by Benn Steil
The first major breakthrough actually came from Capitol Hill initiatives of which the White House had been skeptical. Between August and November 1947, more than two hundred congressmen went to Europe on fact-finding tours—what The Washington Post called “the greatest legislative exploration in history.”62 The most famous of these missions was undertaken by the eighteen-member “Herter Committee.” Organized by internationalist Massachusetts Republican representative Christian Herter, the group split into subcommittees that spent forty-five days traversing the continent (save Yugoslavia, Albania, and the Soviet Union), meeting with public officials and private citizens. Determined that the trip would be no junket, Herter ordered members to bring no evening clothes or wives.
Echoing the attitude that Keynes had found so offensive when pleading for American postwar financial assistance in 1945,63 one committee member told The New York Times that he and his colleagues had “tried to look at Europe in about the way a banker would look at a bankrupt corporation trying to get a loan.” From the European side, the American visitors were, in the words of historian Theodore White, received with “a mixture of tongue-tied dread and hushed servility.”64 Yet in spite of ample opportunity for mutual incomprehension, the group returned home, accompanied by seventeen trunks of documents, with a near-consensus on the need for immediate, large-scale, multiyear American economic aid. “I became a convert on this trip,” Wisconsin Republican Lawrence H. Smith proclaimed on the floor of the House.65 This was a pleasant shock to the White House, which had been “afraid the traveling Congressmen would merely gather information to support their own prejudices.”66
What moved the congressmen was not just the hardship they witnessed but their understanding of the forces exploiting it. “The Marshall Plan,” New York Times correspondent William White wrote, “appears to draw its greatest strength not from any special feeling that other peoples should be helped for their own sake, but only as a demonstration against the spread of communism.”67 Communist “overlords,” South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt said, were disrupting economic activity “so as to produce chaos and put an end to freedom.” We must, he said, “turn the Red tide.” Herter himself cited the danger posed by Communist-controlled labor unions in western Europe. Freshman California Republican Richard Nixon, assigned to tour Italy, wrote that “the great difficulty [here] is not so much the physical destruction of the war, but the fact that the Communists have chosen this country as the scene of one of their most clever and well-financed operations against the forces of democracy.” Alabama Democrat Pete Jarman, who traveled in eastern Europe, spoke of the “feeling of strangulation that one has behind the iron curtain.” We in the United States, he concluded, had to recognize “the absolute necessity of our doing whatever is necessary to prevent [communism’s] spread.”68
The committee’s final 883-page report, which would not be released in full until May 1948, highlighted the anti-Communist basis of its support for the Marshall Plan: “To the degree that a country is faced with the constant disorders and the sense of hopelessness and insecurity caused by Communist activities,” it said, “it becomes more difficult to solve the problem of its economic reconstruction. On the other hand, a state of economic crisis and stagnation is the best breeding ground for the successful continuation of such activities. Thus a vicious circle is formed, a circle which the European recovery program must break in order to succeed.”69
Vandenberg’s strategy to build legislative support for the Plan was to weaken its links to the State Department. Just after Marshall’s Harvard speech in June, he urged the president to appoint bipartisan committees to pronounce on the advisability and domestic impact of a large-scale foreign aid program. Truman appointed three of them, the first headed by Commerce Secretary (and former ambassador to Moscow) Averell Harriman, the second by Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug, and the third by Council of Economic Advisers chairman Edwin Nourse.70 All three of their reports would form part of a Top Secret Soviet report on the Marshall Plan prepared for Gerashchenko in December.71
The most important of these committees was Harriman’s, the President’s Committee on Foreign Aid. A former banker and son of a railroad magnate, Harriman’s business bona fides balanced off his Democratic politics and ensured Vandenberg’s support. Though a multimillionaire, Harriman was “famed for his battered old hats and rumpled overcoats.” Embarrassed friends noted that “the cuffs of his trousers are so frayed that strings of material trail after him along the sidewalk.” Asked to explain his choice of party, he would offer that “trickle-through theory is terrible. . . . Besides that, I think being a Democrat is great fun.”72
With Vandenberg’s cooperation, Truman selected the committee members to repel attacks from the left and the right and to provide political cover for waverers. The chosen included Republican Studebaker automobile company president Paul Hoffman, former General Electric chairman Owen Young, American Federation of Labor (AFL) secretary-treasurer George Meany, and former Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette, Jr. La Follette—a former isolationist, Progressive-New-Dealer-turned-Republican—was the most colorful of the group. British philosopher-diplomat Isaiah Berlin branded him “peculiar . . . confused . . . Nationalist . . . unpredictable . . . radical in internal issues and obscurantist in foreign affairs.”73
Although the nineteen notables had been handpicked to back the principle and practicality of aid, their deliberations did not go smoothly. Heated arguments flared over whether the U.S. economy could support a program of the size the administration was demanding, with the matter of steel resources touching off the “hottest fight.”74 There were also political and ideological melees, the most consequential of which was over whether aid should be conditioned on recipient countries pursuing market-friendly policies. Hoffman skillfully hammered out compromise language pledging belief in “the American system of free enterprise” while abjuring pressure on others to adopt it.
