| Original caption: “George C. Marshall walking in Washington, District of Columbia on the day he assumed the office of Secretary of State. Others are unidentified.” Newly appointed Secretary of State George C. Marshall Jr. (December 31, 1880 – October 16, 1959), enters the Old Executive Office Building on the day he became Secretary of State under United States President Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972). Marshall — his nomination unanimously confirmed by the Republican-dominated Foreign Relations Committee and the entire Senate in less than an hour – came to chilly Washington and the Department of State on January 21, 1947. Although his appointment might be considered political – that he could not change-the new secretary had no intention of playing a partisan role. Met by a clutch of reporters at Washington’s Union Station on the morning of January 21, Marshall volunteered: “I am assuming that the office of secretary of state, at least under present conditions, is nonpolitical and I am going to govern myself accordingly. I will never become involved in political matters, and therefore I cannot be considered a candidate for political office. The popular conception that no matter what a man says he can be drafted as a candidate for some political office would be without any force with regard to me. I cannot be drafted for any political office.” The flat disclaimer cleared the air. New York Times columnist James Reston (November 3, 1909 – December 6, 1995) wrote that Republicans in Congress could now support his program without fear they were creating a presidential candidate. David Lawrence (December 25, 1888 – February 11, 1973), conservative publisher of United States News, concluded Marshall’s railroad station announcement had “surrounded him with a prestige both inside and outside this country which no man in public office, not even President Truman, can command.” Within an hour of arriving in Washington, Marshall, clad in his 1 civilian suit, strode into the White House. As he made his way through the crowded lobby, he was greeted with spontaneous applause from White House staff members. In a brief ceremony, with his wife Katherine Tupper Marshall (October 8, 1882 – December 18, 1978) and a beaming Harry Truman looking on, Marshall was sworn in by Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson (January 22, 1890 – September 8, 1953) as the 50th man to be Secretary of State, and the 1st career military officer to hold the position. Marshall’s mettle would be tested quickly. He was coming to State with no overriding policy, with no personal agenda other than the most evident to a professional soldier who had weathered 2 world wars in his lifetime. “The only way to be sure of winning a third world war is to prevent it.” All else was secondary. The indoctrination of the new secretary of state began immediately. Marshall spent 45 minutes with the President, then crossed to the adjacent former State, War and Navy Building for a meeting with Undersecretary of State Dean G. Acheson (April 11, 1893 – October 12, 1971). In that ornate structure, where 45 years before, less 1 month, 2nd Lieutenant George C. Marshall had reported for duty, the new Secretary of State began work. He would have been less than human if he had not paused to wonder about the very neatness of it all, beginning both his 1st and his last government job in the same building. His face was lined and wiser now, and the years had left him 50 pounds (22 kilograms) heavier, at 200 (90 kilograms). His once sandy hair was silvered, the lean face drawn, grown lumpy, the flesh sagging beneath the chin. The eyes were the same, a piercing blue that riveted men in place. The experienced Acheson could guide Marshall through the host of international problems confronting his new department: the German and Austrian peace treaties had to be negotiated; France and Italy teetered on the brink of voting Communist; Great Britain was virtually bankrupt; divided Korea had to be unified; China-well, Marshall knew all about China. Despite a succession of 1- to 3-hour briefings he called his “Ten Commandments,” Marshall could not hope to master more than a portion of it. He needed someone with a broad familiarity with the issues, and especially someone, like the acerbic Acheson, who understood just how the department functioned. In his 1st weeks as secretary, Marshall found himself nearly overwhelmed by briefings and problems. “It is a little more than an endurance contest,” he wrote Madame Soong Mei-ling Chiang (March 4, 1898 – October 23, 2003), on February 5. Still, these were rewarding weeks for a restored Marshall. 4 days after the swearing-in ceremony, Acheson was writing the former secretary of state, Henry Stimson, “General Marshall has taken hold of this baffling institution with the calmness orderliness and vigor with which you are familiar.” He settled upon an easy schedule, arriving at his office at 38 each morning. Lunch in the dining room next to his office was brief, often enough followed by a 15-minute nap on an army cot set up in the great walk-in safe in the secretary’s office. After a day of briefings, he routinely left for Leesburg at 34 where he might find himself “dispatched to the roof to clean out the gutters, with the simple excuse that no other labor was obtainable,” he wrote to the former British ambassador, Lord Halifax. “This was the action of the totalitarian government which kept me at work every evening when I returned at about 1730 Hours. However, the physical labor really helped me to endure the mental torments of this confused situation and lack of time to assimilate the large amount of information required of me to act intelligently.” Marshall 1st tackled a thorough reorganization of his department. Marshall’s predecessor, James Byrnes (May 2, 1882 – April 9, 1972), had cared little about the convoluted bureaucracy. Absent at foreign ministers’ meetings for 350 of his 562 days in office, Byrnes with his off handed administrative style had driven Acheson, the acting secretary, to distraction and near resignation. Acheson was delighted with Marshall’s proposal. Power resided in the geographical desks, Far East, Latin America, Europe, headed by regional potentates who talked with each other only to wage jurisdictional war. It was a department grown encrusted with privilege and seniority, slow to respond, and ponderous with prerogatives. In their 1st meeting on January 21, Marshall outlined a new structure, imposing a chain of command for the 1st time in departmental memory. He wanted Acheson to create a secretariat