The Daily Stoic - David Roll on What We Can Learn from General George Marshall

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

On today’s podcast, Ryan and historian David Roll discuss his most recent book George Marshall: Defender of the Republic, the most magnificent moment in American history, the moral obligation to remove confederate statues, and more. David Roll is the author of several books and is the founder of the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation, an organization that provides free legal services to social entrepreneurs around the world.This episode is brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. LMNT was developed by co-founder Robb Wolf, a former research biochemist and 2X NY Times best seller. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. This deal is only valid for the month of January. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.This episode is also brought to you by GiveWell, the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. GiveWell’s team of researchers works countless hours to determine which charities make the most effective dollar-for-dollar contributions to the causes they support. Since 2010, GiveWell has helped over 50,000 donors donate over 500 million dollars to the most effective charities, leading to over 75,000 lives saved and millions more improved. Visit GiveWell.org/stoic and your first donation will be matched up to 100 dollars.This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN, the #1 worldwide VPN. ExpressVPN has super-fast connection speeds and keeps your data safe. No more advertisers selling your info for a quick buck, no more downloads at a snail’s pace. Sign up now at ExpressVPN.com/STOIC and get an extra three months on your one-year package, absolutely free.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow David Roll:Twitter: https://twitter.com/misterroll See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stood Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystowup.com. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward.

Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holliday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. So this would have been 2016. I was on BookTur for Ego is the enemy and I was giving a talk in DC. This would have been a politics in prose. I had a dinner next door with Cal Newport first and then I went over and did my talk. And after you give a talk, people come up and say hello.

And a guy came up and was telling me that he enjoyed the story that I told about George Marshall because he himself was working on a biography of George Marshall. And so we immediately nerded out because I love George Marshall. And only like halfway through the conversation did the man today's guest, David Role, offer that he was a rich Role's father. Also podcast guest, great friend to me and supporter of my work over the years. So obviously that's how David had found out about the book, but I was so looking forward to this book He gave me an early copy. I read it when it came out. I guess this would have been last July

July 2019 I when I was writing the Ego's the enemy I read all the books that were about Marshall and unfortunately there's not a lot of famously Marshall doesn't write an autobiography He's offered a million dollars for it in 1950s dollars and turns it down because he's a not an egotistical man. So this great human being, his legacy is suffered because of his egolessness. That's sort of the contradiction, the paradox of George Marshall, why I wanted to focus on an ego's the enemy. So this is a very necessary, very important and riveting biography, and I was so excited

to have Dave on it. I texted Rich, I said, hey, would you, to how do I want to come on the podcast? I don't know why I didn't ask him earlier. And he said, I think he would. And so he came on and actually I would also highly recommend Rich had David on. And it was a fascinating interview to have a son interview of father. They get into all sorts of very vulnerable stuff. It's a great interview.

Anyways, David and I nerd out about one of, I think, the great stoic leaders of the 20th century, George Marshall. We connect into the present day, talk about the art of biograficizing and, of course, the real purpose of reading and writing biography, which is to learn real lessons we can apply to our lives. Look this is a great book. Seriously just go on Amazon and check out the blurbs of this book. I mean it's nuts. Walter Isaacson, General Stanley McChrystal, Evan Thomas, The Washington Review of Books,

Susan Page. I mean all the reviews you could possibly want. This book is shamefully not as well known as it should be. It deserves a wide audience just as George Marshall deserves a huge audience. If you're looking for a great book to read to kick 2021 off, you can't go wrong with this thing. Check it out.

David is not just an author, I would say. He is, although he wrote another book called The Hopkins Touch, and he wrote a biography of Louis Johnson, Harry Truman's Defense Secretary. But he's Senior Counsel at Steppto in Johnson, an international law firm, and he's now a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

He is the real deal, a great guy, and I think you'll like this interview. I wanted to start with what I think is maybe the most magnificent moment in American history, one of the most magnificent moments in leadership certainly. And that's the moment where FDR is trying to decide who will command the invasion of normity. And I thought maybe you could. That's the moment.

It was a conversation. Cairo, December 1943. Sember fifth actually, 1943. Conversation between George Marshall and President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt began, this was in his villa in Cairo after they got back from the Tehran conference. And at that conference, Stalin bluntly opened the second plenary, saying, who will command over Lord? And Roosevelt was not ready. He had not made his decision.

This was later on in December. So back in Cairo, they'd left a Tehran, they got to Cairo, they had the conversation in Roosevelt's villa. In Roosevelt beat around the bush, he usually did when before he got to the point. And he said to when before he got to the point. And he said to Marshall, do you want to command operation over Lord? Do you really want that? And Marshall said Mr. President,

that's a decision for you to make, according to your view of the best interests of the country. And you should not consider my feelings at all when you make that decision. And so Roosevelt couldn't get him to tell him. And Marshall had asked for the command. All historians have said, he would have given it to Marshall. And so obviously Marshall did not ask for the command, he'd have murdered. And so Roosevelt set back and said, well,

set back and said, well, I could not sleep at ease with you out of Washington, which meant the command of Overlord, probably the decisive battle of World War II, which meant that the command of Overlord was going to go to General Dwight Eisenhower, which was his springboard to the president. Now whether Marshall coveted the command of Overlord and some of his close associates, namely Henry Stimson believed he did, really wanted, or whether Marshall really felt that it would be in the best interest of the country for him to remain in Washington as chief of staff as the dominant voice in the chiefs of staff.

