On a spring morning in 1948, the U.S. freighter John H. Quick eased into the harbor of Bordeaux, her holds heavy with 9,000 tons of wheat. The scars of war still showed in the prostrate Europe that lay beyond the Quick's bows.
As the vessel's golden cargo hit the dock, an act of giving and building unparalleled in history got underway. The Marshall Plan had become a reality.
Last week, in ceremonies from Brussels to Bonn, the U.S. and its onetime beneficiaries quietly marked the 20th anniversary of the plan's conception.
Burden of Reconstruction. It was in the course of a Harvard Commencement Day address by then Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall that the plan was officially born. "I need not tell you gentlemen that the world situation is very serious," began Marshall in his precise, low-key style. "The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for foreign food and other essential products—principally from America —are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social and political deterioration."
Though it is fashionable nowadays to deride American altruism as "unconscious imperialism," or worse, the U.S. had realized—even before combat in Europe ended on May 8, 1945—that as the world's wealthiest nation and the only major power that had endured the war unscathed, it would inevitably have to shoulder the burden of reconstruction. Until early 1947, Marshall had hoped that the Soviet Union would cooperate; he later offered aid to war-wracked Russia and Eastern Europe.
Stalin, resentful of U.S. influence in a Europe that seemed ripe for Communist plucking, denounced the plan—and within a year of its inception, Czechoslovakia and Poland, both of which had been eager for its benefits, had fallen to Red putsches. In the Hotel Ritz in Paris last week, the U.S.'s most seasoned envoy, Averell Harriman, who was Ambassador to Russia during the last days of World War II, recalled before a 20th anniversary banquet a meeting that he had with Stalin in Berlin at war's end. "It must be a great satisfaction for you to be in Berlin," remarked Harriman. "Czar Alexander," growled Stalin, "got to Paris."