Boris Pasternak, the great Russian writer, wrote that "Man is born to live, not to prepare for life." George Marshall's life, in full retrospective, appears to have been a life in preparation for the mighty tasks that it might have to undertake later.

He was born at the right time, 1880, for what was to be asked of him. The array of his assignments, the character of each of them and their range, made for a great preparation and a lifetime's education. And Marshall, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Lincoln, "grew with each new challenge, however large." Like his own great hero, Benjamin Franklin, he made himself a continuous student with a lifelong instinct for what was new: new ideas, new men and women, new and useful things.

This is the general who interrupted a meeting in 1942 to hear a two-minute presentation in the hallway by a senior aide, Walter Bedell Smith. Smith said, "This new vehicle is simple, mobile, and hardy and I think we ought to go ahead and contract for it." Marshall looked at him and said simply, "Go ahead and do it." Six hundred and forty thousand of these new vehicles were manufactured during the war. It was the Jeep. No study. No committee. No memoranda. Just do it.

In 1897, Marshall went to the Virginia Military Institute, the redoubtable old Virginia school that believed in using military means to educate productive civilian citizens, men--it was all male in those days--who would be prepared to answer their country's call as citizen soldiers during wartime. Marshall was an indifferent student, but he was a model cadet. He learned how to lead. These young cadets were not automatons who wanted to be career soldiers. They wanted to be judges, farmers, doctors, lawyers. They could not be ordered around like Hessian conscripts. From the first, he cultivated a cool, distancing courtesy, as Barbara Tuchman called it, and a personal austerity. Yet it was not the kind to excite jealousy. It evoked admiration.

He served as a young officer in the Philippines shortly after the end of the Spanish-American War. Within six months, he had been assigned to command an outpost on an island, several weeks' travel from headquarters, making him, in effect, at the age of twenty-one, a governor general of a place as big as Connecticut. Like Douglas MacArthur and Joe Stillwell and others of this cohort, he was given huge responsibility at a very early age. Here is the school of self-reliance, and the satisfactions of work, completely unrelated to praise, promotion, celebrity, riches. Marshall, in fact, would remain a lieutenant for fourteen years, which was standard for his generation, and, much later, a lieutenant colonel for eleven.

In the years before World War I, he discovered that he was a natural teacher. He undertook many assignments as an instructor or a counselor to National Guard units in the Midwest and northeast. From the earliest days of his career he seemed to understand that future American wars would be prosecuted and won mainly by people who were not professional soldiers, but ordinary American citizens. They had to be made competent soldiers who simply understood what they had to do and were unafraid to do it. By the end of World War I, more than two million were in uniform. Only fifteen years before, the total enrollment in the American army had been twenty-eight thousand.

By now Marshall had made a reputation as a brilliant staff officer capable of great prodigies of training and logistics, and something else--man with an uninhibited compulsion, as the Quakers say, to speak truth to power. In World War II, he would regularly challenge President Roosevelt, always respectfully, always loyally, of course, but always forthrightly and boldly. Once during World War I, as a young major, he was outraged at General Pershing's criticism of his divisional commander, and spoke up, "in front of a horrified audience of staff officers," even laying a hand on Pershing's forearm as the general turned to leave.

It's difficult for this generation to imagine the eminence of General John Pershing, the only American soldier ever to have the title of general of the armies, but to approach General Pershing in that particular way must have taken some strong Quaker instinct to speak truth to power. The consequence was that Pershing respected him and later hired Marshall as his aide. Marshall served Pershing as a regimental officer in China, where he learned Mandarin; he went to Fort Benning, where he became, in effect, the dean, and radically reformed the curriculum. During his stewardship, thousands of young officers passed through the Infantry School. Two hundred of them would become generals in World War II, and Marshall knew and watched and evaluated almost all of them.

In 1938, as a fairly new brigadier general assigned to Washington among thirty general officers, and the most junior among them, he, again, found himself in a situation not unlike that with General Pershing.

On this occasion, he accompanied a group of his superiors to the Oval Office. He had not yet met or had a chance to talk to President Roosevelt. The president asked the group whether they shared his enthusiastic vision for how the Army Air Corps should purchase and develop large fleets of planes. He went around the room. Each officer nodded. Finally, he looked at General Marshall and said, "Don't you agree, George?" the only time he ever called him "George." "No, Mr. President, I do not agree with you at all." Leaving the office, the other officers wished Marshall well in his new assignment in Alaska or wherever he was about to be sent. But FDR, as his friend, Henry Morganthau, pointed out, liked to be stood up to in that way. The following year, the president made the best appointment of his wartime years. He made General Marshall chief of staff, joining him in a partnership with a great secretary of war, Henry Stimson. From 1939 until 1951, Marshall would serve in the most consequential posts in government, in the first six years of that period as chief of staff, and, later on, as secretary of state and secretary of defense.

