Paul R. Porter Oral History Interview

Notice
These are transcripts of tape-recorded interviews conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of each transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that these are essentially transcripts of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened June, 1987
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[1]
WILSON: It's interesting that in talking with persons who were involved in foreign aid it seems so many of you had experience in the War Production Board. I don't know whether you ever noticed that at the time, but a great many people came out of that. I don't know; it was just coincidental I'm sure. But how did it happen that you took the position with the War Production Board? You were there for three years, all during the war.

PORTER: Yes. At the time I went there I was publisher of a group of trade union newspapers in Wisconsin. I got a call out of the blue asking me to come down for three months. And on the expectation that it would be only three months, I accepted, and I never went

[2]
back to Kenosha.

WILSON: And what were your responsibilities at the time? I notice you were in the shipbuilding...

PORTER: Yes. My initial responsibilities were very vague. I was given a number of errands, but after a few months I was made chairman of the Shipbuilding Stabilization Committee, which was a tripartite body of procurement agencies, the shipbuilders, and the shipbuilding unions, and our purpose was to establish labor standards that would suffice for an expansion of the shipbuilding industry from about 175 thousand employees to nearly two million. On the whole it worked well. We had less time lost due to work stoppages than any other industry during the war.

WILSON: You would have been involved with the establishment of the landing crafts program.

PORTER: Very much. That was very interesting.

WILSON: It's very interesting. It came from Evansville, Indiana and there was, of course, LST programs.

PORTER: Yes.

[3]
WILSON: Looking back on the War Production Board, do you have any general comments about that agency? It has come under fire from historians as being a sprawling, ill-directed outfit, though it accomplished a great -- I think -- a remarkable record in many ways.

PORTER: Yes.

WILSON: Much of the criticism has been launched at President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt, because he didn't give authority to people.

PORTER: That's right. There was a good deal of difficulty at the top. The two-headed arrangement with Knudson and Hillman never worked out well, and it's pretty hard for such an arrangement to work.

Then Donald Nelson made a major effort, and on the whole, I think did a good job, but he was dealing with an awful lot of prima donnas, the dollar-a-year men, and many of them felt they couldn't stay for the duration, there was a big turnover among many of the top people there. So, eventually, he was succeeded by Cap Krug. By that time, though, the work was beginning to wind down. My guess is that any administrator would

[4]
have found the job an almost impossible one.

MCKINZIE: There were some plans during the war for the postwar period. Were you involved in any of those -- the transformation from War Production Board to Civilian Production Administration?

PORTER: No, I made up my mind in 1944 that I wanted to go into military government. The main factor of influence then was, I thought, that it was very important to revive the democratic trade unions in Germany after the war, and that -- if that was not done -- the Communists would take over. So, that was my objective in seeking a job with military government.

WILSON: You did then seek a position in military government? Yet our records show that you went to London. Is there a hiatus in our information?

PORTER: I was in Germany first, but I was only there three months. A chance event resulted in my transfer to London. Overnight I became a coal expert. I had never been in a coal mine before. I was assigned to the 15th Army Group at Wiesbaden. The British had

[5]
responsibility for the operation of the coal mines in the Ruhr. The American Army at the time had the responsibility for the occupation force there. The British had established a workday ending at 6 in the evening. The Americans had established a 5 o'clock curfew. So, as the miners came out of the mines our soldiers were arresting them. I was sent to mediate the conflict between the commanders of the British and American forces. We worked out a reasonable agreement and that made me a coal expert.

So I was asked to go to London to be the U.S. representative in the European Coal organization, which had the responsibility of allocating coal for all the countries of Europe. The U.S. by that time was becoming a major supplier. Later I became chief of the U.S. Mission for Economic Affairs.

MCKINZIE: When you were in Wiesbaden did you have a feeling that there was added emphasis on the revival of the democratic trade unions in Germany? Did the military command seem to have, in your opinion, a knowledge of the importance of that sort of thing, or was it, you know, to prevent rebellion, starvation and everything else?