Whether it would be really being the interest of the country for him to remain in Washington where he could continue to influence the course of the entire global war. influenced the course of the entire global war. There's no answer to that. We don't know what he said to others or what he felt. We know what some of the others thought he must have felt, but we don't really know the answer to it. No historian does. But the point of it all is that this was his refusal to express his desire, one where the other, was utterly selfless. And it was the code. It wasian, he was Secretary of War.

He found an apt proverb to express Marshall's act of selflessness, self-mastery. He that ruled with his own spirit better than he that than he that take of a city. That was a quintessential moment, in my view, and up perhaps yours, as well, when Marshall's character was defined. And even in the subsequent moments after FDR makes his decision, you see what must have, the self-discipline required not to call for the ball and to let the coach decide where it goes.

That's sort of impressive in and of itself. And then when the shot does go to somebody else, I thought what was so amazing is Marshall's response after that. It was a great story on that. Marshall thought he was going to be a five-row-sale. And so his wife, Catherine, was moving stuff out of the Portis-Wanett Fort Meyer into their country house. But instead of coming back from Cairo to Washington, Marshall flew eastward, 10,000 more than 10,000 miles, several plain hops across some of it

across Japanese health territory. He wanted to meet with MacArthur to show him that the United States was behind him because MacArthur was complaining about loss of resources and so forth. But during that trip, his closest state, Frank MacArthur sat with him on a plane. It was two weeks. And he said if MacArthur later said that if Marshall had talked about the Roosevelt's

decision to anyone other than his wife, it would have been me. And he said that Marshall never mentioned the incident during that entire trip. The only thing he did, another aspect of his character was Magnanimity. When Roosevelt made the decision in Cairo, he asked Marshall to draft the order to Eisenhower and Stalin, saying that Eisenhower was in command of Overlord. And so Marshall was charged with writing out the order that he possibly, he possibly coveted that command we don't know.

Anyway, he wrote out the order and then at the bottom of one of the copies that went out, the one to Eisenhower. He said, dear Eisenhower, he always called him that, dear Eisenhower. I thought you would like this as a momento. And Eisenhower cherished that no Marshall's handwriting for the rest of his life. He thought it was such a gracious thing for Marshall to have done.

So, there's so many aspects of Marshall's character grew out of this one incident. Yeah, there's so much to unpack there. I sort of want to do all of it. I would say sort of first, before we get into Marshall, it's one of the things that strikes me, the more I read about Roosevelt is you, on the one hand, you can't help but really grasp his political genius, his insights, his brilliance.

And the other, it's hard not to get the sense that he was a very self-absorbed man who is completely oblivious to the feelings of others. And in the sense of, first off, making martial, sort of forcing martial to choose whether he's going to break his own code and ask for the job that he deserves. There's part of that. There's also just the making martial right hand right out the order, giving the job to his former protege. There's just, I think there was a great line from maybe Churchill's daughter about the way that FDR had taught Churchill where he said something like, you know, FDR's behavior hurt my father, but it didn't unman him. There's a little bit of that, I think, in Marshall where FDR kind of had this kind of condescending, oblivious,

mystical way of treating people. And Marshall, it's easy to overlook in that story just what a completely unfair position Marshall was forced into. Right. For all his charm and way in which he handled people, managed men, as they said. Roosevelt was cold. That was a cold decision. The reason, one reason why he decided Eisenhower rather Marshall, is because in an earlier conversation with Churchill, Roosevelt throughout the idea, well, you know, I want Marshall to be the commander

of Overlord, but that means a commander of all the theaters in Europe. That is the Mediterranean, a commander of all the theaters in Europe. That is the Mediterranean, which Churchill was desperate to hang on to because he wanted to swart over Lord, even then by controlling the Mediterranean. And Churchill told Roosevelt, look, I'm allowing you to have an American commander in charge of overlord, but no way is an American commander going to be a commander in the Mediterranean theater.

That's British. He put his foot down on that. Roosevelt went along with that. Once he did that, Marshall's stature as commander of overlord was diminished. He was a tactical commander if he accepted, or if Roosevelt gave him the overlord command, whereas as chief of staff back in Washington, you know, he was a commander of the deployment of troops across the globe in a broad sense. So it would have been, it would have been a demotion if Roosevelt had appointed Marshall, should just be, and it sounds like this is a decisive battle of war,

but it would have been a demotion in terms of the military hire. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the show, stay tuned. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This,

where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Mandukayoga mats, Soul Cycle and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one,

and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free on the Amazon or Wondery. Those sort of moments of coldness from FDR are quite straight. They're sort of a coldness like, I was struck in the Ken Burns documentary about the Roosevelt's where it's like Roosevelt's where it's like Roosevelt's last decision on Earth was to spend like a weekend trip with the woman he swore to his wife he would never see again.

You know, there's this sort of, for all of his ability to see other people suffering, you know, to be this sort of great leader at this moment of incredible difficulty and fear. of incredible difficulty and fear, there was an inability to empathize on a one-to-one level that have always found striking. And you know that Churchill had the same quality.

