On November 18, 1945, George Catlett Marshall stepped down from his post as the fifteenth Chief of Staff of the United States Army. It was a momentous tour of duty by any standard, as over the course of five years Marshall oversaw the Army’s preparations for the Second World War and the ultimate victory of American arms over the Axis powers. As the longest-serving Chief of Staff in the Army’s history, Marshall’s retirement was overdue, and after the stresses of the war he looked forward to a long period of rest with his wife.

Instead, a month later Marshall flew to China as President Harry Truman’s special envoy to the region. This marked the start of a new phase in Marshall’s storied career of public service, as the general now began a six-year period undertaking a new succession of challenging tasks. As Forrest Pogue makes clear in the fourth and final volume of his account of Marshall’s life, the general’s service came at a critical moment in the country’s relationship with the world, as the United States sought to define its place in the postwar environment. Marshall played a major role in this process, first as Truman’s special advisor in China, then in the cabinet as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. In these offices he helped shape the postwar settlement in Europe, championed the economic recovery plan that was to bear his name, and managed America’s military at a critical phase of its war in Korea.

These positions called upon the depth of knowledge and the range of skills that Marshall had developed over his long military career. As special envoy, Marshall attempted to bridge the divide between the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong’s Communists, only for his efforts to fail at the intractability of the two sides. Marshall’s experience with high-level conferences proved far more useful in his role as Secretary of State, to which office Truman named him upon his return to the United States in 1947. As the nation’s top diplomat Marshall soon found himself dealing with the enormous challenge of rebuilding postwar Europe, one made more difficult by the Soviet Union’s willingness to let policy drift regardless of the ongoing suffering.

In response, the United States developed the European Recovery Program. Though this became known as the Marshall Plan, Pogue makes it clear that this was not his brainchild but that of his department’s Policy Planning Staff. In this respect it was a triumph of Marshall’s management style, in that he defined their goal and left them to work out the solution. Yet Pogue’s description of Marshall’s efforts to convince Congress to approve the funding for it make it clear that his involvement was vital for the program’s success, fully justifying the Nobel Peace Prize he subsequently would receive for it.

Upon his departure from the State Department in 1949 Marshall accepted a largely honorific position as the president of the American Red Cross. His hopes for a permanent retirement, though, ended with the Korean War. With the incumbent Defense Secretary, Louis Johnson, blamed for budget cuts that left American forces poorly prepared, Truman asked Marshall to take up the office. As a result, Marshall found himself at the heart of the controversy surrounding Truman’s firing of Douglas MacArthur, and subject to increasing attacks by the Republican right as a consequence. It was a discordant note to what was otherwise the acclaim he received both upon his final retirement in 1951 and his death eight years later.

The final volume of Pogue’s biography completes what is an effective monument to a great statesman and public servant. In it he provides an often-meticulous account of Marshall’s labors and the problems he addressed. In the process of recounting the events of the various conferences and committee hearings in which his subject participated, though, Pogue often loses himself in the details. What he leaves out in the process is any real analysis of Marshall’s actions or his broader thinking. As a result, while giving us a biography that will long serve as a valuable resource on Marshall’s career and a testament to his labors, it falls short in providing us with any assessment of his achievements or the legacy he left through them. ( )