[6]
PORTER: Yes, to prevent disease and unrest. No, they did not. The general attitude was why have trade unions? They'll make trouble. They should be prevented from reorganizing. Even if it's a good thing in the future, we cannot afford it now. So, the basic attitude was one of resistance. At least that was the initial position. And the Communist position (and there were some Communists in military government) was also to prevent the reorganization of trade unions because they felt that the organization of work councils, so-called, devoted to only getting production would enable them to establish a base for taking over the trade union movement at a later date. And so for a time there was an acceptance of the position of Communists within military government.

WILSON: I see. Was that U.S. military government?

PORTER: That's right. That's a story I've never wanted to tell, because of the [Joseph] McCarthy period. I did tell it once to Stewart Alsop, because he had learned that [Dwight D.] Eisenhower was about to be attacked by McCarthy, and he felt that the best way

[7]
to offset the McCarthy attack was to tell the story. And so I did give him the details; but he never published it, as he felt that the tide was turning against McCarthy. McCarthy was afraid to attack Eisenhower and so that story was never told.

WILSON: Did you have a feeling that this was rather long range planning on the part of Communists who worked for positions in military government, that they might not be able to get into this situation and was it seizing an opportunity that came up?

PORTER: I think it was part of a long term plan.

WILSON: We have been struggling with the records about the early period of the occupation and have gone to Hyde Park and gone through this massive record of Henry Morgenthau and his diaries, so-called diaries, which he kept, which actually is every bit of things that came through his office -- transcripts. It's clear from that record that people in the Treasury were still pushing for a very strong, harsh policy for treatment of Germany until at least Morgenthau's dismissal or resignation in July of '45, and then perhaps even

[8]
thereafter. Was that apparent at the level at which you were working at the time, this confusion, this struggle about policy?

PORTER: Yes.

WILSON: What then were its effects?

PORTER: Well, we must be very careful to distinguish between those that were consciously carrying out a Communist plan, and those who just favored harsh treatment of Germany. Most people were in the latter category. I'm convinced, or at least I've never had any reason to believe, that Morgenthau himself was in the slightest influenced by any disposition to be pro-Communist. Some of the people in the Treasury were pro-Communist, but there weren't very many. And they had very definitely infiltrated the Manpower Division of military government. I never spotted any in the Treasury division of military government.

Well, the Treasury took a very hard line, but I don't think they were in the least bit influenced by any Communist objective. At least I never identified any of those that were influenced at least.

[9]
WILSON: What was your personal reaction to the situation in Germany when you arrived? Had you been prepared to recognize the chaos that was present? Do you think that the United States Government had really recognized the kind of problems that they were going to face in getting Germany back to some minimum level of...

PORTER: Very inadequately. I was not prepared for the amount of devastation that we encountered, or for the near complete breakdown of many services. When I first saw Germany in 1945 (I went in while the war was still on), I didn't think that they could make a comeback in less than 25 years. They did. This was largely the result of American assistance, but at that time it looked hopeless.

WILSON: One guiding assumption at that time was that the three-power occupation in Europe -- and that would be under the Potsdam Declaration -- there would be sooner than later some kind of economic unity in the three zones. At least the records suggest that the United States authorities believed that this was going to happen.

PORTER: You mean three-power or four-power?

[10]
WILSON: Well four-power, because that's after the French came in.

PORTER: Yes.

WILSON: And indeed, that story, I'm sure is very important. But in the other spots was there the belief that it was going to be possible to work with the Russians?

PORTER: Yes, for a time. I myself was very skeptical of it. But I had been a Socialist, and had some experience with the Communists, and I was very doubtful that it would work; but most of the military command I think genuinely believed it would work, genuinely tried to make it work.

WILSON: There's a recent book, which we think is a very good book, about the early years of the occupation, by a man named Gimbel. He argues that in the first two years the great hangup was not with the Russian opposition but it was the French opposition in carrying out the Potsdam Declaration. The United States had more difficulty with France and with the French opposition than with the Soviet Union. What about that?

PORTER: I think, one, was that the French were very

[11]
difficult. We had trouble with them because we weren't prepared for the French to be difficult. We were very surprised that they were offering such obstinate opposition. And the second was that we had expected the Russians to be difficult, and therefore, we weren't surprised when they were. And we were making a great many concessions with the Russians because we were prepared to make them, but we weren't prepared to make them to the French. That would be my opinion on that. I haven't read the book.

