Anne Cipriano Venzon – författare

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was a maverick Marine, the emblem of the old corps, and one of the most controversial figures in Marine history. He was a high school dropout who became a major general; a Quaker and a devout family man who was one of the toughest of the Marines; an aristocrat who championed the common man; a leader who thought of himself as striving to help the oppressed of the countries he occupied as the commander of an imperial fighting force. This work is an annotated edition of his letters covering the period from Butler's commissioning as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps to his retirement as a Major General.This is the first time the majority of these letters have been made public, and the book offers the reader a first-hand look at the motivations and attitudes of the American military as it implemented U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the century. There is extensive coverage of U.S. interventions in Nicaragua, Haiti, and China from a man on the scene, offering an immediate perspective to those events. General Butler won two Congressional Medals of Honor, as well as numerous other U.S. and foreign medals, including two Umbrellas of Ten Thousand Blessings from two Chinese cities--honors never before given to a non-Chinese. Military and diplomatic historians, as well as Marine and Navy enthusiasts, will find this superbly edited and annotated collection of interest and value.

What was it that transformed the United States Marine Corps from a quasi-constabulary in 1861 to one of the world's elite fighting forces by 1918? As there was nothing terribly unusual about the Corps' organization or bureaucracy, the only conclusion left is that it must have been its extraordinary people. The Civil War attracted to the USMC a handful of young men who were natural leaders. These men then trained another cohort of talented, tenacious leaders, who, in turn, molded the men who led the Marine Corps into the twentieth century.Many of their names have faded in the brighter lights of the campaigns in the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam, but without men like Huntington, Cochrane, and Myers, there wouldn't have been Puller, Edson, or Pace in later years. Author Anne Cipriano Venzon selected ten men whose skills and leadership clearly contributed to the formation of the ethos, which became the modern Marine Corps. By examining each man's strengths and weaknesses, the continuum of leadership from the earliest days of the Corps becomes very clear for the reader.Based on extensive research, most of it in little-used primary documents, the biographies of the ten men featured in Leaders of Men look both at the men and their role in various engagements and events. From Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the search for the Alabama during the Civil War to the Battle of Belleau Wood and "peacekeeping" missions in China in the 1920s, the examination of these careers will give readers a better understanding of what it means to be a Marine.

First Published in 1999. Includes six maps.