The Marshall Plan - 6 December 2002

A telephone call from my oldest living friend in England, in great distress - he was very angry and frustrated at the same time by the intensity in his adopted country of anti-Americanism.

Perhaps his emotional outburst can be better understood if I tell you at the start that he is - was - a Viennese refugee, an escapee by a hair's breadth from Hitler at the tender age of 18.

I think I should expand his story because, though it was woefully common to my generation and the next, it must sound to even middle-aged people a history book relic of human cruelty like the exercises of the Spanish Inquisition.

Imagine then being a university student in Vienna in 1938 and living with your parents in an apartment in the city.

One spring day my friend goes home from his studies and is beckoned to by the concierge of the apartment house.

In retrospect the old man did a courageous thing - he simply told the 18 year old in a stage whisper that "the SS has been here and gone through the names of the tenants."

The next day came what is now called the Anschluss, Hitler was going to take over Austria, not in any brutal invading fashion.

The long newsreel film shots of endless rows of smiling Viennese, women and children pouring a stream of petals along his route, were absolutely true. The Viennese were just as anti-Semitic as the Germans had been made to be.

So throw your mind back again to what must be, for my old friend, a moment frozen in time.

You're young, a student, surely living for some time in secret apprehension anyway because you are a Jew and have awful good cause to fear that if Hitler ever decided to move into Austria you and your family could be on the humiliating road to the sort of oppression you'd read and fretted about in Germany, a society in which no matter what your class or station - lawyer, doctor, plumber, waiter, clerk - you would be forced into the most lowly degrading jobs.

And for any protest or infringement of the rules - on to a concentration camp.

So the 18 year old thanked the concierge, goes up to his apartment, packs a bag, makes a phone call, leaves a note for his mother and father and adds he was fleeing to an uncle in Switzerland.

The parents in time arrived, saw the note, packed their bags but did not flee at once. They warned their close relatives - brothers, sisters, cousins, so on - "No, no, no," most of them cried, "it won't be the same here."

Well they landed and ended in the slaughter houses of Buchenwald, Mauthausen, wherever.

My friend got to England, he worked on a farm, he was taking a horticultural course when England went to war in September 1939.

He was put behind wire in, we must admit, a humane centre for the detention of enemy aliens, where a little later on he swore loyalty to the King of England, joined the British army, served in the Italian campaign, came through and established a position of great prestige and gentle authority in British broadcasting.

There was a time maybe 30, 40 years ago when he spent a year or more on a fellowship in the United States.

So why is this admirable and extremely unmalicious man so angry and frustrated?

Because he has seen a massive, spewing outburst of anti-Americanism such as he'd not known in his lifetime among the British people he greatly respects - such as I have not witnessed since I was a teenager in the 1920s when the First World War reparations demanded by the American government were outrageous and eventually deemed to be not only excessive but unpayable. Uncle Sam became known as Uncle Shylock.

But for the most part in the 1920s mockery was the weapon, at the expense of American mass produced clothes, at their grotesque new fashionable dances - the Charleston - at horn-rimmed glasses, bobbed hair, jazz itself and - for the upper crust - cocktails, for the young - dreadful fizzy sweet drinks.

All these fashions - from awful soft shirts with collars attached, to paper napkins, parking meters, refrigerators, on and on up to supermarkets - they were at first despised, then adopted, enjoyed, finally thought to be English inventions.

But al-Qaeda and Iraq are grimmer stuff.

I believe the general European assumption a year ago that the navy wounded ships and the bombed nightclubs were the work of fanatical loners.

I believe this has now been reluctantly abandoned in the face of the hard facts we've discovered - that the enemy, al-Qaeda, is worldwide and invisible, something new in the history of warfare.

That it has been preparing for these atrocious events for 20 years.

That its agents, ready for action, are now in 80 countries. It has substantial bank accounts in more than 200 countries.