WILSON: We had not realized at the beginning of our study how crucial the question of Germany was to both any treatment of foreign aid, and also how crucial the whole problem of the occupation and of the continuation of military government, was to be. It is very difficult for us. The records that we have seen suggest that there were repeated efforts, offers, on the part of the Army, the Department of the Army, and later Department of Defense, and on the part of [Lucius] Clay himself, to turn over administration to some civilian authority, and that the State Department said, "No, this is not our responsibility," dragged its

[12]
feet, or whatever. And yet, in practice, the kind of actions taken by military government suggests that they were digging in, that they were building an empire, perhaps naturally. The coal question and the setting up of the joint export-import agency with this rigid control over the German economy, might you comment on that? Is this a contradiction or is it just how people worked?

PORTER: Well, there were all kinds of contradictions in what happened there. The preparations which had been made I think were pretty theoretical. Have you had any opportunity to look at any of the manuals that have been prepared?

WILSON: Yes.

PORTER: They are awfully superficial. And how superficial they were I didn't realize until I got to Germany. So, there was a weakness there.

Secondly, there was a very big turnover in the Army. The combat officers weren't really well-suited for military government anyway, except maybe Eisenhower would have been. He had been selected primarily as supreme commander for his qualities as a man to reconcile

[13]
differences. But most of the combat officers were wholly unsuited for military government and they wanted out as quickly as they could, and the men who were assigned there were largely second-string men, who had had not been used for combat because they were not first-class officers. We got some awfully poor quality men as military commanders then.

I don't know how you run a military government suitably. It's a pretty difficult thing to do. Certainly the combat officers would not have been the right people; but neither were the men that were chosen, other than Clay, who was a man with very real ability, and a few others, but particularly the men out in the field were not.

MCKINZIE: The people who had to deal with the German people.

PORTER: That's right. They were not particularly well-qualified. And even communications, you know, weren't too good for a time. We had to rely not on domestic communications, but on Army communications, and we were pulling out a lot of communications equipment for the war against Japan. So, frequently, if we wanted something done we got into a jeep and rode out to find the man to talk to.

[14]
I almost never communicated from Wiesbaden to Hoechst by telephone, it was just too difficult. I'd just get my driver and go over there and look around the halls until I found the man I wanted to talk to.

Well, that's not a very efficient way to run a government.

WILSON: Should we give any credits to the records that suggest that there were continued discussions between the Army and the State Department, particularly by the State Department, and civil authorities about the occupation; it never happened, of course, until the Federal Republic was set up.

PORTER: Yes. I wasn't involved in that so I wouldn't be a good judge. I rather imagine that the discussions were undoubtedly conducted in good faith, and that people were just finding it difficult to reach a decision. Partly because of the fact that it was a quadripartite operation and anything we did had to be coordinated with what the others did.

WILSON: What expectations did you have when you went over

[15]
to the European Coal Authority?

PORTER: It was called the European Coal Organization.

WILSON: Yes, the European Coal Organization. There were several, there was the European Transportation Organization, there was the Inland Waterways thing.

PORTER: Yes.

WILSON: And, of course, the Committee on European Economics.

PORTER: The Emergency Economic Committee for Europe.

WILSON: Yes.

PORTER. And also the European Inland Transportation Organization.

WILSON: Yes, that's correct, yes. The records suggest that, in the planning stages, that these organizations were to have very large powers, and indeed it was expected that they would guide reconstruction; again it didn't work out that way. What happened? Or am I getting you ahead of your story?

PORTER: I became our representative in all of them.

[16]
I started with the coal organization and then I was given the responsibility for EECE and ECITO. The European Economic Committee that was the weakest of the three, partly because it was so diverse. The European Central Inland Transportation organization on the whole did a better job, but their main job was to try to locate lost freight cars and lost barges, and get them operating again. I think that ECITO did a reasonably creditable job. In the coal organization, we had the easiest task of all, which was simply to add up the amount of coal that was available, add up the claims, and work out an allocation. We did try, also, to stimulate the revival of mining, helping to finance some equipment that was needed, and particularly had a problem of shortage of pit props, that is, timbers to support the mine roof. We helped to overcome that.

