In 1960, Henry Steele Commager, a professor of history at Amherst, wrote an article that asked why America had failed to produce a generation of leaders to rival the country’s founding generation. It’s true that the Civil War had given rise to a great president and two generals of unusual military gifts, but Commager saw in his day no leaders of comparable distinction. I’d like to talk about a group of men in living memory whose leadership skills rivaled those of the makers of the Revolution and the architects of the Constitution. These were men who saw the country through the Second World War and especially through the early years of the Cold War—all of whom worked at one time or another for George Marshall. One cluster in this cohort included the American Army’s and Navy’s most senior officers during the war. Their actions constituted a pillar of liberty during a time of world crisis.
From 1941 until 1945, the United States Army was led by the ablest cohort of military leaders in American history—the men who led the Greatest Generation, none of whom survives into the twenty-first century. With rare exceptions, they were men born between 1890 and 1900, and to the larger culture they were essentially unknown until the last year or two before the attack on Pearl Harbor. As a group, their achievements were by any measure extraordinary. The force they built and led grew from 190,000 (in 1939, the American Army ranked in