Looking back, Marshall remembered that simply announcing the “idea of the so-called Marshall Plan” was the easy part. The “heavy task,” he observed, was “the execution”—how he and his fellow proponents overcame opposition in America, especially in the Midwest, and moved it through Congress.1 It would take from June 1947 until the following April for the idea to become law and two more months to secure the funding.
During the week after the June 5 speech at Harvard, Marshall met alone at Blair House with Arthur Vandenberg, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to nail down his support and to discuss the heavy task ahead. He succeeded in getting his support, albeit provisionally. At the end of that week, Vandenberg issued a statement endorsing the need for a program to rehabilitate Europe. However, in an effort to quell the opposition at home, he cautioned that the U.S. should not “rush into imprudent or inadequately seasoned plans . . .” In the next breath he proposed the creation of a high-level “bipartisan advisory council” that would assess the ability of the nation’s economy to meet Europe’s needs. And he let it be known that he would not touch the Marshall Plan unless this was done.2 Once again, he imprinted the Vandenberg brand on an administration-backed foreign policy initiative.
Marshall was pleased to have the Michigan senator’s endorsement, conditioned as it was. The president, after hearing Marshall’s explanation of what happened at Blair House, agreed with the secretary that Vandenberg’s call for a bipartisan council “was really a good thing coming at the time it did and from him.”3 Acheson too thought it was a positive step, but he believed it was of great importance that Truman move quickly to appoint council members of his own choosing. With Marshall’s approval, Acheson and William Foster, undersecretary of commerce, assembled a blue ribbon eighteen-member council consisting of several prominent industrialists (e.g., CEOs of General Electric, Procter & Gamble, B. F. Goodrich, Studebaker), labor leaders (e.g., George Meany of the AFL, James Carey of the CIO), academics/think tanks (e.g., Cornell, Harvard, Brookings, Duke, Colorado School of Mines, University of California), and public officials (e.g., Chester Davis of the Federal Reserve). Acheson recommended that Averell Harriman, his former Groton schoolmate and Yale rowing coach who was then serving as Truman’s commerce secretary, be designated chairman.
Armed with the list of council nominees and a press release, Truman summoned Marshall, Vandenberg, Senate majority leader Wallace White of Maine, two Democratic senators, and selected members of his cabinet to his upstairs study. After making sure that Vandenberg received full credit for the idea, Truman read the list of nominees and their qualifications. At Vandenberg’s suggestion, former Republican senator Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin was added to the list. Without objection, all of the nominees were approved. The council, known as the Harriman Committee, was officially charged with finding facts and providing a report on the “limits within which” the U.S. can “safely and wisely plan to extend” economic assistance to the Europeans.4 The president also ordered that two additional reports be prepared: one by the Council of Economic Advisers, headed by Edwin Nourse, on how the foreign aid proposed to be extended would affect domestic production, consumption, and prices; and the other by Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug, on whether U.S. resources and physical capabilities could adequately support a large new foreign aid program.
The next move was up to the Europeans. Could they come together and make a joint request for assistance, as indicated in Marshall’s speech? Would the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites participate? From Washington, Marshall could only watch and wait.
It didn’t take long for the east-west fault lines to appear. During the initial three-party discussions between the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and the Soviet Union that began at the Quai d’Orsay (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs) in Paris, Molotov expressed “serious doubts” about the plan for moving forward proposed by the French and supported by the British.5 By the 2nd of July it became clear that the Soviet position was fundamentally at odds with that of the British and French. In accordance with Marshall’s speech, the Anglo-French foreign ministers (Bevin and Bidault) insisted on setting up a multinational steering committee that would examine, validate, and coordinate the aid requests of all participating states. On the other hand, Molotov wanted to simply aggregate the amounts requested in each nation’s self-determined aid request and forward the total to Washington. He regarded involvement in a European coordinating body—with authority to inquire into each nation’s resources—as an infringement of sovereignty that would expose the Soviet economy and that of its satellites to invasive outside scrutiny.
Molotov also demanded assurances that German participation in the Marshall Plan would not jeopardize Soviet claims for reparations taken out of current production in each of Germany’s four occupation zones. As to the question of reparations from production in the British and French zones, Bevin and Bidault waffled, ignoring promises made at Yalta and Potsdam. By contrast, the U.S. position on reparations was firm. Pursuant to a directive by the JCS, which made creation of a self-supporting Germany a principal objective of American occupation policy, all prior agreements to pay reparations to the Soviet Union from production in the U.S. zone were to be suspended as of July 7.
The Soviet foreign minister could have dragged things on for weeks, as he was wont to do. However, during his fifth and final meeting with Bevin and Bidault, Molotov decided to stalk out of the conference room, having been given discretion by Stalin, approved by the Politburo, to obstruct and prevent the Marshall Plan from being implemented in the Soviet occupation zone in Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe. A few days earlier, Stalin had been persuaded by a Soviet intelligence report that the multinational body demanded by the Anglo-French and backed by the U.S. would lead to American interference in the economic and political affairs of the Eastern European buffer states in the Soviet sphere of influence. Stalin’s overriding concern—his first priority—was maintenance of control over his satellites because they provided him with border security, vital resources, and trade advantages. “Stalin considered the Soviet zone of influence,” wrote Russian historian Mikhail Narinsky, “to be the most important legacy of World War II.”6
Molotov’s staged walkout was treated as good news by Kennan and Marshall. In a note to Bevin and Bidault, Marshall wrote that “at least the Soviet attitude . . . has been clarified” and will not continue to hinder the “working out of a recovery program for the other countries.”7 Averell Harriman later commented that if Molotov had not withdrawn, he “could have killed the Marshall Plan.”8
In Molotov’s closing speech on July 3, he accused the Western powers of dividing Europe. Bevin muttered to an aide, “this really is the birth of the Western bloc,” and he blamed the Soviets for creating the split.9 The next day Bevin and Bidault invited all twenty-two European countries (excluding Russia and Spain and including Turkey) to participate in a conference to create a program for the economic rehabilitation of Europe. The gathering was to be held in Paris, beginning on July 12. Once acceptances were in hand, the world would know the depth of the division or, to put it another way, the components of the Western bloc.
In Moscow, Stalin and the Soviet leadership vacillated. At first they cabled their representatives in Eastern European capitals that they should attend the conference, but object to the U.S. offer of assistance and then walk out, taking as many other countries with them as possible. A day later they had second thoughts. Some of their satellites might give in to the temptation of receiving American economic aid. The Marshall Plan, they concluded, was the beginning of a Western offensive against the Soviet Union—a hostile encirclement. On the night of July 7, arguably “the birthdate of the Cold War,” Soviet envoys in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland received messages instructing them to refuse to participate in the Paris conference.10 All complied except for Czechoslovakia. The majority of the Czech ministers, including non-Communist Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, favored participation in the Marshall Plan. Klement Gottwald, the prime minister of Czechoslovakia and leader of its Communist Party, cabled Moscow that it was impossible to change his government’s decision to attend.
Stalin was furious. He ordered Gottwald and his delegation, who were on the way to Moscow for trade talks, to meet with him. The evidence suggests that Gottwald initially met alone with Stalin in the Kremlin at which time he agreed to rescind his government’s decision to attend the conference in Paris.11 Heavy-handed pressure was no doubt applied. Gottwald said later that he had never seen Stalin so angry.
The official meeting of Gottwald and his delegation with Stalin took place at midnight on July 9. The Soviet leader acknowledged to them that he had changed his mind. He said he was convinced that “the Great Powers,” using the pretext of offering U.S. economic assistance, “are attempting to form a Western bloc and isolate the Soviet Union.”12 This statement, recorded verbatim in the minutes of the meeting by a member of the Czech delegation, is probably the best evidence of what Stalin actually thought about the Marshall Plan.
