Most biographers have treated the failure of the Marshall Mission as a blip in a career of untarnished success. But Marshall’s defeat in China had a deep effect on his later work in Europe with the Marshall Plan and in fashioning a strategy to confront Communism. Never again would the general advocate a negotiated power-sharing agreement with a Communist regime. With diplomat George Kennan, he would become an architect of a containment strategy that involved massive support for anti-Communist governments that endured for more than thirty years.
