Ask an American soldier to identify himself, and he probably will say he is “in the Army.” By contrast, a Marine — especially if he is one of the bet… - Thomas E. Ricks

especially in the key task of translating broad strategic concepts into feasible operational orders. Marshall understood that Eisenhower had a talent for implementing strategy. And that job, Marshall believed, was more difficult than designing it. “There’s nothing so profound in the logic of the thing,” he said years later, discussing his own role in winning approval for the Marshall Plan. “But the execution of it, that’s another matter.” In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership.

During the same Monte Carlo trip, Churchill, while waiting outside the casino for his car, was buttonholed by Frank Sinatra, the American singer, who rushed up to him and shook his hand, saying, “I’ve wanted to do that for twenty years.” After the singer departed, a puzzled Churchill inquired of an assistant, “Who the hell was that?” Churchill

Spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you from enjoying it,” he wrote in April 1946. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators, nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.