Since Prime Minister Gottwald had already given in, Stalin appealed to the rest of the delegation, many of whom were not communists. He made it clear that they had no choice. Two days later the Czech government unanimously canceled its decision to attend the Paris conference. Jan Masaryk reportedly said, “I went to Moscow as the Foreign Minister of an independent sovereign state; I returned as a lackey of the Soviet government.”13
Once Czechoslovakia’s decision, forced upon it by Stalin, was radioed to Washington, the states comprising the East and West blocs were known and the depth of the east-west division was settled. Ambassador Beetle Smith cabled Marshall from Moscow. The “Czechoslovak reversal,” wrote Smith, “is nothing less than a declaration of war by the Soviet Union” concerning the control of Europe.14 It was not exactly a war, but it did represent a shift in Soviet grand strategy, a strategy that in Stalin’s mind was driven by the Marshall Plan. In his view the plan was a hostile act. Cooperation was no longer possible. As Smith wrote, “the lines [were] drawn.”15
On Saturday, July 12, at eleven a.m., representatives of the sixteen nations in the so-called Western bloc took their seats under the gold and blue ceiling cove in the main dining room of the Quai d’Orsay. In response to George Marshall’s Harvard speech, states of all sizes, economies, and cultures gathered together to agree on a common program for the economic rehabilitation of Western Europe. The “sixteen power” conference had no precedent in the history of Europe.16
Without the presence of Molotov, the parties smoothly and unanimously agreed to an organizational structure and an agenda for moving forward. Ernest Bevin, Great Britain’s exuberant foreign secretary who looked like “a cross between Santa Claus and a Welsh coalman,” was appointed chairman of the conference.17 A steering committee called the Committee of European Economic Cooperation, or CEEC, and four technical committees, along with subcommittees, were established and staffed. Their tasks were to study the resources and needs of the states and to devise a four-year program for collective rehabilitation. There was a palpable sense of urgency. The delegates set themselves an ambitious deadline of September 1—just six weeks for the CEEC to devise a program acceptable to the American administrators of the Marshall Plan and the U.S. Congress. Within four days the machinery was set up, the conference disbanded, and the committees and subcommittees got down to business. “It is the quickest conference I have ever presided over,” remarked Bevin.18
Back in Washington there had been a changing of the guard at Marshall’s State Department. The six months of service that Acheson promised Marshall expired at the end of June. He returned to his law practice after several years on a government pay scale. His replacement as undersecretary, Texas-born Robert Abercrombie (“Bob”) Lovett, took over the day-to-day running of the State Department on July 1, 1947. In the coming months, with Marshall scheduled to be attending conferences abroad, fifty-one-year-old Bob Lovett was destined to play a vital role in the shaping and selling of the Marshall Plan.
Lovett, a member of Skull and Bones in Yale’s class of 1918, left college before graduating to serve as a pilot with the British Royal Air Service in the Great War. He logged numerous combat hours flying Handley Page bombers over German troop concentrations, artillery, and ammunition trains. For the rest of his life Lovett was a student and advocate of airpower. During World War II, he earned Marshall’s esteem and friendship when, as assistant secretary for air in the War Department, he was responsible for procurement of aircraft for the huge army air force.
Knowing that Acheson would be with him for only six months, Marshall had his eye on Lovett since the day he was sworn in as secretary of state. In February he enlisted the president to help persuade Lovett to again leave his lucrative partnership with Brown Brothers Harriman, a prestigious investment banking firm in Manhattan (Lovett had left the partnership earlier, during the war, to work with Marshall in the War Department). One morning the White House operator telephoned Lovett at his home in Locust Valley. Truman was on the line. He told Lovett that General Marshall was insistent that his “old copilot” return to Washington to replace Acheson as his undersecretary of state. Lovett asked for time to think it over. It would be almost impossible to refuse both Marshall and the president, but he was concerned about withdrawing from the firm for a second time. Averell Harriman, his former partner and fellow Bonesman, told him he would be a “damn fool” to turn down the job. Acheson, Lovett’s friend since their days at Yale, urged him to take the post. Lovett called Truman back. He accepted on condition that he could take two months in Florida to recover from another operation on his “glass insides” (meaning his gallbladder) and a month of on-the-job training with Acheson before “flying solo.”19
While the force of Acheson’s personality was essential to the emergence of the Marshall Plan, Lovett’s temperament was suited to the heavy task of transforming the ideas undergirding Marshall’s speech into a program acceptable to both the Europeans and Congress. Like Acheson, Lovett had a sharp and worldly intellect. However, he had more self-awareness, a keener sense of how he was perceived by others. In contrast to Acheson, who could be brusque and acerbic and did not suffer fools, Lovett was tactful, genial, and soothing, qualities that were particularly important when dealing with American and European politicians. Moreover, he had an unusually attractive sense of humor. In Driven Patriot, Townsend Hoopes and coauthor Douglas Brinkley wrote that Lovett’s “‘sophisticated witticisms’ and ‘rueful humors’” made him “one of the funniest men of his generation.”20
Lovett must have laughed at the first line of Kennan’s July 21 memo concerning the Marshall Plan. “We have no plan,” it began. The next sentences, however, explained what he meant. It was the Europeans who were responsible for coming up with a plan, he wrote. The U.S. would consider their plan, but only if it did “the whole job,” and enabled the “principal European countries to exist without outside charity.”21
By early August, with the September 1 deadline at hand, the efforts of the Europeans to agree on a plan, let alone one that would do the whole job, had stalled. The problem was Germany. Britain and the Benelux countries were convinced that rehabilitation of the economy in Germany’s three western occupation zones (which included the Ruhr Valley) was essential to the recovery of Western Europe. France was adamantly opposed. The wounds inflicted by Germany were fresh. The French feared a German resurgence and believed that their economy should be the main engine of recovery for Western Europe. Marshall decided it was time for the Americans to step in and provide “friendly aid” in the drafting of an acceptable plan, as he had promised in his Harvard speech. Accordingly, he directed Will Clayton and General Lucius Clay, military governor of the U.S. zone in Western Germany and Berlin, to break the deadlock. On August 14, the French agreed to a compromise. With the hope, not yet a promise, of security guarantees, France agreed to join the UK, the Benelux countries, and the U.S. in internationalizing the production of coal, coke, and steel in the Ruhr, a forerunner of the European Coal and Steel Community and the Common Market. As a consequence, Germany was vaulted from “the periphery” of the Marshall Plan “into its core.”22
In the third week of August, Lovett wired a blunt message to Marshall, who was attending the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Continental Peace and Security at Petrópolis, Brazil’s imperial city, to finalize a Latin America mutual defense pact. Progress of the CEEC in Paris, he reported, was “disappointing.” All they have come up with is “sixteen shopping lists” totaling $28 billion, Lovett wrote, and “even these huge sums” would not result in “rehabilitation over a four-year period.” Lovett recommended that the CEEC promptly be told that its present plan is not acceptable, that George Kennan be sent to Paris to offer realistic proposals, and that the deadline be extended to mid-September. Marshall agreed, stressing that those on his team need to be firm and emphatic.23
With Marshall’s backing, and the dogged persistence of Lucius Clay, Lovett pushed the European delegates to reduce their collective $28 billion aid request by taking advantage of opportunities for “self-help” and “mutual help.”24 They made it clear that the economies in the three western zones of Germany must operate as one. In Paris, Kennan assisted Clayton in fashioning guidelines to the CEEC that emphasized production (especially production of coal and food), financial and monetary reforms, and liberalization of trade barriers throughout Western Europe. Meanwhile, time was running out. The economic situation was deteriorating so rapidly, reported Kennan, that the U.S. had no alternative but to provide “interim aid” so that the Europeans could survive the winter.25
Whether planned or not, Lovett and Marshall embarked on a “good cop, bad cop” maneuver. On September 7, Lovett pressed the CEEC harder than ever. He gave the Paris delegates another two weeks to hammer out a final program that addressed the deficiencies and reforms identified by Kennan and Clayton and substantially reduced the amount of aid requested. The French and British representatives stubbornly resisted, claiming that the Americans risked “wrecking the whole conference in its final critical stages.”26 Bevin was angry.
It was at this moment—a critical juncture in the implementation of the Marshall Plan—that Marshall chose to step forward and defuse the situation. On September 10, he issued a press release that had been cleared by Truman. Citing the accelerated need of some of the European countries for aid in reducing hunger and cold in the coming winter, Marshall announced that the administration would support a bill in Congress to provide “interim assistance.”27 The next day he offered to soften several of the changes that the U.S. was insisting be made to the proposed plan of the CEEC and he suggested that its report to the State Department be framed as a first report—“a basis for further discussion.”28
Marshall’s intervention was the right touch at the right time. On September 12, Jefferson Caffrey, the distinguished American ambassador to France who served under eight presidents from Taft to Eisenhower, cabled Marshall that the Paris delegates “were prepared to proceed along the lines suggested by the U.S.”29 Nine days later, the CEEC released its historic two-volume General Report to the public, which hailed “the advent of a new stage in European economic cooperation” and the inclusion of Western Germany in the program for European recovery.30 The total request was reduced to $17 billion, a significant improvement, but still more than the State Department wanted. Five signed originals of the report, encased in green manila folders and bound with shocking pink ribbons, were personally delivered by Walter Kirkwood, His Majesty’s messenger, to the United States. “It is now for the American people and the American Congress,” Bevin reportedly said, “to decide whether this program, undertaken at Secretary Marshall’s initiative, should be fulfilled and whether Europe by this means can contribute to the peace and prosperity of the world.”31
The selling of the Marshall Plan was going to require a heavy lift. Near the end of September, the president convened a meeting of key leaders of Congress plus Marshall, Lovett, and Harriman for a strategy session. According to Truman’s memoir, he began by summarizing the report of the CEEC. He said the Europeans would require an appropriation of $580 million of emergency aid to take care of immediate needs until March 31, 1948—the earliest date by which comprehensive legislation providing for recovery (to be delivered to Congress in December) could be enacted.32 This meant that Congress would need to adopt a two-part legislative strategy—enact emergency relief by Christmas 1947 followed by hearings and passage of the main recovery plan in the spring of 1948. House majority leader Charles Halleck, a conservative Indiana Republican, spoke up. “Mr. President, you must realize there is growing resistance to these programs. I’ve been out on the hustings and I know. The people don’t like it.”33 Halleck’s pessimism was shared by others in the room. Nevertheless, Truman dispatched letters to the House and Senate committees on foreign affairs and appropriations. Citing the “steady deterioration” of the French and Italian economies, the president asked that their committees meet as soon as possible to consider his request for interim aid.34 In late October he called for a special session of Congress to convene on November 17.
