Speaking Truth to Power and General George C. Marshall - Robert Holcomb, PhD - Substratum 611

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This video is a part of a seriescreated in collaboration with
the George C Marshall International Center about
George Catlett Marshall Junior and his home, Dadona Manor.
The George C Marshall International Center brings to
life the timeless values of selfless service and unwavering
integrity to develop visionary leaders worldwide.
Learn more about Dadona Manor, view upcoming events, and join

(00:20):
the mission to preserve Marshall's legacy at
georgecmarshall.org. So you have a pH D in human
cognition. In the information technology is
the title on the degree in my field of study was Human
Cognition. What part of human cognition
specifically was it like? Like.
Specifically with situational awareness and so how, how do you

(00:42):
know people are situationally aware and can you actually
quantify situational awareness? That would be interesting.
If we ever do like another podcast, that would be really
fast. OK, there's a guy that did a as
a theory that there is such a thing as a cognition, a
continuum of cognition that runsfrom intuitive cognition on one
end to analytical cognition on the other end.

(01:03):
And I took some exception to that and I thought that.
So I, I looked at his experimentthat he conducted before you to
to demonstrate it. And he, he came up with the
theory and then he demonstrated his had his own experiment.
I'm always a little bit suspect of people that designing their
own experiment and then it comesout the way they want.
I'm always a little suspect by that there was a second

(01:23):
experiment done in University ofGeorgia, but it was done with a
pool of psychology students, which I think is hardly a
representative sample. So I thought I would try it
myself with a using his metrics,but at the same time using
experienced judges from teachersfrom the ranks of teachers and

(01:44):
to my surprise, following, you know, his basic methodology.
I made a couple of additions to it, but, but both basically his,
what I found was that I, I, my evidence supported his, his
theory. So in contrast to what I was
expecting, which was it that I would disprove it or at least
falsify it, I was unable to do that.

(02:05):
So I thought that was pretty interesting.
And I've always, I've still beeninterested in the topic,
although I haven't revisited it since my PhD, but I'd, I would
like to revisit. I think about it quite a bit how
how cognition works in the humanbrain and when it began.
I do a lot of reading on evolutionary psychology and how
we went from great apes to almost sapiens and.

(02:26):
So you're more into into like not only how people think, but
like how they react in certain situations.
Yes, the the basic his basic premise is that if the cognition
type matches the task at hand, it's an intuitive task, then
intuitive cognition should do better than analytical.
And if it's an analytical task and an analytical cognition

(02:46):
should do better and that in generally shows itself to be
true. I've personally still am not
convinced that there is such a continuum because in my mind
there's there's if there is a continuum like that, there
should be some physical manifestation that changes as
you go from here to here, such as if you look at the
electromagnetic spectrum, for example, it's the frequency of

(03:08):
the light that's being examined that changes as you go from one
end of the spectrum to the other.
Well, I think there should be something like that in the
analytical, intuitive, analytical cognition.
I haven't come up with it. So like the energy change in at
the. Time I did my experiments, which
was in 2010, there was no professional writings on that

(03:32):
subject, that of of a physical manifestation of change.
However, since that time I've noticed that there have been two
articles published in peer reviewed journals that talk
about. You keep talking.
Sure talks about the the the change in the glucose level
within the blood is a measurablequantity that changes as your
cognition type changes. And another is the dilation of

(03:54):
the eye, the pupil of the eye. Yeah, I heard that.
That was definitely. I've heard that before.
And so it's, it's occurred to methat if I was doing it today, I
would devise my experiment a little bit differently and
measure both of those things to see if there is in fact a
physical manifestation of this drift along the continuum, if it
is in fact a continuum. So that was, I haven't done

(04:14):
that. I mean, I've been busy ever
since, you know, I, I already had the degree, so I didn't do
it, but I would love to find a PhD student that's interested in
that and have them put to work on it.
Competitions are probably one ofthe most fascinating things that
people don't think about becausesome people like to escape from
reality rather than try to understand why they think the
way they think. Situational awareness is all

(04:35):
about reality. Yeah, yeah, that's what sucks.
Like some people want to want that fantasy world rather than
the oh, let me actually find outwho I am rather than try to
experiment with all the possibilities that I'm.
Not right. The one of the interesting
things in the situational awareness studies in the
literature is professional airline pilots have been doing

(04:55):
studying situational awareness for a very long time.
And the one of the interesting things they found is that when
a, when pilots on an airplane engage the autopilot when they
were at cruising altitude and they engage in autopilot, they,
they find that they lose situational awareness extremely
fast because the automatic pilotdoes all of that.
And then if the automatic pilot fails, they're actually worse

(05:17):
off than if they never had one in the first place.
Because now they have to figure out where they are, what they
do, what the attitude of the airplane is, what the airspeed
is, what's, what's the indication, what's the problem.
So they start basically below A0level with situational awareness
once they've used an autopilot, which I thought was an
interesting observation. The Army at this time was
putting a blue forest tracker, which is sort of AGPS screen

(05:40):
inside all the combat vehicles that would show you where all
the other blue or friendly vehicles were located.
And so I was interested in situational awareness from that
aspect. Does it does it improve their
war fighting capability or not? I found of course it does, and
we end ultimately the Army endedup buying those and putting them
in combat vehicles and they wereused very successfully in the

(06:03):
the 2003 Gulf War. When they're on the autopilot,
is that mostly that once they have that like sense of security
that they start becoming complacent?
They turn off their attention. Yeah.
So their attention to the airplane becomes much less than
it is when they're actively flying.
Their visual pattern changes as it as to what interim
instruments that they scan. And frequently they don't scan

(06:24):
any instruments at all. As long as there's no indication
of trouble, They, they, you know, you got to drink coffee
and talk to each other. And, and so they, they, they
definitely lose the awareness ofwhat their airspeed is, what
their heading is and what their altitude and attitude are, which
is fine. That's what an automatic pilot
is for. But when the automatic pilot
fails, then that kind of leaves them at a significant

(06:45):
disadvantage. So there's been talk about
having one crew member, I say flying the airplane all the
time, even when the automatic pilot's engaged just to offset
some of that. And I don't know what, I don't
know what they do up there in that cockpit.
So. But it seems like that might not
be a bad idea in my mind. What was the first thing you
wanted to go over? Is there's several

(07:06):
characteristics of leaders like we just mentioned, but there's
one characteristic that I think is extremely important is the
ability to speak truth to power.And George Marshall had that in
spades. And I want to give 3 examples of
it and kind of explain the context and the lessons that
came out of of his doing that. It's an example of not only

(07:28):
moral courage, but even physicalcourage and of integrity to be
able to speak to your boss or toa superior of some grade and
tell him things that he doesn't want to hear or to inform him
about things that he doesn't really want to know about.

(07:49):
The first example I want to talkabout was in October of 1917.
It was during World War One. Marshall at this time was a
captain and he was the G3 or theoperations officer for the First
Infantry Division, which was ourFirst Division, that we sent to
France. And they were engaged in
training with the French Army inorder to be employed in combat

(08:11):
for the first time. They had not yet been employed
in combat. So at that time the army didn't
have divisions. This was the very first one that
was formed, and so it was calledthe First Infantry Division.
General Pershing at this time was the A4 Star, and he was the
commander of the Army Expeditionary Force, I'm sorry,
the American Expeditionary Force, AEF that was in in France

(08:35):
and of which the First Division,of course, was a part.
And so General Pershing was going to come down and watch
some of the training that was taking place in France before
the 1st Division was going to becommitted into the line.
And Marshall, of course, as the operations officer, was
responsible for the, the training of the unit and also
for setting up this particular training demonstration that took

(08:57):
place when Pershing came to visit.
And so Pershing came down, he watched a demonstration.
It was a some French, French based training on how to live
and survive in the trenches. And it didn't go particularly
well. And Pershing was pretty upset by
what he had seen. And he felt like the the the

(09:21):
what he thought was the trainingwas substandard based on the
results of what had happened in the exercise that he watched.
And so the division commander was there.
All of the division staff officers were there, a division
commander being a two star, including Captain Marshall.
In fact, Captain Marshall was the junior man present.
And after the exercise was over,Pershing said, assemble the

(09:43):
officers. So they assembled all the
officers around General Siebert,who was the division commander,
and Pershing, in Marshall's own words, it gave everybody hell.
And he just chewed them all up and down one side and down the
other. And in particular, General
Siebert, he asked him several specific and pointed questions,
which Siebert wasn't able to answer.
And Siebert was already in kind of bad form with General

