Sublime

In his first State of the Union address, Eisenhower had promised to carry out Truman’s edict and end segregation in the military and in the District, and he had kept that promise. By the end of 1953, all public facilities in the capital had been desegregated, and he could boast that in the Navy and the Air Force, segregated units were “a thing of t

George Marshall was the US Army chief of staff during World War II, meaning that he essentially ran the entire war effort. His name might not be as well known as Dwight Eisenhower (whom Marshall hand-selected for advancement), but those who were involved in the war credit Marshall as a key figure—if not the key figure—in coordinating the Allies’ tr

Russell was for twenty-six years either Chairman or dominant member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversaw the battle readiness of the nation’s far-flung legions and armadas. As senators of Rome had insisted that, regardless of the cost, the legions must be kept at full complement because the peace and stability of the known world—th

The Manila protest set off a string of others. Twenty thousand soldiers protested in Honolulu, three thousand in Korea, five thousand in Calcutta. On Guam, the men burned the secretary of war in effigy, and more than three thousand sailors staged a hunger strike. Protests erupted in China, Burma, Japan, France, Germany, Britain, and Austria, too, w

500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.” The retired general told FBI director J. Edgar Hoover about the conspiracy. Reports about the Wall Street cabal’s machinations soon leaked, and the threat fell apart.

McKinley, meanwhile, called for 125,000 volunteers to carry the war to the Caribbean. The army was swamped with applicants. And bouncing up and down enthusiastically at the head of the line was one Theodore Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy. Roosevelt’s eagerness to leave his post and join the army baffled his friends. “Is his wife dead? H

President Wilson named one of his brightest generals to lead the incursion into Mexico: John J. Pershing. In a controversial move a decade earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had promoted Black Jack Pershing, over 762 superior officers, directly from captain to brigadier general. For the Mexican operation, Pershing selected several of the Army’s most promi

It seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible and wonderful thing called a war? Nobody who knows anything of soldiers believes the silly notion of the dons, that millions of men can be ruled by force. If they were all to slack, it would be impossible

General George C. Marshall—essentially