Part two: lessons from George Marshall and The China Mission
At the start of World War II, Marshall received a letter from a high school student in Seattle. What, the student wanted to know, was the secret of success? Marshall replied with a personal answer: “Giving the best I had to each job and not permitting myself to grow pessimistic over the slow progress or inevitable discouragements.”
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George Marshall’s attempt to broker peace between Mao and Chiang Kai-shek was ultimately a failed mission.
This book inspired humility.
As evidenced by my recent study of the Vietnam War, war is really hard.
But peace-making is really hard, too. Even the ‘greatest of the Greatest Generation’ can fail.
In China less than a month, Marshall was more entangled than he had ever intended. “Conducting war,” he would say, “is a relatively simple profession, because one understands clearly the objectives to be attained. To make peace seems to me to be a more complicated matter.”
Here are some of what were to me standout passages from the book…
Applied history
Even in the middle of the war, he [Marshall] read thick volumes on Napoleon and ancient Rome, and asked newspaper publishers to encourage Americans to study history’s “great lessons pertinent to the tragic problems of today.” Decades later, in a classic study of how decision makers use (and misuse) history, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May would single out Marshall for his ability to think in “time-streams”—drawing a web of connections between the present and the past in order to illuminate possible paths into the future. “By looking back,” they wrote, “Marshall looked ahead.”
On Marshall
Great man of history passages…
Marshall as a man that seemed modeled on the first great American soldier-statesman
manner both understated and imposing
the renown not so much for brilliance of insight as quality of judgment
the temper, which flared in displays all the more fearsome for their rarity
suited to wielding power, but hesitant when it came to seeking it
They spoke of his presence, “a striking and communicated force” felt as soon as he entered a room. It “compelled respect” and “spread a sense of authority and calm,” yet still conveyed “abject humility.” They marveled at his aura of command, above all self-command, and his capacity for decision, for decisiveness. “Don’t fight the problem, decide it,” he would tell them.
ruthlessness was essential… he argued, “You give a good leader very little and he will succeed. You give a mediocrity a great deal and he will fail.”
his reputation made less by battlefield heroics than by bureaucratic foresight and finesse. He was such an ideal staff officer, such a “brilliant planner”
Churchill, not easily impressed, conceded that “he has a massive brain.”
Marshall had lived up to advice he once gave Eisenhower: “Persuade by accomplishment rather than eloquence.”
A reporter wrote that Marshall had “the memory of an unnatural genius, and the integrity of a Christian saint.”
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He had developed exquisite self-control, an aptitude for focusing on what was necessary, and a commitment to relaxing “completely.” Even during the war, he napped on a lounge chair after lunch and went riding almost daily. (That is where he was the morning of Pearl Harbor.) In the hours before the D-Day landing, he went to bed at his usual time—he had already done what he could.
Before World War II, Marshall challenged Roosevelt in a meeting at the White House: “Mr. President, I am sorry, but I don’t agree with that at all.” Again those watching thought Marshall, not yet army chief of staff, was finished. Instead the president promoted him over several higher-ranking generals.
Marshall told stories about hunting trips, about his time in the Philippines, about military history, about World War II. “I’m almost convinced he knows more about everything than anybody,” Caughey raved to his wife. “He can pull out of his head more ideas and facts than you can shake a stick at—all without the slightest effort and all in the most interesting sort of a way.”
Marshall also had a striking ability to detach. “You ought to see the way he relaxes when the pressure is off,” Caughey wrote. “That is very uncommon among people who fight with their minds. Usually those kind of people wear their minds out…” Marshall had learned that lesson years before and, more recently, discovered an added imperative: when he looked worn out, the public assumed a mission was going poorly. In Chongqing, he napped briefly nearly every afternoon. He took sightseeing walks with Caughey.
Marshall’s hill walks could be strenuous enough to wear out young officers.
“If your subordinates can’t do it for you, you haven’t organized them properly,” Marshall had told Eisenhower in the thick of world war, ordering him to take a vacation.
Years earlier, watching Black Jack Pershing lead American forces in World War I, Marshall had grasped a lesson that stayed with him. “When conditions are difficult, the command is depressed and everyone seems critical and pessimistic, you must be especially cheerful and optimistic,” he recorded. “The more alarming and disquieting the reports received or the conditions viewed in battle, the more determined must be your attitude.
In Tokyo, General MacArthur said that no one in the world was more capable than Marshall of “bringing order out of chaos.” In Washington, John Carter Vincent declared that whatever the current travails, “I’d still rather have my money on Marshall than in the stock market.”
What’s inspiring is that Marshall wasn’t always like this…
In his thirties, he again and again pushed himself to the point of breakdown, or past it, agitated by the slow progress of his military career. At 35 he was just a lieutenant, ready to give up on the army. “I do not feel it right to waste all my best years in the vain struggle against insurmountable obstacles,” he confessed. He was known for edgy intensity, a quick temper, a heavy smoking habit. Twice he was hospitalized, exhausted and overrun, for “neurasthenia.” Once he collapsed in the street.
First Lieutenant George C. Marshall, 33 years old and fresh off his second hospital stay for nervous exhaustion
The restless drive had given way to assured determination, the nervous energy to Olympian calm. He would still curse, but now only for effect.
To overcome those flaws, he demanded “meticulous self-control.”
Along with this transformation had come another trait central to Marshall’s persona: a reputation for truth-telling, for almost insolent integrity in rooms of yes-men.
Marshall quotations
“So long as I do not give a damn about what they say in the future, I probably will be able to do a fair job at the present time.”
“God bless democracy!” Marshall would say. “I approve of it highly but suffer from it extremely.”
His approach to the mission
Marshall revealed little in these first days. He spent hour after hour receiving visitors and listening—to anyone, he said, “who has a genuine interest in the settlement of China’s problems.”