Truman’s two-stage proposal meant that political resistance to the first stage—a request for almost $600 million of interim relief—could be just as fierce as the opposition to the $17 billion European recovery plan. Opponents in Congress were likely to claim that a vote for emergency funds would be tantamount to a vote for the entire Marshall Plan. Passage of interim relief arguably would let the horses out of the barn.
The opposition was led by “Mr. Republican,” Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. A week before hearings began on interim aid he declared in an address to the Ohio Society that the Marshall Plan was inflationary and would require huge tax increases. Taft complained, yet in the same breath admitted, that he and his colleagues had been out-organized: “We have seen in the past three months the development of carefully planned propaganda for the Marshall Plan, stimulated by the State Department, by widespread publicity, and by secret meetings of influential people in Washington.”35
Taft was right about meetings of influential people, but the most consequential meetings were not exactly secret. And they were not in Washington. Instead, they took place at the second home of a wealthy Brazilian in the mountains northeast of Rio de Janeiro. Over a period of eighteen days in August 1947, it was there that George Marshall, Arthur Vandenberg, and their respective spouses became close friends. The Vandenbergs were part of the delegation that Marshall brought to the Inter-American conference at Petrópolis, Brazil’s summer capital. In her diary, Hazel Vandenberg wrote about a day during the conference when she found Katherine and George Marshall on the porch of their villa “playing Chinese checkers . . . completely congenial and a simply grand pair.” Before long the couples spent evenings together, relaxing with cocktails before dinner and playing bridge and other games into the evenings. “There is nothing stuffy at all about [Marshall],” wrote Hazel, “in fact, he is a lot of fun and so human.”36 As a mark of friendship, the general began addressing the senator as “Arthur” and “Van.”
Arthur Vandenberg Jr., who edited the The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg, wrote that it was because of the conference in Brazil that Marshall and Vandenberg were able to establish a “new and close working relationship” and an “abiding friendship . . . based on mutual respect and affection.” He concluded that the bond between the two of them was largely responsible for the bipartisanship in foreign policy that was to prevail in the coming months.37 Indeed, in the late 1940s, Vandenberg was regarded as chief advocate of the idea that “politics stops at the water’s edge,” though a version of the adage was coined as early as 1812 by Daniel Webster.
After returning to Washington in September, the senator became a full partner of the general in “the adventure” (Marshall’s term) of trying to persuade Congress to vote for interim aid and to pass the main plan for European recovery. “Van was my right-hand man and at times I was his right-hand man,” recalled Marshall. To avoid media attention, their practice was to meet twice a week, on average, at Blair House through the autumn and winter. “We couldn’t have gotten much closer together,” joked Marshall, “unless I sat in Van’s lap or he sat in mine.”38
Senator Taft’s admission that propaganda for the Marshall Plan was “carefully planned” was spot-on. A week before Taft’s speech to the Ohio Society, the bipartisan Harriman Committee, originally suggested by Vandenberg, released its unanimous endorsement of aid for Western Europe, making the case that the U.S. could afford a four-year program, that America had a moral duty to help, and that U.S. assistance would halt the spread of Communism in Europe. The conclusions of the Harriman Committee were widely publicized. Similarly, reports issued in October by Julius Krug, secretary of the interior, and Edwin Nourse, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, concluded that a recovery plan costing between $12 and $17 billion would not endanger America’s national security and vital resources nor was it likely to cause inflation or necessitate a tax increase.
Support for the Marshall Plan came from an unlikely but highly influential source. Newly appointed Secretary of Defense Forrestal began promoting the plan to key members of Congress as an alternative to an expensive military buildup, a form of asymmetrical warfare. Since Forrestal was the administration’s chief spokesman for the military, his endorsement of an economic strategy for defeating the spread of communism constituted a radical departure from conventional military thinking.
From his law firm, Dean Acheson helped set up a first-class lobbying organization in the summer of 1947 called the Committee for the Marshall Plan. Its three hundred bipartisan members were a who’s who of the American elite in industry, religion, media, academia, agriculture, and labor. Henry Stimson served as its honorary president. Acheson and former secretary of war Robert Patterson assumed operational responsibility. The committee raised $150,000, hired a staff in Washington, and retained a news bureau to create and publicize editorials and articles favoring the Marshall Plan. To influence public opinion the committee organized hundreds of radio and in-person speaking events. Acheson himself debated the pros and cons of the Marshall Plan in New York City, gave speeches in San Francisco and the Northwest, and teamed up with Hubert Horatio Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis, to promote the Marshall Plan in the Twin Cities and Duluth.
In July Congressman Christian Herter of Massachusetts, destined to become secretary of state under Eisenhower, pushed through a House resolution providing for the appointment of a select committee to undertake a broad study to determine the relief and rehabilitation requirements of war-torn nations in Europe as well as Asia. Among those chosen to become one of the nineteen bipartisan members of the Herter Committee was freshman congressman Richard Nixon (R-CA), the youngest and the only westerner. Except for a small Asia contingent, the group departed New York near the end of August on the Queen Mary. After a six-week fact-finding trip to almost all countries in the Western bloc (Nixon was assigned to Italy), the group returned to Washington in October, burdened with seventeen trunks of facts and figures. Senator Taft and fellow opponents of the Marshall Plan were not happy with the Herter Committee’s findings and conclusions. Almost every single Herter delegate, including Nixon, supported interim relief and a plan for recovery of Western Europe, deeply convinced of the “peril of Communist expansion” and the “necessity for American leadership and aid.”39
By mid-November it was finally time for the first test of the effectiveness of the blue ribbon fact-finding committees, the lobbying campaigns, and the secret meetings excoriated by Senator Taft. On the 17th, a special session of Congress, the first since 1939 when the war in Europe broke out, was convened to debate and vote on the precursor to the Marshall Plan—an emergency aid package primarily for France, Italy, and Austria—$6.2 billion in today’s money. President Truman opened the session with a note of urgency. “The future of free nations in Europe hangs in the balance,” he proclaimed.40
Since Marshall was about to leave for the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings in London, he was not on hand for the debates. A week earlier he made his final appeal in separate appearances before the Senate and House foreign relations committees. This time, having been advised by Vandenberg to fight for the interim funds on “an anti-Communist line,” Marshall invoked iron curtain imagery and fear of alien forces to the east.41 Once again he was grilled on why emergency aid should be given to three European nations but not China. Calling upon his yearlong ordeal in China, he patiently explained, as he had done previously, that unlike those countries China was not faced with an inability to grow or purchase food for its citizens. Moreover, there was no realistic basis, he said, “on which to act for [the] rehabilitation” of China.42
With Marshall off to London, it was up to his trusted friend and “full partner,” Arthur Vandenberg, to deliver the votes in the Senate. Except for Senator Tom Connally, the previous head of the Foreign Relations Committee who was jealous of the new chair, Vandenberg had little trouble with the Democrats. His problem was Bob Taft and a dozen or so other dissenting Republicans. In a New York Times piece Scotty Reston observed that the Democrats were only too happy to step back and let Vandenberg twist the arms of members of his own party.43 To parry arguments by Republican opponents that a vote for interim aid presages a vote for the Marshall Plan, he announced that it carries no such obligation. “The only question here, and there are no other implications, is interim, emergency aid for France, Italy, and Austria . . .”44
The final vote in the Senate was 83 for interim aid and only 6 opposed. Even Senator Taft voted “aye.” The amount authorized for France, Italy, and Austria was almost $540 million, less than requested by the administration, but nevertheless probably enough for the next three months. It was a remarkable achievement for Vandenberg.
