Word: commander
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...devoted 19 years to a four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee, the untouchable Galahad of the Confederacy; historians of the Civil War were agreed that the job need never be done again. Another six years were spent on his three-volume Lee's Lieutenants, a study in command and military personality so lastingly pertinent that General Omar N. Bradley made it his major reading in the days before the European invasion...
Freeman has a quartermaster's command of the immense body of historical material he works with. His researcher's notes on white, blue, pink and yellow slips are arranged to correspond to the biographical plan he has carefully outlined in his notebooks. By the use of an ingenious system of numbers and symbols he can turn to any scrap of material he needs in a matter of seconds. After he has written a chapter, he "lets it cool" for a month and then his revisions always "cut the first draft to pieces." After the fourth typing he sticks...
...Freeman the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1934. Lee's Lieutenants, which followed, was an even more impressive achievement, and a complex study of Lee's command problem highlighted by brief, brilliant biographies of his commanders-Jackson, Stuart, Early and Longstreet...
Those two masterly books brought Freeman invitations to lecture at the Army & Navy War Colleges and the Army's staff and command school. They also brought him the admiration of such men as Eisenhower, Marshall, Patton and Nimitz. Freeman still guides visiting generals over the Civil War battlefields near Richmond and no living person knows the terrain so well...
Bitterly, at the end of the next year, he resigned his commission. Not until he was called to command the Continentals in 1775 did he wear a uniform again...