Reconciliation Road: A Family Odyssey

Epilogue

Euilolue A DECADE HAS PASSED since the road trip around America that is the centerpiece ofthis story. In many ways, the time seems much longer, with all the changes that have come in the passing years, some welcome , but others not, especially the deaths of many people who were crucial to my odyssey. This is now a country with an ever shrinking attention span, where nothing is stronger than the urge to move on to the next new thing. So it was inevitable that the "S. L. A. Marshall controversy" would soon fade away. Yesterday's front-page headline is today's stale news, after all, and tomorrow's forgotten footnote. Yet, there are important points made while the embers of this controversy still flicker. Zealotry does give way to reason and later to new research with an appreciation for Marshall's significant contributions to history, whatever his flaws as a person. In 1990, two rising talents in military history-American Eliot A. Cohen ofHarvard and Englishman John Gooch ofthe University of Lancaster-draw heavily on Marshall's work in a new book. Their Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy ofFailure in War devotes one chapter to an examination of the defeat of the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea, which Marshall recounted in The River and the Gauntlet. Cohen and Gooch describe Marshall as "perhaps the greatest of all American combat historians and the author of the most important studies of combat in this phase ofthe Korean War."! And they praise his post-combat interview technique as "one of the most striking methodological innovations in the study of military history."2 282 EPILOGUE 283 But nothing that Cohen and Gooch write resonates with me as much as their description of the approach that Marshall brought to his studies in Korea. The two historians found that he was no lackey, apologizing for the Army's failings (a charge made even more during Vietnam ). Instead, Marshall raised criticism in what he considered the proper channels. As Cohen and Gooch write: "In public Marshall leaped to the defense of the GIs and their commanders in Korea. In private-in letters and classified reports-he scourged the Army he held responsible for the needless losses of November and December 1950."3 Marshall's work in World War II is praised in Geoffrey Perrett's 1991 book, There's a War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II. Perrett spotlights Marshall's post-combat interview technique and its important impacts: "Combat historians . . . would get to the survivors of firefights and battles to show them where they had been, describe what they had done and turn the reconstruction of combat into a collective act of memory and catharsis. What had become obscure became knowledge, what had been mystifying had become obvious . The actors finally understood their parts and could measure their performance."4 The passing decade also sees a growing public appreciation for military history, with highly rated films and best-selling books, from Ken Burns's The Civil War to Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, from Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain to Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. Such popularity never came Marshall's way during his lifetime , not even with the excellent film version of Pork Chop Hill (now on video). The 1990s' surge in interest in military history brings no new notice of Marshall's huge body of work either. Most of his books are now out of print, usually bought and sold only by avid collectors. Yet Marshall's work lives on in other ways. His pioneering postcombat interview technique continues to be used by American military historians in today's conflicts, including the Gulf War, although the interviews are now recorded on videotape. Two of the most prominent military historians of this day do acknowledge their debt to Marshall. American Stephen Ambrose and Britisher John Keegan are, in a way, Marshall's legacy. Their eloquent, best-selling works focus on the uncommon contributions of the common soldier, just as Marshall always did. Ambrose becomes one of America's most popular historians in 284 EPILOGUE the years after our meeting in Pennsylvania, his chiseled visage now familiar from Ken Burns's documentaries and television appearances on behalf of his best-selling accounts of Lewis and Clark and World War II. Ambrose, in our interview, says he has reexamined Marshall amidst the controversy and concludes that "Marshall's place in military history is secure." Keegan makes a similar point...