The House was another story. Six days of debate yielded evidence that the Marshall Plan itself was in jeopardy. Lovett wired Marshall in London, reporting that the bill sent to the floor by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs slashed the amount of interim aid that had already been passed by the Senate and it was still under heavy attack. Of forty-seven floor amendments proposed by House members, sixteen passed, many with additional debilitating provisions. Marshall sent a message to Republican Speaker Joe Martin with a copy to Vandenberg, conveying his “grave concern” and stating his preference for the Senate bill. Lovett reported to Marshall that the outlook for the long-term recovery plan was grim. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal wrote in his diary that Vandenberg “was very gloomy” about its prospects.45
On December 11, the House bill for interim relief passed. Despite Marshall’s letter to Speaker Martin, it provided for a disappointing authorization of only $509 million, $60 million of which was earmarked for China. For the next twelve days the legislation threaded its way through a maze of House-Senate conferences and appropriations committees. In the end, the amount actually appropriated was $522 million for France, Italy, and Austria and $18 million for China.
In a letter to Hazel, who was at home in Michigan, Arthur Vandenberg reflected on the way forward. If the fierce resistance to a “little short-range European relief bill . . . is any criterion,” he wrote, “our friend Marshall is certainly going to have a helluva time down here on the Hill when he gets around to his long-range plan . . . Politics is heavy in the air.”46
The main subject at the London Council of Foreign Ministers (November 25–December 15, 1947) was the future of Germany; that is, whether it could be reunited and its economy restored. Because neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union would permit a unified Germany to be the ally of the other, the conference ended with a bitter exchange. Molotov charged that U.S. policy, meaning the Marshall Plan, was intended to “enslave” Germany through economic aid and to develop Germany into a “strategic base” aimed against the Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union. In an icy tone Marshall responded, “Mr. Molotov must recognize” that such “propaganda” makes it “difficult to inspire respect for the dignity of the Soviet government.”47 Molotov winced. Two days later all of the delegates except Molotov approved Marshall’s motion to adjourn sine die. Germany would remain divided. For Marshall the Cold War had begun.
After an all-night flight from London, Secretary Marshall landed in Washington on December 19, the same day that the White House delivered a rough draft of the European Recovery Program legislative package, commonly known as the Marshall Plan, to Congress. He was met at National Airport by the president himself and taken to the White House for a cabinet meeting, followed by lunch at Blair House with Kennan, Lovett, and Bohlen. At ten p.m. that evening Marshall addressed the nation from the State Department auditorium by radio and television. It was the television premiere for the State Department and up to that time the largest live coverage ever accorded a secretary of state. The purpose of his talk was to report to the American people on the disappointing outcome of the London conference and to make the case for preserving “western European civilization with its freedoms.” As usual, Marshall was frank. Get used to it, he said. Germany was going to remain divided for the forseeable future. He blamed officials of the Soviet Union for their opposition and hostility to the reunification of Germany and the rehabilitation of Western Europe. They were doing this, he said, because they and their fellow communists sought to fill the “political vacuum” created by the war. Marshall didn’t use the term “Cold War,” but for the first time he indicated publicly that the success of the administration’s European Recovery Program was the key to winning the struggle against “governmental tyranny” posed by the Soviet Union and leaders of the Communist parties.48
With Marshall that evening was Madge Brown, widow of Allen Brown, the general’s stepson who was killed in Italy. In the fall of 1947, Madge and her six-year-old son, Tupper, had moved to a narrow two-story row house on Volta Place, just off Wisconsin Avenue in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. Madge had left her job as a journalist with Life magazine in New York City to work for Reporter, a newly formed newsmagazine in Washington, and was supporting herself and Tupper. For the remainder of the two years Marshall served as secretary of state he spent weeknights with Madge and Tupper when he was in Washington. On typical evenings, recalled Madge, they would have drinks before dinner and Marshall would reminisce about his early days in China, the friends he made at VMI, and his love for Lily. One evening when they were playing Chinese checkers, Marshall told her about how he taught Chiang Kai-shek to play the game and allowed him to win every so often. The fact that the secretary of state was staying at Madge’s tiny house “was a huge secret,” she remembered. “Nobody knew about it. And it worked very well.”49
Following his televised speech Marshall returned with Madge to Volta Place. He left the next morning to spend Christmas at Pinehurst with Katherine. “I had a fine rest,” he wrote to one of his VMI roommates, “the first of more than five days since June ’39 and I feel ready for the battle of Washington.”50 After Christmas, George and Katherine drove down to Hobcaw, Bernard Baruch’s plantation in South Carolina, for a few days of wing shooting. To Molly Winn, his stepdaughter, Marshall proudly wrote that he “got seven or eight quail each day.” He bragged in a birthday letter to Eisenhower that “I have not yet lost my shooting eye.”51
Senator Vandenberg did not rest. Rather than returning to Grand Rapids, he remained in Washington, thinking about how best to present to Congress the administration’s legislation for the Marshall Plan, conferring with key Republicans, and anticipating objections likely to be raised. By the end of the year, Marshall’s sixty-seventh birthday, Vandenberg was convinced that it would be a huge mistake to ask Congress to commit to spend $17 billion, the whopping price tag for the entire four-year European Recovery Program set forth in the administration’s legislative package. In a letter to Marshall, he argued that while Congress should enact a multiyear program for recovery, it would be much more palatable if the amounts to be spent were presented and considered by the Senate and House annually, or at least not all at once. Bob Lovett, Marshall’s undersecretary who had remained at his desk over the holidays, agreed. Since the Eightieth Congress could not bind the next on spending, there was nothing to be gained and a great deal to be lost by asking it to authorize the entire $17 billion. On January 2, 1948, after consulting with the president, others in the State Department, and presumably Marshall, Lovett advised Vandenberg that the administration backed his change.
During the holiday recess Vandenberg acted to remove stumbling blocks to the legislation and to improve his position as its most influential advocate in Congress. First, he asked Harold Moulton, president of the Brookings Institution, Washington’s preeminent think tank, to task a team of its scholars to prepare an analysis of the European Recovery Program and to provide advice on whether it should be administered by the State Department or an independent agency, an issue that Vandenberg saw as the “biggest single conundrum.” There is no source other than Brookings, he wrote Moulton, “which could be of greater value or command more general respect.”52 Second, since Vandenberg was being talked about as a leading candidate for the presidency in 1948, he did what he could to suppress the speculation. On New Year’s Day he called Michigan governor Kim Sigler and wrote Republican leaders in the state, asking that they refrain from nominating him at the party convention in Philadelphia and that they put a stop to the talk. Vandenberg did not want opponents of the European recovery plan to be able to question his motives or tactics on the ground that he was running for president. By setting aside his own presidential aspirations, Vandenberg aimed to be free to work with the Democrats in a bipartisan effort to get the Marshall Plan through Congress.
Marshall returned to Washington on the first Monday of January, mentally refreshed and ready for the battle to persuade Congress to pass the program popularly named after him. The latest issue of Time had once again proclaimed him its “Man of the Year.” The cover depicted the hooked beak, fierce eye, and curved talons of an American eagle behind a full-color likeness of Marshall. The artist had chiseled Marshall’s nose, chin, and jawline to resemble the sharp features of the eagle. Marshall’s riveting blue eyes and compressed lips conveyed grim determination. The caption below read “Hope for Those Who Need It,” an obvious reference to the Marshall Plan. Describing 1947 as the year Americans “took upon their shoulders the leadership of the world,” Time declared that “one man symbolized U.S. action. He was Secretary of State Marshall . . . a man of stubborn, unswerving honesty—a good man.”53
As perhaps the most respected public figure in America—the good man whose name would forever be associated with the European Recovery Program—Marshall was scheduled to be the leadoff witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the first of dozens of congressional hearings on the so-called Marshall Plan that would continue into the early spring. Marshall would later say that he “took pride” in his own performance during that period. Yet he also stressed that credit for the “actual movement” of the Marshall Plan through Congress would always belong to Senator Vandenberg. “[H]e was just the whole show,” remembered Marshall.54
Vandenberg was the Senate concert master. It was he who orchestrated the legislative strategy, a carefully planned series of hearings involving some ninety-five witnesses that led to a consensus by the thirteen members of his committee. And it was he and his staff who turned the administration’s rough draft into Senate Bill 2022, a well-crafted piece of legislation that was eventually sent to the floor and passed by the Senate.
At ten a.m. on January 8, Marshall made his way past a crowd at the head of the stairway in the original Senate Office Building and into the marble Caucus Room, featuring twelve Corinthian columns along opposite walls and an elaborately embellished high ceiling from which hung two enormous crystal chandeliers. He was immediately bombarded by the popping of camera flashbulbs, blinding klieg lights, and senators pressing forward to shake his hand. Scotty Reston wrote that despite the cacophony, Marshall looked “even more relaxed and self-possessed” than when he had returned from China a year earlier, still emanating his trademark “quality of moral grandeur.”55
The secretary chose to begin by reading his entire 5,500-word written statement, copies of which were already in the hands of the press and the senators on the dais. His delivery, wrote Reston, was almost deliberately dull. Dull or not, Marshall’s opening words were arresting. Referring to the European Recovery Program, he declared, “This program will cost our country billions of dollars. It will impose a burden on the American taxpayer and [i]t will require sacrifices . . .” Those who read or listened that day to these politically incendiary words knew at once that this was no ordinary sales pitch.
