When a young man who has just been transfixed on a bayonet retains his affection for the military life, he clearly has a vocation. General George Catlett Marshall, who is now Chief of Staff of the United States Army, was submitted to this test in 1897. In that year he was a freshman at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, and an overenthusiastic sophomore hazer ran a bayonet through his body. Marshall came near dying in the hospital, but when he recovered—without reporting the sophomore—he was sure he was tough enough to be a soldier. The sophomores, in gratitude for his silence, called off hazing for the rest of the year and Cadet Marshall became the unquestioned leader of his class. He graduated as Senior First Captain, the highest distinction a cadet can achieve at the Institute, and went into the Regular Army as a second lieutenant, where, despite a superlative record, he had to wait thirty-two years to be made a colonel. The bayonet and the thirty-two years’ wait taught him a certain stoicism, of which a Chief of Staff has constant need.
While at V.M.I., Marshall played in the line on the varsity football team and, after the season of 1900, was named tackle on the first All-Southern Eleven to appear in the pages of the Intercollegiate Football Guide. He retains from those days a habit of speaking of military tactics in football terms. “The tanks made the holes, the planes ran beautiful interference, and the infantry carried the ball,” he said of the German offensive in France last spring. What he does not say is that today the Chief of Staff, as the ranking professional officer of the Army, has to run interference for all land armaments, clearing a way through Congressional committees for the legislation that will transform the Army from a blueprint to a tangible and effective reality. The President, who is titular Commander in Chief, is under constant political attack, from which the Secretary of War, being a Presidential appointee, is also not exempt. But the Chief of Staff is presumed to have a special competence and a purity of motive, since the Army is non-political.
In the preliminary stages of preparing for war, a Chief’s most valuable asset is a knack of getting along with legislators in order to secure appropriations. General Marshall has it to a degree which veteran Washington correspondents call unprecedented. The Chief of Staff neither harks at congressmen as if they were rookies—a tactical error made by a couple of his predecessors—nor condescends to them too obviously. He is just about six feet tall, a height adequate to impress without arousing antagonism. Although he is fifty-nine years old, his hair is still sandy rather than gray; he is florid and genial in the best Congressional manner. He was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, but his Kentuckian father and four years at V.M.I. served to soften Marshall’s speech agreeably without making it so mellifluous that it would put up the hackles on a New England senator’s neck. When he appears before a committee, he is good-humored without being humorous. He is patient, persistent, and a trifle prolix. When a congressman asks him a question, he is likely to reply with an extemporaneous monograph that draws an awed response of “Thank you, General. I will not dwell on the subject any further.” Records of hearings at which he has appeared are studded with citations from admiring senators or representatives, who say, like Representative Snyder (Dem., Pa.), “General Marshall, I think I voice the sentiment of every member of the committee when I say you have made a most comprehensive, detailed, and elucidating statement.”
In Washington, Marshall nearly always dresses comfortably in mufti. His suits, he sometimes tells Congressional callers, are several seasons old, although they look as good as new. These clothes help to overcome the prejudice many inland Americans feel against military men, a feeling induced by brass buttons and fanned into a leaping resentment by the sight of a Sam Browne belt. None of the officers on duty with the General Staff have habitually worn uniforms since the time of General Charles P. Summerall, Chief of Staff some ten years ago, who was something of a martinet and made a ruling that officers would have to wear uniforms at least one day out of thirty. The order inspired so much muttering about Junkerism that it was withdrawn. Marshall’s custom of speaking in long strings of football metaphors further reassures the legislators. When he says, “You wouldn’t send a team against Notre Dame before it had had a scrimmage, would you?” the congressmen vote money for large-scale war games. The more imperious General Douglas MacArthur, one of Marshall’s predecessors as Chief of Staff, had trouble talking Congress into providing the price of rifle ammunition for the annual marksmanship tests.
There are two women secretaries in the anteroom of Marshall’s large, blue, air-conditioned office in the War Department on Constitution Avenue, just as if he were the president of an advertising agency; when he wants information, he talks in the general direction of an interoffice telephone box, and the answer floats back in the disembodied voice of an officer in another part of the building. This civilian-industry camouflage was adopted during the years following the first World War, when the War Department ranked among the legislators as the least popular department of the government. Even during that period there were a few big-navy senators and representatives—mostly from states where there were shipyards—but nobody had a kind word for the Army. Both Services reached their post-war low point in the spring of 1933, as President Hoover relinquished office. The Navy had been reduced only to twenty per cent of its 1918 Wartime personnel and fifty per cent of its 1921 built-and-building tonnage, but the Army had declined from approximately 4,000,000 men in November, 1918, to 117,000 in 1933, a number barely sufficient to guard the arsenals, cut the grass on reservations, and fire a salute on Army Day. The number was approximately doubled in the next seven years. The task of expanding and rebuilding the Army has therefore superficially resembled the reconstruction of a dinosaur around an ulna and three vertebrae.
