The subsequent story of how Bevin both upstaged Bidault and carried him along with him, how they jointly invited 22 nations including the Soviet union to a meeting in Paris at the end of June, how they all came, how Molotov made it clear that Russia would be delighted to get American money, but only on a bilateral cash basis and without any commitment to a common plan, how when this demand for eleemosynary treatment did not work he took seven other nations away with him (although the Czechs only with difficulty and the Finns against their natural instincts) and how the remaining fourteen quickly prepared at least an approach to a unified Western European initiative, is enshrined in innumerable memoirs, biographies and other accounts of events of the following few months.
Three hypothetical questions remain about the Marshall Plan. First, to what extent did its assumption of reality depend upon Ernest Bevin’s determined and enthusiastic response? Might it all have got lost if Bevin had followed the recommendation of his permanent under-secretary (William Strang) and asked the Embassy in Washington to inquire what precisely Marshall had in mind? Bevin himself regarded his more positive and urgent reaction as important. It was certainly so in the sense that Marshall had stressed at Harvard that ‘the initiative … must come from Europe’. There was also considerable vagueness in Washington during the following few weeks as to exactly what was planned in the Plan.9 A request for precision might therefore have been counter-productive. But this is a long way from the extreme thesis that Marshall was just musing in Cambridge, and that the dinner for which Bevin so firmly and immediately accepted the semi-proffered invitation was only half intended to take place. The thrust of the Truman Administration had been firmly behind Marshall’s words, at least since April.
Second, what would have happened if the Russians, instead of flouncing out with their satellites from Paris, had remained in, half cooperative, half sullen? Most probably the venture would have led only to some limited transfer of funds from the United States to Europe and then run into the ground. Clearly it could not have proved the forerunner to Western European unity, and most probably the Republican Congress would never have voted an appropriation of $17 billion. Marshall’s decision that the Russians and not the Truman Administration should be left to split Europe was a well-calculated risk.
Third, how much difference did the Marshall Plan in fact make to the pace of European recovery? Historians who wish to show that no event is decisive and all landscapes more or less flat are now intent upon proclaiming that Marshall Aid, like the Battle of Waterloo, the repeal of the Corn Laws and Roosevelt’s pump-priming, made practically no difference. It would all have happened anyway. As always with this eventless and enervating theory of history there are some facts on its side. There had been massive but relatively unpublicized outpourings of US aid in 1945 and 1946. There was a trough in 1947, which coincided with, although it did not cause, the economic and political foundering of that year in Europe. And in 1948 the economies of Western Europe began significantly to pick up well before they received the flow of Marshall funds. But that was assisted by the fact that governments knew the funds were coming. Previously Europe had lived from hand-to-mouth. Such recovery as had taken place had been based on re-stocking. The Marshall Plan enabled Europe to get its second wind and to embark upon an essential recovery of fixed investment. If it did not start the recovery it crucially underpinned it.
A postscript needs to be added. The British response to the Marshall proposal was at once splendid and ludicrous. London led Europe, as has been seen. Yet, having led it, the British Government tried equally hard to detach itself from it. At a series of late June meetings in London a determined attempt was made to argue that Britain should not be lumped in with the other European countries, but (although at the same time a beneficiary) should also be a co-distributor, with the United States, of the aid to the other countries. The ludicrousness of the claim was symbolized by the fact that Attlee, Bevin, Cripps and Dalton all assembled in 10 Downing Street to argue the point against Clayton, who was no more than equal third in the US State Department. He held firm. They did not, for they had no firm ground on which to stand, and to their credit, once resisted, co-operated enthusiastically on a basis they would not have chosen. Yet the incident was a remarkable and depressing precursor of Britain’s relationship with the continent of Europe throughout the 1950s.
Such reflections about Britain’s medium-term relations with the mainland hardly dominated Truman’s mind in the summer of 1947. He was totally committed to the Marshall Plan, upon which a substantial part of his reputation rests. In the autumn he was to demand and get from a tight-fisted Congress the maximum practical appropriation for its implementation. But after a strenuous spring of foreign policy initiatives he switched back for much of the rest of the year to more domestic concerns.