But, again, these were organizations that had been improvised, I think, by people that had no grasp of how great the job would be. This is not a criticism necessarily of the people who did the planning. I think no one in a civilian position back in Washington or even in London grasped the magnitude of the breakdown that had occurred, because it was much more than

[17]
devastation. There was a breakdown of operations and it was very difficult to get it all reestablished.

MCKINZIE: Certainly the people in Washington had high hopes for those things and they talked about the revival of the European economy within two, perhaps three years after the fighting. They expected that these organizations would start all of the wheels turning again.

PORTER: I really didn't have a judgment on that. I would say I more or less accepted that the first few months. I quickly changed my view on it. And by agreement with the State Department I gave an anonymous interview to a magazine that since has been consolidated with U.S. News -- it was then called World Report -- it was a subsidiary of U.S. News. This was in the summer of 1946, in which we felt -- well, the basic theme of the article was that the breakdown was much more serious than we realized, but also it foreshadowed some of the ideas that later emerged in the Marshall plan.

MCKINZIE: You mean at that time you saw a need for a greater input than there was in 1947?

PORTER: Well, from my position in London, as the American

[18]
representative in these three organizations, I was seeing all of the bad areas in my position there, and I started early in 1946 to say the situation was much worse than our plans had allowed for.

WILSON: But, of course, you have to look back at these problems in retrospect. The one thing we deal with, and look back on in a way, is that during the war, and for a time thereafter, at the highest level, the problems of the postwar world economy was primarily financial. There were financial imbalances, imbalances in international trade, and they assumed that agencies such as the World Bank and the Ex-Im Bank, that these things would correct these imbalances and everything would fall into place, and that the whole business of the problem of food shortages, which partly was the matter of poor crops, was not foreseen.

It just took a period of time to have a shift in thinking at your level in London and also back in Washington. Is that correct, that these things had to beat in on them? Is that how it operated, that the information came in and finally it became so clear that the conception of the problem was...

[19]
PORTER: I think you have made a very good statement of it. Most people were not making an overall assessment. They were describing the problem that they had, and whatever role that they had and that was a fairly limited role, and there weren't very many people to watch the whole picture. The Policy Planning Staff of the State Department had not yet been created; there really wasn't anyone in the State Department I think that had seen the whole situation. We had the German desk, we had the other country desks, but they were not yet presenting an adequate understanding of the breakdown of the European economy.

MCKINZIE: What about national delegates to these committees from the Western European countries, did you have any feelings that any of them had a clear perception of the magnitude of the problem, early.

PORTER: Very few. Hector McNeil, in the British government, I think, was one of the first that began to get a grasp of it. Also his chief, Ernest Bevin. McNeil was Minister of State and he was the number two man in the Foreign Office. I didn't encounter any others in the British Government who at the time seemed to understand the

[20]
whole picture. I didn't find it at the civil servant level, but again they had their specific niches in which they were working. But very early McNeil and Bevin began to see the magnitude of the problem.

WILSON: You being stationed in London, I'm not sure you had any direct responsibility for the involvement in the problems of the loan, and of the U.S.-British economic relations during this period, but you were an observer. Did you think that the British themselves understood the magnitude of their difficulties?

PORTER: No, I don't think they did.

WILSON: That bears out the information we have too. How might you explain that? It's just again that no one was able to have an overview of the kind of problems that they were having?

PORTER: Yes, partly that, and everyone had made assumptions that were too optimistic. That is before the end of the war they'd assumed a much quicker recovery than was possible. I think they were thinking in terms of the fairly quick recovery after World War I, but you

[21]
can't really compare the two periods.

WILSON: Well, the British officials with whom we've talked have placed great stress upon the abrupt termination of lend-lease that turned their affairs into disorder. Were you in London at that time, by August of '45?

PORTER: Yes. I had just arrived. I had no background on it, but that was certainly one feeling among the British and I think probably a justified one.

WILSON: The decision seems to have been a matter more of bureaucratic politics.

PORTER: Yes, I think so.

WILSON: Truman later called it his greatest mistake and...

PORTER: Well, he certainly wasn't prepared for a careful decision on that.

