Saving Postwar Europe (and America): The Marshall Plan Speech

Abstract

On the morning of June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall stood before an audience of graduates, parents, and guests to receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. After awarding 11 other honorary degrees to such luminaries as General Omar Bradley and poet T. S. Elliott, as part of Harvard University’s 286th commencement, President James Bryant Conant, called Marshall forward. Conant cited him as “an American to whom freedom owes an enduring debt of gratitude, a soldier and statesman whose ability and character brook only one comparison in the history of this nation.”¹ The audience knew the allusion to George Washington was well earned.