The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) is a non-partisan American public policy think tank that seeks to promote cooperation and understanding between North America and the European Union.

Goldman, an American whose family had fled Germany in 1940, lobbied the West German government, particularly Finance Minister Alex Möller for an endowment to promote European and U.S. relations on the 25th anniversary of Marshall Plan aid.

[4] Working with a planning group that was to constitute the fund's initial board of trustees – including physicist Harvey Brooks, diplomat Robert Ellsworth, journalist Max Franke, economist Richard N. Cooper, and educator Howard Swearer – Goldman eventually received an agreement to support an independent institution in 1971.

By 1977, the organization had spent more than $7 million on nearly 100 projects involving the United States, West Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Japan and Canada.

In 1987, George Kennan gave the keynote address at a conference organized in West Berlin by GMF to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Marshall Plan.

Also in the 1980s, GMF supported programs such as a National Governors Association initiative to tackle acid rain, and began to work actively with the democracy movements of Central and Eastern Europe through the funding of small grants.

GMF's exchange programs also expanded with the addition of American Marshall Memorial Fellows, the initiation of the Manfred Worner Seminar for defense specialists, and the establishment of the Congress-Bundestag Forum.