On June 5, 1947, students, families and assorted dignitaries gathered outside Harvard’s Memorial Church to hear Secretary of State George C. Marshall deliver what both the university and the State Department had billed in advance as a routine commencement speech.
Marshall’s actual 20-minute address did little to change that impression, at least at first. When applause for his seemingly perfunctory remarks on foreign affairs died down, audience members filed out to enjoy graduation festivities, not knowing that they had just witnessed the unveiling of what would become the most ambitious and successful economic recovery effort in world history: The Marshall Plan.
The low-key nature of the announcement was fully intentional and part of a careful communications strategy by the Truman Administration to minimize the potential firestorm from critics in the U.S. press and in Congress. At the same time, the administration used diplomatic channels to ensure that reporters and leaders in a desperate postwar Europe were fully attuned to the import of a few sentences buried halfway down in Marshall’s address: The continent “must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character,” Marshall noted. “The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole.”
Over the next four years, the people of the United States poured $13 billion into 16 European nations to help them get back on their feet. Considering that the entire US GDP for 1948 was $258 billion, $13 billion (on top of another $12 billion already committed to rebuilding projects before the Marshall Plan took effect) represented an unprecedented gesture on the part of a victorious nation to aid its allies and foes alike.
From the start, Marshall’s leadership was indispensible to the plan’s success. Within a short while, hardly anyone remembered the official name, European Recovery Program (ERP). It was The Marshall Plan, pure and simple. At a time when his reputation as a soldier and statesman was already secure, Marshall willingly put everything on the line to help ensure passage of the program in Congress and to oversee its implementation. As important as the dollars was the fact that the Marshall Plan put a unified focus and face on what until then had been well-meaning but disorganized and piecemeal attempts to help Europe out of its postwar economic crisis.
Today, there’s little doubt that the Marshall Plan radically transformed a broken continent. The influx of American dollars, produce, and goods helped spur the most rapid growth in European history, with industrial growth surging 35% from 1947-1951. American generosity (while certainly self-interested) cleared the way for a swift return to prosperity and stability that Europe has enjoyed ever since.
Even so, success of the Marshall Plan was by no means preordained. Many experts believed Europe’s problems were so enormous as to be unfixable. Marshall had to know that becoming the face of a massive initiative at a time of deep uncertainty carried enormous personal risk. Individual politicians or bureaucrats may retreat from failure relatively unscathed, so long as they are one among many authors. For Marshall, failure of the program could have been devastating to a reputation he’d spent more than 40 years building. History shows what happens when leaders stake everything on an ill-considered decision. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous declaration of “peace for our time” in 1938 made his name forever synonymous with appeasement.
Indeed, the Marshall Plan attracted its full share of critics from every political persuasion. To those on the left, the Marshall Plan was a thinly veiled act of American imperialism. Critics on the right wondered why the United States, having just expended some 400,000 lives and trillions of dollars to win a war, should now spend billions more in its aftermath.
But Marshall spearheaded a tireless campaign to sell average citizens on the need for European relief. He crossed the country giving speech after speech in plain, unadorned language, explaining why a health Europe was essential not just for humanitarian reasons, but to maintain U.S. and world security.
Within months, polls showed solid majorities of Americans recognizing and supporting the Marshall Plan with an enthusiasm that has yet to be shown by current generations for the current round of economic recovery programs. Indeed, a recent American Enterprise Institute roundup of polls showed that while the public initially supported both the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) of 2008 and the subsequent stimulus bill of 2009, both efforts were quickly seen by the majority of Americans with a combination of mistrust and confusion that lingers to this day. According to a CNN poll in January 2010, 74% of Americans felt half or more than half of the stimulus money had been wasted.
Why the divergence of opinion between the popular Marshall Plan and the far less popular TARP/stimulus efforts? What seems especially puzzling is the fact that the modern programs devote U.S. dollars to solving a U.S. problem. By contrast, the Marshall Plan’s beneficiaries were foreign countries, including Germany, which until recently had devoted itself to killing Americans.
Cost likely isn’t the answer. At $700 million, 2008’s TARP represented around 5% of that year’s U.S. GDP—roughly the same percentage as the Marshall Plan in 1948. And while people are understandably wary of spending during a financial crisis, the same financial pessimism was widespread in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Some in Congress claimed that the Marshall Plan would bankrupt the country.
In the end, one of the most powerful forces in winning popular support for the plan was the ability of people to connect the program directly to the man whose name was on the label, so to speak. Would the country have embraced “ERP” as resoundingly as they supported the Marshall Plan? Possibly, but it’s hard to imagine. In the end, the people put their faith and trust in the wisdom of a leader who risked everything to make it happen.
Richard S. Levick, Esq., is the president and chief executive officer of Levick Strategic Communications www.levick.com, a crisis and public affairs communications firm. He is the co-author of Stop the Presses: The Crisis & Litigation PR Desk Reference and writes for www.bulletproofblog.com. He was named to the 2009 NACD/Directorship list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the Boardroom.” Reach him at rlevick@levick.com.