Truman, however, facing a tough reelection campaign, believed he needed the Jewish vote in several key states. Against the wishes of his departments of state and defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff he decided he would recognize Israel, should it apply for membership in the United Nations. Marshall strongly disapproved and said so to the president, who responded, “Well, General, it sounds like even you might vote against me.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Marshall replied, “if in the election I was to vote, I would vote against the president.”5
The next day, Israel declared independence and the United States recognized it—the first nation to do so. Fighting had already begun in the streets of Jerusalem.
AT THIS SAME TIME, the Soviet Union spitefully ordered a full blockade of Berlin, threatening starvation for citizens in the western occupied zones. The army administrator General Lucius D. Clay wanted to call the Russians’ bluff by sending an armed convoy “to shoot its way in,” if necessary, but Marshall turned that plan down. He didn’t want the United States to fire the first shots of what might possibly become World War III. The Allies (Russia was semiofficially no longer a part of the group) managed to supply Berlin with an airlift, but the blockade was a major blow. The United States simply did not have the troops immediately available to fight a war.
As the tension reached a high point Marshall visited Bernard Baruch, who had been a close adviser to Roosevelt, and discussed using the atomic bomb against the Soviets, which he had also discussed with the president.
Shortly afterward, Baruch attended a meeting in Washington in which “powerful influences” were in favor of a preventive (atomic) war against the Russians. He asked Marshall’s opinion, to which he responded with an Arab proverb that argued against such a notion. The America of this period had assumed the mantle of protector of the free world, and while the idea of using nuclear weapons on such a scale was abhorrent to the secretary of state, if nothing else it remains ironic that—as the nation’s top diplomat—he was willing to entertain the idea.
In December, Marshall suddenly entered Walter Reed Hospital for a serious kidney operation that prompted his resignation as secretary of state. After a long but successful recovery, he began serving as president of the American Red Cross, a sinecure almost, when President Truman came calling once again. His secretary of defense, it seemed, had turned out to be a fractious, incompetent political hack that needed replacing. Who else but George C. Marshall was competent enough to do the job?
With his usual misgivings, Marshall dutifully accepted the appointment and was sworn in September 21, 1950, just in time for, of all things, the Korean War.
At the end of World War II, it will be recalled, Korea was divided north and south between the Soviet-backed Communist regime of the original Kim Il Sung and the Democratic South Korean government of Syngman Rhee, backed by the United States. In June 1950, after endless provocations, the North Korean army, directly sponsored by the Soviet and Chinese Communists, invaded the South and pushed the South Korean army into a defensive perimeter near Pusan where it teetered on the verge of collapse.
MacArthur, who remained the supreme commander in the Far East, seemed as surprised as anyone. His Eighth Army, stationed in Japan, was a shell of its former presence during the war. However, MacArthur proved yet again that he was a soldier to be reckoned with.
During this period, Marshall concerned himself primarily with organizing American fighting units and equipment to rush to Korea. He had little contact with MacArthur owing to his long-standing dictum of allowing the commanding officer on the ground to run his campaign as he saw fit.
THE ATMOSPHERE IN AMERICA, as the 1950s began, teemed with frustration and mistrust over the Communist menace. China had been “lost” and people were struggling with who or what to blame. In the face of a Communist onslaught, Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists had fled to the large island of Formosa, while Mao Tse-tung solidified his grip on the world’s largest country and closed out international discourse.
Through the machinations of Soviet spies, the Russians now had the atomic bomb, which terrified everyone; schoolchildren regularly underwent A-bomb drills in which they would hide under their school desks. Tens of thousands of Americans had been killed in the Communist-inspired Korean War with no end in sight. Congressional committees were formed in both houses to investigate “un-American activities.” The U.S. State Department came in for special condemnation for allegedly housing disloyal bureaucrats and diplomats. But it came as a great surprise when George C. Marshall was sucked into the Red-scare vortex.
On June 15, 1951, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, delivered a damning sixty-thousand-word speech to Congress in which he accused Marshall—with Truman and the present secretary of state Dean Acheson as fellow dupes—with what amounted to treason. Specifically Marshall was accused of “losing” China and aiding the Soviets in their international takeovers. The accusations were mostly disparaged in the mainstream press, but it began a controversy that painted Marshall as at best a dupe and, at worst, a traitor. Newspapers variously described the speech as “scurrilous,” “a smear marathon,” “new outburst of misstatements,” “character assassination.” Others—respectable publications such as the Washington Times-Herald—had this to say: “We will place a small bet … that not one of those who have been calling Joe McCarthy names since June 15 has actually done the basic homework job of reading the speech itself … The writer of this editorial has read McCarthy’s speech and finds it a challenge that will have to be met and dealt with, sooner or later.”
Marshall was characteristically silent when asked to respond to the charges. “If I have to explain at this point that I am not a traitor to the United States,” he told the columnist Clayton Fritchie, “I hardly think it’s worth it.”
