George C. Marshall Quotes
Mr. President, If you don’t do something and do it right away, I don’t know what is going to happen to this country.
The only soldier ever so honored
George C. Marshall, 1880-1959, General & U. S. Army Chief of Staff, U. S. Secretary of State, U. S. Secretary of Defense, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Statement to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, May 1940, [Hitler was marching through Europe with little opposition, and Marshall had done a critique of the American Armed Forces and found it very “inadequate.” He asked for $657 million – a large fortune in those days – to fix the inadequacies. The right wing conservatives – then opposed to military preparedness – were opposed to such “aggressive” action. Roosevelt wanted to build up the forces but was eyeing the presidential election in two years and the fact that at that moment, the U.S. was officially neutral. Marshall never minced words and
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Played the President in the NBC Network West Wing
All presidents since have followed the practice.
“This” referred to the money to finance the Truman Doctrine of containment of aggressive Communism. There was already a Red Scare in the nation and Vandenberg realized that the only way his Republican Colleagues and the Conservative Democrats would appropriate the money was if there was public demand, and exaggerating the communist menace would scare the country sufficiently to move Congress. Truman took Vandenberg’s advice. On March 12, 1947, Truman delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress and did “scare hell” out of the country. The money for the Truman Doctrine came fourth.
on the decision of whether to use military force against the Assad Syrian regime for their using chemical warfare against their own people
The University of Alabama was one of the best college football teams and most people thought of Coach Bryant as singularly focused on football and nothing else. However, this quotation illustrates the degree of penetration and awareness that occurred when JFK was assassinated.
While Abraham Lincoln set the precedent for independent Presidential action in a national political crises without much reliance on Congress, this was where Roosevelt established the precedent of unilateral action in financial crises.
George Catlett Marshall Jr. was an American soldier and statesman. He rose through the United States Army to become Chief of Staff under presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, then served as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense under Truman. Winston Churchill lauded Marshall as the "organizer of victory" for his leadership of the Allied victory in World War II. After the war, he spent a frustrating year trying and failing to avoid the impending civil war in China. As Secretary of State, Marshall advocated a U.S. economic and political commitment to post-war European recovery, including the Marshall Plan that bore his name. In recognition of this work, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.