(10:05):
Pershing, and he didn't think very highly of him.
But he really was outspoken in his criticisms in front of his
staff officers, which is a fairly significant failure of
leadership to do that. And after he got done with
Seibert, he turned to the chief of staff of the division, who
was a Brigadier General and who had only been there for two

(10:27):
days. He had literally less than 48
hours in France, and he knew nothing about the exercise that
happened. He was just there to observe it,
just like Pershing was. And so when Pershing asked him a
couple of questions and he wasn't able to answer anything,
and Pershing became disgusted with the whole group.
And so in his anger, he turned around to walk away.
And Captain Marshall as the junior man in the present at the

(10:49):
assemblage. What was the Marshall's rank at
the time? Captain.
So there, there were seven grades between him and Pershing.
So that's a that's a lot of difference in, in, in both age
and experience and in responsibilities.
I've ever Pershing started before Marshall.
Yes, Pershing was was commissioned I think in 1898.
So he started, he started several years before Marshall

(11:12):
did. And Marshall felt like something
had to be done and something hadto be said to salvage the
situation. And so despite the fact that
he'd just been chewed out, he reached out and grabbed General
Pershing physically by the arm to prevent him from walking
away. And Pershing turned around and
said, what do you have to say? And Marshall said, Sir, there's

(11:34):
something that needs to be said here, and I've been here the
longest, and so I think I shouldsay it.
And then he proceeded to speak for about 5 minutes on all of
the different things that the First Division had been promised
by either the French or by Pershing's own headquarters,
which failed to materialize. They were responsible for
providing them transportation. They were responsible for

(11:55):
providing ammunition, because the American Army didn't have
any of those things when it wentto France.
They were responsible for providing instruction.
They were supposed to be a standard operating procedure for
how a unit operates in the trenches.
It was supposed to come from Pershing's own headquarters.
And it had not had not yet been printed.
So they had no standard operating procedure to go by.

(12:17):
And they were reduced to relyingon what the French told them
about the war. Of course, the French have been
fighting this war for several years now, and they've been bled
white. So they didn't have the
ammunition, they didn't have thetransportation.
They didn't have anything either.
And so Marshall was view was that what you had just seen was
the best that could be done under the circumstances?
And Pershing said, well, you must understand, well, first he,

(12:41):
he did verify what Marshall toldhim.
When Marshall said the SOP, for example, hadn't been published
yet, Pershing turned to one of his staff that was there and
asked them, is that so? And the the Colonel said, yes,
that was so. And so Pershing began to believe
maybe Marshall was telling them the truth.
And then he said, well, you mustunderstand the troubles that we
have as well. He turned to go again.
And Marshall stopped him a second time and said, yes, we

(13:02):
have them as well, General, but every single day.
But all of them have to be solved by night.
And the point that I carried away from this is that first of
all, he was courageous enough tospeak up.
Second, he was in command of thefacts of the situation, which
other people did not have. That's the connection to the
situational awareness that we talked about.
Third, he had the courage, the moral courage and the physical

(13:24):
courage to reach out and stop General Pershing from walking
away and put himself in the lineof fire to in order to explain
to Pershing what had happened. Now, General Pershing was a
unique soldier and he was not the kind that took criticism
personally. And so when he heard all of
this, he he heard all of this without exploding and and

(13:45):
unloading on General Marshall a second time, Captain Marshall at
that time. And in fact, Marshall said in
future visits to the First Division, he always asked for,
where's Captain Marshall? I want to talk to him.
And he sought him out and and confided in him.
Marshall after the war was over,General Pershing became well,

(14:06):
even before the war was over, General Pershing moved Marshall
from the First Division all the way up to the Allied
Expeditionary Force and and he was the assistant operations
officer there. And then after the war, General
Pershing went to become the Chief of Staff of the Army and
he asked Marshall if he would come and be his aid.
So Marshall spent five years as the aid to the chief of staff,

(14:28):
which was excellent training forhim when he became chief of
Staff himself. So that was not just a one of
incidents. Another anecdote though, before
we leave it, General Marshall felt that all of his compatriots
that were there on the staff felt that he had sacrificed his
career in that brief 5 minute span and they all wished him

(14:51):
well because they said you're going to be fired, no doubt.
And, and Marshall's response to that was it.
The way he saw it, the, the, theonly thing Persian could do
would be move him into the trenches and that's where he'd
rather be anyway. So he was not the least bit
perturbed by any future repercussions.
But there weren't any bad repercussions, they were all
good. Well, the second example that I

(15:13):
wanted to talk about it was in 1938.
So this is almost 20 years laterat this point.
Now, General Marshall is the deputy chief of staff of the
Army. He's a one star general, the
very junior one star just been promoted to one star.
And he was in Washington and he was on the chief's staff.

(15:33):
The chief at that time was a a four-star whose name was Mallon
Craig and Marshall was one of his.
He had several one stars on his staff.
Marshall was just one of them. There was a meeting in the White
House. They were Army was still trying
to get its act together in preparation for what they
believed was going to be World War 2 when it came along.

(15:54):
The British and the French had been fighting now for for some
time and the Japanese and Chinese as well have been
fighting. I take that back.
The British and French had not yet gone to war, but the signs
were that there was war coming. President Roosevelt was involved
in the budget decisions that hadto be made in the Army, and he

(16:17):
proposed In this meeting, which was held in the White House,
President Roosevelt was the senior attendee.
There were about a dozen people in the room, including the
Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of Commerce, General
Craig, of course, as chief of staff of Brigadier General Hap
Arnold, who was the chief of theArmy Air Corps at that time, and
then George Marshall, who was the chief of war plans.

(16:39):
And the discussion was about theArmy's budget.
And Roosevelt recalled that the the Army Air Corps was a part of
the Army at that time, so they didn't have a separate budget.
And Roosevelt was enamoured withthe idea of having an industry
produce about 10,000 airplanes airframes for for use.
But he was not at all in favor. In fact, he he removed from the

(17:04):
budget the the money it would take to produce the crews to fly
those extra 10,000 airplanes, the hangar space for them, the
fuel, the maintenance facilities, none of those things
he wanted to fund only the acquisition of the airplanes
itself. And he proposed all of this and
then went around the room of this dozen or so senior people

(17:27):
in the administration that were there and asked it what they
thought of of that idea. And Marshall reports that in
fact, the reports from anybody that was in the room was that
everybody was in favor of it. And as he went around the room,
he said it was all smooth talking and very everybody was
in agreement. Yes, this was a good idea, Mr.

(17:48):
President. And he finally got to Marshall
and he said, what do you think, George?
And General Marshall is a very formal man, and he did not
appreciate anybody calling him George, particularly not
somebody that he had just met for the first time that day.
And so he said, I'm sorry, Mr. President, but I don't think
that's a good idea at all. And he said Roosevelt had a

(18:10):
startled look upon his face. He adjourned the meeting right
away. Everybody left.
Same thing happened as happened in France 20 years earlier.
Everybody crowded around Marshall and said, well, that's
the end of your career. You can kiss your star goodbye.
But Marshall felt that it was important to say those things,
that they they required buying airplanes.
He had a seeking suspicion that Roosevelt's motive was to buy

(18:34):
the airplanes without any of these additional support
packages solely so that we couldgive the airplanes to the
Russian, I'm sorry, to the British or to the French, which
he felt was detrimental to the best interests of the United
States. And that's why he didn't agree
with the with the decision or with the proposal.
As it turned out, they did budget for airplanes, but they

(18:55):
reduced the number of airplanes and budgeted for crews,
maintenance, hangar space and all of the support that goes
with the airplanes so that they could be used by our army rather
than giving off to the British or to the French.
So that was the second instance.And again, as with Pershing,
Roosevelt was able to take criticism if it was thoughtful
and and not personal. And in a matter of less than a

(19:20):
year, he had promoted Marshall to from straight from one star
to four-star to become chief of staff of the Army himself and
replace Mel and Craig. On the best day to get promoted.
On the best day to get promoted,his his promotion and his
assignment as chief of staff wason September 1st in 1939, which
was the day that Hitler invaded Poland.
So he began his long tenure as the Chief of Staff throughout

(19:43):
all of World War 2. The third incidents that I
wanted to talk about took place while he was Chief of Staff.
It took place in 1943, again in November, and it was during the
Cairo Conference, the war effort.
Now, Churchill, of course, was the Prime Minister and minister
of defense in Britain. Roosevelt was still president,

(20:06):
of course, and General Marshall was now chief of staff and had
been for about four years and had been intimately involved in
organizing, equipping and training.
Now, the American theory of war is that you first, your center
of gravity is the enemy's army. And once you've defeated the
army, then you can do what you will with the rest of the
country. But the first center of gravity

(20:28):
is the army itself. Churchill had an opposing view
from the British side, which wasthey weren't strong enough to
come across the Channel and attack in France, which would
have been truly the center of gravity for the German army.
And so he was. But at the same time, he felt as
a politician, they couldn't sit idle and do nothing while they
waited to build up strength. Most of that strength, by the

(20:51):
way, was American. So there was constant conflict
where Churchill wanted to embarkupon different campaigns on the
periphery around Germany, nibbling at the edges, so to
speak. And the Americans were bound and
determined that they wanted to go across the channel and fight
the German army and defeat that.And then they could do whatever
they wanted anywhere else in theworld once they've done that.