He had promised the command of Overlord to Alan Brook. He had promised him. And when it became apparent at the Quebec conference in the fall of 1943, that the command had to go to an American because they had preeminent forces. They had they out they out two to three, two to three times more men than the British had to fight an overlord. So Churchill took broke out on the great scene planes of the overlooking the planes of Abraham and Quebec City and informed him,

well, you're not going to command over. And Brook wrote about that as diary and said, the man had no sense of how I felt. And you just casually said, well, you're not going to command over. And this was a, this was something that broke coveted. So it's interesting that those two leaders shared that quality of, you know, no empathy with regard to these people who were, you know, devoting their life to serving those two extremely, extremely good politicians. Yeah, I, that, now that you bring that up, it reminds me of, I think it was Churchill, he was saying that when he took over some governmental position, his predecessor had given him the advice, maybe

it was Chancellor of the Achequer or something. It was something to the effect of like, you're going to have to be a good butcher. But basically at that level, part of leadership is making really hard decisions that inflicts sort of pain on other people and that maybe to do that job, there is a little bit of unfeeling brutality required. And with Roosevelt is so interesting, the way he treated the people that were closest to him, beginning with, well, beginning in the war with Hopkins. And then, you know, when Hopkins was living beginning with, well, beginning in the war with Hopkins.

And then, you know, when Hopkins was living in the White House for two or three years, I got married there. And, you know, suddenly, he's out. He's on the out, partly because of Eleanor Roosevelt. They wanted him out of there. And so, but Roosevelt had to get a replacement right away. So it was his oldest daughter, Anna Bodinger, Anna Roosevelt, who moved right in as Hopkins left.

And then Missy Lehan was one of the most important persons in his life. She had a stroke and she was banished to the third floor and eventually out of the White House. And he just totally completely forgot about her. And when Hopkins got sick, after leaving the White House, they were, you know, he was not part of Roosevelt's life. And the way in which Hopkins and Roosevelt parted was brutal because Hopkins was very sick on the trip back from Alta.

And he said, I gotta get off this boat. I can't take a seat trip across the Atlantic with you. I can't take a seat trip across the Atlantic with you. And Roosevelt was, again, cold. He barely looked up from his papers. And that was his last goodbye with Harry Hopkins. And they never saw each other again. It's another aspect of his handling of these people who again just laid down their life for him. Is that a feature or a bug of leadership? I think that's That's such an interesting question.

You know, I think it's essential when you're dealing with these matters. But you know, it's one thing to do it with Marshall. But it's another thing to do it with people who you know he wants to have a drink every night with Hopkins. He wants to spend every you know social hour with Missy Lehand. That, you know, that's a, that's a bug. And, you know, so it's, it's, it's, it's one thing to make these hard decisions. But then again, just, you know, the, the people that surround him, you know, for his pleasure, for his relaxation. And then bang, cut it off.

So I'm not entirely sure where that goes back to Marshall. I think the other thing that that story that that's easy to overlook and that story about the job going to Eisenhower is that Eisenhower was Marshall's protégé. I mean, the only reason he's even in the position to snake the job from Marshall is because Marshall, you know, continually promoted him and put him in a position to succeed. And I think what's so fascinating about Marshall is sort of true sign of his greatness was, and I gave a talk at the NFL owners meeting maybe two years ago, and I told this Marshall story,

the one you were just told. And I likened it to, you know, the way we evaluate like a truly great football coach is by their coaching tree. You know, where, you know, you look at someone like Bellicek and you see what the coaches underneath him have gone on you know, you look at someone like Bellicock and you see what the coaches underneath him have gone on to do. You look at someone like Bill Walsh.

You see what the coaches underneath him have gone on to do. One of the ways you truly judge a great coach is by, you know, are they sort of the selfish, tyrannical autocrat, or are they the kind of person that builds in organization that, you know, ultimately ends up putting its fingerprints all over the NFL or college football. That's really a sign of greatness.

And I think Marshall has maybe the greatest coaching tree in American political and military life. Yes, sir, with not only Az in our Bradley Lucien Truska, one of the great commanders in World War II, that doesn't get a lot of press. And the way he treated MacArthur as a management problem, and was showed magnanimity to the Anthropy with MacArthur. That relationship is really interesting.

Because at one point MacArthur was Marshall's boss. Absolutely. Did not act the same way at all. Absolutely. And it's so interesting. Maybe this is far a feel from what you want to focus on right now, but his decision to finally be the last one before Truman to decide that Carthor had to be relieved or fired, famously fired. And it kind of reminds me of the debate today about

And it kind of reminds me of the debate today about waving the law. So at the time, Marshall was Secretary of Defense. He was supposed to be a civilian, but they'd waive the law. You know, they waived the law just as they did with Mattis, and they're probably going to do with Austin as Secretary of Defense. But Marshall was very reluctant to let MacArthur be fired publicly. And he was the last man after all the joint chiefs have said, yeah, he's got to go. And it was pretty obvious. He had to go. He was undermining the president's foreign policy. Marshall had to read the papers he took forever.

