jun 5, 1947 - George Marshall speaks at Harvard University - declares a need for US lead European Recovery Program - The Marshall Plan

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"[George] Marshall – following Truman’s lead – was constructing a Cold War grand strategy. Kennan’s long telegram had identified the problem: the Soviet Union’s internally driven hostility toward the outside world. It had, however, suggested no solution.
Now Marshall told Kennan to come up with one: the only guideline was to avoid trivia. The instruction, it is fair to say, was met. The European Recovery Program, which Marshall announced in June, 1947, committed the United States to nothing less than the reconstruction of Europe. The Marshall Plan, as it instantly came to be known, did not at that point distinguish between part of the continent that was under Soviet control and those that were not – but the thinking that lay behind it certainly did." (Gaddis 2006, p. 31)

"Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan:
that the gravest threat to Western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow’s wishes;
that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend;
that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War." (Gaddis 2006, p. 32).

(the Marshall Plan) was to create an alternative to communism, within the framework of democracy and capitalism, which would remove the economic and social desperation that drove people to communism in the first place. (Gaddis 2006, p. 98)

"The Marshall Plan – at first glance a successful projection of domestic values into the Cold War – illustrated the problem. Its goal was to secure political freedom by means of economic rehabilitation in the remaining non-communist stated of Europe: Only hungry and demoralised people, the plan’s architects assumed, would vote communists into office." (Gaddis 2006, p.162)

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