Interest in the Army began to pick up in 1937. “It was the newsreels of Spain and China that got us our first sizable appropriations for anti-aircraft guns,” General Marshall says gratefully. Still, the interest was something less than fervid before the German offensive in the Low Countries began on May 10th of this year. Congress usually lags far behind public opinion. For instance, as late as November, 1939, when the Army asked for $120,000,000 to provide for and maintain increased personnel, Representative Johnson of West Virginia, a member of one of the key committees, remarked, “What I am trying to get at is this: I am quite a peace-loving soul myself, and I do not want to leave the impression on the outside world that we are spending large and vast sums of money at this time, right when the war is going on; it might be an embarrassing situation.” The same Mr. Johnson, in July, 1940, handsomely told the Chief of Staff, “The question of money, with me, does not bother very much. What I would like to know is can you do the job, as far as the Army is concerned, if you are given what you are asking for. I am going to vote for whatever you want if you are doing the job.”
The trouble is that the matériel being delivered to the Army this fall is of necessity matériel which was ordered in 1939 or even earlier. “A few years ago,” Marshall recently remarked at a press conference, “the Army had lots of time and no money. Now we have lots of money and no time.” Publicly he always says he gets wonderful coöperation from everybody, but in private he often wonders whether our potential adversary—his circumlocution for Germany—is going to wait until the matériel ordered this year finally begins to come in. When, after having announced on one day that the transfer of fifty destroyers to Great Britain had practically put us into war, the ineffable Representative Fish of New York two days later moved to defer the Selective Service Training Act for sixty days on the ground that the country was in no danger, there was nothing Marshall could do about it but sweat. In such circumstances, the Chief of Staff, who is a very moderate drinker, cannot, like General Grant, even go on a toot.
General Marshall knows exactly what he will do with men and matériel as they become available. The shrunken body of the post-armistice Army sustained a relatively vigorous theoretical life, and ever since 1920 the General Staff has been preparing mobilization plans and keeping them up to date. The progress of the country’s mobilization is pictured on a great sheet decorated with twenty-seven colored discs and a number of other geometrical designs. Each disc represents a division of the Protective Mobilization Force, an army considered barely adequate for the defence of the continent, which the General Staff hopes to have organized within about a year. A few of the divisions already exist, at full peacetime strength and with adequate equipment. Some of the others have recently materialized partially, and a few remain completely intellectual concepts. The degree of a division’s actuality is indicated by a segment marked in its disc, like a cut of pie. Nine of the divisions are to be built around nuclei of Regulars and eighteen around National Guardsmen. The men to be obtained by selective draft are to be used to bring all twenty-seven divisions to full strength, so there will be no wholly “draft divisions” or “volunteer divisions,” as in the first World War. Three divisions, plus supplementary troops (four regiments of heavy artillery, two of engineers, extra Signal Corps and Medical units, and aviators to man fifty-two observation planes), will constitute an army corps. The country is divided into nine Corps Areas. At the moment, these have the same relation to reality that the plan of a real-estate development has to a city. Each corps at war strength will number about 70,000 men. Armored divisions, cavalry divisions, Air Corps personnel, Coast Artillery, and other branches of service not included in the corps structures, together with the troops in overseas possessions, will bring the Army’s total to somewhere around a million by next summer. Because of the shortage of matériel, there would not be much chance of putting a larger force in the field by that time even if this country should become involved in the war in the interim, but if that should happen, more men probably would be called up immediately for training, to be ready to form new divisions as matériel became available. It is likely that even asleep, Marshall sees the twenty-seven discs representing those twenty-seven divisions, within each of which the segment of reality slowly increases—too slowly to satisfy a Chief of Staff who takes his responsibilities seriously.
