Age of Marshall
Age of Marshall is a new podcast from the George C. Marshall Foundation exploring George C. Marshall, his era, and the world he helped shape. Host Glen Carpenter talks with historians whose work sheds new light on Marshall’s life, legacy, and historical moment.
Age of Marshall
Anna Rosenberg: Marshall's Secret Weapon
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Glen J. Carpenter speaks with Christopher C. Gorham, author of The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America, about Anna Rosenberg’s remarkable career. Their conversation examines Rosenberg’s rise from New York politics to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations; her role in Executive Order 8802 and the GI Bill; her relationship with George C. Marshall; her contentious Pentagon confirmation during the early Cold War; and the influence she exercised behind the scenes at some of the highest levels of American power.
LINKS
Buy The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America
Age of Marshall is a podcast from the George C. Marshall Foundation exploring the people, events, and ideas that shaped Marshall’s world and the legacy of the soldier and statesman whose leadership helped define the 20th century.
Age of Marshall was established through the generosity of Jessine Monaghan, whose support made this series possible. The George C. Marshall Foundation presents this series in honor of her memory and her dedicated service as a Trustee.
Learn more about the George C. Marshall Foundation, its public programs, and its research library at MarshallFoundation.org.
Welcome to Age of Marshall from the George C. Marshall Foundation. I'm Glenn Carpenter. In this series, we explore the people, events, and ideas of the chaped Marshall's world, and the legacy of the soldier and statesman whose leadership helped define the 20th century. Age of Marshall was established through the generosity of Jasine Monahan, whose support made the series possible. The George C. Marshall Foundation presents this series in honor of her memory and her dedicated service as a trustee. My guest today is Christopher C. Goram, author of The Confidant, The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win World War II and shape modern America. His work has helped bring renewed attention to Anna Rosenberg, a remarkable figure whose influence reached from the home front to the highest levels of American power. Christopher, welcome.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Glenn, for having me, and thank you to the George Marshall Foundation.
SPEAKER_01What first pulled you into Anna Rosenberg's story? And was there a moment that made you think, how is she not better known?
SPEAKER_00Yes, the story is I'm a high school history teacher here in suburban Boston. And seven years ago or so, I was with my students up in the library. One of my juniors wanted to write a research paper about the Forgotten War, the Korean War. So as I always wanted to do, I always tried to give my students a little help with their research. So I pulled a book off the shelf, uh found the Korean War, and I opened it up, and it was at a picture of President Harry Truman and this clearly civilian woman standing next to him. She wasn't in a uniform. She, in fact, she had a make stole around her neck. And Truman had a big smile on his face, and and this woman had a big smile on her face as if they were on good terms. And the caption, Glenn, just stopped me cold. The caption said Anna Rosenberg, Assistant Secretary of Defense, and the year was 1951. And I thought, who is this person who's on good terms with the president, who has a top position at the Pentagon during the Korean War and has the surname Rosenberg, which was at the same moment as the atomic spy case. So I was just convinced that there had to be books about her. So I said to my students, let's go find some books about this Anna Rosenberg person. We all heard about Francis Perkins and, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt, but who is this person? And Glenn, uh, we we found no books. So fortunately, her papers had been left at Harvard, and I'm on the bus line. You know, I can get on the 71 bus and be in Harvard Square in 15 minutes. So it was just a stroke stroke of good fortune that her papers were so close to where I could access them. And I began immediately looking at her papers, and it was like being struck by lightning, you know, opening up those first boxes of documents, and there's a citation from President Truman making her the first uh recipient of the Medal of Freedom. I mean, just pretty crazy and pretty wonderful moment.
SPEAKER_01Her family immigrates from Budapest to Manhattan in 1912, where she builds influence in New York politics and labor management work. What were the key moves she took from these smaller political circles into problem solving at the national level?
