Truman (16 page)

Acheson not only organized the back-room work. He also put on a dress rehearsal of the Harvard speech itself. Truman had earlier promised local friends that he would address the annual meeting of the Delta Council, half picnic, half serious-minded local reunion at the Teachers' College in Cleveland, Mississippi. It was fixed for May 8th. By early April he had decided that a combination of his mother's health (she nearly died at the age of 95 in June that year and finally did so in July) and that of Senator Bilbo (whose equally imminent death was causing a bitter faction fight in Mississippi politics) made such a presidential visit inappropriate. On April 7th he asked Acheson to go in his place. They both decided that if Delta could not have a President it ought to have an important speech. The next month was spent in detailed and rigorous drafting, with the White House much involved, and State consulting other relevant departments.

Most of it was done before Marshall got back from Moscow on April 28th. On May 1st Acheson put on a pre-rehearsal of the dress rehearsal. He took the speech together with a few of his staff to an off-the-record luncheon of the officers of the League of Women Voters, and proceeded to give it what he described as ‘a preliminary canter'. It seemed to go well. With a little further
polishing and some advance briefing of the British press, he set off for Mississippi.

This long-prepared oration was well-received by the audience, reasonably reported by a few papers in the South, but ignored by the rest of the American press. It was however extensively reported in Europe, particularly but not exclusively in London. This interest fed back in a few weeks to America. By then however the next stage of the operation was well in train. Marshall, during May, performed a key rôle. He brought Kennan back to the State Department from the National War College, where he was lecturing and put him in charge of a policy planning staff which directed itself in more detail to the shape of the Plan and produced a report on May 23rd.

His instructions to Kennan were both vague and splendid. ‘Avoid trivia,' he said. Kennan did. From the report there stemmed a strand of settled United States foreign policy which persisted at least until the 1970s. This was American belief in the desirability of fostering a union, most desirably federation, in Western Europe. It led over decades to the United States being prepared, on occasion, to subordinate trading difficulties with the European Community to this wider political consideration. It led to Jean Monnet finding some of his best allies in Washington. And it led to continuing mild friction between off-shore Britain and pro-federalist America. At this initial stage however it merely took the form of a resolve to use the aid to promote regional unity in Europe.

Marshall also took three key decisions himself. The first was that speed was essential. Otherwise Europe might disintegrate in front of benevolent but too leisurely American eyes. ‘The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate,' he said.
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The second was that Europe get together and produce a plan for its own recovery. The United States would then do its best to produce what was needed to sustain the plan. But it must not produce both the supplies and the plan; or at least not be seen to do so. Third, and most controversially, he decided that the offer must be made to Europe as a whole and not only to the non-Communist part of it. If Europe was to be more deeply divided he wanted it to be done by Moscow and not by Washington. He may have hoped, or
calculated, or both, that the Russians would neither accept nor allow their satellites to do so. But he was determined (and so persuaded Truman) to take the risk. It was of course a risk, for had they done so it is difficult to see how the objective of using the Plan to promote regional unity could possibly have been achieved. A federation extending from Paris to Moscow was not remotely feasible.

Marshall also made his own decision to use the Harvard speech as the occasion for the next (and as it happened the crucial) major pronouncement. Acheson was against. Like many of the highly educated, he distrusted educational occasions. ‘Commencement speeches', he wrote, ‘were a ritual to be endured without hearing.'
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Marshall in Harvard Yard gave the impression of not greatly caring whether anyone was hearing him or not. He read a short speech with his head down. His audience revered him but hardly recognized the full importance of what he was saying. Perhaps that has always been so with the great orations in the history of the world, from the Sermon on the Mount to the Gettysburg Address. Marshall did not take precautions to ensure that reverberation was greater than instant appreciation. I do not know how Harvard compared with the Mount and Gettysburg in this respect, but it was certainly less widely trailed than Cleveland, Mississippi. The State Department did not even have a full text when the Secretary of State left Washington for Boston. Once again, the domestic coverage was thin. But Leonard Miall, the BBC correspondent in Washington, acted as an essential disseminator. Ernest Bevin heard it on his wireless early the following morning, and lumbered into the Foreign Office determined to let no time go by before Marshall's most pregnant sentence—‘The initiative, I think, must come from Europe'—was responded to.

