Truman(41)
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.7 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.’8
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.