iative, I think, must come from Europe [and] the role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting . . . and of later support of such a program [which] should be a joint one, agreed to by a number of if not all European nations" (quoted in Pogue 213). The genuine novelty of such a concept--both of European unity and American financial support--is hard to understand from the vantage point of the next century. On the one hand, the complete withdrawal of the Soviet Union behind the "Iron Curtain" was only beginning to be understood and, on the other hand, most Europeans did not conceive of the United States as a permanent ally, remembering the fiasco of the League of Nations and the rebirth of American isolationism after World War I.
Indeed only a year earlier Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, had spoken of Great Britain as "the last bastion of social democracy . . . against the red tooth and claw of American capitalism and the Communist dictatorship of Soviet Russia" (quoted in Reynolds 171). Many Europeans were like Be
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