Marshall read on, aggressively making the case that if Congress did not act and act soon, “the vacuum which the war created in Western Europe will be filled by the forces of which war is made.” As a result, he feared, “our national security will be seriously threatened.” (The “forces of which war is made” was a patently obvious reference to the tyranny of the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism, though he never identified those forces by name.) Despite Vandenberg’s misgivings, Marshall did not mince words with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the huge cost to America’s taxpayers of the administration’s proposed recovery program. For the first fifteen months, he said, the cost would be $6.8 billion, while the total would range between $15.1 and $17.8 billion over the four-year period. Marshall made a point of saying that the $6.8 billion number had been carefully computed and thus was “not an asking figure.” He challenged the senators to refrain from cutting back on the dollars. “Either undertake to meet the requirements of the problem or don’t undertake it at all,” he bluntly said. He was adamant that it be all or nothing. Near the end of his statement, Marshall posed a rhetorical question: If Congress were to enact the requested program for the recovery of Western Europe, will it succeed? His candid answer: “It is a calculated risk.” However, he believed there was no viable alternative. “The way of life that we have known is literally in the balance.”56
For the most part Marshall remained “patient and courteous,” wrote Reston, while calmly fielding questions following his prepared remarks, “yet he acted like a man determined to get substantially the Marshall plan he wanted or as already rumored in the capital, retire at last to Leesburg.”57 Marshall was interrogated during the four-hour question period about the structure and control of the executive agency that would administer the European Recovery Plan. Premised on the theory that there could be only one secretary of state, Marshall was of the view that on matters of foreign relations the new agency and its administrator should be controlled by the secretary of state. Several senators, including Vandenberg, disagreed. To attract the best results-oriented and pragmatic businesspeople to run the agency, they believed it should have complete autonomy, subject to a provision requiring State and the new agency to establish effective working relations and to try to avoid conflict in matters involving foreign policy. They also thought that to the extent the State Department maintained a measure of control it would be more difficult for Congress to exercise direct oversight of the agency.
Near the end of his Senate testimony Marshall was asked whether the Western European states would continue to cooperate with one another and become more closely integrated in future years following expiration of the Marshall Plan. The questioner feared that after recovery they would revert to their historic pattern of erecting trade barriers and fighting with one another. Marshall’s response was both wise and prescient. Promotion of further European integration by the U.S., he warned, will present “delicate” management problems—the need to “keep the process going toward further cooperation” while taking care not “to awaken hostilities because of national pride.” However, he expressed confidence that the advantages of integration would become self-evident as a consequence of the success of the European Recovery Program. “You might say it fulminates the charge. It will begin to break the bottlenecks.”58 Marshall could not have realized it at the time, but his words presaged the Common Market and the European Union.
Marshall’s testimony before the twenty-five members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee went on much longer—three sessions—and at a leisurely pace. Contrary to Reston’s prediction, the questions were not “more serious and fundamental” than those posed by the senators.59 They were largely the same in substance. The only difference was that several congressmen, including Democrat Mike Mansfield of Montana, sensed a reluctance on Marshall’s part to explicitly blame the Soviet Union and the Communist Party for exploiting the economic chaos in Europe, or to at least come out and identify them by name instead of using euphemisms like “police state” and “tyranny” and “totalitarian state” in his prepared statements. They were right. With an eye on Berlin, a divided Germany, and a powerful Red Army, Marshall had no interest in ramping up tensions with the Soviets. Nor did he want to give Stalin reasons for clamping down further on wavering satellites like Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, when Mansfield asked who would gain if Congress failed to pass the European Recovery Plan, Marshall responded: the leadership of the Soviet Union, “which is antagonistic to all that we find moral and desirable.”60
In mid-January Marshall took to the road to rally support for the program that bore his name. Though he was not a good public speaker, the administration believed that his honesty, nonpolitical stature, and gravitas would be more than enough to persuade groups of doubting Americans to support the European Recovery Program. “Oh Lord I traveled all over the country,” he remembered. “I worked on that as hard as though I was running for the Senate or the presidency. That’s what I’m proud of, that part of it, because I had foreigners, I had tobacco people, cotton people, New York, eastern industrialists, Pittsburgh people, the whole West Coast . . . It was just a struggle from start to finish.”61
The first several days were anything but auspicious. In Pittsburgh, where Marshall had many friends due to its proximity to Uniontown, the Chamber of Commerce businessmen he spoke to listened politely, but in his view they were not persuaded that the European Recovery Program was necessary. He spent the night at the Hotel William Penn and returned to the State Department in the morning to conduct business and prepare for another session with the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. During the following week, after an exhausting day of questioning by the House, Marshall was rushed to Walter Reed, probably due to a kidney infection or passing of a stone (five months later he was diagnosed with an enlarged kidney). While hospitalized, he was given injections of penicillin, the new wonder drug, which caused him to suffer painful side effects, probably hives or a rash that broke out on his back. Instead of canceling his scheduled speech to the Cotton Council, Marshall flew to Atlanta, where he struggled through his talk, unable to mask his pain and discomfort. The press corps, who were used to seeing him speak, knew something was terribly wrong. Still, Marshall believed that this time his message got through, mainly because his speechwriters focused on the facts and economics of the cotton export business and its critical role in European recovery. A few days later, reflecting on his first two forays outside Washington to sell the recovery plan—his failure in Pittsburgh and his struggle in Atlanta—Marshall confessed to the press, who had kept his health situation under wraps, “That was the worst two weeks I ever had in my life.”62
Over the next couple of months Marshall’s schedule was packed with day trips and one-nighters along the East Coast, flights to the Midwest where Bert McCormick’s isolationist Chicago Tribune was leading the opposition to the recovery plan, a long speaking tour in California and the Northwest, and talks to associations and labor organizations holding their annual conferences in DC. After speaking to the New York–based National Garden Institute in early February, he added women’s groups to his schedule. Women, he learned, were effective activists. When they heard him speak, the women “went back home and they scared Congress to death in the next twenty four hours . . . It was electric what happened, just electric.” On the other hand, he said, “the men will agree with me, but they don’t do a darn thing.”63
Marshall’s swing through the Midwest heartland marked a turning point in his rhetoric. His initial speech, which incorporated suggestions by former Senator La Follette (then serving as a foreign-aid adviser in the Truman administration), was to be delivered to the five thousand members of the National Farm Institute who were having their annual meeting in Des Moines, Iowa.64 En route, Marshall’s plane encountered a dangerous winter storm. “I almost lost my life in that,” recalled Marshall, because “I got forced down in the only airport that was available.”65 His plane landed in Knoxville, Tennessee. Since gale winds made it impossible to continue to Des Moines, Marshall’s speech was broadcast via a radio hookup. Either at La Follette’s urging or on his own, for the first time Marshall invoked by name the Soviet Union and the Communist Party as enemies of the United States and the Western democracies. Scarcely four paragraphs into his address, he warned that “the Soviet Union and their Communist allies have been seeking to exploit the crisis so as to gain a controlling influence over all of Europe.”66 Never before had Marshall publicly laid blame for the economic and political crises in Europe so squarely on Soviet leadership.
On his West Coast tour, Marshall went even further. He not only named the Soviets as enemies of America, he compared their regime to that of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. At the University of California at Berkeley he spoke of how Soviet “absolute control of the press, domination of the people, [and] the conduct of a skillful campaign of propaganda” were similar to the Nazis.67 The next day at the University of California in Los Angeles, Marshall made the same comparisons and declared that the responsibility to put a stop to the Soviet takeover of Europe “is now clearly ours.”68
While Marshall was barnstorming, Senator Vandenberg was busy negotiating changes in the European recovery bill to strengthen its chances for unanimous approval by his committee and to assure a majority vote of the Senate as a whole when it reached the floor. Many of the changes he regarded as window dressing. A handful were critically important. Fortunately for Vandenberg and the success of his bill, the report of the Brookings Institution helped him push through a significant change that Marshall initially opposed. One of Brookings’ principal recommendations was that a separate executive branch agency, headed by a single administrator of cabinet rank, should be established to administer the Marshall Plan. The Brookings report made clear that the administrator must have “direct access”—and “be responsible only”—to the president.69 In the judgment of its experts, who aligned with the views of Vandenberg and a large bloc of senators, the State Department should not have any control or direction over the administration of the recovery program. If serious disputes regarding the conduct of foreign policy should arise, they were to be resolved by an appeal to the president. Brookings’ rationale for the complete separation was based on the idea that the agency administering the vast new recovery program needed to be run according to sound business practices, not influenced by political concerns that sometimes undergird positions of the State Department. Its reasoning was also based on the notion that separation would enhance the ability to recruit outstanding personnel to lead the agency. With the backing of the Brookings report, Vandenberg persuaded Marshall and Lovett to support the change. In the Senate bill, the new independent agency was to be called the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA). At the insistence of Vandenberg, Truman would appoint Paul Hoffman, CEO of Studebaker, an experienced and nationally known businessman, as administrator of the ECA.