SPEAKER_00Well, she had she had a what I like to call a political mother and a political father. And you're right, you know, she's a an immigrant from Europe. She arrives in 1912, she goes to the New York public schools, she graduate graduates from high school, the girls' school, the Wadley School for Girls. And she's, you know, 19, 20 years old. She always wanted to be engaged in politics. That's something that her father, who had immigrated two years earlier than the rest of the family, that's what he instilled in her. And she really took that took that mantle. And she meets in her early 20s, she meets Bel Moskowitz, who's like the chief of staff, basically, of the governor of New York. And Bel Moskowitz is a woman who is exercising tremendous power for the day behind the curtain. You know, she's a gatekeeper for the governor, she's drafting legislation, she's uh shaping policy for the most populous state in the country and the wealthiest state in the country. And she's doing it all behind the throne. And she hired young uh Anna Rosenberg to work with her. And really, it was a demonstration to Anna that that a woman could hold power and have power and wield power. And you didn't have to be out there in front. You could do you could do so from behind the curtain. And so Belle Moskowitz is sort of her political mother. And her political father is a Tammany Hall operator named Jim Hagan, who is a tough old bird. And she met him when he was giving a speech against women's right to vote. And so they they butted heads, but instead of being angry with her, he tutored her over the next three years on the retail politics of New York. So she sort of she never went to college, let alone law school or or business school, but she sort of graduates from this tutor, you know, this sort of tutor situation, mentorship from these two characters, with a real grasp of how to get problems solved and get people on board for political ideas and political candidates. And in fact, she becomes one of the first w women in American history to manage political campaigns up to and including U.S. congressional campaigns. And this is in her mid and late 20s.
SPEAKER_01In plain terms, what kind of leader was she in these roles and how did she get results? Was she a negotiator, an administrator, something else?
SPEAKER_00Well, let me go back one second. Had she had she only met Moskowitz and Jim Hagen, she would have been a public relations and labor relations businesswoman in New York who her whose hobby was politics, you know, maybe local politics. But in 1928, she met Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, and that was really the the changed the direction of her life. So she takes these lessons that she's learned about New York and and and and problem solving and getting people to to say yes to each other. You know, she's a mediator, you know, she's getting unions to to to to be nice with uh management and management to be nice with unions, and she's sort of a pioneer in that in that realm. And she's sort of grafting this onto politics as well. And now she has access because uh, as you said, she gets elevated as part of uh FDR's New Deal army and and and she becomes a New Deal officer. And in Social Security, the Social Security Board, she is named as the only woman regional director. So the there's 12 regions around the country, she's the only woman, and remarkably, Glenn, Roosevelt hasn't trusted her with his home state of New York. And I just find that so fascinating because this is still early on in the New Deal. And if this doesn't work, if these programs don't work in New York, how can you tell Wyoming or Ohio or Texas that that they're going to work? So the stakes were incredibly high. But Anna Rosenberg without a college education, has the people skills and the organizational aptitude to sign up six million New Yorkers to Social Security. And she would have elderly women say to her, and this is sort of the human element that she brought to the table as well. She would have elderly women say to her, Well, I can't tell you my real age because my husband doesn't know my real age. And she would say to them, Uncle Sam and I will keep your secrets. So there's a real magical combination of aptitude and also a human touch that Anna Rosenberg brought to these jobs. So Roosevelt, uh President Roosevelt, you know, he met her in New York when he was governor. Uh, he elevated her into the New Deal where she demonstrated a wonderful aptitude. And then as World War II gets closer, uh, she finds herself closer to the president. You know, you can look at Roosevelt's day-to-day meeting schedule, and you start seeing Miss Rosenberg on there and Mrs. Rosenberg on there. So she's starting to meet with the president, and she, again, is a mediator. That's what she does. So Roosevelt finds himself in a real pickle in the summer of 1941. This is uh six months before Pearl Harbor. And the problem is that defense jobs are only being given to white Americans. And uh systematically, black Americans are being left out of these good paying jobs. This is on the heels of the Great Depression. So A. Philip Randolph, the black leader of the day, uh, says to the White House, we will have a march on Washington for equality and for uh fairness and defense hiring. And Roosevelt's got a problem on his hands because he needs Southern congressional support should the United States go to war, but he knows that they will grant no concessions to the black leaders. So he calls upon Anna Rosenberg, his ace mediator, and says, you know, get this fixed, get this sorted out. And over two weeks in the summer of 1941, as I describe in one of the chapters in my book, The Confidant, she's the point person bringing the White House and the black leadership together. And it ultimately, ultimately resulted in executive order 8802. But to get the president to sign it was still something of a thorny issue. And Eleanor Roosevelt said to Anna, she's she said, You need you need to get the confidence up to get the boss to sign it. So go down to Georgetown, buy yourself one of your fancy hats that you love, get the confidence to come back and get the president to sign it. So when she returned from her shopping expedition with the draft executive order in her handbag, she pulled it out, spread it on his desk, and said, Sign it, Mr. President, sign it. And he listened. Executive, no, it is wonderful. And and really, you know, it's it's it's a huge thing that happened. You know, historians say that that's the first federal action on civil rights since Reconstruction, Executive Order 8802. So she had a big hand in that, and that was really just the beginning of many problems that many fires that she put out for President Roosevelt during the war.