WILSON: In this early period how did you deal with the diffusion of responsibility in economic foreign policy or in foreign policy generally? There were so many agencies -- still are today -- with interests and with perhaps little empires to protect, the Treasury, Agriculture,

[22]
and of course, the State Department, in their early stage, the FEA, and then the ECA came in. How important was that, I should say, as a factor in determining what happened?

PORTER: In the first two years I was never able to do anything about it; that is during the time I was in London. All I could do was just to send forward the problem to Washington and give my assessment.

Later when the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe was created and I went to Geneva as our permanent representative, and I had an opportunity to talk to people from Agriculture and Commerce and Treasury, who had come there as advisers. I wouldn't suggest that it made any major difference but at least we had a chance to talk out the problems and it gave me a better understanding of what they were confronted with domestically; and to some extent they carried my assessments back to Washington.

WILSON: Did these people, as representatives of agencies of the United States Government, did they tend to run their own lines of policy without much concern about any common front, united front?

[23]
PORTER: Treasury, yes. The other agencies I don't think so particularly; and after Harriman went back to Washington as Secretary of Commerce, that agency became one of the most cooperative and constructive. It hadn't been very much of a factor one way or the other, until Harriman moved in as Secretary of Commerce.

I just can't give you a judgment on Agriculture because I wasn't close enough to it. When we got into the Marshall plan, then things changed; then there was no question but what the Economic Cooperation Administration was in charge. The other agencies were directed to cooperate. As chief of the Marshall Plan mission in Greece I had no complaint. After my assignment to Greece I was in Washington as the Assistant Administrator in charge of program. I had a weekly meeting at lunch with the State Department, always an Assistant Secretary. If it was a Far Eastern problem it was Dean Rusk. If it was a European problem, as it generally was, I met with Tom Coolidge. But Dick [Richard M., Jr.] Bissell, then the Deputy Administrator, usually joined us every week for lunch. Any problem between the agencies was supposed to be resolved at our level. I also met frequently with John Snyder who was the Secretary of the

[24]
Treasury, and again, we had no problem with Treasury then. Because of his friendship with Truman he was loyally carrying out the policy of cooperating with ECA.

So, at the time of the Marshall Plan I had no complaint about the cooperation of other agencies.

WILSON: Perhaps to sum up the discussion of your tenure in London, how might you characterize the atmosphere of U.S.-British relations? Was it one in this period of a suitor, the British being suitor for all kinds of help from the United States, or was there a resentment? Some people have suggested that in this period the United States -- and I'm not sure you will accept this -- the United States took advantage of the British, and that it would in some ways take over, or try to take over British oil interests and certain other rights. Was there any feeling among the British about...

PORTER: Well, that was outside of my sphere, I didn't encounter it. In the areas that I was working in, we had the closest kind of cooperation; very close relations.

WILSON: Were you happy with the kind of British representation

[25]
in those agencies?

PORTER: Yes. Almost without exception, they were very well-qualified men, and they came prepared, they were adaptable, they were very fine men to work with. They were much better selected than those from any other country.

WILSON: The problem of coal continued throughout the period. In part it reflected or was affected by differences in the philosophy of the occupations, particularly the British and the U.S. occupations. Were you at all concerned about the problem of denazification as it affected the operation of the coal mines? It seemed to be much harsher in the U.S. zone.

PORTER: Yes. I didn't get involved in that. I was aware of it. Again it was an area in which we'd had all kinds of conflicts. We were much tougher on denazification, but we also recognized sooner than the British that Germany had to be restored, or all of Europe was going to be in deep trouble. I remember my first meeting with Ernest Bevin, it was before I had gone to Germany in 1945. He was then the Minister of Labor. I had called on him to propose that the British and the

[26]
Americans should support the early re-establishment of German trade unions. When we walked out of his office together, he made a sardonic remark to me. He said, "Well, it will take us about two years longer than it will take you to love the Germans."

WILSON: What about the problem of nationalization in the British occupation zone? That alarmed Clay a great deal. Did you get into that at all?

PORTER: Not in any direct way. Again I was reading the cables and I had no direct responsibility for it. I was less concerned about nationalization than I was about getting production. And from a very early date I started opposing the restrictions on German steel production.

