The next day he called in George Kennan, one of the State Department’s Russian experts and asked him to build a Policy Planning Staff. Its task was to figure out what the United States had to do in order to turn things around in Europe, and Marshall wanted a concise plan within two weeks.13
Kennan delivered a brief report on May 23. It said that the root of the crisis was not Communist activity but the disruption of the economy brought on by the war. Although Kennan acknowledged that Communism was gaining, he also said that a recovery program had to aim at undoing “the economic maladjustment that makes European society vulnerable to exploitation by any and all totalitarian movements.” Ultimately, the crisis could only be addressed by a plan developed by the Europeans. The United States should give only its “friendly support.” Although Kennan believed the Soviets might try to stall things, they still should be included in any program.14
Others in the State Department, such as Dean Acheson and Will Clayton, put forward broadly similar proposals for Marshall to consider.15 Then he put Bohlen and Kennan to work, independently, on a speech no longer than ten minutes that he would give at Harvard University on the recovery program.
Marshall’s address to the Harvard convocation on June 5 began by stating that, while most of them likely knew about the visible destruction in Europe, perhaps they did not realize that its entire economic structure was dislocated. The crux of the problem was that Europe needed more food and fuel than it could pay for. If the problem was not solved, he said, demoralization would surely set in and disturbances would grow. His mildly phrased proposal was that if Europeans could come up with an international, cooperative plan for recovery, then the United States would be willing to offer “friendly advice” in drafting the program and provide “later support.”16
There was no “Marshall Plan” in the sense that the United States presented a thick document like one of Stalin’s five-year plans, setting out production targets and quotas and all the rest. In his speech at Harvard, Marshall stated in no uncertain terms that “our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” A new approach was needed, and “it would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans.”
Marshall was serious about including Eastern Europe. Those who knew him said “he deplored the emotional anti-Russian attitude in the country and kept emphasizing the necessity to talk and write about Europe in terms of economics instead of ideologies.”17 Of course he recognized that if “the Russians” agreed to go along with any recovery program, then it would be more difficult to get Congress to fund it. Nevertheless, to Marshall and Kennan it was self-evident that any offer of aid had to include the Soviet Union and all of Eastern Europe.18
Stalin saw things differently. In his view, the United States and Great Britain, the two major capitalist powers to survive the war, had been pleased to defeat their main competitors in Italy, Germany, and Japan and intended to keep them down to control prices and dominate the globe. That was his message in January 1947 to visiting German Communist leaders. He also predicted that the United States would faiclass="underline" “The Americans believe that they alone will be able to deal with the world market. That is an illusion. They will not be able to cope with it.”19
He was quite wrong to suppose the United States would be against the recovery of Europe, and he did not anticipate such generous assistance. The American offer to the Soviet Union confronted Stalin with a momentous choice.
A CHANCE TO SAVE THE WORLD FROM THE COLD WAR?
Britain’s foreign secretary Bevin heard the first report about Marshall’s Harvard speech on his bedside radio in early June and realized its potential at once. When he and French foreign minister Bidault spoke of it later, they said “it was like a life-line to sinking men. It seemed to bring hope where there was none. The generosity of it was beyond our belief.”20
Bevin promised Washington a speedy response and contacted Bidault; they called for a meeting on June 27 to discuss the next step. During the interim Marshall reiterated that by “European” recovery he definitely included the Soviet Union. According to the report of U.S. ambassador Jefferson Caffery, the British thought that Soviet participation would “complicate things,” as did the French. However, on June 19, and because Marshall was quite emphatic, they extended an invitation to the Soviet Union.21
To this day, some Russian historians maintain that the United States, Britain, and France were playing a “double game,” inviting Soviet participation while hoping they would not accept. Supposedly, the West had “decided everything in advance.”22 In fact, the plan had yet to be written. Moreover, even had it been already drawn up, and even if, as Soviet spies reported, a few or many bureaucrats in Washington, London, or Paris “hoped” the Russians would turn it down, the decision was still Stalin’s to make.23
Why should the Soviet leader not concede that the war had been much worse than he had at first let on? Why not remind the West of the bitter truth that the Soviets had paid with far more blood than anyone else for victory over Hitler? Millions upon millions of its citizens had been killed and the country devastated. Why not ask for help?
Alas, Stalin was caught in the trap of his own theories. He and his followers had created a system that regarded economic data almost like state secrets. It did not help matters that Soviet diplomats and spies added to their leader’s doubts. Thus Ambassador Nikolai Novikov wrote from Washington that the underlying goal of the recovery plan was to hinder Europe’s “democratization”—a code word for stopping Communism.24
The Soviet leadership approached international relations as a zero-sum game. If the United States was going to gain in some way in Europe, then the USSR would have to lose. That thinking became integral to Cold War psychology and incredibly difficult to overcome.25 With the Marshall Plan, the game had changed. The U.S. secretary had left a way for destitute Soviet citizens to be winners too, along with those in the West.
Of course, it is also true that the Marshall Plan, in addressing the economic causes of Europe’s problems, would have the effect of reducing the potential sources of Communist support. Although Bevin and Bidault indicated, at least privately, that they neither wanted nor expected Soviet participation in the program, the two men were not completely out of step with the mood of the U.S. government. Some historians overstate the case by concluding that the State Department’s insistence on treating Europe “as one common economic area” and on getting a coordinated response to the American proposal was the equivalent of excluding the USSR.26
Stalin had many misgivings about the June talks scheduled in Paris, but he dispatched Molotov, who was accompanied by a delegation of close to a hundred. The unusually large number of representatives was a symbol of strength, a visual display of Communist solidarity. It hardly shows, as has been supposed, that the Soviets were “still moderate.” They were not there as a team that would participate, take notes, and make suggestions.27
At the first session on Friday, June 27, the hosts Bevin and Bidault opened by saying that a larger meeting was to be called and that specialized committees would examine the requests of each country and coordinate them. The goal was to develop a European-wide program that would be presented to the United States for financial support.