SPEAKER_01By 1944, Roosevelt decides to send her to Europe to assess what troops would need as they returned home. What did she see up close and how did that shape her recommendations?
SPEAKER_00There's this, I think, misconception about the GI Bill, and the misconception I think out there is that the politicians signed this into law and it was fully formed and fully fleshed out, and nothing could be further from the truth. The only thing that the president and Congress knew in 1944 is they didn't want to have a replay of World War I where returning veterans got a train ticket and I think $40 or $60 and were sent home. They got no support of any of any other sort. So one historian says, you know, the the early drafts of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act were written like they were on the back of a napkin. So Roosevelt uh is smart enough and savvy enough to know he's got to do better. So he, in a remarkable decision, he decides he's gonna send Anna Rosenberg to wartime Europe as his personal emissary to find out from the GIs themselves what they would like to see in this legislation that's that's being conjured up in Washington. And she goes to literally Nazi-occupied France so soon after D-Day that the soldiers are still hemmed in in the hedgerow country. And over six weeks, she has conversations with soldiers, you know, sharing rations off the hood of a Jeep or listening to them as they show her pictures of their sweethearts back home. And then the conversations, she jots down what they're saying. And Glenn, what they're saying time and time again is I wish I had a college education. You know, sure I would love to have job training when I get home, but I really, really would love to have a piece of the America that we're trying to help save, a lasting college education, something that was the realm of only wealthy men for this generation. So she gets back to Washington and debriefs Roosevelt, and Roosevelt said, What did you learn? And she told him that they wanted a college education, and she said, President's face lit up. And if you look at what was then grafted onto the GI Bill in 45 and 46 and 47, almost uh entirely educational in nature and really transformed post-war America.
SPEAKER_01When she comes back with those recommendations, how does she make that case in a way presidents and agencies actually act on? What levers does she pull?
SPEAKER_00Well, she was first of all, she was respected by Democrat and conservative alike. And I think that's a very important aspect of how she got things done. She considered herself a new dealer. She literally was a new dealer, but she considered herself sort of a lifelong Democrat, even though her second marriage is going to be a centrist Republican. But she also, uh in her career, was a mentor to Nelson Rockefeller, who is four-time Republican governor of New York and Republican vice president, and obviously one of the Rockefeller sons. So she has this goes all the way back to when she was in New York in the 1920s as a mediator. She has the union guys that respect her because she's, you know, they would say on the level, you know, Mrs. Rosenberg's on the level. And she has the management and the ownership class who also respect her. One one factory owner said, I would have saved myself $10,000 if I'd just gone to her sooner. And she continues to have that ability to work across political lines during her uh career in World War II and politics. So she can go up to Capitol Hill, and she did at the behest of Roosevelt many times, and lobby individually sometimes with lawmakers, and other times in a group to get Roosevelt's programs to get more senators on board and more Congresspeople on board. So she and she counted some of these uh lawmakers like Lyndon Johnson and and Senator Benton as personal friends, and that certainly helped as well. But men and women respected her, right and left wing respected her, and that was a huge part of her magic.