And the reason, as at least as I wrote in my book, he was afraid of the tarnishment of the army. His beloved institution was the arm. Here he was Secretary Defense, the law was waived. He was supposed to be the civilian head of the war department. Yeah, he was really worried about his institution, his beloved institution. It was my view and that's why he did not want to harm the US Army, but he finally did it. That's the reason why they have this law. They have this law that says you can't be in the army. You have to have resigned, you know, for seven years or something, right? Ten or seven years, they changed it. And even Marshall was tempted. But in the end, his character,

you know, prevailed, said, no, no, he's got to go. No, is Austin going to be able to do the same thing? Or, and Madison last long enough to be really tested in that regard. And Madison, you know, Madison is probably, they did the waiver for Madison because they wanted to find somebody that would have some influence and control over Trump. You go ahead.

Maybe tell people about this idea of a coaching tree, and I think I'll get back to that sort of idea of duty. This idea of a coaching tree, Marshall's famous little black book. It seems like, on one hand, we sort of think, yeah, of course, the role of a leader is to develop talent. And then anyone who's experienced, you know, being in a big organization and meeting a big powerful boss, you sort of get the sense that that's not the imperative that most leaders are operating from.

Well, I mean, you mean to develop talent? No, to sort of selflessly advance, not selflessly, but to actively try to advance the interests of others. Like, there's certainly leaders who develop talent for the good of the organization. They go, you know, they're sort of like moving people around as pieces on a chess board. But there seems to be in martial kind of this almost moral obligation to help young Officers realize the full Way to their potential. Yeah, yeah, he was yeah, and he he learned that You know at Fort Benning in the in the late late 20s early 30s and in fact

That's where many other many of the of World War II came from out of that Fort Benning infantry school that Marshall. Marshall's head of the academic program at Fort Benning. It wasn't in charge of the whole 40 and that was what he really wanted to do was to teach and train army officers to think for themselves, to be much more independent minded in terms of taking on decisions and responsibility. And he mentored them. There were like 200 army officers that he trained

at Benning who became generals in the second world war. He built, yeah, he built a huge, he made some mistakes, but not that many. And he's a commander in the Northern North Africa was a mistake. Patten, of course, there's a completely different ball, you know, different place as far as their relationship is concerned.

He had known patent for years and I just stood Pat. And of course, in the end, they gave Pat a command after he had made all those mistakes before an overlord. The game of command in Europe, Pat, was ever grateful for that. And it was an essential decision. It was a great decision to hold on to him. Eisenhower was on the wire as to whether to fire a pot. Yeah, it seems like Marshall had almost kind of a Phil Jacksony

knack for you treat a patent this way. You treat a MacArthur this way. You treat a Bradley this way, you treat a macarza this way, you treat a Bradley this way and an Eisenhower this way. And it wasn't this sort of what you would maybe expect in the military, this sort of like, these are the rules. This is what I expect of a commander, no room for latitude. But he had a pretty remarkable flexibility as far as not just getting what he needed from different people,

but also giving those people what they needed to succeed. Yeah, yeah, you know, he didn't like grandstanders though. You know, that was just something that, and of course, he had MacArthur and Pat on his hands all the time, but he recognized their brilliance. They were truly brilliant battlefield commanders, MacArthur and Patten. And Patten was because of his, you know, his, he'd take huge risks and was flamboyant. MacArthur was a being, a constant being a juror. He was always asking for more. And he felt, you know, he felt aggrieved.

So yes, he had the room for balancing, balancing the qualities of a good commander. Yeah, it's funny. We have this. I think there's a reason that, you know, MacArthur and Patton are probably infinitely more famous than Marshall. In some respects, even more famous than Eisenhower,

because, you know, sort of their personality style naturally led, led itself to publicity and attention. We sort of forget the scandals that would have made them household names. We just remember sort of the echo of it. But it is funny to think that Marshall, in a sense, ends up accomplishing more than all of them. Or by precisely by being subdued and disciplined and quiet and really not thinking about himself. I think it was Truman who said, never did Marshall think about himself. You could almost, like if you were to say, this is a person who never thinks about himself, you might have guessed that that would have not been a successful career strategy.

Of course, he would never call the Marshall Plan the Marshall Plan. Everybody else did. He didn't want to take credit for that. It's interesting. I know you used to, I think, have some relationship with the film business, maybe in the talent area. You know, Frank McCarthy, who was his closest aide, beginning in the Tehran conference, and you know, flew with him all the way to the far east

to the Carthor. Frank McCarthy became a, he was headed the Motion Picture Film and Association. And he wrote, he was the one who produced Pat. And the early, what it was early 70s, I think. And I just discovered in the archives at the Marshall Foundation library that McCarthy commissioned a screenplay by a well-known screenwriter at the time.

And I've read it, a screenplay of a commercial. He wanted to produce around the time he produced Pat and he wanted to produce Marshall. And it never happened. And McCarthy didn't like the screenplay of Reddit. It's kind of kind of a lame screenplay, but it's hard to do. It's hard to do Marshall in a film. Sure. You know, unless you focus on one particularly incident like who will command overlord something like that. And actually we're I'm thinking I'm talking to some people now about that, but it's, you know, Pat and MacArthur have been movies made

above both of them and Marshall hasn't hasn't hasn't made it. Well, you know, Plutarch, I think maybe the great biographer of all time sort of makes this distinction. He says, you know, there are, there are biographies and there are lives. And, and lives, he says, as a genre is, is how, and this is what I was talking about in my book, Lives of the Stokes, but, you know, he says,

lives is, is when you get the essence of a person through an incident, through a quote, through, you know, he says, there may be in an off-handed gesture or remark, you know, far more insight than the story of, you know, their grandest battle. And I think what is interesting about Marshall is that he is this riveting, fascinating character, but the arc of his life is not particularly cinematic.

