Posted on 02/13/2024 6:58:57 AM PST by ProgressingAmerica
It is a difficult book to accept for many people. It was difficult for me to accept.
But Joseph McCarthy had plenty of experience spotting people whose actions indicated that they might have conflicted allegiances, and Marshall drew his attention.
As he examined the life of George Catlett Marshall, he found reasons to suspect Marshall, for whatever reason, was serving the interests of entities other than the US Government.
McCarthy does not specify who or what those entities may have been, and he does not specify why he thinks Marshall may have been making decisions that served the interests of people who were not serving the interests of the United States of America.
He doesn't say Marshall is a Communist or Communist sympathizer, someone who might be influenced by ideology or a misguided desire to help the downtrodden. He doesn't say he thinks Marshall was being blackmailed. He doesn't address those things at all.
But what he does in this book is look at the indisputable facts as seen in a contemporary prism, while events are fresh, and examines Marshall's actions in it. He pointedly asks questions about those actions that many people don't want to even consider, much less answer.
Even to themselves.
He starts the book by baldly stating that people advised him against giving the speech in the Senate that the book is based on. This is on the first page of the book:
"...Those questions recalled the advice given me by some of my friends before I gave the history of George Marshall “Don’t do it, McCarthy,” they said. “Marshall has been built into such a great hero in the eyes of the people that you will destroy yourself politically if you lay hands on the laurels of this great man.” My answer to those well-meaning; friends was that the reason the world is in such a tragic state today is that too many politicians have been doing only that which they consider politically wise—only that which is safe for their own political fortunes..."
I think that in today's world, if one is a Patriot, that last sentence has to not only resonate, but serve as a familiar reminder of why we are in the position we are in.
As for the book, I will give you one scenario in the book that illustrates why McCarthy wrote the book, and why he had suspicion and contempt for Marshall:
"...Another item of interest in regard to Marshall is found in the Reader’s Digest of January 1944.
The late Frederick C. Painton was describing an interview had with General Marshall by 60 Anglo-American correspondents in Algiers:
“A door opened, a hush fell, General Marshall walked in. He looked around the room, his eyes calm, his face impassive. “To save time,” he said, “I’m going to ask each of you what questions you have in mind.” His eyes turned to the first correspondent. “What’s your question?“
A penetrating query was put; General Marshall nodded and went on to the next man—and so around the room, until 60 correspondents had asked challenging questions ranging from major strategy to technical details of the war on a dozen fronts. “General Marshall looked off into space for perhaps 30 seconds. Then he began.
For nearly 40 minutes he spoke. His talk was a smooth, connected, brilliantly clear narrative that encompassed the war. And this narrative, smooth enough to be a chapter in a book, included a complete answer to every question we had asked.
“But what astounded us most was this: as he reached the point in his narrative which dwelt upon a specific question, he looked directly at the man who had asked the question! “Afterward I heard many comments from the correspondents. Some said they had just encountered the greatest military mind in history. Others exclaimed over the encyclopedic detail Marshall could remember. All agreed on one thing: “That’s the most brilliant interview I have ever attended in my life.”
The above interview becomes extremely interesting when compared to Marshall’s inability to recall what he was doing on the morning of Pearl Harbor.
Originally, Marshall testified that he was out horseback riding and for that reason could not be contacted.
Later, he testified his memory had been refreshed and that he actually had not been horseback riding but was at home with his wife
The third version of where the Army Chief of Staff was on that fateful morning is contained in Arthur Upton Pope’s book Litvinoff, in which the diary account of Litvinoff’s trip from Russia to the United States shows that Marshall was meeting Litvinoff at the airport on Pearl Harbor morning. While the question of whether Marshall was riding horseback, or with his wife, or with Litvinoff seems unimportant today, it does form a very interesting comparison of Marshall’s memory on these two occasions..."
The reason I present this anecdote is that McCarthy's instincts on this were usually spot on when he was running his committee, and he had an ability to spot inconsistency. In this, he considered the seminal event of American history, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and knew that everyone from small children to elderly adults knew where they were on the morning of December 7, 1941. This is much the same for the Kennedy Assassination and the Challenger Explosion. It is burned into most of us.
And Marshall seemed not to know, changing his story under oath several times, and nobody called him on it.
Marshall was not a stupid man, as the anecdote about his press conference clearly shows. And given all McCarthy wrote in this book about the loss of China to the Communists, Marshall was not a man who made careless mistakes.
The last page of the book states:
"...If Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would have dictated that at least some of his decisions would have served this country’s interest. Even if Marshall had been innocent of guilty intention, how could he have been trusted to guide the defense of this country further?
We have declined so precipitously in relation to the Soviet Union in the last six years, how much swifter may be our fall into disaster with Marshall’s policies continuing to guide us? Where will all this stop? This is not a rhetorical question; ours is not a rhetorical danger.
Where next will Marshall’s policies, continued by Acheson, carry us? What is the objective of the conspiracy? I think it is clear from what has occurred and is now occurring: to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East and to impair our will to resist evil. To what end? To the end that we shall be contained and frustrated and finally fall victim to Soviet intrigue from within and Russian military might from without. Is that far-fetched? There have been many examples in history of rich and powerful states which have been corrupted from within, enfeebled and deceived until they were unable to resist aggression..."
