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The Most Noble Adventure

God bless America

Greg Behrman
Aurum, 464pp, £25,

Margaret MacMillan

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Margaret McMillan on the new book by Greg Behrman

If Europe was going to survive and withstand the challenge from Soviet-style Communism, it would need massive imports. Stalin and his fellow ideologues had no interest in propping up bourgeois governments and saving capitalist societies. The United States had the resources but Europe did not have the dollars to buy them. ‘The margin between recovery and collapse throughout Western Europe’ said the Economist in the spring of 1947, ‘is dependent at this moment upon massive imports from the U.S.’ Would the Americans see it that way?

After the first world war, the United States had withdrawn from Europe and its troubles. Certainly many Americans hoped to do so again. What changed the minds of even some of the most determined isolationists was the Soviet Union. If Stalin had been determined to ensure that the United States stayed in Western Europe, he could not have done a better job. His tightening grip on Eastern Europe, culminating in the Czech coup of 1948, the violent strikes and outright sabotage by Communists in the West, Soviet attempts to move in on such countries as Turkey and Norway, all served to harden attitudes in the West.

Even so the battle to get first the Marshall Plan and then Nato approved by the American Congress was a long and difficult one. Behrman’s heroes, who include George Marshall, the great soldier turned equally great statesman, George Kennan, the architect of containment, Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican isolationist who became an internationalist after Pearl Harbor, and of course President Harry Truman, laboured to build a bipartisan coalition and to explain to the American people why such extraordinary peacetime measures were essential. Some 200 Congressmen, among them the young Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were taken off to Europe to see for themselves its devastation. As one asked on his return, ‘What would it cost not to aid Europe?’

The Plan’s advocates put their case in moral terms, but also, tellingly, in terms of American self-interest. If Western Europe collapsed, the United States would lose key markets and run the risk of another Great Depression. And the Soviet Union was standing by to pick up the pieces. As William Clayton, one of the fathers of the Marshall Plan said in the spring of 1947, ‘We must go all out in this world game or we’d better stay home and devote our brains and energies to preparation for the third world war.’ He and his fellow advocates had to overcome resistance from isolationists, and even American businessmen who saw the Plan as a waste of money.