It's really in these little incidents like we're talking about, which is why I wanted to open it. And I think, you know, it's like if you were to do something on Marshall, it really I think need to be some sort of epic series. Like, you know, you really have to explore character. Like they say, you know, film is about story, television is about character. I think what you see in Marshall is character,

like good character, but then also just he was a character. But I think that's a thing that we struggle with as far as learning from and modeling leadership to people is that the people of true sort of character and leadership are often by definition the least interesting and the heart of you right about. You know, like there's no, as you talk about in your book and I think I noted and he goes to the enemy,

Marshall declines even to write a biography of himself. He refuses to write memoirs. Right. Right. You wouldn't do it. And his, and he probably would have been boring had he done, had he done them because, you know, he, he wouldn't, I mean, Marshall or sorry, MacArthur's memoirs are riveting, grants memoirs are riveting, Sherman's memoirs are riveting

because they were kind of a different type of leader. Yeah. And how to portray character? Yes. In any kind of TV or movie or whatever, is another aspect of character that I didn't talk about much in the book, but I remember David Brooks's book, he wrote a book about character. Yeah, the road to character. And also, and also featured Marshall and one of the aspects of character that he

So featured Marshall and one of the aspects of character that he highlighted, which I think in Marshall's case fits. And it's a capacity to love and be loved. It's hard to imagine a character like MacArthur having that kind of capacity, but it is. That was, it was something that Marshall clearly had. And I tried to portray that in the book, not only with two wives, but also the step grandson, who was so close to Marshall and was killed and leading a tank platoon in the road to Rome. killed and leading a tank platoon in the road to Rome. So yeah, I mean,

you do get, you do get in Manchester's, epic biography of MacArthur. You do get some glimpses of MacArthur's relationship with his son, which I found to be incredible and revealing. It was sort of the only place where MacArthur seemed to be human and joyful and connected and empathetic. Although the incredible thing, I found this, MacArthur's son is still alive. I was just going to say that.

Arthur, his name is Arthur. I think, yeah, he was six years old on the batan in Corregidor. You were six years old on the batan, you know, in Corregator. And took that PT boat trip, you know, with MacArthur and his wife to Australia. Yeah, you try to wrap your head around the fact that MacArthur's father, Arthur MacArthur, Oh, I know. Fought at the bloody angle in the war. And MacArthur fought in World War II and and in World War I. And then his son is just, you know, you could bump into, I think he lives in the Greenwich Village, like he's like a recluse, clearly having MacArthur as a father, you know,

had an effect on somebody. But the idea of it, like you could go for pizza in the West Village and go into the sun, into the grandson of a civil war veteran gives you kind of a glimpse of how short history actually is. I mean, one of the Morgan Thou's just just died. He was in, he got it a hundred. He lived here in Washington in one of the, in a Presbyterian home for seniors, Morgan. I think one of John Tyler's grandsons just died. Yeah, that's that's right. They're trying to get him something. I forgot what it is, but it is. And you know, just just writing about these characters has been really interesting because like Harry Hopkins daughter who lived in the White House, Eleanor was her, Hopkins was widowed. So he had this daughter

who was seven or six or seven years old and lived in the White House for a couple years and Eleanor was her sort of her mother figure. She's still alive. She lives out in Vienna, Virginia. The son of Marshall's beloved stepson, the son of the stepson, which would be Marshall's step grandson, lives up in Northwest Massachusetts. And I've interviewed him several times. He actually had a box of documents, you know, underneath the bench and he's in a farmhouse up there.

And one, you know, one day Nancy and I would drove up there. But I went to Amherst College and it's not far from where this guy lives. And so we went up and spent a day with him and he pulled out these box documents. I couldn't believe it. And on top was this crumpled map. It was the battle map that was in Marshall's stepped son's hand when he was shot by the Germans on commanding that tank between the actual battle map. I've never seen anything like that before. Wow. The topographical, you know, the kind of map that they handed out to these tank commanders. So anyways, it is.

No, no, it's, it is. I think that this is, to me, the importance of studying history and the importance of biography is it connects you to the past in a way like my son is for and you try to read in these sort of poems before Betty likes, you know, he likes Kipling's if and, youellow's a psalm of life. And there's a line in that poem where he says, you know, the lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and leave behind his footprints in the sands of time.

I think there is something in the, you know, the tradition of MacArthur's ancestors or knowing that, you know, people who maybe met George Marshall are still alive. I had, I had George traveling on the podcast, so I know I also connected your son Rich with. It's like when I had rich on, or sorry, when I had, when I had George on the podcast, I was talking, not only did he meet Martin Luther King, but he met Harry Truman. I mean, he stopped by the Truman's presidential library. They'd won some basketball tournament. And Harry Truman gave him a signed copy of his memoirs, and that's actually what he put the I have a dream speech in when Martin Luther

King had given it to him. But we just have this idea that these figures, the marshals of the world are our relics of the past, the churchills of the world are relics of the past. They're really not that distant past. And they were just human beings while they were alive who, who I think it was Marshall's second wife said something like, you know, my husband had an ego and yet a temper. He was a totally normal person. He just managed to in the pivotal moments, sort of rise above those things. Where was rambling when he met Trum? Where was he coaching?

