Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan, and the National Interest

409 Pages·1973·6.499 MB·English

by  Hadley Arkes

Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan,
and the National Interest

Bureaucracy,
the Marshall Plan,
and the National Interest
By HADLEY ARKES
M
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 1972
by Princeton University Press
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
L.C. Card: 78-166360
1.S.BU.: 0-691-04607-7
This book was composed in Linotype Times Roman
Printed in the United States of America
by Princeton University Press
Princeton, New Jersey
For my wife Judy,
and for my father and mother,
Morris and Pauline Arkes

PREFACE
In the wake of the Pentagon Papers, no one can feel entirely com­
fortable in relying on the public record, or even the files of admin­
istration, as a source of explanation for the things leaders do.
Clearly there are recesses of confidentiality that lie beyond even the
classified documents, and the most important motives of statesmen
may be the ones that, for reasons of their own, they prefer not to
express in writing. In this respect, what the record is silent about
may be far more decisive than what is printed. Yet it is also clear
from the Pentagon Papers that leaders who are forced to justify
their policies in public are not likely to hold back the most convinc­
ing arguments they think they could make. And thus, while it has
been common to indict the protagonists in the Pentagon Papers for
deceiving themselves, it would be hard to argue that the justifica­
tions that were offered to the public differed in any signifi­
cant way from the justifications that were advanced within the
Administration.
I would not expect, then, that there is something hidden away
beyond the classified material that would throw off the main points
I have drawn in reconstructing the character of the Marshall Plan.
The confidential material I have seen has usually added a bit of
juice to the story, and I use it where I can, but I have not encoun­
tered anything that would affect the principal strands of interpreta­
tion. If I were writing this book again, I might give more attention
than I did to the role of organized labor in the program, and par­
ticularly to its activities in Europe. Perhaps when that account is
written it will provide a muted counterpoint to the patterns I have
described. But my hunch, again, is that it will still bear out the main
lines of analysis in the book; for the character of the Marshall Plan,
as I have suggested, was built into the structure of the agency that
administered the program, and the meaning of its features was es­
tablished on the public record by men who sought to understand
what they were building.
vii
Preface
Most of the research on this project was carried out in Washington
in 1965-66, when I was a Johnson Fellow at the Brookings Institu­
tion. I would like to thank the Institution for its support, and for
the services that were made available to me. Among the members
of the Brookings staff at the time, I am particularly indebted to
James L. Sundquist, D. A. FitzGerald, Robert W. Hartley, and
Edna Birkel for helpful advice—and recollections.
The Bureau of the Budget proved to be the source of the most
useful information that was not on the public record. I am grateful
to Hope Grace, the former archivist of the bureau, for the generous
help she provided in tracking down the files I had to see and sug­
gesting other sources that I had not known about. She and her staff
went out of their way to make my extended “residence” at
the Budget Bureau as profitable as it could be.
In the area of secondary sources, nothing stands out as impor­
tantly for a study of the Marshall Plan as Harry Price’s early book,
The Marshall Plan and Its Meaning. I mention it here for the sake
of recording my debt in a place more visible than the footnotes.
Several people have been kind enough to read the entire manu­
script and give me the benefit of their comments and criticism.
Among them I would like to thank Morton Kaplan, Earl Latham,
N. Gordon Levin, Jr., C. Herman Pritchett, and Herbert Storing.
I would reserve a special word of appreciation for Richard Ullman
of Princeton University and Sanford Thatcher of Princeton Uni­
versity Press for their very close reading of the manuscript, and for
criticisms that I know helped to improve it measurably.
The Brookings Institution has kindly permitted me to quote from
documents in its private files, and on a more modest scale, The
Economist of London has allowed me to reprint some of its own
copyrighted material. In preparing the manuscript, the secretarial
services were provided with funds from the Brookings Institution
and, later, from Amherst College. Anne Filippone typed the whole
of the original manuscript with a rare judgment and good humor;
and for their timely help in typing large portions of the manuscript
later, I want to express my thanks to Diane Souci and Barbara
Bond. In addition, Dale Swartz gave me the benefit of his steady
competence as he helped me work over the galleys and prepare
the index for the book, and it made these tasks considerably lighter.
Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my wife Judy, who has
lived with this project as long as I have. She has been an enduring
source of encouragement and sensible advice, and at those mo-
viii
Preface
ments when it became impossible to review a passage once again
and see with any freshness, I found it invaluable to have her judg­
ment at hand as a check upon my own. She has shared with me
some of the strains in the work, and she has shared the satisfaction
of bringing this project to completion.
H.A.
Amherst, Mass.
November 1971