(21:15):
So Churchill, the situation was we had finished the invasion of
Sicily and now we're in fact in Italy.
And, and they met all the chiefs, met in Cairo to discuss
what are, what should be our next steps.
Well, this conflict, of course, emerged almost immediately where
Churchill wanted to invade the island of Rhodes, which is a

(21:35):
small island southeast of Greecein the Mediterranean, very close
to the Turkish border. And he there was a German
detachment there. He wanted to take roads and use
it as an airfield to then in to get Turkey into the war on our
side. And Marshall felt very strongly
that any diversion of resources to such as a sideshow as the

(21:57):
island of Rhodes was not something he wanted to do.
And he instead wanted to continue to build up the forces
in Great Britain as quickly as possible so that we could do a
cross channel invasion. In fact, he wanted to do a cross
channel invasion in 43 and had to postpone it into 44.
And he saw this Rhodes adventureas just being a way to to

(22:20):
accomplish basically nothing. And so Churchill was insistent
and Marshall was insistent. And finally they convened the
meeting of all of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, so all the
chiefs of staff from the American forces and all the
Chiefs of staff of the British forces, with Churchill and
Marshall of course present. And finally Marshall said to the

(22:40):
assembled group, Far be it from me to dictate, but there will
not be 1 goddamned American soldier die on that beach and
Rhodes. And there was a stunned silence
in the room. Nobody had ever talked to the
Prime Minister like that, certainly not the British Chiefs
of Staff. And but Churchill accepted
defeat graciously. He didn't have enough forces in

(23:00):
the British Army to do that himself.
So he accepted defeat and the roads operation never was
carried out. But that's another example of
Marshall having the courage to speak what ultimately became how
the best to use the American army.
It's a dynamic people tend tend not to think about, but the the

(23:21):
dynamic between the British who started the war in September 39
before we did fought alone. I think in Churchill's memoirs,
he describes it how Britain fought alone with hardship as
their garment while the rest of the world, those who were half
blind became half ready or something along those lines.

(23:45):
And then when the Americans did join the war in after Pearl
Harbor in 1941, then slowly but surely the Americans built up a
preponderance of the combat power, a preponderance of the
men, the equipment, the tanks, artillery, the ammunition that
was being going to be used to prosecute the war.
And the British share of the wardecreased at the same time.

(24:08):
And that was a hard pill to swallow for the British Empire,
that they were being essentiallymarginalized in the conduct of
the war that they had not only been in from the beginning, but
it fought alone for a long time.Yeah, so it's almost like the
British started the war and Marshall wanted to end it.
Well, he did. He wanted to end it, and
quickly. And the quickest way is to is
something General Grant proved in the Civil War, is to seize

(24:30):
the enemy's army. Once you've destroyed that,
that's the center of gravity, then you can do anything you
want with the territory. You can go anywhere you want.
You can open up waterways and ports.
You can do anything. But the first objective is to
destroy the enemy's army. That's always been the American
way since the Civil War. Yeah, Was it sort of like
Churchill wanted to have a show where as Marshall wanted to have

(24:51):
results? Yes, that's exactly right.
And Churchill as a politician, There's no nobody's evil in all
of this. Churchill as a politician
required the British Army to do something.
He, he said, you know, the forces of the king cannot stand
idle. Muskets much flame I think was
his exact expression. They have to do something to
show to the public, the British public who are suffering

(25:11):
particularly from air attack, that the British forces were not
idle and they were in fact all the forces of the empire were in
fact fighting somewhere. And he had strategic reasons for
picking roads. It wasn't just some island.
He wanted an airfield. Much of World War 2 was all
about airfields, particularly inthe Pacific.
So from Churchill's perspective,he wanted to.

(25:33):
He wanted a good victory that'llboost the morale of the people.
A good victory, but also a demonstration that they were in
fact contributing to the war effort.
That they were not just they weren't.
The British population was simply not being forced to
suffer air bombardment and nothing was being done by the
armed forces of the of the Empire.
That was a sort of a, a situation he could not let

(25:56):
evolve. And then the Americans frankly
weren't ready with the, they, they weren't trained.
We didn't have enough to go across the channel, although we,
we wanted to until not till Juneof 44.
And even then when we did, then again, the British contribution
began to shrink and continue to shrink.
There was a point, I want to sayit was in July or August of 44

(26:18):
when the Americans on the continent outnumbered the
British. And, and so that's when the, you
know, the balance shifted and Churchill suddenly realized that
he was perhaps not running this war anymore, and perhaps it was
being run out of Washington. Yeah, what you were saying about
both Pershing and Roosevelt, that's the first two examples

(26:40):
you give for both situations. It sounded like the people
there, the subordinates were alltry and we're very eager to
please to to want the want the perception that they're doing a
good thing, that they're agreeing with the authority
rather than really digging into the actual situation and getting

(27:00):
the problem solved. And then also the authorities
having the perception of circumstances that what they
think should happen and what is happening are two different
things. Yes, and particularly the first
part of that is sort of an ugly aspect of this, this lesson that
all the other people in that room should have been able to
speak up and should have known better.

(27:20):
In the case of the first example, perhaps the chief and
the the chief of staff of the division and the division
commander both were largely unaware of what the what had
gone on and and so they were really not in a position to
defend themselves. But in the second example in
Washington in 1938, certainly the chief of staff of the Army

(27:41):
should have been able to make the same point without having
his deputy chief of staff step in for him.
And it, it's a very, in my opinion, this is my experience
in the world, that the higher upyou go in the chain of command,
the more responsibilities you have and the harder it is to
discover the truth because people have a tendency to tell
you what you want to hear. And that has to be actively

(28:03):
fought by a leader at a high level.
You have to have to really fightto get the truth and not just
what people want to tell you. They're trying to please you.
And so if you want to know the truth of what's going on, that's
one reason we you, you know, management by wandering around
is a term that I've heard a great deal where you go out into
the field to the front and see what's happening with your own

(28:25):
eyes so that you can have a better appreciation.
You can really fall into a very pleasant kind of an information
coma at, at, at the high levels of your, you know, government if
nobody will come in here and tell you what the actual truth
is. So a man that will tell you the
truth, even if it's unpleasant, is a very valuable thing to have

(28:45):
on your staff. I think Roosevelt and Pershing
both saw that and and did and that's why they kept him on
rather than firing him. When you're talking about
Pershing, about how he had the he was angry about the
situation, about all the things that are happening, but also why
it wasn't, why it still was happening.
Why it wasn't right? Yeah, why it wasn't right in a

(29:06):
way is the both the fear and thedisgust and the anger part of
the problem of him blind of him,like putting up a not a wall,
but kind of putting like a, a facade in front of him that's
like this is. You have to understand in, in my
mind, you have to understand thepressures that each of these men
are under and they're under verydifferent circumstances and they

(29:28):
act according to their own best interest in each of those
circumstances. Pershing has been named as the
head of the American or Allied Expeditionary force.
He is responsible for the execution of the American army
in France. When they fight.
It was Pershing's. Actually, it was our president's
decision that Pershing had to follow through with to employ

(29:49):
the American army as an as an independent unit by itself.
The British and the French wanted to break our army up into
battalions and shove them into British and French divisions and
just use them as a manpower resource rather than to fight as
an army as a whole. Pershing got had very strict
instructions from the White House that that was not to be
the case. The American army would fight as

(30:11):
an American army as a whole. We would plug any hole in the
line you want, but we're going to be an integral American army.
We're fighting alongside, not. Precisely we're we are not
merely manpower replacements foryou guys.
So Pershing had that pressure onhim.
This was the first time since the Spanish American War that
the American army had gone overseas to fight the American

(30:33):
army since the Spanish American War had deteriorated a great.
Deal The Spanish American War was late. 1898 OK OK.
And this was the first case where the American Army had gone
over. We had no division headquarters
when the Army began. We were only a collection of
regiments. And so we had to put together
several 3 regiments in in each division.
Create a division headquarters, give it an artillery unit for

(30:54):
support, and then train them as a unit.
That that none of that had happened in the United States
before they went to war in France.
It all had to be done on the fly.
Meanwhile, of course, the American army.
So Pershing has the pressure of that.
He has this brand new, untested,untried organization full of
green soldiers that he has to meld together into an active

(31:18):
fighting force in France in war.It's like trying to paint a
train while it's moving and, andthen on top of that, he's got
the American people back at homewanting to know where, where is
their army? What's it doing?
When is it going to fight? When are we going to win this
war so they can come back home again?
So there's a lot of pressure from the home front to for the

(31:39):
army to perform, to be put into combat, to be put into the line.
And yet they weren't ready. They weren't trained.
It would have been murdered or put them in the line against
German troops. So he had a lot of pressures on
him as well. And coming down to the First
Division to watch a training exercise that he had every
reason to expect would go well and it didn't made him question

(31:59):
whether or not the training thatthey were being given was good.
So he had a lot of pressures under him as well.
Does that have to do? Like if you take society as a
whole, one thing's done immediately as soon as possible,
but like all sense of urgency, that like it should have been
done yesterday. We have a tendency, and
Americans in particular have a tendency to be in a hurry.