What coherence the group’s economic approach achieved owed much to Harriman’s choice of executive secretary, Yale economist Richard Bissell, Jr., who would later go on to a colorful career at the CIA. Bissell’s analysis was largely of an early Keynesian variety, arguing, for example, that the program would generate inflationary effects in both Europe and the United States that would have to be offset by fiscal and administrative measures—as opposed to the monetary measures that would be orthodox today. But his conclusion, which the group signed off on, backed the report’s finding that a major foreign aid program could be managed without imposing undue hardship on the American people. It was a classic product of “New Deal synthesis” thinking: that supranational planning and scientific fiscal management could be combined with market forces to solve a complex economic problem with political roots.75 Science did not entirely drive the report’s findings, however. Later asked whether it had been a certainty that the group would reach its positive conclusion, Bissell replied: “The honest answer is affirmative to that.”76
On November 6, Vandenberg, who had been following the committee’s progress while working with his fellow senators, called Bissell and told him he wanted the report immediately—by the following morning. Marshall would be testifying on interim and long-term aid before his Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on November 10, and the president would be addressing a special session of Congress on the 17th—the first such address since 1939, at the start of the war in Europe. Vandenberg needed the Harriman Committee’s weight behind the initiative to set the stage.
It was outlandish enough to expect Bissell to complete the report in such haste, but impossible to expect that the committee could read, debate, edit, and approve it overnight. So Bissell and Harriman both did the outlandish. Bissell wrote and rewrote until 4 a.m., at which point he stopped typing to get it to the printers. “How he did it,” Hoffman said, “I still don’t know.” As for Harriman, he made sure that each committee member read and signed off on his own particular section, but on nineteen separate phone calls told them ju
st to “make a minority objection” after the report’s publication if they took issue with anything else. “An introvert, naturally shy, and lacking oratorical powers,” Harriman was nothing if not tenaciously persuasive when he set out to convince a man (or charm a woman).77
After the first copies rolled off the press just after dawn, Bissell couriered one to the White House. At 10 a.m. he distributed dozens to the major news outlets.78 The 286-page tome placed its rhetorical emphasis right where Vandenberg needed it: on the necessity for western Europe to take primary responsibility for righting itself. The self-help motif played to Republican desires to be seen as champions of free enterprise and personal initiative, not collaborators in their undoing. While praising the thrust of the European report from Paris, Harriman’s group also hit helpfully on some of the State Department’s own objections to it. They argued that the Paris effort did not sufficiently emphasize the primacy of reviving consumption goods production over capital development and housing programs, that it overestimated the availability of certain commodities from the United States, and that it underestimated the financial assistance that could be secured privately and from the new International (World) Bank. Yet they also insisted that it was a “strategic and political” imperative for the United States to plug the region’s inevitable trade deficits over the coming few years.
It was, the Harriman report said, “the Communist tactic” to exploit “misery and chaos” to undermine democracy, and such disorder was likely in the absence of immediate and significant American assistance. It set the total requirement for the full four-year period of the program at $12–$17 billion, emphasizing that the allocation of this aid would have to differ somewhat from the Paris blueprint—in particular, in funneling more of it to Germany, recovery of whose coal industry was vital to the entire region. Here, the State Department got useful political cover for its ongoing effort to persuade the French of the need to accept German industrial revival. Harriman also played to Republican distrust of the State Department. The report, like that of the Herter Committee, called for an independent agency to be established—one that would have “the closest possible relations” with Congress.79
Supplemented by the Krug and Nourse reports, both of which backed a European aid plan, the Harriman report became Truman’s and Marshall’s intellectual armor in jousting with Republican opponents. Truman invoked all three reports in his December 19 “Special Address to Congress on the Marshall Plan,” concluding, on the grounds of their authority, that the Plan was “proper, wise, and necessary.”80 Harriman’s report also became “the bible of those who defended the [Plan] in Congress,” not least Vandenberg. 81 It was, in Hoffman’s words, “of monumental importance” in shaping private and congressional opinion.82 New York Times columnist Felix Belair called it “exhaustive and eloquent,” even while criticizing it for paying insufficient attention to the sacrifices the American public would be forced to bear.83 After falling 11.6 percent in 1946, U.S. GNP would fall a further 1.1 percent in 1947.
A month after the report was released, nearly two thirds of Americans had now heard of the Marshall Plan, up from just under half two months prior.84 At least as important, 56 percent had a favorable impression, and only 17 percent an unfavorable one. The poll numbers gave skeptical congressmen leeway to consider legislation without having to posture against the president.
WITHOUT THE HARRIMAN AND HERTER Committees’ bipartisan support for the Marshall Plan, “the program couldn’t have gotten Congressional approval,” Hoffman reflected years later. But it was far from sufficient. Even the open-minded still had reservations.