SPEAKER_01Do you think that's something that attracted her or attracted Marshall to her?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, Glenn, you you hit the nail on the head. Part of what makes her part not all, but part of what makes her very attractive to Marshall is when they meet in World War II, they're finding that, you know, naval architects or people who could do naval architecture are being drafted as ensigns in the Navy, and you know, people who could be apt to be vascular surgeons are being drafted as privates in the army. And this, of course, has to stop. There has to be a way to sort of figure this out. So Anna Rosenberg, as part of the what they called back then manpower, she works with George Marshall, General Marshall to sort of sort this out and make it uh work better. But the other thing that was very attractive to Marshall is her ability, again, at the behest of Roosevelt, to, you know, quote, go up on the hill and talk to the boys. So Anna could do that for the president. And when Marshall finds himself needing some someone to go up on Capitol Hill and do some lobbying on behalf of the Defense Department, you know, he thinks, well, she's the perfect person. You know, not only does she know manpower, but she knows the ins and outs of Washington and how to get things done.
SPEAKER_01So is that why he views her as uniquely qualified in his words?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. When you you think, you know, why would now Secretary of Defense, George C. Marshall, nominate a civilian woman to sort of be his right-hand person at the Pentagon during the early, desperate days of the Korean War, during the early part of the Cold War. A very desperate time for the American military. And the answer is that she combined a unique set of uh skills that were unique to her. One was her ability to work with GIs in great numbers. I mean, she had been embedded with Patton's army in France in World War II, and in fact, had made two trips for the demobilizing troops, and also her ability in Washington as a behind-the-scenes shaper of uh opinion and mover of policy. And so those two things, and also I think the human element that he respected. I mean, we all know about uh George Marshall's Titanic reputation and humanistic approach to those under him, and uh, she shared those values and venerated the man. So she had a lot of pluses for him when it was time to hire someone to help rebuild the size and strength of the U.S. Armed Forces.
SPEAKER_01Her confirmation turns contentious. What were the claims against her in plain terms?
SPEAKER_00Secretary Marshall, who's been pulled out of retirement, as many of your listeners will know, by President Truman during the Korean War, he needs help. And he nominates Anna Rosenberg, civilian woman, to be uh director of quote, manpower at the Pentagon, sort of assistant secretary of defense. And this is in November of 1950. The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously approves this nomination, and all that is required is the full Senate vote, which Glenn is a formality at this point, right? Formality. But but then something happens. Senator Joe McCarthy, who's not on the committee but had allies in the Senate that did not want to see someone with the last name Rosenberg be a quote unquote dictator at the Pentagon, he conjures up a smear campaign in December of 1950, and he buys one of his allies in in the Senate, delays the full Senate hearing for two weeks, and that allows him to conjure up this smear campaign, which hinged on the testimony of a man who would come up from New York City and testify that Anna Rosenberg was a traitor. She was really unfaithful to her country. You know, she was a secret communist. You know, this is like the early years of McCarthyism. And the Senate Armed Services Committee had no choice but to reopen the hearing, and Anna Rosenberg had to come face to face with her accuser. And it riveted Washington and riveted the country.
SPEAKER_01What do you think kind of the biggest strike against Anna was the fact that she's a woman, the fact that she's Jewish, the fact that she's a New Dealer? Like what is the biggest point of contention there?
SPEAKER_00Glenn, I'm so glad that you brought you raised that because when when Secretary Marshall sent her a handwritten letter to ask her to join him at the Pentagon in October of 1950, she knew she couldn't say no. Part of her knew she could not say no. She she respected uh the heck out of the general and she she wanted to serve a country. But she also said to him very candidly, I wear multiple bullseyes. I'm Jewish, I'm from Hungary, I'm from that part of Europe that we're now sort of at odds with terms of the Cold War. She said, I'm I'm pro-union, former New Dealer, I'm a civilian. She said, They're going to come after me, General, and they're going to come after you. And to his credit, he said, we will stick through this together. So he he provided cover for Anna Rosenberg and was willing to take the slings and arrows from the McCarthy wing of the Republican Party during that time to see that that's how important she was to him. He was willing to put his Titanic reputation on the line to see that this woman uh was sitting next to him at the Pentagon and doubling the size of the U.S. Armed Forces. And that it's just a remarkable part of the story.