You are most welcome. You can probably tell this was a bit of a labor of love for me, due to the subject matter.
By the way, I would welcome any criticism if you are indeed listening to it. I am trying to get better at this dictation of books, and anything you think I could change to make it better is criticism I am willing to listen to!
Thank you.
Is this about the feckless GOP?
Kidding, aside. Looking forward to this read.
Thanks again! I am learning a lot.
The low volume is a Librivox requirement. They want the files at a certain decibel level. I think it has to do with keeping in mind people who might be using headphones, and I also think there are requirements on archive.org that are out of Librivox’s control.
If you ever changed your mind about contributing, I would greatly like to have someone that doesn’t do full solo works but just helps me out with a few items on a rare occasion. There is much less recording that way.
Thank you for that feedback-the volume is a strange thing to me. You have to record it within specific parameters (between 86dB and 92dB) but I will be damned if can figure out any kind of control over it!
But I think in the future, I will add a step after exporting as an MP3 file, to do a final boost up to the maximum dB.
I’m like you-I listen to a lot of books, and there are some I have never even made it through the first chapter! I try to remember to sample now before I get them...:)
Heh, the last book I did “Life and Times of Joseph Warren” was really hard for me to read...it had a whole paragraph of French, another paragraph somewhere of...Latin, and...a song patriots of the Revolution sang to the famous tune of “British Grenadiers”.
The French...I hope to God I never run into a French person (or anyone who knows French) because it was really damn hard. I ran it through a google thing that played it, and I had to write it down phonetically. It was terrible, and I don’t think I did a good job.
I work in medicine, so the Latin part was easier...I can figure out most Latin words.
And the song? I wasn’t going to sing it and just dictate it, but...it sounded so flat and dead just reading it, that I gave it a shot at singing it. That was fun, but I don’t have any illusions about how well it came out, but...I think it is just barely passable! I did kind of enjoy that, because I like the song. It is one of those songs (”British Grenadiers”) that when you hear it, you know it already because you have probably heard it played dozens of times in your life, and it is quite catchy!
Ha ha That sounds like it was quite challenging.
Thank you very much.
The machine worked its magic. Now on YouTube! Such a great delivery system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7CFX347lrk
Huh. How does that work? Someone just posts it to YouTube?
I don’t know for certain.(I never asked) I would hope that there’s a bit of code automation that puts most of it together, then a person would have to select an image and upload it to YouTube at the end.
But I do find it really cool that when we do these things, our voice gets carried forward in a multitude of ways.
I agree! I expect I will start The Capture of Fort William and Mary tonight or Wednesday night!
Excellent post.
I remember an old book that covered the topic very well:
https://www.amazon.com/McCarthy-His-Enemies-William-Buckley/dp/0895264722
I was a prodigy I guess—read books like this before I went to college—inoculated me against the leftist professors.
I had a lot of fun tricking them into contradictions of their own propaganda—because I knew more about various topics than they did.
After a few months you could see the look of sheer terror in their eyes every time they looked at my raised hand.
;-)
I think the questions/mysteries you raised are mostly solved by reading the works on Anthony Sutton.
https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-FDR-Antony-Sutton/dp/1905570716
https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Capitalists/dp/190557035X
https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Hitler-Antony-Sutton/dp/0945001533
Follow the money.
A forensic audit of Marshall would answer all the questions.
In "America's Retreat From Victory" he obliquely points at something:
"...After Colonel Marshall had been removed from command at Fort Screven, he left for Fort Moultrie in South Carolina. The residence of the Commanding Officer of that post was a large, rambling structure, replete with 42 French doors opening on two verandas. Mrs. Marshall, as she reports it, had barely provided 325 yards of curtains for the French doors when orders came transferring her husband to Chicago as senior instructor of the Illinois National Guard...
I see this as a clue, that he (or his wife) had a grasping nature, and were susceptible to the pressures of money. We were in the grips of the Depression when his wife was purchasing 325 yards of curtains for the commandant quarters on Fort Moultrie.
I have never fully been ready to reconcile Marshall as a Communist or even a closet Communist, but I think it is possible influence was being negatively asserted on him in the form of blackmail of some kind, financial, sexual, et.
And that is something the Communists were very good at. And once they own someone, there is no escape.
The audio revisionist history is now available to be propagted
Once you master Sutton you realize that ideology is a symptom of the problem and not the problem.
Communism was about an elite keeping competitors down.
I always say that under Communism what is mine is mine and what is yours is mine.
The analogy would be “climate change” ideology today.
It is insane on its face—but the elites use it to control people, manipulate people, brainwash people.
They use it get special favors and special treatment for themselves and their corporate and/or nonprofit buddies.
Once you recognize as a tool and not the driving issue (which is wealth and power) a lot of stuff starts to make sense.
Part of why I freaked out professors was by showing that those who claimed to help the poor seemed to always get rich on their schemes.
Case in point: US Politicians, particularly (but not universally) on the Left.
I think Fani Willis exemplifies that. She gets an annual salary of around $120K, but is worth over $8 million, with an annual net revenue of $2.7 million.
It is all those stock options. And speaking events. Yeah. That's the ticket.
What’s that supposed to mean?
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