Robert Browning’s question about his great poetic predecessor Shelley came to me one mild September day forty years ago when at Arlington National Cemetery I said to myself, “Yes, I did once see Omar Bradley plain.” The last living five-star General of the Army, in a wheelchair, had come to the burial of the Vietnam War commander General Creighton Abrams. After the 1976 bicentennial awarding of the rank to General George Washington “effective as of 1776,” the five-star rank closed with the death of Bradley.

To me, once a boy in Second World War years, those generals—“Hap” Arnold, Omar Bradley, Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, and George Marshall—were demi-gods. Or, more mundanely, they were faces on the Fleer bubble gum cards we collected and traded. Even then, the least vivid of these wartime heroes, Marshall, somehow had an aura of enigmatic authority felt in our gang: trading a “Marshall” could get you a Bradley and two Chiang Kai-Sheks.

And of these five generals, and the five-star admirals, it is George Marshall whose later reputation rose over time to the top, not exactly surpassing Eisenhower but in a distinctively awe-compelling category of its own. If one were to pair Marshall with another of the five-stars, without question it would be George Washington: Both recognized as unflaggingly serious, stern, stolid, indomitable. Beyond patriotism, each somehow was at one with America itself. And each man was ultimately unknowable. The characteristic stories about the two make the same amusing point. There