The subsequent story of how Bevin both upstaged Bidault and carried him along with him, how they jointly invited 22 nations
including the Soviet Union to a meeting in Paris at the end of June, how they all came, how Molotov made it clear that Russia would be delighted to get American money, but only on a bilateral cash basis and without any commitment to a common plan, how when this demand for eleemosynary treatment did not work he took seven other nations away with him (although the Czechs only with difficulty and the Finns against their natural instincts) and how the remaining fourteen quickly prepared at least an approach to a unified Western European initiative, is enshrined in innumerable memoirs, biographies and other accounts of events of the following few months.

Three hypothetical questions remain about the Marshall Plan. First, to what extent did its assumption of reality depend upon Ernest Bevin's determined and enthusiastic response? Might it all have got lost if Bevin had followed the recommendation of his permanent under-secretary (William Strang) and asked the Embassy in Washington to inquire what precisely Marshall had in mind? Bevin himself regarded his more positive and urgent reaction as important. It was certainly so in the sense that Marshall had stressed at Harvard that ‘the initiative … must come from Europe'. There was also considerable vagueness in Washington during the following few weeks as to exactly what was planned in the Plan.
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A request for precision might therefore have been counter-productive. But this is a long way from the extreme thesis that Marshall was just musing in Cambridge, and that the dinner for which Bevin so firmly and immediately accepted the semi-proffered invitation was only half intended to take place. The thrust of the Truman Administration had been firmly behind Marshall's words, at least since April.

Second, what would have happened if the Russians, instead of flouncing out with their satellites from Paris, had remained in, half cooperative, half sullen? Most probably the venture would have led only to some limited transfer of funds from the United States to Europe and then run into the ground. Clearly it could not have proved the forerunner to Western European unity, and most probably the Republican Congress would never have voted an
appropriation of $17 billion. Marshall's decision that the Russians and not the Truman Administration should be left to split Europe was a well-calculated risk.

Third, how much difference did the Marshall Plan in fact make to the pace of European recovery? Historians who wish to show that no event is decisive and all landscapes more or less flat are now intent upon proclaiming that Marshall Aid, like the Battle of Waterloo, the repeal of the Corn Laws and Roosevelt's pump-priming, made practically no difference. It would all have happened anyway. As always with this eventless and enervating theory of history there are some facts on its side. There had been massive but relatively unpublicized outpourings of US aid in 1945 and 1946. There was a trough in 1947, which coincided with, although it did not cause, the economic and political foundering of that year in Europe. And in 1948 the economies of Western Europe began significantly to pick up well before they received the flow of Marshall funds. But that was assisted by the fact that governments knew the funds were coming. Previously Europe had lived from hand-to-mouth. Such recovery as had taken place had been based on re-stocking. The Marshall Plan enabled Europe to get its second wind and to embark upon an essential recovery of fixed investment. If it did not start the recovery it crucially underpinned it.

A postscript needs to be added. The British response to the Marshall proposal was at once splendid and ludicrous. London led Europe, as has been seen. Yet, having led it, the British Government tried equally hard to detach itself from it. At a series of late June meetings in London a determined attempt was made to argue that Britain should not be lumped in with the other European countries, but (although at the same time a beneficiary) should also be a co-distributor, with the United States, of the aid to the other countries. The ludicrousness of the claim was symbolized by the fact that Attlee, Bevin, Cripps and Dalton all assembled in 10 Downing Street to argue the point against Clayton, who was no more than equal third in the US State Department. He held firm. They did not, for they had no firm ground on which to stand, and to their credit, once resisted, co-operated enthusiastically on a basis they would not have chosen. Yet the incident was a remarkable and depressing precursor of Britain's relationship with the continent of Europe throughout the 1950s.

