"Unacceptable, Unconvincing"

One evening last week the five members of the Executive Committee of the European Economic Cooperation Committee were ushered into the green-tinted library of the U.S. Embassy in Paris. Their job had been to lay a practical groundwork under the Marshall Plan. They were in a mellow mood. Their report on the 16 participating nations' reconstruction needs and measures was ready for signing. But their U.S. hosts for the evening (Under Secretary of State Will Clayton, Ambassador to Britain Lewis Douglas, Ambassador to France Jefferson Caffery) soon routed any optimism. For two hours Clayton handed out "friendly advice." The report, he said, would be "unacceptable and unconvincing" to the U.S. public and Congress.

Clayton told them that the 16 nations must plan more positive steps to increase their own production and pool their own resources. For example, Britain must schedule more coal production, France more wheat. The nations must set up a supervisory body to check up on promises to meet higher production goals. And the "bill" of dollar needs for the next four years, already cut from $29 billion to $20.6 billion, must be cut even further if the plan was to win congressional approval.

Quipped Paris' Le Monde next day: "The task of drawing up the report should have been conferred on psychologists instead of statisticians."

But the planners for the 16 nations obediently set about to comply with Clayton's wishes. The full committee cut the estimate of dollar needs to about $17 billion, by the simple but uncertain expedient of assuming that U.S. prices would fall. France's delegate, dapper Herve Alphand, emphasized that, in any case, "the figures in our report are by no means a claim or a demand, they are merely an illustration [of what it would cost to reconstruct Western Europe]."

Thirteen of the 16 nations (all except Norway, Sweden and Switzerland) announced that they would discuss a European customs union. Top U.S. officials were even more interested in a program that would inspire Western Europe to work for itself than in the amount of help the U.S. would be asked to deliver.

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