General Marshall gets along almost as well with the Washington correspondents as with the legislators. He holds rather genial mass press conferences once or twice a week. His popularity is slightly impaired by a habit of talking quite frankly and then saying, “Of course, you understand that this is off the record.” When a politician says this, a reporter may refuse to respect it, but when a Chief of Staff is discussing matters of national defence, the reporter has to accede or feel that he is a Lord Hawhaw. In return for such consideration, the General exercises an exquisite restraint in his journalistic criticism. “The headline was not sufficiently factual,” he sometimes says when he means to say that an entire story which has appeared in a newspaper was a fabrication. One week this summer the defence program was attacked first by Al Williams, the Scripps-Howard aviation columnist, who insisted that fighting planes should have liquid-cooled motors, and then by C. B. Allen, in the Herald Tribune, who declared just as pontifically that only the air-cooled variety was worth bothering about. The apparent common denominator of their thought processes was that both Scripps-Howard and the Herald Tribune violently disliked the administration. Marshall, however, if he had read both columns, would have had to go on with the gracefully silent pretence that questions of national defence are remote from politics, as he did when he heard about Willkie’s plan for an independent air force which American Business would materialize from nonexistent assembly lines. His position is like that of a neutral passenger on a belligerent ship. “No publicity will do me no harm,” he once said in a pessimistic mood about newspapers, “but some publicity will do me no good.”
The two worst backfires from publicity suffered by the Army during the last few months resulted from the testimony of Air Corps officers before a House committee to the effect that airplane firms would not sign contracts until they could be sure of a profit of 13.66 per cent, and from news reports of the employment of “stovepipe guns” and of trucks to represent tanks in the summer field maneuvers. The air officers’ testimony was not intended as criticism of the manufacturers. They merely felt that any legislative obstruction to satisfactory profits and quick deliveries should be removed as quickly as possible. The General Staff was ingenuously astonished by the public’s unfavorable reaction. The governing factor in the Staff’s decision to use trucks for tanks in the war games was the desire to keep the Army’s one armored division, with its five hundred quite good tanks, intact as units for its own maneuvers at Fort Knox. The Germans had proved to our Staff’s satisfaction that tanks should be employed in masses instead of being doled out a few to each regiment of infantry. So the trucks were used as symbols for them. The German Army, in the early thirties, when its matériel was not equal to its suddenly swollen manpower, used trucks in exactly the same way. Back of the General Staff’s decision, however, was also a desire to dramatize the need of getting more equipment rapidly. The emphasis became too emphatic, and a good many people got the idea that the Army was completely unequipped. Photographers, whose editors welcomed their first shots of automobile-truck tanks and stovepipe anti-tank guns, soon obligingly furnished pictures of soldiers with wooden rifles and machine guns. There are thousands of good machine guns and hundreds of thousands of rifles which have been stored in government arsenals since the last war, and there are also a couple of thousand 75-millimetre field guns which could be used against tanks if need be, although they are not as handy as anti-tank cannon. Instead of merely hastening the passage of appropriations for matériel, the stovepipe cannon furnished a recurrent argument to anti-draft congressmen, who kept insisting that the Army did not have modern equipment with which to train more than the Regulars. General Marshall had to keep telling thinkers of this school that the number of men in an army who fight in tanks is minuscular compared to the number in other branches of service, and that it is unreasonable to forego all training until the last items of equipment arrive. The Germans didn’t.
As far back as he can remember, the Chief of Staff wanted to be a soldier, but he says he can’t recall what first made him feel that way. His father was not an Army officer but a coal-and-wood dealer who was conspicuous in Uniontown principally because he had emigrated from Kentucky after the Civil War and was the only confessed Democrat in town. (General Marshall himself, like many Regular Army officers, has never voted in his life.) His father, who approved of young George’s military ambitions, couldn’t get the Republican congressman from Uniontown to give him an appointment to West Point, so the future general, when he finished high school, went to V.M.I., which is classified by the War Department as a military college because, in the words of the Army Directory, it “requires all students to pursue military training through the course and to be habitually in uniform, constantly maintains military discipline, and has as objectives the development of the student by means of military training and the regulation of his conduct in accord with military principles.” An alumnus of a military college—Norwich, in Vermont; Pennsylvania Military College; and the Citadel, at Charleston, South Carolina, are other examples of the genus—usually has no trouble getting a commission as a second lieutenant in the Regular Army if he wants it. In practice few do; of the thirty-four members of General Marshall’s graduating class at V.M.I., for example, only three chose an Army career. More than half the others became civil and industrial engineers and among the rest are two prep-school principals, a New Orleans newspaper publisher, a portrait painter, and a few businessmen.