(32:20):
It's astonishing just in my own lifetime to see the the
shortened reaction time that we expect.
It used to be we communicated byletter, and so you write a
letter and a week later you'd get a response and you were
happy with that. Now it's instantaneous.
If it's not a text, then you know it's too late to be of any
good. Does that have to do with now
it's there's a lot more convenient communication, yes.

(32:43):
Absolutely. Communications is is very
convenient until it isn't. And then and then for example,
my grandson is a soldier, just finished basic training.
So here's a kid that's grown up,he's 20 years old.
He's grown up and he's had a cell phone ever since, you know,
he's been able to talk and sending a text and communicating
with his buddies while he was inhigh school very easy and

(33:05):
trivial to take. You know, they can text out
messages in their pocket if theywanted to.
And then you go off to basic training and they take your
phone away from you. Now the only thing you can do is
write a letter, and that takes, you know, four days to get to
where it's going and then another four days to get a
response back, if you're lucky. And so writing to his

(33:27):
grandfather or writing to his mother suddenly becomes a very
slow form of communications, which to me was perfectly
normal. That's how we communicated in
our day. And so I didn't see any problem
with it, but he was just appalled at how long things
took. So we've become very attuned to
instant gratification, which is not necessarily good.
I think there's a massive difference between the 40s and

(33:49):
today's. That instant, that constant want
for instant gratification just because.
I'll give you a counter example that I ran across which is was
interesting to me to see. There was an exchange of message
traffic between Eisenhower, Marshall, Churchill and Stalin
during the end of the war. In about April of 45, Eisenhower

(34:10):
sent a message off to Stalin asking where the Russians were
to communicate. Churchill took offence at that
because it was, he was communicating with a head of
state rather than a, you know, the commander of an army.
And he didn't think that a, you know, a theatre commander should
talk to a head of state. That should be done by another
head of state. The whole matter had to go back
to Washington to Marshall to be adjudicated.
And then he send his message of support.

(34:32):
But it all took place in about 3days, which is sort of
astonishing. I mean, it's all radio
transmissions. And I was surprised at how
quickly the, the, the thing blewup and then blew over in just a
matter of about 3 days. Now that was, you know, very
senior secure communications forpeople who are running a
worldwide war. I guess that stands to reason.
But the people that lived, you know, in the in mom and pop

(34:53):
America certainly couldn't communicate that quickly.
Yeah, that sounds really similarto the the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I think, if I remember correctly, that I think was it
Kennedy during the. Yes, Kennedy was the president
during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev was the Prime
Minister, not Prime Minister, Premier in the Soviet Union.
Yeah, and then all like everything was about to blow up

(35:16):
and then one phone call and it ended or pretty much ended all
of it. Well, what ended it was the
Russian ships with the missiles on them turned around.
OK, so that was what ended it. But the the threat was that
we'll we'll put missiles in Turkey if you put missiles in
Cuba. And it was, we clearly had the
ability to do that. And so shortly thereafter, the
missiles in Turkey came out. So it was a kind of a trade quid

(35:39):
pro quo. When I was a student at the
armor advance course back in thein 1980, there were the, the one
of the blocks of instructions was on communications and there
was a quote that they had hanging on the wall that was
from General Omar Bradley. He said that Congress makes you
a general, but communications makes you a commander.

(36:01):
And I've always just remembered that you can't command if you
can't communicate. And if you don't know the basics
of situational awareness, like where are your people and what
are they doing, then you're you're no longer in command.
You're merely an observer of what's going on in the unit.
So the communications is critical.
Yeah. What about when there's
miscommunication, but you're notaware of that miscommunication?

(36:23):
Very deadly situations can eruptif you're if you're not aware of
it. Just again, as an example of the
the same message traffic that sent that Eisenhower sent to
Stalin that day said that the forces of Montgomery were going
to be clearing the ports in the northern flank of the army.

(36:46):
But when it was transmitted to the British, they were encoded
and then transmitted. The encoder screwed up the
message. And it said that the
Montgomery's army group would bedoing patrol tasks, which is
very minimal. And of course, that wasn't what
was intended. And it it wasn't what Eisenhower
sent. But he did not know that that

(37:07):
error was made. And so when Churchill, of
course, got that message and believed it, that they were
relegating the entire British Army to mere patrolling on the
northern flank, and he became irate, and so there was a
serious miscommunication that had to be unscrewed.
Once Eisenhower figured it out, once they read the message to
him and he realized that this had been mistranslated or

(37:31):
miscoded, I guess encoded. He said that in one of the
things he sent me, so I was like.
Yeah, that was an example from that Eisenhower and Marshall
paper. There was one thing that he said
in the first, I think it was thefirst, the first thing you said
that the problem had to be solved by night.
That was a quote from Marshall. That was his quote that yes, he

(37:53):
said, I think if you if you pushthat little black button hanging
off the fireplace over there, you'll get the exact recording.
But because we play it as a partof the house tour here in in
Dedona Manor. But what he said was, yes,
again, general, we have many a day and every day and every one
of them has to be solved by night.
And I don't think Pershing perhaps realized the urgency of

(38:15):
the problem solving that was taking place, you know, three
and four and five levels down below him.
And the second you said that there's a song that I know that
one of the phrases in the song is whatever you do today, you'll
have to sleep with tonight. It's kind of like goes back to
like the sense of urgency that all the problems that you try to
get as many problems as you wantto get done before you go to

(38:37):
sleep just so it's like it's, it's off your docket.
But at the same time, sometimes,and I guess I get your insight
on this, like if you overwhelm yourself and the problems that
you're trying to solve will justbecome half solved.
You can do more damage than goodnumber one.
Number two, the first thing you have to do is decide which is
though which of these are important.

(38:58):
So there's you have to evaluate tasks in front of you both in
terms of their importance and interms of their urgency.
And those are not the same thing.
And so some tasks are urgent butthey're unimportant.
And other tasks are very important, but they may not be
as urgent, but they still have to be done.
So before you decide how you're going to spend the whatever it
is 80,000 seconds a day that theGod gives you, you have to

(39:22):
decide what's important and thenwhat's urgent and focus your
attention on those things. If you can't do that, then you,
and I'm talking about just generally people in general,
then you will find yourself overwhelmed by the speed at
which life progresses. But if you can do that, and
particularly if you can do it ina chaotic situation around you,

(39:42):
and this is what many small unitinfantry people come to find
out, then you can, then you'll be OK.
Because the things that don't get done are the less important
tasks. So prioritization is a crucial
skill for somebody as they develop as a leader.
You're a Colonel in the army. I was a Lieutenant Colonel when
I retired. Is there anything in during your
experience or in your research with Marshall or?

