foreign Ministers on
peace terms for Austria and Germany.

   The conference lasted more than a month, through 44 sterile
sessions. For Marshall, it became no more than a series of
sorties down the valleys of world peace, sorties which ended
always at the same roadblock: Soviet intransigence. He came back
with this intelligence report: "At moscow, propaganda appeals to
passion and prejudice appeared to take the place of appeals to
reason and understanding."

   It was then, in the deceptively peaceful setting of the
Harvard Yard, that the Secretary made his first clearly offensive
move. His aides had brought him other intelligence reports.
Europe was broke. Unless the U.S. acted, the whole front of
Western democracy was about to collapse. Quietly, George Marshall
said that if the countries of Europe would meet and agree on
their economic needs, the U.S. would underwrite their recovery.

   The Gigantic Suggestion. A politician -- e.g., Franklin
Roosevelt -- would have launched the policy with full organ
tones. Marshall was so matter-of-fact that at first his country
did not even catch the import of his gigantic suggestion. It flew
in the face of all the vows that Republican Congressmen made --
and the public, at election time, had approved -- to cut taxes,
end Government controls, end Government spending. It was a
promissory note for billions of U.S. dollars.

   But the rest of the world caught it before the next day
dawned. Ernest Bevin exulted: "I grabbed it with both hands."
Western Europe was galvanized with new hope. The Soviet Union was
thrown into momentary confusion.

   Moscow tried desperately to sabotage the conference which the
European nations immediately called in Paris. Moscow tightened
its grip on the satellite states, forced Poland and
Czechoslovakia to decline to attend the conference after both had
announced that they hoped to participate in the Marshall Plan.
As a reconnaissance in force, Marshall's speech was spectacularly
successful.

   End of a Campaign. Battleground and antagonist were now clear
to all the world. George Marshall pursued the campaign. One day
in September, while the hushed, nervous General Assembly of the
United Nations listened, the grey-haired man with the lined face
and the dry, unresonant voice placed directly on the Soviet Union
the blame for the world's woes: "In place of peace, liberty and
economic security, we find menace, repression and dire want."

   He demanded that the nations of the world unite in a coalition
against Soviet obstruction.

   In the debate, no quarter was asked or given. From the
Assembly rostrum, Soviet Delegate Andrei Vishinsky counter-
attacked with a 92-minute diatribe; the Soviet-controlled press
rolled out its thunder of slander. The violence of their reaction
attested to the effectiveness of Marshall's blow. Three months
later, in the cream-and-gold salon of Lancaster House in London,
the Secretary delivered the coup de grace to the last false
postwar hopes. Barely suppressing his anger through Molotov's
interminable dialectics, he finally, impatiently, called for an
adjournment. A campaign had ended.

   A campaign had also begun, and the U.S. people were in the
middle of it. They had not been put there by George Marshall
alone. Their decision had been shaped, in part, by the pressure
of events -- starvation and despair in Europe, the cynical and
ruthless policies of Joseph Stalin, the stubborn, mendacious
methods of Molotov, the calculated rantings of Andrei Vishinsky.

   George Marshall had had further help from such men at home as
Robert Abercrombie Lovett, his able Under Secretary;
Massachusetts' Congressman Christian Herter, who had organized
the congressional fact-finding trip to Europe; and, above all,
from Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg, whose services have
never been fully acknowledged by the Administration.

   Vandenberg's personal contribution was threefold. As a
parliamentarian he guided the Greek-Turkish and interim aid bills
through Congress almost singlehandedly. As a policymaker, he
prodded and pushed the State Department into recognizing the
hopelessness of dealing with the Russians. As a politician, and
as the Republican spokesman of foreign policy, he warded off
sniping attacks from members of his own party and preserved the
bipartisan foreign policy. Without him, indeed, there probably
would not have been a bipartisan policy. And without such a
policy, George Marshall could never have led his nation into its
new world role.

   Guests from Russia. Much had been written about George
Marshall, but even to his own countrymen he was more a figure
than an intimately known personality -- a homely, reassuring man
with compressed, unsmiling lips and deep-set, searching eyes, a
man who was curiously unimpassioned and unimpressive when heard
on the radio. As Chief of Staff of the Army, he had established a
reputation for brilliance. Congressmen and others who dealt with
him in Washington also knew him as a man of stubborn, unswerving
honesty -- a good man. His countrymen generally knew him as
admirable and let it go at that.

   George Marshall's admirable career began in Uniontown, Pa. 67
years ago. He was the son of a coal operator, and a colateral
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 5th
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, O 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.

   Ordeal of a General. No one knew better than George Marshall
what World War II had cost the nation; he still has the bill, in
men and dollars, at the tip of his tongue. At the end of the war,
he wrote in his last report to the Secretary of War: "We must, if
we are to realize the hopes we may now dare have for lasting
peace, enforce our will for peace with strength. We must make it
clear to the potential gangsters of the world that if they dare
break our peace, they will do so at their great peril. . . . We
have tried since the birth of our nation to promote our love of
peace by a display of weakness. This course has failed us
utterly."

   It was an old soldier's valedictory. He did not expect that he
himself would be recalled to help implement that advice. He went
to China and he came back as Secretary of State only because, in
his soldier's view, he was at the command of the President. "What
I wanted most," he observed, "was to go home and fix things up at
Leesburg."

