On this day in 1947, General George Marshall gave a speech at Harvard University. As commentator Heather Cox Richardson pointed out this morning, it wasn't stirring or fiery - it was, in fact, the sort of bland, political-wonk speech you would expect at an Ivy commencement..
It called for the US and her allies to rally round "...A concept of government based on equality before the law, secularism, civil rights, economic and political freedom, and a market economy; the tenets of liberal democracy. As Otto Zausmer, who had worked for the US Office of War Information to swing Americans behind the war, put it in 1955: "America's gift to the world is not money, but the Democratic ideal, democracy."
In short it was the Marshall Plan.
Too bad far too many in DC have not read it.
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