The work was enormous, almost beyond our capacity to measure: to create a vast army and its leaders, to assure its support, its weapons, its logistics, to develop the tactics and strategies for its employment, to help fuse and direct the energies of a mighty coalition of allies. It is impossible to imagine larger responsibilities. In addressing them hour by hour, day by day, with steady, unsparing attention and intellectual equanimity, great integrity and in the fact of unremitting difficulty, Marshall was demonstrating a heroism of a particular and exemplary sort.

In the summer of 1943, as the invasion of Normandy grew near, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that the commander must be an American, given the size of the American force. It seems to have been understood by both Roosevelt and Churchill, that Marshall, as the senior American, would command the invading force. Churchill, in his war memoirs, talks of the moment when he learned he would be prime minister and how it seemed to him that all his life had been preparation for that moment and that it was a vindication of what he believed himself capable of achieving. For a soldier, General Marshall, it would have been the equivalent to what Churchill had experienced: The supreme command of the greatest operation in military history.

However, Marshall had made himself literally indispensable to the president and to the country as head of the army-not of its largest invading force abroad, but in Washington as head of the army's 8.3 millions of men and women in uniform.

Roosevelt, always diffident in personal confrontation, sought somehow to have Marshall indicate to his friend, Harry Hopkins, what Marshall's preference would be. Marshall would not respond. He was the dutiful servant of the elected government and its president. He would not want the president to feel constrained, he said, in any way in making his choice. He repeated the same in a meeting with FDR. The president, who by now realized he needed Marshall to stay on as chief of staff, could only respond, "Well, I couldn't sleep at night with you out of Washington."

Dwight D. Eisenhower was given the command, at which he was to prove superlatively good, and he had the full and affectionate backing of his old mentor, Marshall. It was one of the three great military relationships in American history: Marshall and Eisenhower, Lee and Jackson, Grant and Sherman.

General Eisenhower must surely have felt the warmth and confidence of Marshall's regard for him, perhaps best shown in a small incident in 1943. Eisenhower had wrestled for weeks over the problem of whether to relieve General George Patton of command because of the well-known slapping incident in Sicily. Patton had accused two soldiers of cowardice on the battlefield when he met them in a medical tent. Eisenhower had to weigh this issue against Patton's great skill and reputation as the country's greatest combat commander. Marshall wrote him an extraordinary letter saying, "if it is your decision that General Patton be relieved from duty, allow me to do that. You have far more difficult and searching duties and decisions before you to be further troubled by the outcry that would follow such a decision. Let me do it."

The war ended. From 1947 through April 1949, Marshall served as secretary of state, and almost at once came face-to-face with a challenge that would both test and define the nature of his service. By March 1947, it had become plain that the Soviet Union was determined to exploit the terrible economic and social consequences of the war in Europe. The United States had already given four hundred million dollars in aid to Greece and Turkey, both in danger of communist takeover. At the same time, in a little heralded speech at Princeton University, George Marshall told his audience that the United States was now, beyond any reckoning, the indispensable power for good in the world. The European world, however, could never strengthen itself, could never revivify itself by means of treaties of defense or armaments. Its condition required a complete program to rebuild the economies of its countries.

The initiatives that came together and were made a coherent program approved by the Congress and by their European beneficiaries, are known to us today as the Marshall Plan. The public enunciation of that plan was made on June 5, 1947, at Harvard University, as part of the commencement exercises at which General Marshall, along with T. S. Eliot and Omar Bradley, received an honorary degree.

It was a pure reflection of a deeply meditated conviction. Marshall delivered his remarks in his authoritative, quiet, uninflected voice. "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos," he said that day. "The initiative must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support of such a program, so far as it may be practical for us to do so." This was a workmanlike talk. There was no filigree of ingratiating commencement oratory. The British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, the next morning, immediately saluted it as "One of the greatest speeches in the history of the world."

The program that it catalyzed into being, the Plan for European Recovery, would be saluted by Churchill as the most unsordid act in history. Its net disbursement in goods, credits and grants, was about $13.5 billion over four years, in today's dollars, approximately ninety to ninety-five billion. It was given very much in the spirit of priming the pump. We would be the helpful enabler, not the rich uncle, and though it was unsordid, it was not completely disinterested, for there could be no stronger bulwark against communism than a vibrant western economy.

The columnist, George Will, some years ago talked about heroic lives, not heroic acts or heroic campaigns to achieve some finite end, but lives which themselves have an integrity that fuses and connects all their elements, lives that are made in obedience to a certain code, and are consecrated to some special, mighty purpose, and without calculation of risk or reward. Marshall's was one of these lives.

He would not permit himself to receive decorations, awards, or honorary degrees during wartime. He would not permit himself to write memoirs. He believed they would invariably be hurtful to some people or to the relatives or to some people no longer alive to defend themselves.

Marshall, like the great man in the Stephen Spender poem, "left the vivid air signed with his honor," dutifulness, self-command, compassion, and courage. Marshall embodies, he incarnates all of the things that you should champion in your own lives.