The only conclusion I can draw is that for two decades - through Reagan, Bush, Clinton - the Western world, so-called, has been living in a fool's paradise.

Now, on top of this daily dread, President Bush seems impatient to call Saddam's bluff.

Very few other countries want to join him, though he talks of the recruiting of a coalition of allies to fight a necessary preventive war.

But even in this country 40% of the people are against a war, even before it's started. It is a perilous obstacle.

Now my ex-Viennese friend is not pro-American or anti-American, he is - at all times in his 80-odd years has been - absorbed by foreign relations and I should say most by British and American foreign policy.

But now over the telephone he told me about the viciousness of some friends, British friends, complaining about the arrogance, the war mongering, the bullying of the United States and the president's unnecessary obsession with Saddam Hussein.

My friend cried to me: "I took up your point that we've been softened by 50 years of peace and come to accept it as normal but I asked them who kept the peace? 'Their power, their bomb is our umbrella,' Churchill said at a time of the ban the bomb crusade."

"But why don't you tell them what made all this scorn and this prosperity, the ability to stand on their feet and bite the hand that saved them, why don't you tell them about the Marshall Plan?"

"I've done that."

"Well tell them again."

Very well then. It's 54 years old and not likely to be taught now in European schools.

George Catlett Marshall, a soldier all his life, served in France in the First World War then went very slowly up the ladder of promotion because he had not a twinge of self-promotion in his being.

Indeed he acted all his life on one principle which he thought the essence of a soldier's code: the subordination of self to team work.

By the time of the second war he was not known much to the public - or ever. He was the army's chief of staff.

But along with refusing an ADC and a chauffeur he gave no press conferences and the public was never to know that the grand allied strategy - conquering Germany through France first and then conquering Japan - was Marshall's doing.

The time came for President Roosevelt to choose a supreme commander for the invasion of Europe.

Churchill - who called Marshall "the best soldier and the finest character I met during the war" - assumed, as did Stalin and Roosevelt's cabinet, that there was only one choice.

An old upright Yankee patrician, a very gentle man in the office of secretary of war, one Henry Stimson, told the president of his good fortune in having for the job a soldier of such towering eminence.

Alone at lunch one day Roosevelt formally offered the general the supreme command.

Marshall never demurred.

"Thank you, Mr President - no."

FDR was staggered. Twice more on later days he made the offer again.

Marshall suggested instead an old junior once, one Major Dwight D Eisenhower.

"Somebody," Marshall said, "has to be in Washington at the helm."

At the helm?

"To run and master the war of supply - of men, arms, material, food, planes, tankers, everything for a two-ocean war."

Marshall's achievement was, to army, navy, flying men, superb but it could not be translated into popular heroics.

When Stimson heard about Marshall's decision he wrote: "The European command was Marshall's secret desire above all things."

He also wrote: "In Marshall's presence ambition folds its tent."

After the war Marshall read the report of a mild-mannered southern businessman names Will Clayton who'd gone to look over Europe's needs for the president.

He found not wounded economies but a continent of shattered cities and spreading poverty and "a lack of the ordinary staples of life - bread, butter, fruit, meat - and of the essential elements of reconstruction - coal, steel, mining, construction."

And so thus in a speech at Harvard General Marshall came to plead for the rescue of Europe from hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.

An unwilling Congress - scared of the huge, conquering Soviet army and its threat to western Europe - was barely convinced by passionate testimony from Dean Acheson.

General Marshall followed. He was a dull, monotonous speaker - an unheroic, middle-sized, stolid, plain soldier.

But what won them over to vote a staggering $13bn investment was simply his presence. It was the presence of character.

I don't believe there's a statue of General Marshall in Europe.

There ought to be as a reminder of the American aim to restore the fabric of European life, of its giving Europe 50 years of peace in which to go it along, to become prosperous, to forge a common economy and in other ways to be free to challenge and even despise its old benefactor across the ocean.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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