The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe by Greg Behrman

This book outlined the Marshall Plan, which was the plan through which America supported European reconstruction after World War II. The book was fascinating on many levels. First, I hadn't realized what a giant figure Marshall himself was in World War II. He comes out of this book as an admirable person the likes of which we simply don't have in government much anymore -- a true "public servant" and not a careerist. Then again, maybe we have these people but we don't know who they are because the camera chasers suck all the oxygen out of the airwaves.

The Marshall Plan was obviously not entirely altruistic on the part of America, but it almost certainly was a key turning point for Europe nonetheless. This book paints the Marshall Plan as a necessary foil to Soviet communism, which it probably was (and thereby, can honestly be said to have saved Europe -- Europe under communism would almost certainly have been worse off, just ask the Romanians, Poles, and Bulgarians, if not the Russians). But it wasn't just an effort to pry open markets for Americans -- this was not colonialism. The details of the Marshall Plan were remarkably along the lines of the Bottom Billion book I reviewed a while back. One of the main goals of the plan was to get the Europeans trading with each other, and in this, the Marshall Plan succeeded brilliantly, and set the stage for the longest widespread peace Europe has known in a great while.

Two other aspects of the implementation of the Marshall Plan were particularly notable to me. First, the people involved in executing it were drawn from all areas of American commerce, with many very successful people taking whopping pay cuts take part. Hard to imagine that happening today (and no, I don't count Goldman execs saving Goldman from within the Treasury Department). Second, the Marshall Plan ended. There was a lot of opposition from the get-go, and eventually that opposition got the upper hand, and we left. Of course, this wasn't all by design of the plan, but the fact that it clearly had a short shelf-life helped focus European attention on the policies they had to implement to recover. It's rare to see a large government entity not take on a long-standing life of its own, but somehow the Marshall Plan didn't, and that was very likely a key to its success.