George Marshall Quotes

“All told, the performance of George Marshall in many of his roles was less than awe-inspiring. Yet, the far right excepted, the paeans were incessant, the applause unrelieved. The discrepancy may well have originated in Americans’ yearning for a platonic ideal of a triumphant military leader above politics, deceit, and selfish ambition—in a word, a George Washington—which they located in a fallible man of sterling character but unremarkable powers. Only a very few keen observers saw beyond the conventional wisdom. In effect, the Olympian persona that Marshall himself created protected him, though imperfectly, from criticism, both in his prime and in his future historical reputation.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“teaching college and high school students about the causes of past wars so they might learn to avoid the mistakes made by their predecessors.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“And what was the purpose of all these dubious and conspiratorial actions? It was “to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East, and impair our will to resist.”33”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“In the Senate confirmation hearings Indiana senator William Jenner, a right-wing Republican, blasted Marshall along with Truman and Acheson. Referring to a wide range of his actions as chief of staff and China negotiator, Jenner declared he was “not only willing” but actually “eager to play the front man for traitors.” It was no new role for him, Jenner insisted, for rather than being “the greatest living American,” as Truman had said, Marshall was “a living lie.”5 Shocked by Jenner’s venom, Democrats and several moderate Republicans came to Marshall’s defense.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“It was at this point that Truman once again sought Marshall’s help. With his enthusiastic support, in July 1947 the president had succeeded in inducing Congress to pass the National Security Act, creating a new Department of Defense to replace the separate War and Navy Departments that had coexisted—and squabbled—since the early days of the republic.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“No, gentlemen, you don’t take a post of this sort and then resign when the man who has the constitutional responsibility to make decisions makes one you don’t like.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“On the issue of statehood, however, the committee held back. Having encountered adamant and militant Arab protests in the course of its investigation, it recommended against either a Jewish or Arab state, proposing instead an eventual binational entity where both groups could express their legitimate national aspirations.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“Truman deeply sympathized with the plight of Europe’s displaced Jews.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“In short, favoring the Jews would offend the Arabs and their millions of Muslim supporters and create dangerous risks and turmoil in a part of the world where the United States had a substantial stake.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“In the twentieth century the American Jewish community, with more than four million members by the late 1930s, was the largest in the world,”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“The non-Jewish Arab population of mandate Palestine, initially twice the size of the Yishuv, supported by Muslims throughout the Middle East, strongly resisted the Jewish intrusion into what they perceived as their nation.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“By the eve of World War II the Yishuv—the Jewish community of Palestine—had grown to almost half a million and had won broad international admiration for creating egalitarian agricultural communities and flourishing modern towns and cities in an impoverished land long neglected under Turkish sovereignty.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“This is a world-wide struggle between freedom and tyranny,” he told a California audience, “between the self-rule of many as opposed to the dictatorship of the ruthless few.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“Seventeen billion dollars, after the many billions of the war itself, seemed outrageous to many frugal Republicans. Marshall defended the size and timing of the requested appropriation.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“congressional Republicans fought the legislation and mauled the State Department for its supposed past multiple sins.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“the political fallout of cold, hunger, lawlessness, and despair had grown ominous.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“he never perceived U.S. foreign policy as a campaign for American hegemony. In a mid-1947 talk to the Women’s National Press Club he expressed indignation at the charge. “There could be no more malicious distortion of the truth,” he declaimed, “than the frequent propaganda assertions . . . that the United States has imperialist aims or that American aid has been offered in order to fasten upon the recipients some sort of political or economic dominion.”6 In their quest for mid-American support, Marshall and his internationalist Cold War colleagues were not averse to underscoring the economic advantages to American business and agriculture of generous public funding of defensive measures against the advance of foreign Communism. But the secretary of state himself had no ulterior capitalist motives.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“the Republican-dominated Eightieth Congress, the infamous “Do-Nothing Congress,”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“Congress decided to finish the already drawn-out process of investigating”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“Calling themselves the “United Nations,” in Washington twenty-six countries at war with one or all of the Axis nations—including the United States, Britain and its dominions, China, the European governments-in-exile, and the Soviet Union—pledged to fight and defeat “the . . . forces of conquest”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“the House voted 203 to 202 in favor of the bill. Some sixty-nine Democrats had defected, but twenty-one Republicans had voted yes. On August 18 FDR signed into law the bill extending selectees’ obligations to eighteen months of military service.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography

“Czechoslovak government and the pro-Nazi leaders of the country’s Sudeten German minority, Hitler demanded that the German population be given “self-determination,” that is, autonomy within the Czechoslovak republic. The British and French governments feared that these demands, following close on the German annexation of Austria, would be a first step in Hitler’s eventual dismembering of Czechoslovakia and its absorption into a greater Reich.”
― Debi Unger, George Marshall: A Biography