WILSON: That problem of the level of industry and also the level of German coal and steel production. It certainly wasn't resolved really until '49 or '50.

PORTER: That's right.

WILSON: But the United States hadn't resolved its position even at the time of the beginning of the Marshall Plan.

[27]
Who were the people recommending taking off restrictions? It has been suggested to us that Clay and his staff decided fairly early that this wasn't going to work. But the people at home in Washington didn't understand this.

PORTER: I think that's basically correct. I think Clay very early saw that unless production could be restored you were going to have an impossible problem of feeding the German people and that unless the Germans were producing coal and steel, all of European industry would be adversely affected. It was much more difficult back in Washington for them to make this basic reversal of their thinking. The Treasury position was very widely accepted back here, not just in the Treasury but in a great many other agencies of Government.

WILSON: Two additional brief questions on this. One, how widespread was the kind of emotional American rejection of nationalization, or of socialism? How important was that in treating questions such as the occupation and U.S.-British relations, and involvement of socialist governments in agencies such as the one you worked in?

[28]
PORTER: I think less than one would ever think. We really came very close to agreeing to nationalizing the steel industry in Germany. I was told one day that we had agreed.

WILSON: Really?

PORTER: Yes, I forget just what time it was. Well, it was during the Marshall Plan, must have been '49 or '50, and it was very close to American acceptance. Now, of course, there was opposition there also; but the opposition I think was not nearly as pronounced as one would have expected. I think a great many people felt, "Well, if it will work, okay."

WILSON: Yes. A pragmatic approach?

PORTER: That's right.

WILSON: And did you, as a longtime person involved in labor affairs, find that there was a difficulty of Americans who had experienced our rather peculiar labor situation, with the lack of direct involvement policy, the difficulty in making adjustment to the European situation; or did Americans try to push American ideas, American philosophy of labor organization on the Europeans?

[29]
PORTER: No, because they, I think very wisely, selected people who were either able unionists or union historians as our representatives for key jobs. Joseph Keenan, who is now the secretary of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, was the key trade union man. David Saposs, who was well-known as a labor historian, was there; and he also knew European labor history very well. I never encountered any instance of our trying to tell the German unions how to organize, except for the intervention of this small Communist cell, which was, of course, trying to prevent them from organizing. But gradually they were isolated; people like Keenan and Saposs and Henry Rutz of the Wisconsin Federation of Labor and Newman Jeffrey of the Auto Workers -- incidentally he's a K.U. graduate -- were gradually taking the key positions, and had the major influence.

WILSON: This takes us ahead of our story a little, but I have the strong impression that Averell Harriman was very sympathetic to and open to labor people.

PORTER: Oh, yes.

WILSON: And he had a very warm and a very good relationship

[30]
with U.S. labor and with people in the European labor movement. How's that explained? Here's the classic kind of business background.

PORTER: Well, partly the nature of the man is - first-rate intelligence -- sympathetic, a warm type of person, and again a very pragmatic person. He's all of these things, I think, put together.

WILSON: I have another question along those lines, but I'll save it till later. The ECE is baffling to us. This started out again with great fanfare. Of course, there was a time when there was the possibility that it might have been the vehicle for Marshall Plan aid. And it's something about which we have not very satisfactory information, we're hoping that you can help us with this. Had you been brought into the State Department by this time, or what was your position?

PORTER: I went into the State Department immediately when I went to London, in August of '45.

WILSON: Oh, I see, yes. And then you had been involved in the preparatory work before the first official session that was in July of '47.

[31]
PORTER: There was a preparatory session in May, which broke up. Nothing substantial was accomplished. We reconvened in July and that was the session at which ECE was finally organized.

WILSON: Will Clayton had been over in Europe in the spring.

PORTER: That's right. He was there for the GATT meetings.

WILSON: Did you see him during this time?

PORTER: Oh, yes. Nominally he was our representative to the ECE, but since he was tied up with GATT, he thought that he had his hands full there. I was his deputy for the ECE so I attended all of its meetings for him; but I checked in with him every morning to discuss what had happened the day before and what we were planning to do that day.

WILSON: This was in Geneva?