   The Risk. The course which George Marshall had plotted as
Secretary of State was one of calculated risk. It was based on
the premise that Italy and France could maintain anti-Communist
governments, and on the hope that Europe could start production
in earnest. One of the big imponderable elements in the risk was
the intention of the U.S. people. Were they ready to "enforce
[the] will for peace with strength?" If they were not then the
Secretary of State would have to default on his commitments to
the world.

   How did the U.S. look in 1947? By the most extreme of
understatements, it looked healthier than any other nation in the
world. India was free, but the blood bath of partition and the
uprooting of the population had left irremovable scars. Palestine
was partitioned -- by U.N. and with the sanction of the U.S. --
but none believed that she would soon be free of strife. Western
Europe was wrecked by Communist violence. England's economy was
still in the first stage of convalescence. One of the few bright
spots in the year's news from across the Atlantic was the
marriage in London of Philip and Elizabeth, when, for a brief
moment, the world was reminded of the things it cherished most.

   Yet the rich and powerful U.S., untouched by violence and
unhurt by want, had had an uneasy year, full of vague fears and a
lack of confidence. The U.S. people produced more than ever
before and had more money to buy things than ever before, yet the
country still did not have the happiness its boom seemed to
offer. Ten years ago, many an American thought that if he ever
earned the salary he actually received in 1947, he would be on
easy street. Now 1947 was past, and the road was still full of
potholes and sharp turns.

   In the arts, only old, limp banners were unfurled. Uncertainty
and lack of confidence came out in nostalgia. Beyond a small epic
in frustration called A Sreetcar Named Desire, the only important
Broadway plays were revivals of Shakespeare and Shaw, a rewrite
(Medea) of Euripides. Novelists had little or nothing to say; the
most widely read fiction was escapist. The U.S. never had
contributed much to music. In 1947, even Tin Pan Alley failed to
produce a great hit. Many of the most popular airs were revivals.

   Uneasy people saw flying saucers in the air. Women, prodded by
the dress manufacturers, draped their figures in the New Look
which, like all new fashions, was becoming only to the stylish.
Race prejudice still showed its ugly head. Senator Bilbo was
stopped at the door of Congress and went back to the South to
die, but Willie Earle was lynched in Greenville, S.C., and 31 men
who were tried for the crime were freed.

   Weight of a Bomb. Beneath its ruffled and fretful surface,
however, the U.S. nation was stronger than it had ever been
before in peacetime. Aside from its wheat crop, its not-too-good
corn crop, and its $231 billion of produced wealth, it had a
technology unsurpassed in history. In the atomic bomb -- uneasily
held -- it held title, hopefully exclusive title, to the decisive
military weapon. The U.S. had scaled down its once great military
establishment, but it had merged its armed services, which
promised better military preparation. How long it would take
Russian technology to redress the power balance with its own
bomb, no U.S. observer could say; estimates ran from two to ten
years. But for 1947, at least, the bomb, in the hands of free
men, was perhaps the one great deterrent to the authoritarians
who only understand force.

   The Spirit of a Nation. In the end, U.S. aid to the world
would depend on two things. One was the purely selfish
consideration set forth last spring by Dean Acheson, then Under
Secretary of State. "Measures of relief and reconstruction have
been only in part suggested by humanitarianism . . . [it] is
chiefly a matter of self-interest." The other consideration:
humanitarianism.

   Writing in a little British magazine, The Cornhill, Author
Geoffrey Gorer, a British anthropologist, said: "If Americans are
placed in a situation where they feel they are not loved, their
natural tendency is to withdraw. . . . This is one component
making for isolationism . . . a reproduction on an international
scale of the response, 'Let's get the hell out of here.'"

   But Americans, if they were not exactly loved the world over,
had, in 1947, at least gained a greater measure of respect than
they had enjoyed before. They had helped this feeling along by
their own actions. They were presenting a different face to the
peoples of the world from the inquisitive, patronizing face of
the pre-World War II tourist. Most of the Congressmen who had
traveled to Europe last summer for a look at things were
conscientious and sympathetic men, who had shown Europe a more
mature U.S., even as they reflected the spirit of hardheaded
humanitarianism which was abroad in their land.

   Would the U.S. people stick to their course? The opinion of a
visitor may be more pertinent than the guess of a native. This
week, in the New York Times magazine, Barbara Ward, foreign
editor of London's Economist, who had made two trips to the U.S.
in 1947, wrote: "I believe that the American people -- the only
people in the world who thought of an ideal first and then built
a state around it -- will prove in the long run happier, freer,
and more creative when they carry that ideal of a free society
out into the world, than if they sit at home to hug it to
themselves. . . . I suspect that Americans will find initiative
and action so much more to their taste than any panic-stricken
waiting on what destiny may bring."

   Whatever rewards world leadership might return in the long
run, they would not be reaped until the hold of want and
oppression on the world's throat was broken. The country's
decision to break it was the vastest gamble in peacetime history.
George Marshall's estimate -- "calculated risk" -- meant in
soldier's language that it could be won, if all went well, if
the most powerful nation in the world threw all its physical and
moral strength into the fight.