(40:03):
Any other you're also you're also big into into Grant, right?
Ulysses S Grant. Yes, Grant's one of my Grant,
Churchill, Marshall, my father, probably my my 4 big heroes.
Is there anything within those people, those personas that they
always had to had to deal with, both like the family side, but
also the professional side of which one's more urgent versus

(40:24):
which one's more important? That's a very difficult balance
to strike because it depends upon what you're doing and where
you are in the army. In my Army life, for example, I
spent a tour in Iraq. OK, so there my family life was
relatively pushed to the back burner because I wasn't there.
I was overseas, and so my wife had to handle whatever came up,

(40:45):
whether it was good, bad, fast, slow, urgent.
Not that she had to handle it because I simply wasn't there.
However, when you are there, theArmy would occasionally send us
to school. For example, I went to the Armed
Forces Staff College, which is awonderful 6 month tour where I
was home every night. There was no travel involved and
the the workload compared to to being out in the active force

(41:08):
was relatively light. And so you just had to do a
little studying at night and that was about it.
And that was a good thing. So you had to.
It's a constant struggle to balance your life between what
has to be done in your professional life and what has
to be done in your personal life.
I've heard it described as juggling multiple balls, but

(41:29):
some of the balls are made out of glass and some of them are
made out of rubber. OK so you got to know which ones
are which and not drop a glass 1.
You can drop a rubber when it'llbounce, don't worry about it.
But you can don't drop a glass one.
So that's a very it's a personalthing.
Everybody has to go through it. There's no recipe for how you.
Yeah, no shortcuts or anything. No shortcuts, you got to figure
out what's important and and it also changes as your life goes

(41:51):
on. So sometimes you know you're, if
you have a, a child, say you have a special needs child that
then suddenly your, your priorities will change.
So it just depends upon each person individually, but they
have to recognize what's glass, what's rubber.
Did you do a lot of research into Catherine Marshall?
I've done some into Catherine Marshall.

(42:12):
She wrote a book called Together, which is a story of
their life together. She became, she's an interesting
woman, became a, She was a widowwith three teenage children when
she ran across General Marshall and they were introduced by a
mutual friend at a party somewhere in, in Georgia.
And so she became an army wife very late in life.

(42:35):
She, she had no exposure to the Army while he was coming up as a
Lieutenant or a captain or a major or Lieutenant Colonel or
any of those grades. She, he was a full Colonel when
they were married and he became a Brigadier General almost
immediately afterwards. So she came into being an army
wife kind of life very late and yet did fine, you know, so there

(42:58):
was lots of learning on her partand it showed a willingness on
her part to learn from the people that were around her and
and how to be a good army wife. So I think that was, you know, I
I'm as I'm sitting here in her house, I'm I'm a fan of
Catherine Marshall went through a great deal of trauma and
disappointment and hurt in her life.

(43:19):
Her husband was murdered. Her had to had three teenage
children as a young woman and then married General Marshall
and got thrown into this army life experience that she had no
background for whatsoever. He was you know obviously during
the war constantly engaged in the war.
The reason that they wanted thisplace at the Duna Manor in the

(43:40):
1st place was as a refuge for him so he could come and get
away from the the job for a little while.
Her youngest son was killed on active duty during the war.
Her oldest son died of a heart attack six months before he was
due to be married, so she she had a difficult life.
And then General Marshall died in 1959, and she lived for

(44:01):
another 20 years after that. Did she live here for the No?
She would not come back to Dedona Manor after he passed
away. She had a separate, they had a
separate place down in Pinehurstin North Carolina, which they
went to for the winter and she stayed in Pinehurst rather than
come back. She deeded this house over to
her daughter Molly and her husband and their five children
and they stayed here in this house after he passed away in

(44:23):
59. That's that's tough.
And yet she came through it all,I think, in great fashion.
She's a good role model. So anything you wanted to
mention or any topics? There is something I want to
bring up, Amy. Probably the single most
important characteristic of General Marshall in my mind and
was also shared by by Churchill and by Grant are their

(44:43):
integrity. And so they were.
They were men who believed in the truth and they would do
whatever it took to search out and find out what the truth was.
And they were men that who gave their word and you could rely
upon them. The integrity of a leader, I
think is the number one characteristic that they have to
have. And part of that is, and it's
actually evidenced in these examples I gave today, part of

(45:05):
that is not just to speak the truth, but to speak the whole
truth, even when there's aspectsof it that don't that that
aren't exactly the way you wouldlike, but you still have a
requirement and obligation to tell your superiors the whole
truth, not just the parts that are good.
Does that have to do with partially talent that sometimes
the truth also has to require some like emotional

(45:26):
vulnerability? Like there's some things
internally that you have to be able to come to terms with when
you're telling the truth becauselike, your personal opinions and
the logical reason are both sometimes intertwined.
Marshall Somebody asked him whatabout a personal opinion?
One time a news reporter and he said that he reserves his
personal opinion. His personal what?

(45:47):
How did he phrase it? I reserved my personal feelings
for Misses Marshall. So he divorced himself from any
emotion or personal or ego driven involvement in the
decisions that he made as the chief of staff, in fact, all
through his career, not just as the chief of staff and

(46:08):
essentially built a wall around his emotions and not let
anything from the job penetrate that wall.
And I think that you have to do that and, and particularly a
senior military officer in your job as a chief of staff or any
senior position, people are going to get hurt in your

(46:29):
execution of your duties. You're going to send people to
where they're going to get hurt or killed, and that's a
difficult thing to live with, but you have to.
And, and so I think many of thembuild this kind of a wall to
protect their feelings from the requirements of the job at hand.
You have to subordinate your personal feelings in almost

(46:51):
every case. So, and I think Marshall did
that and I think he was very good at it.
Grant, I think, did the same thing.
It was interesting to note, somebody asked Grant if there
was anything in the Civil War that that he regretted, and he
said yes, The the decision to launch the second attack at Cold

(47:11):
Springs was a decision that he regretted.
A lot of Union soldiers were killed in the second attack.
It turned out to be fruitless. Yeah, What's the context around
that battle? It was a battle in Cold Springs
in Virginia. He was his forces were trying to
penetrate a Confederate line. He'd already launched one attack
against that line and it failed,and he launched a second one and
it failed as well. But he said that was, I mean,

(47:34):
considering the number of battles he fought and the number
of engagements, that was the onething he regretted was the
second attack at Cold Springs Cold Harbor.
Cold Harbor, not Cold Springs. Was this, was this like a little
bit after Lincoln took McClellanout of the army and then granted
OK? Yes, it was considerably well he

(47:54):
when he took McClellan out, he didn't bring Grant in right
away. He didn't bring Grant in till
later in the war. It took Lincoln a long time to
find a general that would actually prosecute the war the
way he felt it ought to be prosecuted.
And Grant Grant's big advantage was when he wherever he was, he
achieved results. So he he was a relatively junior

(48:15):
Brigadier in the West Tennessee,Kentucky area and had great
success there. And so he ultimately became the
the chief of the all the Union armies.
But Grant, I mean, Lincoln had aa terrible time finding a
general that was actually worth having.

(48:37):
I know this might not be, this might, it's not like 100%
related to what we're talking about here, but do you mind
sharing your story of where you were on 9/11?
No, not at all. I think that's that's a, it's
not like a like the most fascinating story in the world.
That's very heartwarming. Well.
It's fascinating to me. Yeah.
Yeah, I was in London. Kathy and I were both in London.

(48:59):
I was on a work trip. I worked for the Institute for
Defense Analysis, and I was there to address a conference on
situational awareness, as a matter of fact, and the Blue
Forest Tracker system that we talked about earlier.
And the we were in line, we wentover early, a few days before
the conference began so that we could do some sightseeing in
London. Kathy had never been, and I

(49:20):
don't think I'd only been once. And we were in line to go for a
tour of the Parliament building.And the fellow in front of me,
it was I, I want to guess 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning.
It wasn't terribly late. And the fellow in front of me
turned around and said, did you hear that a plane hit the World
Trade Center? He was an American.
And I said no. And he said yeah.

(49:41):
And he said, I remember this explicitly.
He said it was a small private plane with a pilot.
And I thought, that's too bad, Sucks to be him and didn't give
it another thought. And then we went into the tour
and we were going through the various different rooms in the
Parliament building and I noticed just happenstance, I

(50:02):
happened to notice that as we would clear out of one room and
go into the next one, there was a docent there at the building
who was closing and locking the doors behind us.
And I knew that there were othertours during the day.
And so I couldn't imagine why they would be locking the doors
behind us as we went through thebuilding.
They made no announcements of any kind and they just carried

(50:23):
on business as usual. But they were locking the doors
as we left the room. And so I thought that was
puzzling, but I didn't, I didn'tdraw any conclusions from it.
I just thought it was puzzling. And so at the end of the tour
when we came out, they, they have large concrete pillars in
the roadside that are kiosks that have newspapers and they

(50:46):
plant the newspaper, they open it up and tape it to the pillar
so you can read it. So people can read the
newspapers outside by having to go in and buy 1.
And I, I saw the photograph on one of the Pentagon and I
thought, oh, that I know, I knowabout the Pentagon.
So I started to read the articleand I went, holy smokes.
And so then I went back to Page 1 and found the, IT was all

(51:10):
about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center.
So I realized then why they werelocking the doors.
They stopped the, the tours after, after ours went through,
they stopped them all for the rest of the day.
And that's so now suddenly it made sense while they were
locking the doors behind us. And I told Kathy that we had to
get back to our hotel because I had to get on the phone.

