George Marshall: statesman, 1945-1959.

• Author: Thomas, Evan

George Marshall's lessons of statecraft and public service

In an age when government is populated by leaky self-promoters, the qualities of George C. Marshall seem quaint. Imagine Henry Kissinger or A1 Haig turning down million-dollar offers to write their memoirs. Marshall did it repeatedly, explaining to one publisher that he had not served his whole life in government to sell his story to the Saturday Evening Post. The aging general was so self-effacing that as army chief of staff during World War II he refused to be decorated while young men were dying abroad. He was so duty-bound that when President Truman called him out of well-earned retirement after the war to go to China as a special envoy, Marshall instantly said yes, without so much as asking his wife (who was quite bitter about it). As secretary of state from 1947 to 1949, he was so unpretentious that he refused a body guard, saying that he would "rather be murdered than embarrassed.' Over the years, Marshall has even been spared by Cold War revisionists, who have noted that as secretary of state he tried on several occasions to tone down the Truman administration's more inflammatory anti-communist rhetoric.

The somewhat hazy glow around Marshall brightened this June when the general was remembered for launching the European Recovery Plan that bears his name 40 years ago at a Harvard commencement speech. His image is further buffed by the fourth and final volume of his official biography*, the completion of a project begun some 30 years ago by Marshall's faithful Boswell, Forrest C. Pogue. The book is thorough but uncritical and, like General Marshall's speeches, flat and a little boring. It does not put much flesh and blood on the icon, nor does it grapple with an intriguing question raised by Marshall's career, particularly his unfortunate last tour of duty: is it possible to be too virtuous?

* George Marshall: Statesman 1945-1959. Forrest C. Pogue. Viking, $29.95.

Marshall was not only above reproach, he was above the fray; he never stooped to petty squabbles or schemed against his bureaucratic rivals. Yet the flip side of statesmanlike bearing is Reaganesque detachment. Delegation is an effective management style but only, as President Reagan has learned, if you are delegating to the right people.

Pogue's new volume picks up the old soldier as he becomes a statesman after World War II. As an army chief of staff who had to referee between feuding theater commanders, Marshall...