“I raise the question,” Rep. Lawrence Smith said before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on November 14, “and it is a sincere one—can we expect from these nations any more in the future than we have [gotten] in the past so long as we give and give?”85 Overcoming such doubts took more than congressional fact-finding tours and committee reports; it required shaping voter opinion. Given how little hard public knowledge there was of the Marshall Plan, this required a massive, carefully orchestrated public relations campaign—“a Marshall Plan to sell the Marshall Plan.”86
Impetus for the most important such effort came from wartime secretary of war Henry Stimson, a Republican, in the form of an article in the October issue of Foreign Affairs. Having won the war at enormous cost, Stimson argued, the United States could not now afford to lose the peace. “Only two years ago we triumphantly ended the greatest war in history,” Stimson wrote. “Most of us then looked forward eagerly to the relative relaxation of peace. Reluctantly we have now come to understand that victory and peace are not synonymous. . . . Close on the heels of victory has loomed a new world crisis.”
That crisis was being created by “the tide of Soviet expansion,” which, in the absence of firm and immediate American action to counter it, would “roll into the empty places left by war.” Those most immediately threatened are “the nations by whose citizens our land was settled and in whose tradition our civilization is rooted.” The United States had both a moral and selfish interest in confronting this threat. “The reconstruction of western Europe,” he wrote, “is a task from which Americans can decide to stand apart only if they wish to desert every principle by which they claim to live.” A “prompt and large-scale program” was required; “the penalty of delay [was] to increase the size of the job and multiply difficulties.” And whereas he did not “expect the Russians to make war,” the United States needed to prepare for one. “Our military strength must be maintained as a standing discouragement to aggression.”87
In broad strokes, much as Marshall had used in June at Harvard, Stimson laid out the case for a European recovery program, while also adumbrating what would the following year become more explicit calls for a Western military alliance to protect America’s investment in Europe’s recovery and political stabilization. The article became a rallying cry for the most important of the many private initiatives set up to advocate for passage of a massive European assistance program: the Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery (often called the “Marshall Plan Committee”). Stimson became its national chairman.
Stimson’s successor as secretary of war, Robert Patterson, became chairman of the executive committee. In addition to former top government officials, most importantly Acheson and Clayton, some three hundred notables from business, labor, agriculture, religion, and academia became active members. Acheson in particular was ubiquitous, appearing on radio, at luncheon talks, and at evening functions around the country. The group formed a lobbying organization, created a speakers bureau, and employed a news agency to spread their message. It shaped the details of the aid bill legislation, prepared material for witnesses at congressional hearings, and drew critical public attention to legislative restrictions and amendments it deemed objectionable.88
Many other private groups worked in support of the initiative, such as the nonprofit National Planning Association and Committee for Economic Development, both of which focused on how the Marshall Plan should be administered. Think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution produced papers and convened meetings.89 Frequently, there were fewer than six degrees of separation among the leaders of these initiatives. Of the nineteen luminaries on the executive committee of the Marshall Plan Committee, eight were CFR members. Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles, was president of CFR. Acheson, who joined CFR in December 1947, was also on the Brookings board of directors. Though some were Democrats and some Republicans, they were like-minded internationalists who associated with internationalist-minded institutions.
Myriad business, labor, agriculture, veteran, and religious organizations weighed in, in the main highly supportive. Industry groups representing specific sectors, such as tobacco growers and flour dealers, were naturally enthusiastic at the prospect of having their commodities distributed abroad with government dollars. But the communist argument that the Marshall Plan was about fo
rcing American exports on Europe to forestall a domestic depression found little support in the behavior of industry groups. The leadership of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), the Committee for Economic Development (CED), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) all backed the administration’s aims of boosting intra-European trade, stabilizing finances, and closing the “dollar gap”90—western Europe’s balance of payments deficits with the dollar area—that the new IMF was unable to address.
Union leaders were also enthusiastic. “The ultimate price of a refusal to put the Marshall plan into effect is war,” declared AFL secretary-treasurer George Meany, “a war in which America would be practically alone.”91 The AFL and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which also supported the Plan, counted over ten million American workers as members.
Iowa farmers organized their own mission to Europe to “find out what kind of food Europe needs, the cost to ship it over and how we can get England in a position whereby she can trade with us.”92 The annual convention of the 3.2-million-member American Legion voted unanimously to endorse the Plan, as it did a second resolution calling for the Communist Party to be outlawed.93 Speaking on behalf of the World Assembly of the World Council of Churches, the Rev. Dr. Stewart Herman, Jr., declared the Marshall Plan to be “nearer to being Christian than anything offered to Europe by a single government or by a group of governments for more than a generation.”94 The Right Rev. Charles Gilbert, Episcopal Bishop of the New York Diocese, called it “a plan that would bring new life and hope to the vast multitudes of God’s despairing children.” It should, he said, have the support of Christians everywhere.95