PORTER: In Geneva, yes. He gave me a free hand as to what I should do. Since he was Under Secretary of State, he was speaking for the State Department and I was quite free from any significant guidance from Washington during that period.

[32]
WILSON: What did you feel was his position at that time? Economic foreign policy had not been one of the State Department's strong points before, and perhaps even during the war; and his appointment -- well, Acheson had been involved also, but his appointment was to raise this, officially at least...

PORTER: That's right.

WILSON: ...to give it some considerable prestige. Did it do so, in fact?

PORTER: Well, it did so far as the GATT negotiations were concerned, which were his primary interest. He was a very strong free trader. But he didn't really pay much attention to the Economic Commission for Europe. He felt he had his hands full. It involved a lot of problems that he didn't understand; he didn't have time to familiarize himself with them, and as long as I was keeping him informed and not getting into trouble, he said, "Well, just go ahead and do what you think is necessary."

WILSON: You must have been a key person in informing him, though, in the spring of '47, about how serious the

[33]
situation was. He supposedly, as you know, came back in April from one trip and wrote a very strong memorandum about the situation.

PORTER: That's right.

WILSON: And this is one linkage in the developments leading to the Marshall message.

PORTER: Yes. I'd been informing State for over a year before that -- not at his level, but I think that the information was getting through. I'd asked for an opportunity to come back in the summer of '46 to report. I was back here for three weeks and I tramped the halls of the State Department then; and, as I said, I was encouraged to give an anonymous interview to World Report.

WILSON: This is a hypothetical question, of course, but our view is that the Marshall Plan, the ideas, the recognition of the problem, came about a year late. That's the story of distorting history, of course. Would you agree with that?

PORTER: Yes.

[34]
WILSON: Did you conjecture at the time what's holding up these people? Why don't they recognize what I'd recognized, what other people are telling them as well?

PORTER: Well, sometimes I got impatient, but, again, I knew how long it takes for things to get done.

WILSON: You mentioned at the beginning that the creation of the Policy Planning Staff was crucial, and you recognized that this getting a small group of people to look at overall policy was a key factor.

PORTER: Yes, though I don't think that was the main element in the creation of the Marshall Plan. It was rather a group that Averell Harriman pulled together when he was Secretary of Commerce. He pulled some people out of State, some out of Commerce -- "Tick" Bonesteel from the Army, who is now General Bonesteel (he made a very big contribution then -- a man with a brilliant mind). Link [Lincoln] Gordon was one of the men that was brought in then. And it was this informal group that Harriman pulled together that was mainly responsible, so far as I know, for the planning of the Marshall Plan. Of

[35]
course, I was in Europe then and I was only getting inadequate information. As to what I learned then and later, I would say it was Harriman's staff who did the work. Also, Harriman was very decisively pushing it with the President and presumably with Acheson.

WILSON: There had been, as you mentioned, this preparatory session of the ECE which broke up in late May perhaps. Marshall's speech came in early June.

PORTER: Two weeks earlier there had been a speech by Acheson at Cleveland, Mississippi.

WILSON: Right. Marshall left it open in some ways to perhaps use the Economic Commission for Europe as the vehicle. Did you think that this might be done?

PORTER: Yes. It might very well have been done that way. It would have been done that way if the Russians had participated. It might have still been done that way if they had permitted the Poles and Czechs to participate.

WILSON: Of course, there had been the early meeting first of the Russians, the French, and the British to decide

[36]
what to do. But even after that if the Poles and the Czechs had been allowed in, then the ECE would have been used?

PORTER: Yes, I'm sure of that.

WILSON: That's very interesting. There was pressure in the United States, and some criticism of the setting up a separate agency because the ECE was after all in our minds aligned with the United Nations. It was believed that this kind of information you got was that the United States Government was willing to accept use of the ECE if there had been some indication that the Eastern bloc would participate.

PORTER: It was thought that it would be the best instrument if any of the Eastern bloc countries participated. And it was only after the Russians not only pulled out themselves but prevented the Czechs and the Poles from participating when both wanted to, that the decision was made not to go ahead but to create a separate organization.

MCKINZIE: Not to go ahead...

[37]
PORTER: Through ECE.