SPEAKER_01What are the clearest fingerprints of her impact on the Pentagon?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think the clearest fingerprints, Glenn, are that she accomplished her mission. Her mission, pretty straightforwardly, was to more than double the size of the armed forces. After World War II, because of budget cuts and the reality of the economy, you know, we didn't need uh an army of 10 million, and you know, 90 divisions. So, but the problem was by 1950-51, the army was too small. We're trying to occupy Japan, we're trying to occupy West Germany, we're trying to hem in the Soviets to Eastern Europe. And now we have this disastrous war on the Korean peninsula. So Marshall was desperate. You know, we need this person, we need her to be uh working with me uh yesterday. And so she her fingerprints include getting many more women to serve in the branches, but not just as typewriter soldiers. Communications, intelligence, medical care, and the like. Uh, she helped lower the draft age to 18 and a half, again, by going up to Capitol Hill and making the argument. And her argument was listened to by uh Congresspeople. So that brings in millions of other people. And we have black Americans were being systematically discriminated against, at least in the schools on bases in the South. She ends that practice very, very quietly and behind the scenes, but she ends it before Brown versus Board of Education. So the U.S. military is integrated before the public schools of the country. And all of this, women in the military, more men in the military, higher rate of pay for uh service members, better conditions for their family back here. She also made a promise to the men serving in Korea, the men and women serving in Korea, that they would not serve two winters in that very harsh environment and cold environment. And she kept her promise. So the Army, I think by the end of the Korean War, was up to 3.3 million, which was a successful mission. 26 months at the Pentagon. She served two trips to the battlefields of Korea, and she succeeded in the job that she'd been given by George Marshall.
SPEAKER_01What was it like to work for her?
SPEAKER_00Well, to work for her was she was a delegator. You know, one of her nicknames in World War II was Seven Job Anna. I mean, she was in it. There's so many uh accounts in my book where she's on the telephone and literally saying, you know, I get stuff done not by writing memos and carbons and all this other stuff. I get stuff done by by picking up the telephone. There are pictures, Glenn, of her with three telephones on her desk. So she is getting things done. And and the only way to really get that all that work accomplished is to be able to delegate. So she delegates to young people, she delegates to people her age. And what's wonderful about her style of leadership is that she is very, very liberal with her credit. She gives credit to these people that are working with her. She has high demands on them, and she has high demands on herself. I mean, she got back from Korea on one of her trips to the battle zone and stayed in her apartment in Washington and wrote four hundred. Letters to the families of the servicemen that she met in Korea. So she demands a lot of herself. She demands a lot of the people that work for her, but she's very, very easy with her. She gives them credit and makes them feel a part of the overall scheme of what's going on. And that was what she counseled companies to do in New York way back in the 1920s. She said, one way that you can get along with these unions is to let the union men know and union women know what it is that they are doing that's important to your company, to your product, to your service. And so she she follows her own advice. She gives credit to people and lets them know how important their job is to the overall mission. And so they loved her. People that worked with Anna Rosenberg, whether it was in private practice, whether it was in the military, they respected her and they uh love is not too strong a word. They really, really thought the world of her.
SPEAKER_01After she leaves the Pentagon, what kinds of problems does she keep getting asked to work on?
SPEAKER_00Well, she she is at the Pentagon for 26 months and winds up leaving, not surprisingly, when the incoming president comes in. So she had served under Marshall and under President Truman. If someone and now we have uh Republican Eisenhower coming in, and that was the moment for her to go back to New York and to continue her public relations and labor relations business with her son, who'd also served in World War II, who was her right hand person there and their staff. And again, because she always had to make time for politics, even going back to the moment she met Eleanor Roosevelt in 1928, that's not enough. So she has to also be the executive director of the the New York Veterans Center. You know, in New York, New Jersey, bringing in millions of veterans. She's she's working with that as well, continuing to work with that. She's staying in touch with Eleanor Roosevelt and and and and having conversations with the former first lady about the UN, the United Nations. So she's she's staying in the thick of things. She's staying involved in New York politics, and she's continuing those relationships with the senators and with Eleanor Roosevelt, and continuing to be in the newspapers and in the magazines well into the 1950s. In fact, she was on Edward R. Murrow's television show as late as 1959, where Ed Murrow interviewed her and said wonderfully, he said, Anna, well, you have quite a book to write someday.
SPEAKER_01For our listeners, can can you tell tell us who she was?