Some people noticed that Marshall, though now a diplomat, continued to wear the uniform of a general. That must be meant to convey something, they thought.
In Hollywood, it was dinner with the director Frank Capra, who was getting ready to shoot a movie called It’s a Wonderful Life. A few years earlier, Marshall had enlisted Capra to produce Why We Fight, an Oscar-winning documentary series on the war. Now he wanted Capra’s help on a series for release in China: short films that, “using the highest Hollywood professional standards,” would teach the masses how democracy worked.
His prestige could get both sides in a room. His persuasiveness could get them to strike agreements. Without him, suspicions spiraled, and moves for advantage went unchecked. Arrangements came apart even faster than he had put them together. “It is appalling how bad things have gotten,” Melby wrote. “All parties now admit that things are a mess, but that when the General gets back he will straighten them out.” The embassy cabled drily: “all groups have expressed a desire for the early return of General Marshall.”
> He couldn’t stitch together the peace in a way that didn’t depend on him.
Marshall summoned Zhou
> I thought this a notable line. He had immense authority.
Both sides rushed to promise that, even with the cease-fire done, their armies would fight only in self-defense. But Marshall had come to understand how elastic a term “self-defense” could be.
It was the same quandary he faced with Chiang: saying something vehement enough to move one side in a constructive direction would encourage the other side to move in a damaging one.
There was a military aid bill coming up for consideration by Congress; he [Marshall] wanted it stalled. There was the financial assistance he had toiled to secure in the spring; he wanted most of it still withheld. In August, with the situation deteriorating further and Chiang no less intransigent, he delayed shipments of airplanes and ammunition. [All to try and create leverage with Chiang – who unhelpfully thought the U.S. would support him no matter what.]
“You know, whenever I get discouraged over the difficulties that I am having, I always think of the 450 million Chinese people who will suffer if I am unable to work something out.”
As far as Marshall was concerned, there was already plenty of blame to go around. Each side had pressed its advantage in moments of apparent success, then come back newly obliging when momentum started to reverse.
“Never having failed before, he cannot yet bring himself to admit he has failed this time.”
Just before Chiang’s defeat, Marshall looked back on the challenges in China over the previous four years. “I have never known any problem that had so much complexity in it,” he reflected.
Chiang:
As the end came, he wrote in his diary: “I increasingly realize that it was unwise for us to not heed Marshall’s and Russia’s attempt to mediate our problems with the Communists.”
Other good passages / quotations
“We shall have to breed a race of supermen to endure the strains of American public life,” the columnist Walter Lippmann mused while watching Marshall’s interrogation.
By now Madame Chiang was an icon for Americans, noble or sinister according to taste. In the press, she was China’s Martha Washington, an Almond-Eyed Cleopatra.
One GI commented to a reporter, “If anybody had meddled in our civil war we’d shot the hell out of him. That’s what the Chinese ought to do to us.”
At the time, the city was called Beiping (“northern peace”) rather than Beijing (“northern capital”), since Chiang had chosen Nanjing (“southern capital”) as the seat of his government.
Even now, he [Zhou – Mao’s right-hand advisor] and Chen Li-fu, Chiang’s hard-line adviser, could be seen slapping one another on the back at evening gatherings. Americans were baffled. Everywhere else, the two sides seemed intent on killing each other, and in many places already were. Here they drank together. Zhou had a term for it: fighting while talking.
As Mao had once written in an essay that played off Clausewitz: “Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.”
Truman’s desired timeline, with a July 1 transition, was unrealistic. Marshall could not in good conscience leave China until at least September. In order for him and Eisenhower to communicate about timing by radio, Marshall wrote out a code on a scrap of paper. COURIER would refer to the president, AGENT to Byrnes, AGREEMENT to confirmation. For secretary of state, he chose PINEHURST, his cabin in the mountains of North Carolina, a place he associated with escape. Eisenhower put the scrap in his pocket and kept it there when he left Nanjing the next day.
Once intent on staying as far away from politics as he could, Marshall had come to accept that political and military considerations could not be separated.
there was no reason to be “anxious,” Chiang cited a Chinese proverb: when the fruit is ripe, it will drop into your lap
“when the enemy advances, we withdraw; when the enemy rests, we harass; when the enemy tires, we attack; when the enemy withdraws, we pursue.” - Mao
Melby: “It will take a very pedantic doctoral candidate some day to unravel the threads.”
He complained about private comments and confidential letters showing up in print, sometimes in a matter of hours. (Aides joked: “If you want to have the widest possible circulation you give it to the Chinese and mark it top secret.”)
As Caughey reflected, “so much depends on a few words—the fate of a Nation, the fate of Nations, in fact.”
A few months after Marshall’s return, the Nationalists took Yenan. As CCP forces retreated, Mao decreed: “fight no battle unprepared, fight no battle you are not sure of winning.”
Marriage
Marshall was a different man with Katherine around. His mood was brighter. He made jokes at meals, eliciting a teasing “Oh, George” from across the table. “A wife is a very necessary part of the balance of life in a man,” he had counseled an unmarried former aide a few months earlier. “His judgment and efficiency will always lack otherwise.”
(Notably Marshall never had children of his own.)
Katherine and the Generalissimo played Chinese checkers. They could still hardly communicate, though Chiang had started puckishly trying out bits of English on Katherine: “How do you do? You come back? Good-bye.” The “great shine” he had taken to her, Marshall remarked, might have been the only reason the diplomatic relationship had not broken down entirely by now.
In conclusion (from the book)
The China mission cuts against the conception of American power that Marshall and his era have been taken to represent. It is a story not of possibility and ambition, but of limit and restraint; not of a victory achieved at any cost, but of a kind of failure ultimately accepted as the best of terrible options.