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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative
91.3  
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December, 2004
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Book Review



Bipartisan Strategy: Selling the Marshall Plan. By John Bledsoe Bonds. (Westport: Praeger, 2002. xvi, 238 pp. $64.95, ISBN 0-275-97804-4.)

The Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program) is among the best-researched American foreign policies of the twentieth century. Scores of books have been written on the subject (more then twenty-five in various languages in the last ten years alone), and most of the relevant documents have been available for a number of years, and still scholars find the Marshall Plan a worthwhile topic to research and revisit and to analyze with fresh methodology and from new angles. 1
      John Bledsoe Bonds, developing his analysis on a broad base of secondary and primary sources, does a very good job in depicting the interplay of the various factions and departments involved in formulating American foreign policy. He shows how strategies evolved and were put into place and what obstacles they met, covering the familiar ground of the advent of the postwar bipartisan containment policy championed by Republican senator Arthur H. Vandenberg and a president who had to get a Republican Congress that was bent on scaling back spending to appropriate large sums of money for European reconstruction. Scores of members of Congress were shipped to Europe to be "educated" by Lucius D. Clay and his staff of the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) in Germany on the necessity of U.S.-sponsored reconstruction of Germany and Europe. Most came back sold on the Marshall Plan. . . .

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