The origins of the Marshall plan

Abstract

John Gimbel an independent diplomatic historian, and fashionable and luxurious academic groves of orthodoxy, revisionism, and postrevisionism have bloomed around him without effect. Despite its title, this book on American policy Germany after Second World War-his third book on subject fact-and Gimbel commands wilderness of sources his scholarly province. The volume suffers, however, from its inability to get beyond maze of evidence he has explored. Gimbel believes that it his concern for documents that has put him outside growth of modish controversy. Writers on Cold War, he argues, have oversimplified issues and ignored evidence, conceiving their analyses simply terms of Soviet-American strife; they differ only attributing responsibility for consequences they assume to be bad. Gimbel, on contrary, believes that American decision making rehabilitating Germany and initiating Marshall Plan had little to do with Soviet-American relations. Gimbel's comprehension of data has resulted, first of all, an ethic of complexity. It easy to infer from his writing that for anyone who controls jungle of information, generalization must be a trivial and frivolous enterprise. He says that anyone in search of rationality will be astounded by the contradictions American policy (p. 5). What emerges for Gimbel is a complex picture that boggles mind search of order, system, pattern, and long-range plans (p. 54). The Marshall Plan was not a plan at all, but actually a series of pragmatic bureaucratic decisions, maneuvers, compromises, and actions (p. 277); at best it was a plan to develop a plan. It unfair, however, to saddle Gimbel with view that proper historical interpretation must reflect total chaos. The book develops a series of limited arguments which, he claims, embody what structure

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