Herter Committee
The House Select Committee on Foreign Aid, or Herter Committee, was established to study the proposal that had been launched by General George Marshall in his speech at Harvard on June 5, 1947, for a Marshall Plan, in part as Cold War anticommunism, which led future US President Richard Nixon to focus on foreign policy throughout his public career.
"[6] Representative James P. Richards (D-SC) said that the committee saw Communist leaders in Italy, France, and England who were "tough, hard, fanatical, well-financed and clever"; he called it a "great tragedy" that Europeans were unaware of the degree of American aid to date.
[6] European progress was moving slowly; the committee noted that Finnish farmers were feeding cattle with "a mixture of fish and wood pulp.
John Davis Lodge saw the plan as a tool to support America's "democratic system and its moral and spiritual values.
This was due (a) to lack of political strength and to technical incompetence of the Government, and (b) to deliberate sabotage on the part of the Communists to create chaotic conditions which they hoped would make the rise of a totalitarian regime inevitable.
[12] ERP goals included: rebuilding war-torn regions, removing trade barriers, modernizing industry, improving European prosperity, and preventing the spread of Communism.
The ERP required a reduction of interstate barriers, a dropping of many regulations; it encouraged an increase in productivity, as well as the adoption of modern business procedures.
Economists Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen deemed the Marshall Plan "History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program," stating: It was not large enough to have significantly accelerated recovery by financing investment, aiding the reconstruction of damaged infrastructure, or easing commodity bottlenecks.
We argue, however, that the Marshall Plan did play a major role in setting the stage for post-World War II Western Europe's rapid growth.
It was then that I toured war-devastated Europe as a member of the Herter Committee, as we sought to chart what America's role should be in helping its recovery.
[3] In his 1982 book Leaders, he mentions meeting Italian Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi during his Herter Committee trip.
I can recall him telling me that he made it a point of going to the minimum number of official functions and trying to spend his time out talking to the people or observing things in the countryside.
I remember one of the things he was talking to me about was when we went to Greece and it was the episode with Tito on the other side, and that he decided the embassy parties were fine, but he would rather be out in the countryside.