Other important changes in the Senate bill, concurred by Marshall, included a reduction in the initial authorization of funds from $6.8 billion for the first fifteen months to $5.3 billion for the initial twelve months (roughly the same amount per month); a provision requiring the administrator of the ECA to terminate aid if a recipient did not adhere to its commitments to the U.S. or to its other partners in Europe; and a clever requirement that if U.S. raw materials and goods were provided in kind, which would comprise the bulk of the aid provided, the European recipient would deposit payments in local currency into an escrow account maintained by its central bank to be used to finance its national recovery, while the U.S. would pay the providers of goods in dollars. The latter requirement was designed to ease the “dollar shortage,” a balance of payments crisis caused by the fact that the Europeans did not have dollars to pay for the products needed to stimulate their economies. The escrowed local currency payments, not convertible into foreign exchange, were known as “counterpart funds.” To prevent corruption, Vandenberg made sure that the ECA had authority to veto the use of counterpart funds for purposes other than recovery.
By the second week of February Vandenberg arrived at what he hoped would be a legislative sweet spot, a series of changes and compromises designed to enable all sides of the debate over the Marshall Plan to claim some share of victory. After five days of closed-door deliberations, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 13–0 to approve the European Recovery bill as amended and it was cleared for prompt floor action.
Marshall thanked Vandenberg profusely for his legislative skill. Indeed, he went a bit over the top, proclaiming in a letter to the Michigan senator that he was “a truly great statesman with wisdom and integrity as [his] cardinal virtues.”70 Vandenberg had reason to reciprocate. Just two days before his Foreign Relations Committee voted out the bill, the Washington Post published a page-one story, orchestrated by Marshall and the State Department public relations staff, that made an emotional case for why Americans should back the Marshall Plan. Together with a staged photograph, the tongue-in-cheek story was about “an extemporaneous speech on the state of the world” by Secretary of State Marshall to seven awestruck Cub Scouts, aged nine to eleven, who were seated around a table in Marshall’s office. The scouts had been invited into the secretary’s inner sanctum, wrote the reporter, so that they could tell “the author of the European Recovery Plan . . . about their own little Marshall plan, a project to raise funds to feed eight hungry European boys for a year.” Marshall listened respectfully and complimented the cubs on their plan. He spoke at length about his own boyhood and how little he knew about the world. Then the Post reporter picked up the words that Marshall wanted to convey to Congress and the American public. “In the short period of my lifetime, we are now recognized everywhere as being the most powerful Nation in the world and being the acknowledged leader in the world.” Therefore, he reportedly told the wide-eyed boys, “what you are trying to do . . . for the children of Europe . . . is of great international importance in establishing relations of friendship and good will and trust that are so important to our Government, and to our people and to the world and to peace.”71 A photo accompanying the article showed the scrubbed faces of the young scouts closely surrounding, almost hugging, father-figure Marshall as he sat at his desk. The messaging was obvious. If seven Cub Scouts could raise money to assist in the recovery of Europe, so could the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world.
Marshall’s Cub Scout gambit might have swayed public opinion or possibly moved a few congressmen closer to “yes” on the Marshall Plan. However, it was a Soviet-backed communist coup in Czechoslovakia that galvanized Washington and gave rise to a new sense of urgency to pass the European recovery legislation. On February 20, twelve non-communist cabinet members, a minority of the coalition government in Czechoslovakia, submitted letters of resignation. They did so to protest the refusal of the communist minister of the interior to reinstate a number of non-communist senior police officers, despite a cabinet vote ordering reinstatement. Those who resigned assumed and were subsequently assured by Czech president Edvard Beneš that he would not accept their resignations. They were led to believe that Beneš would keep them in a caretaker government and take steps to force favorable changes in the composition of the cabinet or oust Klement Gottwald, the communist premier. It was a tragic miscalculation. Over the next five days the nation was thrown into turmoil and crisis. Gottwald used his party’s control of the media to characterize the resignations as treasonous. He took control of the police and government ministries. Students fought with the police. A work stoppage was threatened. President Beneš, who had recently suffered a stroke, proved weak and powerless. Fearing civil war and Soviet intervention, he capitulated and allowed Gottwald to form a new communist-dominated government.
Though Marshall had predicted the previous November that the Soviets would “clamp down” on the Czechs as a “purely defensive move,” Americans were outraged and frightened.72 They remembered that only a decade earlier it was Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia that triggered the Second World War in Europe. From Prague, Laurence Steinhardt, ambassador to Czechoslovakia, wired Marshall that the Communists, with Stalin’s approval, if not his orders, “have wiped out every vestige of true representative government . . . They have browbeaten and exercised a degree of duress on Beneš strikingly similar to methods employed by Hitler in dealing with heads of states. In short, they have employed identical methods to achieve a successful putsch which were first employed by the Nazis and subsequently by the Communists in other satellite states.”73
Two other ominous events in Europe heightened alarm in the U.S. and spurred the passage of the Marshall Plan. On February 27, Stalin delivered a letter to the president of Finland urging (demanding?) that it sign a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union. Eleven days later Jan Masaryk, the American-educated foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, was found dead, dressed in pajamas, forty-seven and one-half feet below his bathroom window in the courtyard of the Czernin Palace (the Foreign Ministry). Masaryk, the son of Czechoslovakia’s first president, was the most prominent non-communist in the new government that was formed following the coup. The cause of his death, officially investigated four times over the years, remains in dispute. The initial investigation concluded that he committed suicide by leaping from his window. Some of his close associates, including his private secretary and his former wife, agreed. Many others were convinced that he was murdered—pushed or thrown out of the window to his death—calling it the Third Defenestration of Prague (the fourth and last investigation was completed in 2001). There was a sarcastic joke told by those who discounted the suicide story: “Jan Mastaryk was a very tidy man. He was such a tidy man that when he jumped he shut the window after himself.”
On Monday, March 1, 1948, the Senate gallery was jammed to capacity with reporters and spectators. Down on the floor almost every senator was present. House members who had come from the other side of the Capitol stood against the walls of the chamber. After four months of hearings, sixty-three-year-old Senator Arthur Vandenberg advanced to the lectern to open and frame the debate on the Marshall Plan, officially titled the European Cooperation Act of 1948. The plan’s namesake was not there.
Over the course of several nights in his Wardman Park apartment, Vandenberg had written and rewritten his speech, pecking out seven drafts on his portable typewriter. For the proponents and the undecideds, some of the phrases he chose to urge prompt passage of the Marshall Plan were memorable and inspiring: an act of “American intelligent self-interest . . . a mighty undertaking worthy of our faith . . . a welcome beacon in the world’s dark night . . . a plan for peace, stability, and freedom . . .” Holding forth for more than an hour and a quarter, Vandenberg concluded his speech with a rhetorical flourish. “There is only one voice in the world,” he declared, that can enable the survival of Western Europe. “It is our voice.” The Marshall Plan, he predicted, “can be the turning point in history for 100 years to come. If it fails, we have done our final best. If it succeeds, our children and our children’s children will call us blessed. May God grant his benediction upon the ultimate event.”74
“Senators and spectators sprang to their feet in unrestrained applause,” wrote Felix Blair of The New York Times.75 Some called it “the climactic role of Vandenberg’s career.”76 Marshall said the speech was a “masterpiece.”77
As the debate on the floor of the Senate began, the British, French, and Benelux nations, meeting in London, announced plans to formally incorporate western Germany into the Marshall Plan and establish a West German federal government. It was a bold and historic decision that vastly strengthened Western Europe and was therefore regarded by the Soviets as a direct threat to their security. In a cable to the army intelligence director, Lucius Clay, military governor in Berlin, predicted that war might “come with dramatic suddenness.”78 It was leaked and widely circulated in Washington.
With these developments in the headlines, the debate in the Senate droned on. For the most part Vandenberg fended off crippling amendments and other attacks by the opposition. He enlisted Marshall to speak to Republican senator Homer Capehart of Indiana, the so-called father of the jukebox industry, about his proposal for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to provide business loans to the Western European states instead of direct government aid. Marshall persuaded Capehart to back off, telling him that his amendments would completely undermine confidence in the good faith of the U.S. and the progress that the Europeans had made during the previous eight months.
