47.01.11(617w)
TO MRS. JOHN B. WILSONJanuary 11, 1947
[Honolulu], Hawaii
Dear Rose: Your letter of January 3d from Coon Creek Farm reached me here yesterday. I was astonished to receive your news of next April and delighted.1 You have done a fine, grand thing and guaranteed your future happiness. I congratulate you and compliment you—and envy you. The account of the heir apparent makes it evident to me that he is some boy, a male Rose, I imagine!
That was a terribly tough thing for John to break his good knee over a trivial house accident. He certainly has hard luck with his legs. Give him my sympathy.
I am taking things easy, loafing on the beach most of the day—in the shade of some bordering palm trees in the morning and on the sand in the late afternoon. We have a lovely cottage, roomy, well furnished, highly modern electrically equipped kitchen. Mrs. Marshall’s Chinese Amah, or maid, is an excellent and enthusiastic cook and so is my orderly, so are we well situated, with a Cadillac and a Chauffeur.2 The house is in a grove of palms in a grass plot facing the ocean. Everyone tries to do for us and sends us things, but we are keeping free and loafing. I do have a pretty heavy daily radio business, about thirty messages a day, some of two and three hundred words. One from Winston Churchill just arrived.3 I will stay a week or ten days depending on whether or not the President sends for me to hurry on to Washington. My plane is all ready with all my goods and chattels aboard. I will fly to Los Angeles or rather Hol[l]ywood and spend the day with my former Secretary Col. McCarthy (Eric Johnson’s assistant) and then take off that evening for Washington.4 You met McCarthy with me at the Waldorf.
With my love, Rose,Affectionately,5
G. C. M.
GCMRL/G. C. Marshall Collection; H
1. Rose Page Wilson, Marshall’s goddaughter who lived in New York City, was expecting a second child in April (Her January 3 letter is not in the Marshall Archives.) Marshall had known her since 1919, when she was a child living in his apartment building in Washington, DC.
2. Shortly after Mrs. Marshall arrived in China in April 1946, the general hired Wang Renxian (Anna Wong), a thirty-five-year-old Shanghai native, to be her maid. Wong continued to work for the Marshalls until March 1951. The general's orderly and cook was Sergeant Richard C. Wing, a young Chinese American from California.
3. World War II British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's telegram read: “My most sincere congratulations on the great office to which you have been called and all wishes for good fortune.” (Churchill to Marshall, January 9, 1947, GCMRL/G. C. Marshall Papers [Secretary of State, Categorical, Congratulations].)
4. Since February 1946, Frank McCarthy (secretary of the US Army General Staff between January 1944 and August 1945) had been assistant to Johnson, who was president of the Motion Picture Association of America.
5. “All my life I have thought you were the biggest man in the world,” she replied, “and I am now overwhelmed that the whole world agrees with me. It is, therefore, impossible for me to be prouder or fonder of you than I have been since I was seven years old but that is a great deal as you know.” (Wilson to Marshall, January 20, 1947, ibid.)