Such reflections about Britain's medium-term relations with the
mainland hardly dominated Truman's mind in the summer of 1947. He was totally committed to the Marshall Plan, upon which a substantial part of his reputation rests. In the autumn he was to demand and get from a tight-fisted Congress the maximum practical appropriation for its implementation. But after a strenuous spring of foreign policy initiatives he switched back for much of the rest of the year to more domestic concerns.

On June 20th he vetoed the Taft-Hartley Bill. How much this sprang from conviction as opposed to political calculation is open to a little doubt. He was not instinctively against some curbs on union power. ‘We have got to have a certain restriction on the union element,' his own records show him as having told a group of broadcasters in January, ‘because if we don't, we go haywire. You take the underdog and put him on top, and he is just as bad on top, and sometimes a little worse.'
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He was straining the old Roosevelt coalition in several directions. The South was already unhappy about the appointment of his Civil Rights Commission and its report, due in October, was almost certain to produce further strains. And his robust attitude towards the 1946 strikes, while good for his general popularity, had subtantially disaffected the labour unions. In 1946 however he was dealing with short-term situations on his own presidential initiative. In 1947 the question was whether he was to endorse long-term curbs imposed by a Republican Congress. If he had, he could have said goodbye to any substantial union support in the 1948 election.

Curiously his Cabinet were almost all in favour of his accepting the bill. The only two against were Schwellenbach, the egregious Secretary of Labour, who naturally had his clients to consider, and Hannegan, the Postmaster-General, whose primary business was not mails but the fostering of the Democratic Party machine. Snyder, Truman's closest Cabinet friend, was particularly strong in favour of his signing the bill. At the least equally curiously, the White House mail on the subject was both huge and overwhelmingly in favour of a veto. Over 750,000 communications were received. It was of course largely an organized campaign, but it was not the sort of organization at which the unions were usually very good.

There was no certainty until the last moment about what Truman was going to do. Then on June 20th he came out against
the bill with a message of exceptional length—over 5,000 words. There was no reflection of hesitancy in the tone of this message. The bill was ‘a shocking piece of legislation … bad for labor, bad for management and bad for the country'. There was an element of bathos about this ‘veto', which so far from stopping the bill in its tracks, merely held it up for three or four days while the House overrode the President's view by a majority of 4 to 1 and the Senate by nearly 3 to 1.
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Nevertheless his disapproval of it earned him considerable credit with the unions. A year earlier the President of the Brotherhood of Railways Trainmen had threatened that the Brotherhood would ‘open its treasury' to defeat Truman in 1948. Now Alexander Whitney caused his spokesman to state: ‘It is indicated that our Brotherhood will throw all its resources behind President Truman and his Administration in an effort to elect a Congress which will back the President's liberal programme', thus demonstrating both the union's flexibility and its faithfulness to good trade union jargon.

At least equally importantly, Truman's ‘veto' of Taft-Hartley, following the Marshall speech, clutched back the liberal wing of the Rooseveltians from the enticements of Wallace. In early 1947 Americans for Democratic Action had been founded, with Mrs Roosevelt as its figurehead, a number of old New Dealers as its Praetorian Guard, those patriarchal New York immigrant clothing worker union leaders, Dubinsky and Potofsky, as its godfathers, Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers as a whipper-in, and the then relatively junior John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. as its young Turks. This body at first had no commitment to Truman. Indeed as late as February 1948 ADA refrained from endorsing him. But the Taft-Hartley veto made them neutral. Wallace's withdrawal from support of the Marshall Plan when the Russians walked out in Paris disenchanted them with him. And the sponsors of his candidature (announced in Chicago in December 1947) made them profoundly suspicious, for they were always firmly hostile to Communist front organizations. Thereafter ADA flirted around a little, even with
Eisenhower, but never with any seriously possible Democratic candidate for 1948, before coming solidly to Truman's support in the campaign itself.