While Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Patton fought battles in Europe and the Pacific, one military leader actually ran World War II for America, overseeing personnel and logistics: Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army from 1939 to 1945, George C. Marshall. Telling the story of this rather reserved statesman from his childhood in Western Pennsylvania to his death in 1959, this "elegant and iconoclastic" biography (NYTBR) takes stock of monumental successes like the Marshall Plan and the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, but also such lesser-known failures as the attempt to unite China's nationalists and communists.