Legacy Lecture | Rosie and the General

General of the Army George C. Marshall had few very close friends to whom he confided his most personal thoughts and feelings. Surprisingly, one of the most cherished was his goddaughter, Rose Page Wilson, who first met when she was eight and he was 39 years old, just returned from World War I. Their extraordinary friendship, where Marshall shared personal anecdotes from his own life to encourage his goddaughter as she faced challenges during adolescence, her early career, marriage, parenthood, and the loss of loved ones, endured until his death in 1959. It is an unexpected record of a remarkable rapport between two devoted friends, who each filled special emotional needs the other.

Their correspondence reveals a side of the military and diplomatic giant of the twentieth century known to few people until Wilson published her memoir, General Marshall Remembered, in 1968. There, Wilson remembered Marshall’s “sense of fun” and reflected in her memoir that “without it, he would not have been the whole man that he was. His brilliance, decency, kindness; his continual efforts ‘to understand rather than be understood’; his strict adherence to honor in total disregard of vicious criticism; his utterly selfless service to humanity; and all these virtues leavened by his humor—that was George C. Marshall, the whole man.”

The views expressed in this lecture are those of the speaker/s and do not necessarily reflect those of the George C. Marshall Foundation