In September 1951, Marshall told President Truman he was resigning as secretary of defense. Marshall’s official biographer Dr. Forrest Pogue speculates that the China controversy may have prompted Marshall’s decision. Nevertheless, for years afterward it was a cliché among Washington bureaucrats and diplomats looking to fill some office or other to say, “We need someone like General Marshall; but there is no one like General Marshall.”6
MEANWHILE MARSHALL HAD ACCEPTED Truman’s offer to become chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission. In 1952 he and Katherine journeyed on the SS United States to Europe to inspect American monuments in Normandy and elsewhere. There was a poignant moment at Anzio when Katherine laid a dozen red roses on her son Allen’s grave. The next June, Marshall returned overseas heading the delegation to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, whom he had met with her father, George VI, during the war. As he walked with Omar Bradley, a fellow delegate, down the famous aisle of Westminster Abbey, Marshall noted that the bejeweled and bemedaled royalty of the world had begun standing up, as if a bride were entering the hall. “What are they rising for?” he whispered.
“You,” Bradley told him.7
Marshall’s remaining years were a mixture of pleasure upon receiving any number of guests at Dodona Manor and illness, which eventually drove him down. He began using a cane and was in and out of hospitals. In 1959, he entered Walter Reed for the last time and sank into a coma. He died on October 16 at the age of seventy-eight. His body lay in Washington’s National Cathedral accompanied by an honor guard from VMI, as well as military representatives from each of the services. Thousands of citizens, great and small, came to pay their respects.
Only family and a few select guests—President Truman and President Eisenhower among them—were invited to the Episcopal funeral service the next day in the Fort Myer chapel.§ There was no eulogy at Marshall’s request. Burial was at Arlington National Cemetery near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The funeral party remained seated in the chapel when they heard the rifle volley, followed by a bugler’s taps. He had come a long way, this boy from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, who had no small hand in changing a world that had evolved beyond almos
t everyone’s wildest imagination.
THE END OF THE WAR HIT George Patton hard. Except on those occasions he’d been called on the carpet by Eisenhower, he’d been having the time of his life doing what professional soldiers do—kill the enemy. “Another war has ended,” he wrote, “and with it my usefulness to the world. For me, personally, it is a very sad thought.”
He tried to inveigle an assignment to fight in the Pacific but instead was sent home for a U.S. War Bonds public relations tour of America. When he arrived at the airport outside Boston, Patton was first off the plane and strode across the runway where Beatrice and the family were waiting. Taking off his helmet, he kissed her and she said to reporters, “When he left me two years and seven months ago, he said he expected to die fighting. It seems like a miracle that he’s come back.”8
The whirlwind tour went coast to coast and Patton was mobbed by crowds everywhere—his appearance at the Los Angeles Coliseum drew a hundred thousand people. He “wept, swore, and roared out for the defeat of Japan.” He visited many military hospitals to speak to wounded troops. He was well received everywhere and, when the month was out, he returned to Germany.
The change in Patton was noticeable and dramatic, not just his physical appearance—which was older, lined, grayer—but something in his personality. “He was more mature, quieter,” said a relative. “I even sensed a new element of grandeur about him.”
Before he left Patton, who had always had a clairvoyant, almost supernatural aura surrounding him, had a premonition. He said to his daughters, “Well, goodbye girls, I won’t be seeing you again. Take care of [son] George. I’ll be seeing your mother, but I won’t be seeing you.”
One of them reminded him the war was finished, and that he was being foolish.
“No, I mean it,” he said. “I have a feeling that my luck has run out at last.”9
Patton returned to the Third Army in Germany, which was then “the largest army in history,” nearly half a million men, some twenty-seven divisions of between 15,000 and 20,000 men each, which was then in the process of redeployment to the United States for a planned invasion of Japan.
But Patton was depressed over the future of Europe, which he believed would go Communist, an ideology he feared would spread to America. “If there ever was a war breeder,” he wrote Beatrice, “it is the Europe of today. Russia is just like the French Republic of 1870. Germany is out. The Czechs hate everyone. The French are Communistic. The British are fools. And we, God knows.”
It certainly seemed Patton was on to something. The Soviets were a huge armed presence in Germany—menacing and acquisitive—and the United States was pulling out. The German national government was nonexistent, its economy stalled entirely, the cities in ruins, and millions of homeless and displaced persons were on the edge of starvation. The Russians were shoving in millions of Poles who they wanted out of Poland.
In August, Patton was put in charge of the government of Bavaria, the largest state in Germany. Since Hitler had taken power twelve years earlier nearly every political post large and small had been occupied by a member of the Nazi party or those who acquiesced. But in the summer of 1945 Eisenhower ordered every political and civil office, as well as other positions of importance, purged of Nazi party members by comparing them to a list of some 8.5 million German Nazis. Patton was in the United States at the time and it is unclear whether he saw Ike’s directive.ǁ In any case, in an age before computers, this was a stupendous task in itself.
The problem was that de-Nazification created the kind of vacuum in the administration of government services that Patton abhorred. He didn’t like Nazis any less than anyone else—witness his treatment of the captured SS general whom he “browbeat with pleasure”—but it became his opinion that aside from the original hard-core members of the party, many small-time, nonpolitical Germans had joined in order to keep their businesses going or because they had been ordered to join by party members.
