To everyone’s relief, the Soviet Union refused to participate and forced its eager satellites to withdraw. Secretary of State George Marshall tested the waters in his iconic June 1947 Harvard speech though the American media barely noticed, it thrilled Europe. President Harry Truman and his advisers knew that they needed help. Everyone understood the physical destruction, but many failed to realize how, in the words of the State Department’s Will Clayton, “economic dislocation, nationalization of industries, drastic land reform, severance of long-standing commercial ties, and disappearance of private commercial firms were paralyzing recovery two years after Germany’s surrender. Though scholars have covered the subject many times before, general readers will do well to choose this lively, astute account from Steil ( The Battle of Bretton Woods, John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order, 2014), the director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. A fresh perspective on the Marshall Plan, bringing “new material from American, Russian, German, and Czech sources.”įrom 1948 to 1952, the United States gave Western European nations more than $13 billion to rebuild after World War II.
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