SPEAKER_00Her first husband was a veteran of World War I. Mike Rosenberg was his name. And there's very, very little about him in the research. He was a quiet man. Maybe if you read between the lines, there were uh he was maybe perhaps affected by what he saw in the trenches of World War I, and and maybe that led to his being kind of a quiet and retiring figure. One other thing about him that's clear is that he did not share with Anna Rosenberg the desire to go down to Washington and get involved in politics. So he stayed in New York. He was an executive at a rug company. They were, in some ways, a very strange couple, Glenn. You know, she was on magazine covers and in the newspaper, she was on the radio, she was a well-known figure in American politics for many decades, or at least from the you know, 30s to the 50s, and her husband wasn't interested in that part of her life. So an interesting relationship. They separated in 1956, and in 1962, uh Anna remarried a man named Paul Gray Hoffman, who had been a very, very successful executive with the Studebaker Automobile Company and also a sort of an Eisenhower Republican, someone who was very much in the center, but who wanted to see Eisenhower, if there was going to be a general become president, he wanted it to be Eisenhower rather than MacArthur. So they had a wonderful loving relationship from 1962 until his health gave out in the early 1970s. But they were, you know, personal friends with uh Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. Uh they were a true power couple and uh had a very, very what appears to be a very loving relationship during uh his last 10 years.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. We we haven't talked at all about Anna's relationship with Marshall beyond the confirmation. Can can you talk a little bit about their relationship just as as uh as people?
SPEAKER_00Anna Rosenberg, who had met with Franklin Roosevelt 130 times one-on-one, you know, the great the great Roosevelt, the man who put his name on the age and and respected the president a great deal. That said, there was only one person that she respected more and venerated more, and that was George Marshall. She thought the absolute world of General Marshall, and it was an honor to work with him, uh, not only in World War II when they crossed paths, but also in 1950 to 1950, almost 1953, for those 26 months. And the general, his humanness comes out, you know, in the when when I was reading their story together, the humanness comes out. First of all, they shared, well, he he helped get her through the the very trying nomination crisis crisis. Secondly, they share basically an office in the Pentagon. They share a coffee maker. You know, her office is sort of right next door to the general's office in the Pentagon. And one sort of story that reveals the human side of George Marshall is he goes into her office on her like first day or second day, and he realizes that her feet aren't touching the floor because the chair is built for someone that's bigger than five three. So Marshall goes out in the hall and flags somebody down and says, take this chair and cut the legs down and make it fit for her so she can sit comfortably. And and so that happened. And at another time there were everyone in the Pentagon had to wear like a name badge. And at one point, Marshall traded his badge with with Anna. So Anna was wearing the you know, Secretary Marshall badge, and and uh he was wearing the Anna Rosenberg badge. And the third one that I love is you know, he called everyone by their last name, as I'm sure a lot of your listeners know. And he didn't call her Rosenberg, he called her Anna. So there was a great deal of respect between those two. They they saw in a lot of ways eye to eye the great issues of winning the war and of of making the post-war a safe, safe place for veteran for Americans and a place where the veterans would be treated with respect and and given uh and dignity. And I think that was something that was at the the bedrock of their relationship, but a a wonderful relationship it was.
SPEAKER_01If someone finishes your book and remembers only one thing about Anna Rosenberg, one lasting lesson, what do you hope it is?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think that the idea that the United States is a set of ideals. The United States is an idea, it's a dream that that we can make into a reality. It is less a place and more of a set of ideas that we have. And here's this immigrant woman who comes to the United States as a girl from a place where they had an emperor, and she comes to this new country uh not speaking English and not having any connections, and she, you know, rises up through New York City, you know, through the crucible of New York City, and becomes in in the mid-20th century an incredibly important part of the machinery that helped the United States win World War II and become a tremendously successful country in the post-war. And I think that's the lesson is you know, if you abide by these ideals and if you have an open mind and if you believe in in social equality, there is no limit. There is no limit to what you can do and what you can accomplish. And I think that's the lesson from the confidant from the story and the remarkable career of Anna Rosenberg.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for listening to Age of Marshall. To learn more about the George C. Marshall Foundation and its programs, and to support our mission, visit Marshall Foundation.org.