The most serious challenge during debate over the Marshall Plan was mounted by archconservative Senator Bob Taft, a candidate for the Republican ticket in 1948, who wielded considerable influence over other senators, especially on domestic issues. At five p.m. on March 12, the last day for debate, he introduced an amendment to cut authorization for first-year funding from $5.3 billion to $4 billion, assuring Vandenberg that if his amendment was adopted he would vote for the Marshall Plan. Vandenberg held firm, famously responding to Taft’s proposed cut, “When a man is drowning 20 feet away, it’s a mistake to throw him a 15-foot rope.”79 The Michigander held his supporters in line and quickly moved for a vote. Taft’s amendment was defeated 56–31.
The next day Vandenberg delivered a powerful closing argument, focusing on the threat posed by Stalin’s westward expansion, namely the Soviet-inspired Communist takeover of the Czech government and its relentless pressure on Finland to agree to a mutual defense pact (Finland agreed on April 6, though she retained her independence). His argument was buttressed by growing fears in the halls of Congress, stoked by Clay’s leaked cable, that war was more than a possibility. Finally, at five past midnight on Sunday, March 14, the Senate voted 69–17 in favor of the European Cooperation Act of 1948. Thirty-one Republicans, including Taft, and thirty-eight Democrats voted for the bill. Perhaps it was the fear of war, but given the partisanship that has divided the U.S. Senate in recent years it is difficult to imagine how Republicans and Democrats, driven by such different platforms and ideologies, could coalesce, as they did in the spring of 1948, and vote so overwhelmingly to pass the risky and enormously expensive Marshall Plan.
With whispers of war in the air, the scene shifted to the House of Representatives. Truman’s advisers decided the time was ripe for the president to demonstrate his leadership and urge the House to act quickly. Plus, a forceful speech would kick off his uphill campaign for the presidency. On Saint Patrick’s Day the president addressed a joint session of Congress. “There are times in world history,” Truman declared, “when it is far wiser to act than to hesitate.” Everyone in the chamber knew he was talking about the Marshall Plan. “There is some risk involved in action—there always is. But there is far more risk in failure to act.”80 On the same day or earlier that week, Marshall, with Lovett in tow, urged Chairman Charles Eaton (R-NJ), a Canadian-born Baptist minister, as well as members of his House Foreign Affairs Committee, to avoid unnecessary amendments to the European recovery bill and get it to the floor for debate as soon as possible. By a narrow vote of 11–8, the bill was reported out of committee on March 20 with a recommendation that it be passed by the full House in order to “reverse the wave of Communism in Europe.” The momentum was behind swift passage. However, the tipping point may have been a letter from former Republican president Herbert Hoover that caused wavering lawmakers to make a “‘stampede for the bandwagon.’” In Hoover’s letter, read on the floor of the House by Representative John Vorys of Ohio, the ex-president announced that he had withdrawn his opposition to the Marshall Plan and decided to endorse it as “a major dam against Russian aggression.”81 On the last day of March, while Marshall was in Bogotá, Colombia, attending a conference of Latin American states, the House, in a voice vote, approved the Marshall Plan by a lopsided margin of 329–74. Again, it was bipartisan. The Washington Post reported that “in a seething and excited House, shouts of ‘aye’ came from one Republican after another who had seldom, if ever, voted for any international legislation.”82
Differences between the House and Senate bills were resolved in conference. On April 3, 1948, after returning to Washington from William and Mary College, where he received an honorary degree, Truman signed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948 (formerly, the European Cooperation Act of 1948) into law. It authorized a total of $6.2 billion—$5.3 billion for European recovery (the Marshall Plan) and the rest for aid to China, Greece, and Turkey and for international child relief. From Bogotá, Secretary Marshall issued a press release. “The leaders in the Congress and the membership generally have faced a great crisis with courage and wisdom and legislative skill, richly deserving of the approval and the determined support of the people.”83
Within a day or two of Marshall’s press release, a message of resurrection arrived at Dodona. Allen’s widow, Madge, had written to George and Katherine about a surprise weekend visit by Captain Geoff Wiles, the close friend of Allen’s who fought alongside him at Cassino. Wiles was a “sweet person, very young, just 30,” wrote Madge. He had come all the way from New Zealand to meet Allen’s family and to tell young Tupper, Allen’s son, about the love and respect he had for his father. They played in the yard behind the house on Volta Place for an entire afternoon. Wiles built a hutch for Tupper’s two Easter rabbits, she wrote. “He was looking forward to meeting the two of you.” He would have loved to tell you “what a superb soldier Allen was.”84
At the moment of Marshall’s greatest peacetime achievement, Madge’s letter reminded Katherine and George of what they had lost. Yet it assured them that after they were gone, Allen would live on through the lives of his wartime friend Wiles and his little boy.
While the passage of the Marshall Plan was hailed as a singular triumph, the legislative process was by no means over. It was one thing for Congress to authorize the expenditure of up to $5.3 billion for the European recovery program in the first year. It was quite another for it to appropriate all or some of those dollars to the authorized program so they could be spent. The idea behind this two-step process—involving separate bills, each of which must traverse arduous paths through Congress before reaching the president’s desk—was to make spending harder, normally a good idea.
Fortunately, Paul Hoffman, the new administrator of the ECA, was able to start implementing the Marshall Plan without delay. Senator Vandenberg long ago had found dollars in the projected FY48 budget surplus that could be spent immediately by Hoffman without needing to await completion of the appropriations process.85 Only eleven days after Truman signed the bill authorizing the Marshall Plan, the victory ship John H. Quick, named after a marine who won the Medal of Honor at Guantánamo Bay in the Spanish-American War, set sail from Galveston, Texas, loaded with grain. The Quick was the first in a fleet of five American ships owned by the Luckenbach Steamship Company to carry fifty-four thousand tons of grain, fertilizer, and a variety of other Marshall Plan necessities across the Atlantic to France. Before long 150 ships, chartered and paid for by Hoffman’s ECA, were on the high seas carrying cargoes to harbors at Bordeaux, Liverpool, Rotterdam, and Genoa.
The psychological effect of the first American ships arriving at ports on the continent, along with the promise of what was to come, cannot be overstated. For the Europeans and the British, the Marshall Plan revived hope for the future, a sense of confidence that economic and political recovery was indeed achievable. For the first time in years, wrote an Economist reporter, “it is fitting that the peoples of Western Europe should attempt to renew their capacity for wonder.” For this reason, he wrote, the Marshall Plan “must be seen for what it is—an act without peer in history.”86
“Honest” John Taber, a lawyer from Aurora in upstate New York and chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, had a different view of the objective of the European Recovery Program and how it should be portrayed. With a voice like a bullhorn, Taber was a fiscal conservative, skeptical to his core of the benefits of foreign aid. In his own words, he was convinced that the plan was nothing more “than an international [New Deal] program to give those foreign countries more than they need.”87 Through his power over the purse, he set out to cripple the Marshall Plan, even though it had been authorized by Congress and signed into law by the president. On June 3, Taber’s committee slashed the plan’s first year’s authorized funds of $5.3 billion by about 25 percent. The following day, the House approved the drastic cut by voice vote.
Once the House voted, all eyes were focused on the Senate Appropriations Committee. Marshall called a press conference with the hope that his views would influence the committee. He told the reporters that the appropriation reductions approved by the House would “alter the European Recovery Program from one of reconstruction to one of mere relief.” Furthermore, it would have a “most serious effect” on “the political situation in Europe.”88
Vandenberg was not as diplomatic. He was fighting mad over the House vote. In a departure from tradition, he requested and was granted an opportunity to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee for the purpose of attacking the House cutbacks. It was “an angry, impassioned appearance,” wrote Vandenberg’s son, “a scorching assault” on the “‘meat-axe approach’ of the Taber group.”89 Setting aside his emotion, Vandenberg made a compelling point: the appropriations process should not be used as a backdoor way to reverse a major policy decision already made by Congress and the president. Marshall’s calm, understated testimony followed that of Vandenberg. After patiently and at some length reiterating the care exercised by teams of experts that went into paring down the final first-year funding request, Marshall told the senators that in his opinion the reductions voted by the House would “ruin” the promise of the European recovery plan, undermine its “psychological effect,” and set it on a calculated course “for failure.”90
It is impossible to know which of the two styles of advocacy was most effective. Perhaps it was the combination that persuaded Chairman Styles Bridges (R-NH) and a majority of the senators on his appropriations committee. Two days later the committee restored all but $245 million of the $5.3 billion requested for the first year. The Senate as a whole voted overwhelmingly to endorse the restoration. In the ensuing Senate-House conference a compromise was worked out that allowed Taber to save face. However, the spending level that the Senate wanted essentially remained intact. The Economist wrote, “Mr. Taber’s raid on the funds for ERP [European Recovery Program] has been beaten back. The confidence of those who believed in the ability of America’s responsible leaders to overcome the ignorant and obstinate obstruction of the isolationist fringe is now rewarded.”91
Shortly before dawn on June 20, with Congress rushing to adjourn and the Republican national convention about to convene in Philadelphia, the legislative process that was sparked by Marshall’s speech at Harvard a year earlier, and which officially began in December, at last came to an end. By roll call vote in the House, followed by voice vote in the Senate, the conference report on appropriations was approved. The spending bill was ready to be signed by the president.
