August 5, 2009

Rachel Thompson, director of special projects at the George C. Marshall International Center in Leesburg, spoke to the Washington Society for Churchill summer picnic on August 2nd about the extensive correspondence between Churchill and Gen. George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff from 1939 to 1945. Using color copies of examples of that correspondence, Thompson underlined that though the two men demonstrated dramatically different personalities, and often disagreed on matters of wartime strategy, they held each other in the highest esteem. The stream of letters continued after the war, including Marshall’s hand-written thank-you notes for signed volumes of Churchill’s history of the war, and concerning the June 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, where Marshall represented then-President Eisenhower.

That Marshall actively read Churchill’s books is evident in one delightful phrase from a mid-1946 letter written while he was Secretary of State: “The new weeds in my garden at Leesburg will rejoice in the knowledge that between them and their fate stands over 600 pages of your unexcelled prose.” She noted that in 1953 both men received Nobel Prizes, Churchill for literature, and Marshall for peace (ironic for a former general). For her talk, Thompson drew on a late 2006 exhibition of facsimiles of many of those letters at Dodona Manor, Marshall’s Leesburg home from 1941 until his death in 1959, now a museum. An expanded reprise of that exhibit is being planned for 2010, incorporating documents and letters from both men.

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