FedEx Founder Fred Smith on General Marshall

In a Wall Street Journal profile published on April 15, 2022, FedEx Founder Fred Smith weighed in on the United States’ place in the post-COVID world, including domestic politics and international trade. The piece concludes with Smith’s views on U.S. leadership in free trade, singling out the Marshall Plan as a model for policy and Marshall himself as a personal role model:

“My father died when I was 4,” Mr. Smith says. “As I grew up I searched for role models in all the history I read. And I’ve tried to model my life on Marshall’s leadership.”

What Mr. Smith liked most about Marshall, he says, was that he was “unassuming, and wasn’t interested in self-aggrandizement, the way, say, MacArthur was. In a way, I’d say, Marshall was the best president we never had.”