George Marshall was just a fair student—he stood fifteenth in his class when he was graduated—and his V. M.I. legend has been complicated by the fact that he had a namesake in his class who stood No. 1. The namesake, St. Julien Marshall, was only a substitute end on the football team, however, while the future Chief of Staff was what is called by sportswriters a tower of strength in the line. His teammates considered this particularly remarkable because he did not go out for the team until his senior year, after he had already won his place as ranking officer of the Cadet Corps. The military part of college life always came first with him. It took him only a few weeks to learn everything then known about tackle play—the captain of that 1900 team, a Mr. Roller, says that “George always was a strategist”—and after that he outplayed his opponent on every eleven V.M.I. met. His team defeated Washington and Lee and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and tied the University of Virginia, which was a much larger school. Marshall weighed only a hundred and sixty-five pounds, but all his classmates agree that he played rings around a gigantic Virginia tackle named Lloyd, in V.M.I. retrospect perhaps the largest man ever to play football. Marshall’s prestige at V.M.I. was a result of character rather than brilliance; pierced by the bayonet, he seemed to pride himself on building an Indian indifference to pain. Once he inveigled a roommate, a Mr. Leonard Nicholson, who is now publisher of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, to take a thirty-mile hike with him on Jefferson Davis’s birthday, which was a full holiday at V.M.I. After they had started out, Nicholson learned that Marshall intended to march the thirty miles at a parade-ground pace and without stopping. Marshall did.
The Confederate dream has lived on at V.M.I., and the tradition has always been strong. The whole corps of cadets fought as a unit in the Civil War battle of Newmarket, in Virginia, and twenty per cent of them were killed or wounded. The General, in fact, was the only cadet graduated in his year who came from above the Mason and Dixon line. He was, perhaps for that reason, especially impressed by legends of the war. He used to hike over old battlefields near the school and memorize the positions occupied by units of both armies, a habit which became so strong that years afterward, when he was an instructor at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was sometimes assigned to come East with parties of officers and take them over the ground covered by the Federal Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, conducting a sort of ambulant seminar on the War Between the States. Even now, when General Marshall is motoring through Virginia, he sometimes has the car stopped while he explains to a companion how A. P. Hill’s corps came out of the woods past a crossroads store and fell upon the hapless flank of some Northern general who had forgotten to post pickets.
Marshall got his second lieutenant’s commission in 1901, at a time when prospects of a major war seemed slighter than at any other period of American history, and served tranquil tours of duty on the Pacific Coast and in the Philippines before he was ordered, in 1907, to the Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, which was, in a sense, the most important event in his professional career. The first United States General Staff to be modelled on the pattern of those in Europe had been set up in 1903. The Staff School had been set up soon afterward to train officers for eventual General Staff service. It had formerly been assumed that any officer who served long enough with troops in the field would automatically acquire qualifications for higher command, an illusion which had led to tragic bungling in the Spanish-American War. But it would have been impracticable to reëducate the old rough-riding generals at the head of the Army List, who had gained their reputations by exhibitions of leonine courage while leading small columns fighting Indians and Filipino insurrectos. So the brighter captains and lieutenants of Marshall’s generation became the first trained staff officers of the United States Army. They were the transition group between the old Indian-fighters and the young officers who marched from their West Point classes into the first World War and whose minds were formed in the mold of large-scale warfare. This meant that in 1917 and 1918, Marshall and his contemporaries had much greater military responsibilities than fell on men of the same age in the German or French Armies.
Marshall, having been promoted to a first lieutenancy in 1907, graduated at the head of his Staff School class in 1908, with grades so high that he was immediately appointed an instructor. His pupils the following year included a good many captains and even a few majors. In the very small pre-World War Army, with its rigid conventions, an officer’s teaching his superiors was a breath-taking innovation. The reputation for brilliance which Marshall gained at the Staff School has not been an unmixed advantage, for some oldsters still insist that he is “a staff type and not a command type,” too cerebral to be a really good Chief. At any rate, his fame was confined to the small, specialized Army world, as remote from the general public as that of numismatics or amateur magic. Also, it did not lead to any immediate promotion. It did bring Marshall’s name to the favorable attention of his superiors, including John J. Pershing, then a brigadier general, who has been a Marshall booster ever since. This gaunt, gray old veteran, who surveys the second World War from a deep chair in his Washington living room, likes to tell visitors that “George Marshall is a man who understands military.” That is the greatest compliment in Pershing’s lexicon.
