ABSTRACT
Bissell’s comment proved prophetic. In the decades that followed, the ideas, desires, and accomplishments of the Marshall Plan assumed almost legendary status. In the United States, it allowed Americans to remember the government as a source of good, an image that had been difficult to maintain in the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and support for rightwing dictatorships. In American memory, the Marshall Plan was a bright shining moment that helped fortify Americans’ faith in the nation and in what the true purpose of the Cold War really was. Western Europeans, scarred by the memories of two world wars and the economic struggles and shortages of the interwar and immediate post-1945 periods, similarly embraced the mythology of the ERP. It is easy to understand why: after the end of the Marshall Plan, Western Europe experienced a period of unprecedented growth and material prosperity. Incomes rose and unemployment dropped. High-end consumer goods such as cars, televisions, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and other electrical devices dominated a landscape once overshadowed by piles of rubble, destroyed infrastructure,
poverty, and hunger. Democracy and liberal ideals became the norm as Western European collaboration replaced the dogmatic nationalism that had dominated earlier periods. This change was captured most dramatically by the creation of inter-European organizations and by West Germany’s reentry into the new community of nations. As he departed the Chancellor’s Office after serving 15 years in charge as head of the FRG, Konrad Adenauer, in 1964, took time to praise Harry Truman. He commended the president for having refused the temptation “in spite of her past . . . to simply efface Germany from history” and instead make her an equal partner in Europe.2 The praise was well deserved; it was the power of the United States that forced the other Europeans to accept German recovery. By 1960, West Germany’s economy was the third largest in the world by average value of GDP. Despite being roughly the seventeenth largest nation by virtue of population size, Germany’s economy has remained among the four largest in the world ever since. In the eyes of Georges Bidault, the French Foreign Minister who had been present at the creation of the European Recovery Program in 1947, “American aid prevented the French economy from coming to a standstill. There has never been a finer more far-sighted gesture in history than the Marshall Plan.”3 It was a view echoed along the entire western side of the Iron Curtain.