No, he was like a college basketball student and they were college basketball athlete and they did some tournament in Missouri sort of before, you know, March Madness or something and they swung by and, you know, and it sounded like at that time, Harry Truman was sort of in a bit of a kind of a political exile as a figure from the past. And he sounds like he was very excited

for anyone to come see his library. And so that's where George Rowling met him. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. So right to my right in my library here, I've got a boxed two volume set of Truman's memoirs. The ones that he has sent out to the important people.

And it's signed by Truman. Wow. I borrowed it from my law from Steptoe and Johnson. I mean, I don't know if I ever get to give it back. That's my first book. He wrote, and his inscription on the memoir is, to Louis Johnson. I've never heard of, hardly anybody's ever heard

of Louis Johnson, but Louis Johnson was Truman's secretary of defense after four-star committed suicide. And Louis Johnson's not a good one, if I remember correctly. No, well, he had a lot of problems. But that was when I, that's how I started writing nonfiction after getting, you know, tired of doing the legal stuff at that firm.

That was my firm, stopped doing Johnson. So I, but I found those, the memoirs in the library there. And, and then I went to West Virginia where the firm was founded. And I said, I want to write something about Johnson and the firm and all that stuff. And I ran into a real historian who had already done some interviewing. And as a result, I ended up for lots of different reasons writing the book. The first and only biography of Lewis Chatson. But still, you know, that, Truman was a big part of our law firm because the beginnings of our law firm, we ended up

representing a lot of the defense contractors. It's just, so, yeah, it's Washington's fullest stuff like that. So one one last sort of revealing incident about Marshall and then I want to get to something else with you which is there's a story that Dean is it Aikasin I've never heard of him. I want to say something but I have to go ahead. Okay so Dean Acheson who who worked under both Marshall and Truman and sort of was, you know, found them both to be heroic figures, a sort of cut from the same kind of American mold in a way. I'm writing about this a little bit in my next book. He tells this story of, he tells a sort of the lesson of watching Marshall sort of preside over these meetings and all the bickering and the complaining and the what about this and what about that?

Or, you know, should we ask this? And he finally sort of cuts to the noise and he says, gentlemen, let's not fight the problem. Let's decide the problem. And I thought that was the essence of Marshall in a way as well. But on Ashson, that's the essence of Marshall in a way as well. But, Anaceson, that's the president of the creation, Ashton was a really good writer.

Yes. And, you know, in a law firm that was kind of, same kind of law firm I grew up, he was at Arnold at Cogington, Berlin. He, and we're talking about how to portray character. He had this phrase about something like the moment General Marshal entered a room, everyone in the room sensed his presence

or of controlled power. It went on with several sentences like that. And how do you ever portray that without the man himself? It is a wonderful word description. And that's what it was. It was this sense of control power. You know, he would be reserved and would would let everybody talk. And then he would guide it, guide them to it. Yeah, I think it's difficult to portray and really capture the brilliance of the absence of something.

So like when I was writing my book, he goes, the enemy, I wanted to, originally it was going to be a book about humility. And what I realized is that humility is very hard to portray because often it is nothing. It is that you are not doing something. And so Marshall's restraint, the feeling that you feel him come into the room and not be what he could get away with being is very difficult to portray. That he could be a tyrant, he could be a megalomaniac, he could be delusional, he could be too big and too important for everyone.

He could be all those things, but that he wasn't was the greatness. And that's, it's very difficult to capture that. Whereas MacArthur's excess and brilliance is quite easy to portray. Sure, or a patent in front of the American flag in that film, when he's standing up there telling everybody that they're gonna have to kill those sons of bitches. That thing was, you know, before you go, I opened up your book,

Ego is the anime, because I knew that there was a section on Marshall in there before this, before I, yeah, I talked to you. And so I had forgotten this. In fact, I couldn't find the book for a while. I finally found it in my wife's office room. I wrote down. It must have been, when did that was that public? 2016. And I think that's when we met it at Politics and Pros. Four years ago, yeah.

And the last part of a chapter, what's important to you, you said, find out what, you know, what you're after, ignore these, ignore those who mess around your pace, let them, let them covet what you have. I wrote in my hand, I said, I was thinking about what do I want to do with the rest of my life, You know, I'm not, I'm at the other end. So I want to write a good slice of history. This is my own Hannah. Sure. I want to take care of Nancy and my kids.

Kids rich or old, you know. He's doing all right. I want to die with dignity and three piece. I've forgotten that I've forgotten that. Wow. So, page one night, one 19 of your book. I'm very, I'm very honored to hear that. I mean, I think you know, you sit down and you write something and you kind of, it has an impact on you because the source material has impacted you, but you really have no idea whether it's going to land on someone. That's kind of, I sort of have, I have some sort of broad bullet points like that myself from my own life. And it's

very easy. And I'm sure you saw it in your career. It's very easy to measure success based on your salary, based on cases you argue based on how many copies your book sales. Recognition. Yeah. That's one of mine. Yeah. Okay. So, and let go to go on to your next thing.