as Marshall once had in the War Department. Through that office and the undersecretary would come all papers to him. The secretariat staff-headed by another man drawn from the War Department, Colonel Carlisle H. Humelsine (1915 – January 25, 1989) – would soon learn that he wanted concise reports with terse recommendations at the conclusion, and small boxes on the page, in which he would initial his approval or rejection. There were problems with strict adherence to the military model, Acheson later told Marshall’s biographer, Forrest C. Pogue Jr. (September 17, 1912 – October 6, 1996). “I thought, as distinct from the military services, the Department of State required at all stages of the development of an idea the imprint of the Secretary’s wishes, because these views would reflect the opinion of the Administration, of which the Secretary and the Under Secretary were a part.” Marshall would from time to time have to attend committee meetings, to guide the discussions, Acheson advised. It would remain a distasteful chore to the Secretary. Despite the military-like structure of his department, Marshall’s approach to the work was not that of a soldier, Acheson discovered. Rather, it was that of “a man who understood forms of public leadership and forces of international friction…In the field of ideas, there hardly was less a military mind than his.” Marshall 1st ordered that his department, tucked away in no less than 46 offices across Washington, move into a comparatively small building erected in 1940 for the War Department in “Foggy Bottom.” New State at 21st Street and Virginia Avenue Southwest, with its 604 offices, was too small, but it was better than Old State. At least this 1st new office building for the department since the administration of Ulysses S. Grant that was air-conditioned. The Department of State, like most of official Washington, had grown rapidly during the war. The fewer than 1,000 employees in 1939 and a Foreign Service of 4,139 had grown by 1946 to 7,623 employees and 11,115 Foreign Service officers. With numbers had come a labyrinthine bureaucracy that churned out few decisions and many reports. Robert A. Lovett (September 14, 1895 – May 7, 1986), the former Undersecretary of War for Air, compared the department’s daily functions to the love life of an elephant: all important business was done at a very high level, any developments were accompanied by tremendous trumpeting, and the results would not be forthcoming for 18 months. Marshall intended no housecleaning. According to Marshall’s Department of State aide, Lieutenant Colonel Marshall Carter (September 16, 1909 – February 18, 1993), the Secretary treated those in the department as if they had the same motivation, desire, and intelligence as he did. He did not want to tell people how to do their tasks, but assumed they knew their jobs. When something went wrong, Marshall did not try to fix blame, but rather to fix the problem. There were those who could not, or would not adapt. With the assistance of Colonel Carter, Acheson grimly set to, often working against the entrenched resistance of the Department staff and the clubby Foreign Service. A succession of transfers and accepted resignations broke the resisters; this would not be Cordell Hull’s (October 2, 1871 – July 23, 1955) or James Byrnes’s State Department. David E. Lilienthal (July 8, 1899 – January 15, 1981), a dinner guest at the Acheson home in the 1st months of 1947, marveled at the change in his host. “Dean spent a good deal of the time bubbling over with his enthusiasm, rapture almost, about General Marshall. He has admired him for a long time. But to work with him is such a joy that he can hardly talk about anything else,” he noted. Acheson was not the only employee of the State Department to feel the change. Up and down the halls, up and down the ranks, there was a new spirit. “At an early staff meeting, something was said regarding morale in the department,” a newer member recalled. “Marshall replied:“‘Gentlemen, it is my experience an enlisted man may have a morale problem. An officer is expected to take care of his own morale.’” Shunning committee meetings, Marshall pressed staff members hard to come to conclusions. “Don’t fight the problem. Decide it!” he insisted repeatedly. They were to make recommendations to him: “I don’t want you fellows sitting around asking me what to do. I want you to tell me what to do.” It was the well-honed military technique. D. Dean Rusk (February 9, 1909 – December 20, 1994), a former officer in the War Department transferred to State, remembered Marshall as “a great teacher, by his own example and the remarks he made…’Gentlemen, let us not discuss this as a military problem; to do so turns it into a military problem.’” As Secretary of State, 1 of his many outstanding accomplishments was the Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP). This was an American initiative enacted in 1948 to provide foreign aid to Western Europe, and the non-Communist world. The United States transferred $13.3 1,000,000,000 (equivalent to $133 1,000,000,000 in 2024) in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World War II. Replacing an earlier proposal for a plan by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. (May 11, 1891 – February 6, 1967), it operated for 4 years beginning on April 3, 1948, though in 1951, the Marshall Plan was largely replaced by the Mutual Security Act. The goals of the United States were to rebuild war-torn regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, improve prosperity and prevent the spread of Communism. The Marshall Plan proposed the reduction of interstate barriers and the economic integration of the European Continent while also encouraging an increase in productivity as well as the adoption of modern business procedures. Abbie A. Rowe (August 23, 1905 – April 17, 1967) was an American photographer, best known for being an official White House photographer from 1941 to 1967, covering 5 successive administrations. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0680.jpg |
| Image Size | 702.59 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2912 x 2354 |
| Photographer | Abbie A. Rowe |
| Photographer Title | National Park Service |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | January 21, 1947 |
| Location | |
| City | Washington |
| State or Province | District of Columbia |
| Country | United States |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | 73-2361 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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