That morning Marshall and his wife checked in to Walter Reed Army Hospital for their annual physical examinations. There is no evidence of Marshall’s reaction when he received the good news that Congress had voted to restore funding and that the long fight was finally over. Nor is there any record of his reaction when he received unsettling news a day or two later. The doctors “found a growth”—a renal tumor—on his “enlarged right kidney.” The kidney would have to be surgically removed.92
Due to forthcoming talks to establish a North Atlantic defense pact (ultimately NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and UN meetings in New York and Paris in the fall of 1948, Marshall insisted that his kidney operation be postponed. With a full plate in front of him it was fortunate that he was not also responsible for the implementation and administration of the Marshall Plan. Those duties were lodged in the more than capable hands of Paul Hoffman, administrator of the ECA. By the end of the plan’s first fiscal year, June 30, 1949, Hoffman’s ECA reported to Congress that the Western European nations had already notched impressive gains in productivity as a result of the “flow of United States dollars” and the self-help measures taken by the countries themselves.93 Prime Minister Clement Attlee of Great Britain wrote a note of appreciation to Truman. “[D]uring the last year the whole economic scene in Western Europe has been transformed to a degree that must astonish all of us when we recall the uncertainties and perils of the immediately preceding years.”94
Midway through 1950, the Korean War broke out. The intervention of the Chinese in November marked the beginning of the end for the Marshall Plan. Once it became clear that an early peace was not in sight, the funding for the Marshall Plan was terminated, effective as of the end of 1951, six months earlier than originally planned. With American armed forces tied down in the Far East, the military defense of the Western European states against Soviet aggression was seen by the U.S. as a greater priority than the continuation of efforts to achieve economic recovery.
Notwithstanding its early termination, the total amount actually provided by the Marshall Plan to help finance the recovery of Western Europe was $13.2 billion, $4 billion less than Truman requested. In today’s dollars, the amount spent by the U.S. on the Marshall Plan would be approximately $135 billion; as a percentage of GNP (5.2) it would exceed $800 billion. By any standard, the amounts spent were a heavy burden for U.S. taxpayers.95
In its final press release at the end of 1951, the ECA summarized its view of the accomplishments of the Marshall Plan “in cold statistics.” Industrial production in Western Europe, it proudly noted, was “64 percent above 1947 and 41 percent above prewar levels.” The production of steel “doubled in less than four years.” Coal output was slightly less than it was before the war, but it was “27 percent higher than in 1947.” Production levels of aluminum, copper, and cement, and levels of food production were all substantially above 1947 and prewar levels.96
While the cold statistics were impressive they do not necessarily prove that recovery was attributable to the Marshall Plan. Nor do they support the messianic notion that the plan saved Europe. After all, the $13.2 billion provided by the U.S. was little more than the equivalent of about 2 percent of Western Europe’s national income from 1948 to 1951. Moreover, it was obvious that the amazing economic miracle in West Germany had more to do with the success of U.S. measures to block collection of Germany’s massive debt and reparations obligations, as well as General Lucius Clay’s introduction of currency reform, than the comparatively small amount of relief provided by the Marshall Plan.
Since the 1980s, economists in Europe and the U.S. have debated the causal relationship between features of the Marshall Plan and the recovery of production and investment in Western Europe. Revisionist Alan Milward downgraded the Marshall Plan’s importance, arguing that Great Britain and Western European nations could have financed their own recovery programs without U.S. aid by maintaining food consumption at 1947 levels and that trade with West Germany could have functioned as a substitute for the dollar-based Marshall Plan. Milward contended that it might have taken a bit longer, but the Western European states would have figured out a way to recover without Marshall Plan aid.97Benn Steil, chief economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, dismissed Milward’s thesis as “farfetched,” relying as it did on lower levels of food consumption and more trade with West Germany. He opined that the Marshall Plan, standing alone, made a positive contribution to the recovery of Western Europe because it “helped to close the dollar gap by engineering Germany’s revival as western Europe’s primary capital goods supplier,” thus replacing the United States.98 But Steil persuasively argues that without a military security pact to contain Soviet aggression and the spread of communism, the Marshall Plan probably would not have succeeded in achieving its goal of reviving the economies of Western Europe.
The debate among economists as to the causes of postwar European recovery will probably never be resolved. From a historian’s viewpoint, the most that can be said is that the Marshall Plan provided breathing room, a cushion of resources, perhaps even the “crucial margin” of aid.99 However, there were three consequences of the plan that appear to be beyond dispute. The first was the enormous “psychological boost” that it “gave to a recovering Europe,” as John Agnew and Nicholas Entrikin wrote in The Marshall Plan: Model and Metaphor and as George Kennan had predicted.100 Vernon Walters, who worked at the ECA in Paris with Averell Harriman, agreed. He said that “the most important achievement of the Marshall Plan was not so much the material aid it gave as the rekindling of hope, the rekindling of energy.”101 At a critical time, beginning before the first shipload of goods even arrived, there is no question that the Marshall Plan boosted confidence and raised the morale of its European recipients.
The second consequence was the contribution of the Marshall Plan to cooperation and trade liberalization among the Western European states and the resulting divide with the Soviets and their satellites. Cooperation in the West was a long way from integration or a single market. But it set the stage for future unification and decisions by West Europe states to side with the U.S. in the Cold War against the Soviet Union (though the plan failed to lure satellites out of the Soviet orbit, which was one of Kennan’s objectives).
The third consequence was an urgent request to Marshall by the British foreign secretary asking the U.S. to join the UK and Western European nations in a mutual defense pact to deter the Soviet Union from dominating Europe and to allow democracy and free enterprise to flourish. Marshall responded on March 12, 1948, saying the U.S. was prepared to discuss the “establishment of an Atlantic security system.” Reluctantly, Marshall and the president had come to the conclusion that in order for the Marshall Plan to achieve its vision of a new Europe, the U.S. would have to commit to a military alliance, an alliance that became known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.102
In memory and myth the Marshall Plan endures as America’s most successful foreign policy initiative in history, rivaling that of the Monroe Doctrine or the Louisiana Purchase. Perhaps it endures because it speaks to a moment in the American story when it was the right and honorable thing to do. Or maybe it endures because it was such a monumental and risky undertaking, an act of unprecedented altruism, yet equally motivated by intelligent self-interest.
Understandably, the collective memory of the man whose name will forever be linked with the plan has faded. Few recall the critical role he played in the conception and birth of what became known as the Marshall Plan and the promotion of its bipartisan passage through Congress. In part, this is due to the character of George Marshall. He was selfless, self-sufficient, and private, a magnanimous person who found incentive and reward deep within himself. He did not seek or require praise. Except for the very few who were close to Marshall, he seemed solitary and detached, always reserved and dignified. Since the plan that bore his name had many fathers, Marshall never claimed authorship. He never referred to it as “the Marshall Plan.” Yet it was he who chose and trusted the talented individuals whom he then credited with helping him shape, articulate, and promote the ideas that became the plan—namely, Kennan, Acheson, Clayton, Bohlen, Lovett, and Harriman. And it was Marshall who befriended and gained the lifelong respect of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the indispensable isolationist-turned-internationalist who shepherded the European recovery legislation through Congress.
When Marshall returned from the Moscow conference in April 1947, he believed that unless something was done to help the Western European economies recover from the war, the peace that his armies had fought and died for would never be achieved. Stalin and the Communist Party, he was convinced, intended to exploit the chaos and dominate much of the rest of Europe. By the time the last of the Marshall Plan dollars were spent in 1952, the West was divided from the East, each backed by military alliances. The United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a nuclear arms race, restrained only by the fear of mutual assured destruction. It was nowhere near the kind of peace that Marshall envisioned in 1945 when American troops linked up with their Russian counterparts and shared vodka and whiskey on the banks of the Elbe. Nevertheless, his plan was a signal accomplishment. The Western European states, including West Germany, were well on their way to full recovery. The Soviet Union would remain a threat. However, it would not dominate Europe.