Rachel Thompson--George C. Marshall: Enlightened Leadership Across Continents--from Wartime General to Statesman

September 20, 10 AM, Eisenhower National Historic Site Speaker's Tent

When George Marshall became Secretary of State in 1947, some questioned the choice of a career military man in this role. The answer is that Marshall had treaded the turbulent waters of international diplomacy throughout an entire world war. His collaboration with Dwight Eisenhower in planning of the cross-channel invasion in 1944 was only one part of his delicate and complex negotiations with other formidable leaders whose very survival depended on the outcomes of war, including Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Those experiences uniquely qualified him to take the lead in defining the crucial role the United States would play in post-war recovery through the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan.

Rachel Yarnell Thompson is the Marshall Historian at The George C. Marshall International Center, located on the site of Marshall’s museum home in Leesburg, Virginia. In 2014, the Center published Ms. Thompson’s full-length biography, Marshall: A Statesman Shaped in the Crucible of War. She lectures extensively on various aspects of Marshall’s illustrious career as soldier and statesman, giving presentations in many venues that have included the George C. Marshall Center for European Security Studies in Garmisch, Germany, the United States Embassy in Paris, state conferences for both the Wisconsin and Colorado National Guards, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, NY. In 2009, Thompson curated the Marshall Center’s exhibition, “With Affection and Admiration: The Correspondence of George C. Marshall and Winston S. Churchill.” In conjunction with seminars sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and Defense, Ms. Thompson also periodically conducts meetings at the Center linked to Marshall’s mid-twentieth century leadership roles.

Ms. Thompson was for thirty-one years a U.S. History and American Government teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia. A 1962 graduate of Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, she holds a master’s degree from George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. Although a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, Ms. Thompson makes her home in Haymarket, Virginia, an outlying suburb of Washington, D.C.