For them, Patton said, paying dues was akin to “blackmail,” and he was disinclined to remove some of these people from public service because of the disruption it would cause. In the autumn of 1945, Patton faced a desperate situation for the Bavarians, as did most of the other U.S. commanders occupying German states. Food was scarce and winter was coming. It was too late to plant. There was no coal stockpiled from the mines and the threat of people freezing to death was very real. Patton had resourcefully ordered German prisoners under his command to cut enough wood from the forests to heat one room in every Bavarian household for the entire winter. This astounding task was completed in time for the first snowfall.
In between de-Nazifying and other organizational duties, Patton enjoyed himself by reviewing Third Army divisions that were headed back to the States, visiting historic sites, sailing, fishing, and hunting everything under the sun—deer, ducks, geese, Hungarian partridges, pheasant, auerhahn (grouse), and chamois (mountain antelope). These expeditions were usually undertaken from the fabulous country estates of German royalty or Junker noblemen and accompanied by guides, beaters, throwers, skinners, gun handlers, and other minions of the wealthy who had not been displaced by the war.
Patton occupied a magnificent house on one of Bavaria’s picturesque lakes formerly owned by a Nazi official. It featured a pool, squash and tennis courts, a bowling alley, and magnificent art and Persian carpets, among other amenities. To be a U.S. military officer in Germany during the immediate occupation after the fighting had ended—especially one of Patton’s rank and reputation—was about as close to being royalty that any commoner would ever experience.
But, in Patton’s own words, “all good things must come to an end.” And so came the beginning of that end following a press conference at Third Army headquarters on Saturday morning, September 22, 1945, when a group of reporters asked if they could have a personal meeting with the commanding general. Patton agreed.
During the war, Patton’s appearances at press conferences were an enjoyable experience for both him and the reporters. He had developed a certain rapport with those correspondents attached to his command; the Americans were winning the war, moving forward, and Patton always gave them enough stimulating material in colorful language to fill up their columns.
Now, after the surrender, a new type of reporter appeared looking for stories. The reporters did not particularly care whether the stories helped or harmed the U.S. Army; undoubtedly in some cases they were actively hostile to the army and what it stood for.
Four of these newcomers were Raymond Daniell and his wife, Tania, both of the New York Times; Carl Levin of the New York Herald Tribune; and Edward P. Morgan of the Chicago Daily News. They had heard of the upcoming press conference and driven in from Nuremberg the previous evening. These were not regular Third Army reporters and did not have any loyal attachment to the army or to Patton. Quite the opposite, in fact, for they had heard rumors that Patton was not living up to the letter or the spirit of the de-Nazification program.
It is necessary to digress here for a moment to set the stage for what happened later. Patton, by some accounts, was anti-Semitic. Since shortly after the dawn of Christianity, Jews occupied a separate and often secondary place in the Christian world picture, and that included in the minds of most Americans and Europeans of Patton’s era. Hitler’s Nazism was the ultimate, hideous extension of this unfortunate outlook and it remains a bitter irony that it took that awful level of Nazi persecution to bring about changing attitudes toward the Jews, by society in general, many governments, and a previously, mostly indifferent world.
Patton’s anti-Semitism was limited to opinion rather than overt discrimination; in fact, he kept a number of trusted Jewish officers on his staff and was genuinely fond of the educated, refined, and powerful Jews whose paths he crossed, such as Bernard Baruch or Major General Maurice Rose (who commanded the Third Armored Division in First Army and became, unfortunately, the highest-ranking American soldier killed by enemy fire in the European theater).
 
; To Patton’s discredit, however, he reserved a flagrant scorn for the pitiful surviving Jewish inmates of the Nazi camps who in his opinion did not recover their humanity as quickly as other groups did. The Jews preferred, Patton said, to live in filth and squalor even though his army had provided them with sanitary facilities, clothing, proper meals, etc. In his diary he compared them with “sub-human animals,” and doubted they would ever become fit to rejoin society.
It was ungracious and uncharacteristic of Patton, who was generally a kind person. Perhaps it could be explained as a function of the innate snobbery that stemmed from his wealthy, Episcopal upbringing or related somehow to his compulsive military orderliness. Yet he simply refused to understand how or why people who had been so subjugated and degenerated for years could not snap out of it and return to normalcy once they were liberated. Apparently he considered it a sign of racial or moral weakness, similar, in its way and in his mind, to the slapping incident, a personal opinion that reflected Patton’s “bootstrap mentality,” the lens through which he saw all matters of war. In any case it was a callous and unbecoming attitude.
But there were other factors at work having to do with his growing hostility toward the Russian Communists and their continued attempts to subvert European governments.
Patton became certain that the United States would one day have to go to war with the Soviet Union and was in favor of getting it over then and there while the forces were present to do so. Because there appeared to him to be a disproportionate number of Jews in Communist groups or “progressive” organizations sympathetic with the worldwide Communist movement, Patton began equating Jews with Communists and using the terms almost interchangeably. His hatred of communism during this period seemed to grow in direct proportion to his frustration in not being able to get Eisenhower or anyone else in power alarmed over the Soviet menace.