No, and I was going to say what is, I think why Marshall's such a great example and why your book is so important, why I'm so glad it was published. Why you got over the hump of the fact that, you know, he is not the most hotly anticipated person to be biography, to have their biography written is that he's a great example of what you can accomplish. You know, as as Brooke says in the road to character, he's a you really, if you focus on the uly g values rather than the resume virtues, you really can have an incredible life, a meaningful life and doing incredible

things. That's right. That's right. So the last thing I wanted to talk to you about and this, this, it actually dovetails nicely with where we were talking about, you know, sort

of how short history is. You said you got to meet some of these sort of, let's call them, timers. And here in Austin, I got to meet a guy named Richard Overton, who died almost two years ago now at, at, at age 112. But he was the oldest veteran in the United States when he died, but it was incredible for me to meet someone who was born, for instance, when Theodore Roosevelt was president and to be able to wrap my head around that. And where that really gave me some insight is something I know I've talked probably too much on the podcast about, but it's important to me. And I know it connects with a piece you sent me that you'd wrote, what really made it clear

for me, Richard who is African American, lived in a segregated part of Austin, when it was segregated, you know, would have been in a segregated regiment of the, when he fought in World War II. Richard was born in 1906, in 1910, that they put a Confederate monument, you know, two and a half blocks away from my office in this town that I lived in. And it was like, oh, you know, two and a half blocks away from my office in this town that I live in. And it was like, oh, you know, you think history was so long ago. You go, the Civil War is a long time ago, you know, let bygones be bygones. And you go, no, they put up this, they put up this monument partly as a giant middle finger. So this four year old boy had no idea that he was different because he was black. Like, you know what I mean?

I got him imagine that your experience is studying history as colored your view of this debate about Confederate monuments. And I know you came and you protest, you're not protested, but advocated for the removal of a, was there Stonewall Jackson statue? No, no, so what, I'm actually now advocating, Stonewall has been removed from VMI, I had no... Okay. So that leaves only Marshall in front of VMI right now. But what's happening in Virginia is they've decided to remove the Statue of General Lee

from the US Capitol Statue of Statute, our whole collection. And so I've been involved in advocating. So each state in the country gets two statues. So now for Virginia, they only have Washington. And there's going to be an empty place. And so I've been advocating that Marshall, as a Virginian, who lived there for 27 years or more, is the one who deserves to have his statue at the elbow of George Washington. That's not gonna happen

because the governor of Virginia really wants to have something that represents Virginia's break from its racist slave holding past. And I knew getting into that argument, that that would probably happen, but I wanted to at least gather some support for putting George Marshall in there.

Because in 1947 when Marshall gave his Marshall plane speech at Harvard, the president of Harvard said, there's only in the honorary degree to Marshall, that the president President Harvard said, to a soldier in statesmen who Brooks only won comparison in the history of the Arab Republic. Those were his words.

And meaning Marshall's the only guy that can be compared favorably to George Washington. So I know you were successful in removing the Confederate statue from your town, your Austin, and Rich told me about that. And so I'm advocating Marshall. Now that's what I'm trying to do is get a conversation going beyond this Virginia thing

to persuade the senators in Virginia, Tim Cain and Warner. And also the senators in Pennsylvania, where Marsha was born, to sponsor a bill, to introduce a bill into Congress, because there's another way you can get your statue into the US capital, and that is through congressional act. introduce a bill into Congress because there's another way you can get your statue into the US capital and that is through congressional act. They just did that with Rosa Parks and I think they're going to do it with Frederick Douglass. So I think that goes to something that I think is important and I don't actually think should be that controversial, which is we really should be actively deciding and talking about who our heroes are and who we admire. And we should be celebrating them.

I mean, obviously Statue is the most ancient way to do this. And there's a certain sort of history and prestige in that. But I do think generally the idea of, you know, how are you honoring the people that you want more people to be like is sort of an element of culture that's been forgotten. It's almost as if even in the case of biographers, you get, you read some of these biographies and you get the sense that the main objective of the biographer was to puncture the myths of the person,

you know, not to, or almost, you know, and that's why I love Plutarch and why I think he's endured as long as he has his, you know, the purpose of biography, I think, is ultimately to learn something about history and about yourself and how to apply those lessons. And it almost seems like biographers and artists today almost deliberately reject the obligation to teach anyone through their work. So you know a lot about statues in ancient times. And they were like what were they like a substitute for photographs today or you know, but were you know they were they were they were intended to to to celebrate the quality of the leadership or whoever they happened to be and to last for centuries. So I like that I like that today today too. I think I post you a quote,

why do we have statues? Why do we do that? Right. So what's your answer to that? It's about, there's a quote from Demosthenes where he's giving some speech at a front of a celebration of an Athenian victory or something. He says, you know, let me remind you that your ancestors put up this statue not to recognize, not solely to recognize what had happened in the past, but to call you and to spur us to similar heights of greatness. I want that quote. I want that quote. All right. I'll send it to you. I'm writing it down. But, but you know what I mean? That the purpose of