(51:30):
I had to find out what was happening.
I, I knew many people in the Pentagon and I needed to find
out what they were doing. And at the same time, I needed
to tell Aida where, what I was doing so I wouldn't be counted
among the missing. So we, we were walking, we
didn't take any public transportation.
We were walking back to our hotel.
By now it was getting to be dark.

(51:53):
And I remember when we got back to the hotel that the, the whole
block that our hotel was on was blacked out.
It was all dark. There were no lights of any
kind. And it turned out by sheer
coincidence, there was a, an accident in the tube station.
It was underneath our hotel thatcut power to the whole block.

(52:14):
And so it had nothing to do with9/11, had nothing to do with
anything. But it just happened to me at
that particular time. But it didn't make me feel any
better to to walk into a completely black hotel.
It was, it was dark. It must have been in the
afternoon when we went to the Parliament building because it
was dark when we came out. And in the front door of the

(52:35):
hotel as we came in, there were the staff that worked at the
front desk. It was 3 or 4 young ladies in
their 20s that there were hospitality industry people that
worked at Marriott that was running the hotel.
And they were standing there in a little row and as you came in
the front door, they had candles.
And they said they triaged us. And if you came in, they said,

(52:58):
are you American if you're American?
Then they shuffled us off to theright and that led to the lobby
of the hotel where they had tables set up with a Bank of
telephones on the table. And they said, use these phones,
call home, call whoever you wantto.
It's free. Don't worry about the cost.
Just call whoever you need to talk as long as you need to.
And all the Americans were in there on the phone, basically

(53:21):
all calling home. And if you were European, when
you came in, they triaged you tothe left and you went into the
bar and they had the bar set up with candles and they were
offering free drinks and whoeverwanted them.
Nobody could go to their room because the room keys were
electronic and the lights were out, so it wouldn't work.
So ultimately the lights came back on and we got to go back to
our room and we I got an opportunity to call people back

(53:44):
here and tell them where we were.
My daughter-in-law back in the States took on the role of the
being the command post in the United States.
And so she coordinated all the conversations with all the
children, grandchildren and everybody so that everybody knew
we were safe. And then the next morning we had

(54:04):
a phone call. I didn't have a cell phone, so
it must have been at the hotel. From the friend of mine who had
invited me to the conference to speak in the 1st place.
And his name was Rupert Pengellyand he was an editor for Jane's,
Jane's Fighting Ships or whatever they call their
company. And he was the one that invited

(54:24):
me in the 1st place. And so he said.
For the for the conference. For the conference and, and we
commiserated a bit and he said that there was a memorial
service to be done in Saint Paul's Cathedral in London the
following day, which I believe would have been a Wednesday.
I could be wrong on that. So if you don't check me.

(54:47):
But the following day there would be a memorial service for
all Americans in London for in Saint Paul's and that the Queen
would be in attendance and as well as the Prime Minister.
And he suggested strongly that we go.
And I said I was not in the moodto go to a service and I didn't
feel like that was something we wanted to do.

(55:08):
I didn't. I just didn't feel like I wanted
to do that. And he argued with me
strenuously and said, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity
and you need to go whether you like it or not.
And so I agreed and I talked to Kathy.
She agreed. So we went to the service.
The following day, we walked to Saint Paul's.
And it was one of the most astonishing things I've ever

(55:29):
seen. There's a YouTube video that's
on it that you can look up that it, it describes the the
service. But the place was absolutely
packed. The streets outside were
absolutely packed. They had huge speakers and ATV
screen in the street outside to broadcast the ceremony so that
the people outside could see it.When he came to the cathedral

(55:53):
again, as you went in the door, we were triaged.
If you're an American, come up here.
And they seated all the Americans in the front, very
close to the altar in Saint Paul's.
And the British, anybody else got the back seats, but the
Americans went up into the front.
The Queen was in the center aisle.
Prince Philip was there. Tony Blair, if I'm not mistaken,

(56:17):
was the Prime Minister. I noted at one point during the
service that the the Pew that was behind us farther from the
altar had all the living prime ministers of England sitting in
it behind us, which I was astonished at that.
And then the ceremony was absolutely outstanding.

(56:39):
The Archbishop of Canterbury gave the the sermon and then the
the recessional hymn at the end when they were to recede and to
leave the church. The recessional hymn was the
Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is pretty awe inspiring
and I have a very vivid memory of an army Colonel, a, a British

(57:01):
Army Colonel singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
So yeah, it was pretty impressive thing.
So I'm glad that I went. I'm glad I got it recorded.
We went down to I had a ticket for the Tube that was a week
long pass that was going to expire because we couldn't come
home, so we had to stay. And if you have to stay
somewhere, London's not a bad place to do it.
So at some point I had to go down into the tube station and

(57:24):
buy a second ticket to keep us so we could travel for the the
next week. And there was this fella down
there in the tube station. He was selling the tickets and
he was this great big old bluff Yorkshireman type guy.
Looked like he weighed about 260lbs and very gruff.

(57:44):
And when I went up there, I explained the situation, that I
had a ticket that was going to expire.
I needed to to get a second one.It was a perfectly easy
transaction. He never said anything.
He just looked at me through theglass.
And I gave him my ticket. He took it and I gave him the
money and he gave me a new ticket.
Never said a word. And when he was all finished and

(58:05):
I took my ticket, I turned to leave the window and he looked
up and he said give him hell, Yank.
So I said we will and we did. There's two things I have World
War One's Marshall or like Marshall in World War One and
his temper. Or or we could do both, either

(58:27):
one or ethical leadership. Sure.
I'll start with the first one. So Marshall said that he he he
was a man of very high standardsand he he would when he was a
younger officer, he could lose his temper.
And he was counselled at one point at the end of World War
One when he was a a Colonel and he was not selected for

(58:51):
promotion to Brigadier General at the end of the war.
And so he came back, everybody reverted back to their pre war
ranks after the end of the war. But he was counseled by his
division commander that his his temper was doing him in and that
he would if he could control histemper.
But he just told him explicitly that that was why he was not

(59:14):
selected. And, and Marshall took that very
much to heart and, and began an effort, a conscious effort to
curb his temper and not to display emotion or temper in in
the future. And, and he was very successful
at that. He was very, it was cold.
I, I, I mentioned earlier about his reserving his personal

(59:36):
feelings for Missus Marshall. He, he was very unemotional in
the conduct of his duties after that.
And I think I think that was good advice.
I mean, you, you should never let yourself be ruled by your
emotions and, and particularly in, in the business of the
military. So I think that that was good

(59:58):
advice for him to, to get. He was very frank with his own
advice in many of the letters that I've seen in the Marshall
papers that he wrote. He was very frank in his
writings to, to individuals. So he wrote.
General Mcgruder, one time General Mcgruder wrote him to

(01:00:18):
congratulate him on being made chief of staff, and he wrote him
back and said thank you very much and explained to Mcgruder
that he almost did not. He, Mcgruder almost did not get
selected for Brigadier General because of his tendency to try
to do everything himself insteadof delegating down to his
subordinates. And he's very frank in his
criticism. It was just a private letter
between the two of them. But I was amazed at at how

(01:00:42):
frankly he spoke. And Magruder took that to heart
as well. And he had another case where he
wrote an officer to complain about the amount of alcohol that
he was drinking. And the officer immediately
reformed his ways. But he was very frank in his
criticisms in private. I mean, there's always a good

(01:01:03):
rule and thumb to, you know, praise and public and criticize
in private. And and he he did that I.
Don't know if it was a direct quote from Franklin but from the
John Adams HBO series. Have you seen that?
I have not. It's really it's based.
On I'm reading a biography of Adams right now, but I haven't I
haven't seen it's. Based on David Mccullough's John
Adams, which is would. That's a really good book.

