MARSHALL INTERVIEWS in 1956-57 General Marshall Recorded on Eape Some Forty Hours of Answers and Comments in Response to Questions Submitted by Me

MARSHALL INTERVIEWS In 1956-57 General Marshall recorded on eape some forty hours of answers and comments in response to questions submitted by me. This material was recorded in sessions at the Pentagon, at Leesburg, and at Pinehurst. Some of the comnients were recorded without my being present, with his orderly, Sergeant William Heffner, run- ning the machine. In addition, General Marshall talked to me about fifteen hours without a tape recorder. Part of the comments in these sessions was recorded by his secretary, Miss Mary Louise Spilman, and part by me. The interviews and this biography began with a project first suggested in 1951by friends and admirers of General Marshall. In 1953 a group of graduates of his alma mater, the Virginia Military Institute, headed by the late John C. Hagan. Jr , estab- lished the George C. Marshall Research Foundation to collect material on the Gen- eral’s career which would furnish information for a definitive biography and for numerous special studies on the period in which Marshall served as soldier and statesmen. Earlier the group had been assured of the backing of President Harry S. Truman in the collection of documents and the development of a Research Center. Shortly before leaving office, Mr. Truman issued a directive to the General Services Administrator, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense “to cooperate with Virginia Military Institute and the proposed George C. Marshall Research Founda- tion in procuring documentary material relating to the activities of General Marshall as a soldier, as Secretary of State, and as Secretary of Defense.” In 1956 President Eisenhower wrote a similar letter, and this official support was reaffirmed by Presi- dent Kennedy in 1962 and President Johnson in 1965. In 1956 funds to start the collection of documents and the writing of a biography were provided by a generous personal gift from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Impressed by the actions of President Truman and President Eisenhower and the urgings of many friends, General Marshall agreed in 1956 to cooperate with a biographer in recording, on tape, information on high points of his career. In the late summer of 1956 I was employed to head the project and was directed to begin at once with the interviews. I hoped that it would be possible to conduct the interviews so that the General would virtually write his own memoirs. Unfortu- nately he did not feel up to these demands on his time and energies. Instead he suggested that I prepare, on the basis of his personal and official papers, rather detailed questions which would furnish a general outline to be filled out by his dictated comments. Following his advice, I prepared summaries of information from documents and official histories and listed questions raised in the summaries. I would say, “The authors indicate that it is not clear why General Marshall took this step,” “General Marshall wils criticized for this action,” “Information is lacking on the background of this decision,” “Is this summary of your action in the official history accurate,” “In retrospect do you feel that your decision was correct,” and the like. I was given a desk in his Pentagon office, where part of his papers were kept and where the remainder was brought, and began at once the research necessary to prepare the outlines and questions he requested. As a means of expediting this work the General handed me a manuscript copy of Matloff’s Strategtc Planning for Coalition 4% Bibliographical Note 443 Wurfare, 1943-44, which he had been asked to review for the Department of the Army, and asked that I base some of my questions on material cited in that work. I proposed that I follow the same procedure on earlier periods of his career, using references from Matloff and Snell’s Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-42, Watson’s Chief of Stafl, Prewar Plans and Preparations, and materials collected by Mr. Watson and his assistants for a projected volume (never published) covering the Chief of Staff’s office during the war years. Since the citations in these and other volumes made frequent references to General Marshall’s handwritten accounts of meetings at the White House, to the minutes of meetings of the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in which the General took part, and to folders of material the General had taken with him to the great conferences, to White House meetings, and to congressional hearings, it was possible for me to locate documents he had used and to base my outlines and questions on these. Much of the material was already in the General’s personal files; additional information was delivered to his office for my use. In some cases I went over papers with former members of his staff, such as Gen. John E. Hull, who would check on documents they had prepared for the Chief of Staff, identifying specimens of hand- writing and giving the background of some of them. General Marshall’s appointment books, memoranda for the record prepared by members of his staff, his corrected drafts of key papers, his copies of minutes of the great conferences, and correspondence with key political and military leaders were drawn on. I was also aided by earlier research that I had conducted between 1946-52 while preparing the Department of the Army’s The Supreme Command, the official ac- count of Eisenhower’s command in Northwest Europe, 1944-45.I had collected hun- dreds of pages of notes in the United States and Great Britain, which I left with the Officeof the Chief of Military History when I completed the volume. These papers were sent to the General’s officefor my use. Since the collection included my notes on Allied planning from January 1941 through Casablanca and Yalta to Potsdam. this phase of preparation was simplified. General Marshall was quite willing to deal with specific statements or charges, but he declined to accept my suggestion that he comment generally on a number of public figures that I listed for his consideration. He declared: “You give a long list of names of officers and others to have me analyze them and comment on their efficiency.I am not going to do this. I think if this got into the book in any way, the books rather, all the attention would go to that, and all the acrimonious debate would go to that and nothing to the really important part of the text. ,I don’t think it would be quite fair because the officers would have no chance to answer it at all.” He did agree to comment on views or actions of individuals in those cases where they or their biographers had raised questions concerning Marshall’s decisions. His pur- pose here was to give additional background on which I could judge the points at issue. In this connection he said to me on another occasion: “The accusations are so numerous, so altogether remarkable at the time, that you can hardly believe what you read. But, of course, you have a number who want to get into publlc print. And you have others who feel very deeply and are quite prejudiced. And you have other historians who really try to get at basic truths in the matter. Unless you diagnose which crowd you are dealing with, it is very hard.” Aware of the limitations of interviews and of the skepticism that might greet the accuracy of his recollections, Genera1 Marshall once remarked: ”I am dictating this without a mass of records about me. I am doing this out of hand-off the cuff, as it were-and it should be . checked for that reason. You must be very care- 444 Bibliographical Note ful not to publish in any way or broadcast or arrange for later publication just Out of hand what I say here-speaking off the cuff and at considerable length and of course at times when I’m a little bit tired. I am covering a vast amount of ground in a short time.” Some of the General’s comments have been quoted for their flavor and as guides to problems that he considered vital during the war, but at his in- sistence I have rested the main narrative on his personal and official records. The General’s interest in getting the record straight led to his expression of considerable interest in historical methods. .He asked one day: “How do you know whether you can depend on what I tell you?” I replied that from time to time I gave him “loaded” questions to which I already had the answer from his papers. I dis- covered that if he had ever testified on a subject or had drafted a paper on it, he was likely to remember exact statistics and repeat the same illustrations he had used ten or fifteen years earlier. Inasmuch as General Marshall had no opportunity to check the transcripts of his interviews and perform the careful editing at which he excelled, I have taken the liberty of making occasional slight corrections in the text without in any way altering the sense or flavor of the language. Exact transcriptions will be placed on file with the Marshall papers. (It should be noticed that in those cases where I have quoted from my handwritten notes, the quotation marks denote the language of my tran- scription of his remarks rather than an exact reproduction of his statements.) LETTERS The General’s personal files contained copies of much of his correspondence €or the years 1939-42.

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