When the United States entered the first World War, Marshall, before any considerable number of American troops had embarked, was sent to France to take a seminar course in war with the French Army. He had been made a captain in 1916. He had his baptism of fire with a Moroccan division in August, 1917, and soon acquired a Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor, the first of a series of foreign decorations which includes the Order of the Crown of Italy, the Montenegrin Silver Medal of Valor, the Panamanian La Solidaridad, and the Brazilian Order of Merit; the General does not wear any of them now, because they do not go well with a lounge suit. He also was made a wartime, or temporary, major. The following year he became a lieutenant colonel and was assigned to the staff of the First Division, the first American outfit to do any important fighting, as G-3, or operations officer. The operations officer plans and synchronizes troop movements, translating the strategic concepts of his chief into tactical reality. A number of the Allied Army commanders and almost all chiefs of staff of large units in the first World War had served terms as operations officer. The First Division, commanded in turn by Generals Bullard and Summerall, was one of the best in the American Army. It was the springboard for a dozen brilliant Service careers, including Marshall’s. Pershing made him operations officer of the First American Army, comprising nine or ten divisions, when it was organized in August. Marshall’s most celebrated job during the war was his transfer of this army of 500,000 men and 2,700 guns from the battlefield of St. Mihiel to the Argonne in less than two weeks, a switch performed so deftly—the troops moving only at night, to foil airplane observers—that the Germans were unaware of it until the Argonne offensive began. Pershing has never forgotten that bit of virtuosity.
Marshall came back to America a full wartime colonel and was promptly demoted, like almost everyone else, resuming his career in the Regular establishment as a major. Advancement goes by the inexorable laws of seniority in the United States Army until an officer reaches the rank of colonel. After that, the War Department may promote him as rapidly as it wishes. Marshall and a number of other officers who had distinguished themselves were marked for a quick rise once they gained their colonelcies, but in the meantime they were bound to the wheel. Between 1919 and 1924 he was General Pershing’s aide-de-camp in Washington, and then served a tour of duty in China and five years at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, which he transformed from a mere school of technique into an important school of command for junior officers. He was serving as senior instructor to the Illinois National Guard when, in 1934, the magic hour struck. He became a colonel. Eleven years of Army life lay between him and the mandatory retirement age of sixty-four.
In 1936, Marshall became a brigadier general and was assigned to duty at Vancouver, Washington. His record had already indicated a rapid advancement, but his physical vigor was an added recommendation in the eyes of General Malin L. Craig, then Chief of Staff, and of Louis Johnson, who, upon his appointment as Assistant Secretary of War in 1937, became the energizing force in the Department. Marshall could have served as a photographer’s model for the type of rugged, young-looking officer Craig wanted. In the light of what has since happened to the French High Command, whose generals were continued in service long past their physical prime, this prejudice in favor of muscular generals appears far from frivolous. Marshall was ordered East to Washington and installed as Chief of the War Plans Division of the General Staff. Toward the end of 1938 he was made Deputy Chief of Staff, a post usually reserved for major generals, and he was still a brigadier general in May, 1939, when Craig, who was scheduled to retire in September of that year, took a leave of absence. President Roosevelt appointed Marshall Acting Chief of Staff in Craig’s place, advancing him over the heads of twenty major generals and fourteen brigadiers who were his seniors, a jump that was less startling than it seemed. A Chief of Staff is appointed to serve a fixed term of four years, and few indeed of the thirty-four generals senior to Marshall in 1939 had four years left before retirement. There was newspaper comment on the circumstance that Marshall was not a West Pointer, but six of the preceding fourteen Chiefs of Staff had not been graduates of that school. The Chief of Staff assumes the rank of full general when he begins his term and automatically ranks all other officers of the Army. Lieutenant General Hugh A. Drum, the only other candidate seriously considered, was not a West Pointer either.
In war it is an advantage not to be too closely tied to an intellectual concept. The French refused to credit their own observers in Poland because the observations did not fit the flawless logic of the High Command’s theory. The lessons of the Polish campaign were acted upon more quickly by the General Staff here than by the general staffs of France and England. American military thought is at least eclectic and relatively unhampered by preconceptions. Marshall is alarmed even by the fact that laymen tended to form a set of preconceptions after reading newspaper headlines about the campaign in the Low Countries and France. “To hear some people talk,” he says, “you’d think armies were made up just of tanks and dive bombers now.” One of the things about the German campaigns that impressed him most was the work of the Signal Corps troops, the coordinating unit in the apparently impromptu advances, who kept even attack planes and isolated motorcycle detachments in liaison with the commanders of larger units. Another was the performance of the engineers who accompanied the tank divisions and made a joke of tank traps. “It was teamwork that made their plays click,” the former All-Southern tackle says earnestly. “Why, they couldn’t have moved more smoothly if they had been coached by Rockne.”
