ABSTRACT
The thirty-fifth anniversary of the Marshall Plan in 1982 produced a celebratory symposium at the Center for European Studies at Harvard that in leisurely fashion resulted in a book edited by Stanley Hoffmann and Charles Maier. The participants included a number of veterans from the Marshall Plan days, notably W.Averill Harriman, Milton Katz, Lincoln Gordon, Harold van Buren Cleveland, and Miriam Camps from the United States, and Lord Roll from the United Kingdom, plus a large group of younger economists, economic historians, and historians. My paper (Kindleberger, 1984), more as veteran than as scholar, consisted of informal recollections, carrying forward to some extent the 1948 discussion of the origins of the Marshall Plan-Memorandum for the Files (Chapter 2 of this book). Specific assignments had been given to Gordon and Cleveland to discuss the economics of the plan, but I encroached slightly on their territory in dealing with the chicken-and-egg question of whether the balance-of-payments deficit of Europe gave rise to the aid, or the aid made possible the balance-of-payments deficit, a familiar chestnut in economics called the identification problem, deciding which is the independent and which the dependent variable. Cleveland’s contribution came in for some adverse comment at the time and is dealt with at length below in Chapter 14.