(01:01:23):
Yes, I have read. That yeah, that's a good book,
but I don't. I just remember from the TV show
there is Franklin was saying that if you criticize a man in
public or if you criticize a manin private, he'll probably thank
you later. If you do it in public, he
probably will think that you're serious about it.
Well, I think anything, anytime Marshall told somebody something

(01:01:44):
in a letter, I think he was serious about it.
So. Like if you do it in private
though it's more courteous than if you do.
Absolutely. You, you, that's right.
There's no advantage to be gain by insulting somebody in public.
So he he was very careful to to mind his own temper after that.
Does Marshall's control of his temper and, and being able to

(01:02:07):
have a much more like extroverted canner like being
able to not only be able to control your temper, but also be
able to take action when like when Pershing or someone else of
authority is clearly not, doesn't have enough information
or doesn't have like a good enough information.
Did he learn a lot of that through his time in Fort
Benning, when he was teaching, when, when eventually he got I

(01:02:29):
guess what they call Marshalls men, and then also during the
1930s during the Great Depression when he was I forgot
what was the. He was at Vancouver it, he was
running a a series of Civilian Conservation Corps CCC camps
during that time frame in the Great Depression before he went
to Washington in in 1938. But no, I don't think he did

(01:02:54):
learn that. I think he learned his approach
to leadership long before that. So he was commissioned in 19 O
2. And so he served on active duty
from 19 O2 until, you know, he was chief of staff in 1939.
So that's 37 years. I think his his approach to

(01:03:14):
leadership was formed long before he went to Fort Benning.
He's he wanted to go to Benning.He said in his a letter to
somebody that he would he wantedto get his hands on Benning for
a long time because he wanted tobe the guy that trained infantry
men in the United States Army and he felt that they were not
being trained adequately. He felt that the course of

(01:03:34):
instruction at Benning was too detailed and too oriented on
developing the perfect solution to a tactical problem, when in
fact it was much better to have a, a partial solution that was
implemented quickly than it was to have the perfect solution
that was implemented a week too late.
So he felt that the instruction of bending needed to be

(01:03:55):
overhauled. And so when he got to bending,
that's exactly what he did. And, and typical of him is he,
he first select, selected specific people that he wanted
to come and work with him. He he was very careful about who
he selected to come and be a subordinate of his both at war
plans at Fort Benning before he went to the Washington area.

(01:04:18):
Even during the war. His one of his big strengths was
to select good subordinates because he could then leave them
alone to do the job. He support them, but he would
not tell them what to do. He's he brought Eisenhower up to
be the head of war plans in 1941right after Pearl Harbor.

(01:04:38):
And one of the things he told Eisenhower in his entry
interview is that Goodman or a dime a dozen.
I can find Goodman anywhere thatthat can do what I tell him to
do. What what I really want is
somebody that can act independently and tell me what
they've done afterwards. That's what I really want.
And so and Eisenhower took that to mean that he was free to make

(01:04:59):
decisions and he was free to do what he thought was executing
the chiefs will. He was free to do that and then
tell him afterwards what he had done.
He, he Marshall was really did not want a string of people
coming up to him all day every day asking him to be the final
authority on everything he said.If you're going to do that, then
what do I need you for? So Marshall.
Marshall is really good at judging character.

(01:05:20):
Judging character and and then also at managing in other words,
not micromanaging. I think Patton was the one that
said famously that if you're a yes man, then one of us is
redundant and it's not me. So that they they just didn't
want yes men in in their organization.
They wanted somebody that could do make decisions on their own

(01:05:43):
and and know that they'd be confident that they were doing
what the chief would have done had he been there.
So yes, a very, very good judge of character and and picking the
right guy to come and work for him.
And that's proved over and over again by the men that he
selected brought to work both the Benning and into the war
plans division and then to command the Army's out in the

(01:06:05):
field. Those are virtually every single
one of them was selected by Marshall and sent over there to
do a particular job. Now, the other thing he did,
which I, I personally like, justas an example, everybody's
familiar with the cases where Patton struck an enlisted man in
a hospital in Italy over North Africa, one and he Marshall,

(01:06:32):
despite the pressure, refused tointercede.
And Patton was a personal friendof his.
They had known each other in theold army for many years.
And and yet he let Eisenhower handle that as he saw fit.
And in his correspondence with Eisenhower, he said frequently,
you know, you do what you think is right and we will back you up
from back here. Never giving an indication as to

(01:06:54):
what he thought would he, Marshall thought was the right
thing to do. It was Eisenhower's problem, if
you will. And he had faith in Eisenhower
to come up with the best solution.
And and he said, give no thoughtto, you know, how it'll wash
back here in the United States. You do what you think is right
and we'll back you up. That's very good, you know,
management of your subordinates.And it takes, you know, not only

(01:07:18):
confidence in your subordinates,but also takes a certain amount
of will to to withstand the heatthat's going to come from that.
But that was his approach for for all of these sorts of
issues. How would you define character?
Well, I mean there's aphorisms out there that would define
character, but I think characteris the make up that guides your

(01:07:41):
actions. So I think it's character is
connected to actions in my mind.It cannot be something separate.
Character is, is not just who you are, it's not just who you
are inside your brain, it's who you are through your actions.
And so that to me is a, is a better definition of character.
There's a lot of people who think they're of high character,

(01:08:03):
but in under pressure or in their actions don't show it.
And so they're not as high a character as they think.
I saw a good quote one time thatsaid we judge other people by
their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.
There's probably some truth in that.

(01:08:24):
And how would you separate actions over intentions when it
comes to because obviously you know what you know and how you
intended to do something or how you how you wanted something to
get done. But then when it comes to how
other people wanted to do it, I guess that's just mostly
communication, just asking them like what was exactly?
There's a lot of elements that go into that.

(01:08:44):
So if you have a subordinate andyou want to like Marshall and
Eisenhower, for example, and youwant to you, you want to give
them the latitude to be the bestperson that they can be.
You don't want them just to be alittle mini you.
And and they don't want you justto be somebody who simply
follows instructions, but just, you know, stands there mute
until you tell him what to do and then he goes and does it.
Even if he does it really well, that's not the point.

(01:09:05):
You want, you haven't got time as a senior manager to do that.
You have to let them give them the freedom of action so that
they can do, they can fulfill their own potential, their own
destiny, if you will, and at thesame time do the things that you
want them to do. That's why they're your
subordinate in the first place. And I think Marshall was quite

(01:09:26):
good at that. Communications, of course, is a
part of it, but also empathy. I mean, they have to have some,
some ability to put yourself in the other guy's shoes and see
the world through his eyes, evenif it's just briefly, to see
what motivates them, what makes them work.
I think empathy is a a quality that's necessary for a good

(01:09:47):
leader. Character is in, in a way, not
the only thing, but in a way, character is built on both the
freedom of choice and the freedom of consequences that
that you will. You can have the freedom to
choose to do what you want to do, but there's also if you
choose to do something negative,then there's also the
consequences tied to that. A recognition that there are

(01:10:07):
consequences to everything that you do and you're free to
choose. We have free will.
We're free to choose what it is we do, but we're not free from
the consequences of what we choose.
And so being able to to have anyintelligence to foresee ahead,
what are the consequences of theactions that I take, I think are
important that empathy is a partof that because many of the

(01:10:31):
actions that we take involve other people either in, in their
assignments or their, you know, tasks that they have to perform.
So having the empathy or the ability to see it from their
viewpoint, I think it's an important thing for for a
leader. Is that very similar to ethical
leadership? Well.
Yes, I mean leadership. It's a subset of ethical
leadership. Or actually what?

(01:10:54):
What is ethical leadership? What is ethical leadership?
That's. A very good way to define it
before we go into that. Ethical leadership, I think, is
being able to lead an organization of people without
regret over the choices that you've made.
It's a, it's comprised of integrity.
It's, it's got a component of intelligence.
You need to be able to figure out what it is that the

(01:11:15):
organization is supposed to do. What's the right thing for it to
do as opposed to what's the expedient thing for it to do.
I, I'm, I think that Marshall was a, a good example of ethical
leadership, but there were many others.
And in that particular era, I think that Eisenhower and
Bradley were also ethical leaders and understood that that

(01:11:36):
their mission was to do the right thing, not necessarily
what was easy or convenient, andparticularly not what is for
their personal gain. So it's leadership motivated by
ethical considerations. That would be a description, I
guess that I would say. And how would you define ethics?
Well, I think I would turn to Plato.
I would let Plato define ethics.That's that's more or less

(01:11:59):
outside my bailiwick. How would Plato define?
Or should I get the actual? Book.
Yeah, you you got Google right there.
Might as well get it. Act as accurate as possible.
Plato defines ethics as the pursuit of a good life, a life
of harmony with reason, virtue and well ordered soul.

(01:12:20):
At the core of Plato's ethics isthe idea that the soul has three
parts, reason, spirit and appetite.
A just or ethical person is one who reasons, who whose reason
rules with spirit supporting reason and appetite kept in
check. Virtue, especially justice,
wisdom, courage and moderation is necessary for personal for
both personal happiness and societal harmony.