Ever since his appointment as Chief of Staff, Marshall has put in a phenomenally long working day. This is made possible by his physical strength and by what seems on first acquaintance a depressing lack of outside interests. He gets up at six o’clock every morning in his home on Officers’ Row at Fort Myer, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, and goes horseback riding for an hour. At seven-thirty he is in his office reading mail, and by eight he is hearing officers who present digests of staff studies on specific phases of the defence program. He has five Assistant Chiefs of Staff, assigned to Personnel, Intelligence, Operations, Supply, and War Plans, with whom he consults almost daily, and he is also in touch with all the Chiefs of Arms and Services, from the Air Corps to the Quartermaster Corps. A secondary General Staff has recently been set up to deal especially with the procurement of matériel, and a third organization, known as General Headquarters, to handle the units in the field as they come into being. The primary General Staff must decide all questions of policy.
Marshall has an Early American sense of responsibility, nourished upon the writings of Benjamin Franklin, his favorite author. He supports many of his decisions by invariably accurate references to the campaigns of the conscientious Stonewall Jackson, a former member of the faculty of Virginia Military Institute. He insists on maintaining almost physical touch with every department of the Army’s increasingly complex organization. Friendly critics sometimes say he is spreading himself too thin by trying to live the whole rearmament effort in his own person. Their advice makes little impression on the General. When he can arrange a day free from Washington routine, he climbs into the Beechcraft transport plane that is reserved for him at Bulling Field and lights out for a distant Corps Area to see a demonstration of some new weapon or tactic. An Air Corps captain named Lewis Parker is always his pilot on these trips, which have totalled 28,000 miles since he became Chief of Staff. The General has also made one flying trip to Hawaii by Pan American, and one flight to Brazil in a big Douglas Army transport which was calculated to be much more impressive to Latin Americans than the Beechcraft. He was pursued all over Brazil by native military hands which played the Naval Academy’s football song, “Anchors Aweigh,” in the belief that it was the national anthem of the United States. The General feels that he was framed by some American rear admiral with a clumsy sense of humor.
In the evening, after a long day in his office, he takes a second horseback ride. He is not in any sense a horsy man; the riding is strictly for exercise, and although he has favorite mounts, they are undistinguished animals. He returns home invariably burdened with typewritten reports from observers abroad, which he reads until about eleven o’clock. The Marshall home, officially known as No. I, Fort Myer, is one of those unadorned boxes to be observed on the Officers’ Row of any military or naval reservation. It was occupied by the General’s predecessors in office, General Craig and General MacArthur. General MacArthur, now retired, lives in a penthouse atop the best hotel in Manila, and is possibly the only Regular Army officer who ever attained such luxury. He is the military adviser to the Philippine government and gets $50,000 a year, which is almost exactly five times what General Marshall is paid. The current Chief of Staff receives a basic pay of $8,000 a year, $2,200 a year for extra expenses during his four-year term of office, and an annual allowance of $432 for “subsistence,” which means food. If he didn’t live on a government reservation, he would be entitled, in addition to this, to $120 a month for house rent, which would not pay for much of an establishment in Washington.
Marshall has been married since 1930 to the former Mrs. Katherine Boyce Tupper Brown of Baltimore. His first wife, Miss Elizabeth Coles of Lexington, who died in 1927, was a college-town sweetheart whom he married as a young second lieutenant and took with him on his first tour of duty in the Philippines. They had no children. The second Mrs. Marshall, a friendly, chatty woman who had a brief career as a Shakespearean actress before her first marriage, has two sons and a daughter, who were in their teens when she married the General. Molly Brown, the daughter, lives with the Marshalls at Fort Myer and was his favorite tennis doubles partner until he gave up playing a couple of years ago because of the increased pressure of work. His game was based on a strategic combination of cross-court shots and chops and was extraordinarily good for a general officer. One of his stepsons is an employee of a Wall Street house, and the other works for a small radio station in Poughkeepsie. In more peaceful years the Marshalls spent part of every summer on Fire Island, where they own a cottage, and the General was known to neighbors as a ping-pong expert, a good bridge player without being fanatical about it, and an unimpressive swimmer. He is a sociable man, but he has never been fond of what is officially considered social life in Washington and usually avoids receptions. In the autumn he always manages to take in a few football games. He likes to see V.M.I. play whenever possible. When it isn’t, he likes to watch high-school teams, because they are so earnest. The sight of any fellow tackling another fellow real hard gives him deep pleasure. ♦
