ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, October 9, 1996 TAG: 9610090052
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: The New York Times
Forrest Carlisle Pogue, author of a monumental four-volume biography of George C. Marshall, the Virginia Military Institute graduate who was Army chief of staff in World War II and later secretary of state, died Sunday in Murray, Ky. He was 84 and lived in Murray.
Pogue completed his epic study in 1987 after 30 years of labor and the review of 3.5 million pages of research material. Viking Press published ``George C. Marshall, Volume I: Education of a General, 1880-1939'' in 1963, followed by ``Ordeal and Hope, 1939-1942,'' ``Organizer of Victory, 1942-1945'' and ``Statesman, 1945-1959.''
A pioneer of oral-history techniques, Pogue captured on tape some 40 hours of interviews with Marshall as well as encounters with more than 300 people who had known him, many of them prominent figures themselves.
Pogue served in the Army in World War II as a combat historian and accompanied the troops at the D-Day invasion and across much of Europe. The experience led to his reputation as a first-rate historian of the war in Europe.
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower assigned him to write the official chronicle of the Eisenhower command in Europe, which prompted Pogue's first book, ``The Supreme Command'' (1954). He published many articles and essays and contributed to several books, including ``The Meaning of Yalta'' (1956), a collection of essays on that wartime conference.
In 1956, Pogue became director of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation in Lexington, Va., which asked him to write a full-length biography of Marshall. In 1991, the foundation published a 650-page book of transcriptions from his interviews with Marshall in 1956-57.
He left the foundation in 1974 when he became director of the Eisenhower Institute for Historical Research, affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution.
LENGTH: Short : 43 linesby CNB