(01:12:42):
The ultimate goal is to align the soul with the form of the
good. An abstract perfect, perfect
standard no yeah, perfect standard of goodness that gives
meaning to all moral values. In short, for Plato, ethics is
not about rules or consequences,but about becoming a virtuous
person through self mastery and philosophical understanding.

(01:13:02):
I agree with Plato. I guess at the same time with
when it comes to like anything leadership, both internal
leadership like self regulation as well as external that there
is the opportunity cost which I guess would tie into regret the
things that could have been doneor didn't actually happen.
I mean, there's, I think leadership at a high level is

(01:13:23):
constantly faced with the opportunity cost, the problem of
an opportunity cost. By the time problems get up to
the president's desk or to the chief of staff's desk, there
aren't any easy solutions left. If they were easy, somebody else
would have solved it before it got up there.
And so you're frequently faced with choices at those levels.
I think Truman is a, a kind of agood example of this.

(01:13:45):
You're frequently faced with problems that don't have a good
solution. They only have a, the least bad
solution, and then it becomes least bad to whom?
And you have to decide based on that.
And those are, those are simply not trivial things to do.
It's not easy to be a a leader at that level because of that.
So at the end of the day, it's just being able to make the best

(01:14:07):
decisions with what you know, what you have and the abilities
that you're able to get done with the skills that you.
Have well, you, you want to knowwhat's the best decision for
whom. That's number one is there's
somebody's going to be favored and somebody's not.
And so you have to decide what'smorally right for the decision.
You have to find out whatever you need to know to make a

(01:14:29):
decision. Some people make it an art form
to go refuse to make a decision until they can go get more
information. And so they're constantly on the
hunt For more information, but they use it as a mechanism to
avoid deciding rather than to tomake the best decision.
Time is also a part of the element.
How much time do I have to make a decision?
That's usually the first question the leader will ask

(01:14:50):
when you face him with a A. A decision has to be made almost
always in my mind that the senior guys will say, how much
time do I have? Because I, I can make a good
decision in 30 seconds. I can make a better decision if
you give me two days, make a perfect decision if you give me
a year. You know, it just depends.
But not everyone has a year, andnot every decision has.

(01:15:11):
Not every decision has that, you're right.
So you have to know. So there's a lot to think about
in terms of deciding It's not, it's not a very cut and dried
recipe type of an approach. That's a lot to that revolves
around preparation. The more you prepared for
something, the more you're you can handle that with in a
shorter amount of time. Right.
The, the more prepared I am, theluckier I get.

(01:15:32):
It's kind of the way to, to think about it.
And preparation of course, has all opportunity cost too, where
you've only got so much time. So what are you going to spend
your time to, to do to prepare and, and you can waste it or you
can use it wisely just to get the information that I need.
When we were talking about the Blue Forest tracker that we

(01:15:53):
talked about earlier, we had kind of a, a, I'd say we, the
developers had kind of a dichotomy about how they were
going to present this information.
Is it going to be a push system where information is pushed to
the lower levels from above? Or is it going to be a pull
system where the the informationis maintained in the cloud, so

(01:16:13):
to speak, and when somebody downat the cutting edge wants it,
they call for it, they pull it down.
And we had great debates over and over again about which kind
of system you want. And ultimately the pull system
became what you want because otherwise you will overwhelm the
guy at the bottom because the guy at the top got so much
information. Here's tons of it.

(01:16:36):
And yet the guy at the bottom doesn't want all of that.
What he wants is one or two specific things and nothing
else. You can give someone like if
you're doing the push system, it's like a hurricane.
If you do a pull system, it's like a light shower.
Right. And we, we, we developed a
mission planning system at one time for aircraft for a special
operations aircraft to use in their in their missions.

(01:16:58):
And it was a, a moving map display that that was going to
be put into the cockpit of theirhelicopters.
And when we went down and talkedto the crew chiefs about it or
the pilots and told them what wewere capable of doing, they were
completely underwhelmed. And we were astonished at that
because we thought they'd love to get this kind of information.
It was like a, it was, but what's commonplace now.

(01:17:21):
But in 1990, it wasn't commonplace.
And it was a a digital map that displayed the elevation based
off the photographs, so they could see actual photographs and
basically fly through it. What they were doing, just like
Luke Skywalker and the Death Star type of thing.
And they said no, they said we don't want it once the engines
start turning, they said the only communications we want from

(01:17:41):
anybody is that it to abort. If there's an abort, we want to
hear that. Anything else, we don't want to
hear about it. We're busy.
We got our own stuff. We get, we've planned the
mission. That's what we're going to
execute. So more information to them was
a distraction, not something that they really wanted to have,
which is the way we thought of it at the higher headquarters.
Surely they'll love to have this.

(01:18:02):
Well, the answer was no, they wouldn't.
So that taught me a lesson aboutgoing down to the cutting edge
and asking them what they think they need first.
Now, as time goes on, maybe theywould like it, but their first
reaction was, Nope. The only thing I want to hear
from you is abort. And so it's almost like you have
this massive bucket as a higher up and you get all this

(01:18:22):
information, pour like all this water poured into this bucket
and overtime it starts filling up and you have this like nice
accumulation of information. And if you just dump it on your
on the subordinates, now they'relike overwhelmed with it.
But if you just let them get their own cups and take as much
as they need. Exactly.
A pole system is almost always better, particularly for
subordinates that are under stress, that it's almost always
better for them. They will know what they want,

(01:18:44):
and they want to be able to retrieve it quickly.
That's the best you can do for them.
Shoving everything down there iseasy for you.
That's the easier thing for you to do, but it's not the right
thing to do. Yeah.
So that's that's where convenience is useful.
Well, and the empathy to understand their attention.
Everybody's got finite attentionspans.
We can't absorb much more than 7things I guess.

(01:19:05):
Was Miller's famous thanks 7 ± 2or something?
There's a limit to how much we can and.
They know what they want and andwhat they think they need.
Is there anything specific that you wanted to tie it out of?
No, we would have to take some time to put the room back
together and. Even though technically this is
more of a Marshall podcast, but I'll just tie it in because I, I

(01:19:26):
do this for every podcast. What would you have told
yourself, I guess in your case, maybe 20 years ago or 10 years
ago? Like if you were to talk to
yourself 10 years ago, what would you have told you?
Or another question, what would you?
Who do you want to be 10 years from now?
Well, I'd like to still be me. Yeah.
Well, preferably, yeah, I'd. Like to be above ground?

(01:19:50):
I don't know. 10 years is not a very good time span to pick.
I'm 73. OK, 40 years ago. 40 years ago,
I I would have paid a lot more attention.
I I had several things. I guess one is don't neglect the
religious aspect of your life, the religious component.
I would have, if I met myself 40years ago, I think I would have

(01:20:13):
said you need to develop the religious side of your life more
than you are. So that's, number one would have
paid less attention, I think, tothe conventional wisdom about
how your career should go. And instead let your career
develop on its own. Let it develop.
And there's no, there's no recipe to get to be a senior

(01:20:37):
leader in the US Army and there shouldn't be.
So I think I would have paid less attention to what
everybody, what branch said, youknow, go here, go, go here, do
this, go here, do this, do that job, then do this job.
I would have paid less attentionto that.
But I don't have any what I would call significant regrets
about it. So I'm.
Because it's that's just development that it's like you

(01:20:59):
didn't, you don't know what you don't know.
Everybody develops at a different pace.
It's hard to get get to, to understand that when you're
raising your kids. You, I think you sort of begin
to see that probably for the first time is that everybody
develops at their own pace. It's not the same pace for
everybody. And that goes for all of you,

(01:21:19):
your family. It goes to your subordinates, it
goes for your superiors who are also still undergoing
development in their own lives. Even though they, they, they,
even though they're that you're superior, they're not done
developing themselves. So that's important, I guess, to
keep it. Empathy is a big deal to me.
I mean, being able to see the world through other people's
eyes is a big, a big change, life changer, so.

(01:21:40):
Cool. Thank you.
Appreciate it. You're welcome.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Great. Thanks for listening.
Don't worry, I've done like I think probably have like 1500
minutes already of podcast stuff.
Good. Well, you must be learning a
boatload of stuff. I probably am, I'm just not
retaining it. Well, that's why you got it on
film. I know.

(01:22:00):
Exactly. So I don't have to remember it
now this is this is great. This is not that I had low
expectations or anything, but just I had low expectations.

All Episodes

Speaking Truth to Power and General George C. Marshall - Robert Holcomb, PhD

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Speaking Truth to Power and General George C. Marshall - Robert Holcomb, PhD