putting these people up and to me, this is what the indictment of the Confederate statues is. You know, what, what is the primary accomplishment of Stonewall Jackson's life? What did, you know, Nathan Bedford for a stand for it? So when you put up those statues, you are calling people in effect, you know, and I actually think there's, there's some gray area about Robert E Lee, but not a ton, but I'm just saying I could, I could see him embodying some virtues that you want people to have. For the most part, I think he was actually mediocre and is, you know, is a traitorous and all these things. But I could at least see a non-disingenuous

argument for Robert Ely's statue. Nathan Bedford Forest, as I had another writer on talking about, is basically a murderous psychopath. And so to put up that statue, you are calling people to follow in those footsteps. And so I think that that's why Rosa Parks should be in the Capitol. And that's why Frederick Douglass should be recognized as an American founder. I mean, what's so great about Frederick Douglass is he said, you know, he looked at the astounding hypocrisy of, you know, the founding fathers and said, I'm going to look past that and I'm going to help us get closer to realizing it. And to me, that's what we want people to do. Yeah, it's, you know, and the Confederate statues were there to

And the Confederate statues were there to basically elevate the law's cause. All of that. Blight's books on that are just fabulous. Yeah, I was reading just as a history nerd. I'm sure you appreciate this. I was reading this biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes recently. And you know, late, you know, he basically is another one of those figures that sort of, he meets Emerson and, you know, lives all the way into the, you know, the 30s.

You know, he meets Emerson and FDR, like that's an incredible life. But, but he has this, he's talking about some, he's telling some dinner anecdote about his wife, you know, being rude to Stonewall Jackson's wife at a dinner party in Washington. And I was just, I was like, why was she invited? You know, I was like, like, first off her husband's dead. He was a traitor. And, and, you know, but it is amazing the sort of collective amnesia we had where, where First off, for Usman's dead, he was a traitor. But it is amazing the sort of collective amnesia we had where Stonewall Jackson's widow is

still considered, was getting invites to prestigious events through the late 1800s. You're just like, oh, this was, it was a weird time. He won't believe it. So I tried to track down. There is a story that Marshall led Stanwals Widow and a graduation ceremony at VMI. And I couldn't I couldn't I could not document it, but it's possible that that also have. Well, I I loved in your book, doesn't like McKinley appoint? Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no wanted a commission. It was hard to get a commission then and because it right after the Spanish American War. So he goes to Washington. He has a couple of letters that his father set up to meet with the Secretary of War or whatever. But he stands in line and goes into the White

House, you know, and they eventually gets upstairs and and the Kenley gives them an audience. He said, I want to commit a commission, the United States Army. And I don't know where the McKinley actually got it for him, but he got one, he got a commission. And think of that, think of that. And the guts, for example, of just trying to go to the top back when he was only 20 years old at that time.

So. But also just how small the world was that some kid could just show up at the White House and get in line and see the president. And what a horribly inefficient system was for a very, very long time. I'm going to have it to jump to Department of Justice, right? Right. No, that way. I mean, even, you know, a couple of decades before that, like the Bane of Lincoln's existence was just all these people that wanted to come complain to him about crap. And he had, like, the job of the president was to hold office hours. And yeah, just, you know, I actually,

though, you got to wonder, would the president be better if they had to meet average Americans on a somewhat regular basis? And that average Americans could call on the president at the House. That would be greatest. You know, it's better than reading their letters, you know. Us. Where there are tweets, you know, Obama would read letters,

Trump reads tweets. I'm not sure either is a particularly good insight into the lives of average people. You know, Roosevelt told Eisenhower that he really wanted wish he could have given the command of overlord to Marshal because he said, no one's gonna remember him. No one remembers who was the chief of staff of the army during the Civil War, Henry Hallock.

It was Henry Hallock. And every day, not every day, every other day, I walked by his house on our street in Georgetown. Lived in, because it was on a hill. And I walked in there one day, because it's, you know, got guards all around it, and no one lives in it. And there's a retired DC cop.

I said, what, you know, this is Henry Helix house. What, you know, who owns it? He said, oh, it's one of the best brothers down in Texas. And oh, I'll go. And he never, he just owns the one of the best brothers down in Texas. And oh, well, God. And he never, he just owns the house. And it just sits there. But again, nobody's ever heard of Harry hell in Harry hell. Now that's a, that's sort of a great stoke note to end out on, which is that, you know,

at one point, Marshall was arguably the most powerful military commander in the world. He, he was his soul but in his spirit, but literally millions of men in the greatest military accomplishment in human history. And if it were not for the Marshall Plan, which he didn't want to be named after him, and it's only named after him as a quirk colloquially, named after him, and it's only sort of named after him as a quirk colloquially. No, no one, you know, he would be, you know, ashes and dust like, like everyone else. And that's my favorite line from Marcus to realize he goes, at the end, Alexander the Great and his Mule driver are buried in the same earth and the same thing happened to both. There is this sort of an ultimate equalizer that happens that we can forget and ignore to our own peril. For all specs, we're all dust. Exactly. David, thank you so much. This was an honor. I

love the book. People should absolutely read it. I've raved about it a bunch of times, but it is I have fun talking to you. So call me when you're in Washington. I will, if that ever is able to happen again, I can't wait to get back out there. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast,

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