MCKINZIE: Yes. Primarily on the grounds that it would simply destroy it?

PORTER: It was felt that ECE would be a body that couldn't function, because any decision would be blocked.

Well, I'll tell you a little bit that I think will help on that story. Just before leaving the Embassy on the day that we received the cabled text of Marshall's speech, I picked up a copy. I took it home with me and read it aloud to my wife. I was very excited. I said to my wife, "It looks as though we are beginning to move now, with this speech of Marshall's."

About the same time I had a telephone call from Hector McNeil, asking me to join him for lunch the next day at the House of Commons, which I did. Bevin joined us, and he said, "What does Marshall expect?"

And I had to improvise, of course. I said, "I think he expects a response from you and the other Europeans." I said, "That's the way I read it, but," I said, "I have no instructions on it."

Later that afternoon Hector McNeil called me and said Bevin had decided to go to Paris to meet Bidault

[38]
and Schuman and also had invited DeGasperi.

As a result of that meeting it was decided to invite the Russians and practically all of the European countries. Then, as you know, there was the meeting in Paris, at which Molotov walked out. Then there was the second meeting which occurred in July. The Czechs by that time knew that they could not participate. I spent an evening with the man who was their Foreign Minister, Jan Mazaryk, and McNeil, and Andre Phillipi of France. Mazaryk was very outspoken, very candid. He said, "I no longer know whether I am a man or not." He was a crushed man at that time. But he had made it clear that he knew from the trip that he and Gottwald and a third Czech had made to Moscow that they could not participate. Tadeuz Lychowski, the head of the Polish delegation at Geneva, told me the afternoon before the second conference convened in Paris that he would attend it.

The next morning I was surprised to see him still in Geneva. I asked him what happened and he said, "Well, last minute instructions, you know." But up until then he had expected that the Poles would participate.

[39]
And I think that even if the Poles alone had participated it would probably have been made possible for them to do so by using the ECE, or trying to use it. Probably it would have failed. I think the Russians could have obstructed it enough that we would have had to create an independent organization sooner or later. I was encouraged to talk to Myrdal, the Executive Secretary of the ECE, about using the ECE for this purpose and he was very eager to do it.

WILSON: Yes.

PORTER: So, I think that's the reason why ECE was not used.

WILSON: That's very helpful. This is a source still of considerable debate, and there is a line of interpretation for which we don't find much evidence -- there just isn't much evidence pro or con -- but one line of interpretation has it that the State Department recognized, or believed, that it could never get any appropriation from the Congress if the agency to use the appropriation included the Russians; and that, therefore, the Marshall speech was dishonest in one sense, and that there was never any intention, or at least there was the hope that

[40]
the Russians would do what they did at Paris. But what you suggested is that Marshall was playing it straight with everybody down the line.

PORTER: Oh, yes. I've never had any reason to doubt that. As I told you, I had been encouraged to talk about how serious the situation was as early as 1946, but to do it off-the-record. I was again encouraged to talk to the Observer and I did talk about the basic idea of the Marshall Plan to Nora Beloff, one of the Observer's reporters. This must have been early May, 1947. Then there was Acheson's speech in Mississippi. All of these things lead me to believe that Marshall was acting in good faith. I do not think Marshall would have acted except in good faith. No, I don't find any basis for that interpretation.

Now I think that there may well have been people in the State Department who felt from the beginning that ECE was not a suitable instrument. With regard to any big question like that you're going to get conflicts of opinions, but I think the highest officials were willing to try to use ECE if it meant bringing in the Eastern Europeans and then reduce their dependence on

[41]
the Russians.

MCKINZIE: In a way you seemed to be suggesting that the original intention was to bring about a kind of Will Clayton idea of expanded international trade more than it was a matter of ideological clout, that the original purpose was pretty much integration and elevation of European trade levels more than political stability. Am I missing what you're saying there?

PORTER: No, I didn't mean to give that impression. I think it was recognized from the beginning that we would have to put very large sums of money into Europe. The figure of 17 billion dollars I think emerged pretty early in the planning committee of the Harriman staff. How they arrived at 17 billion I don't know. The actual cost was about 13.

And, of course, another thing that I think was an argument against the interpretation that you mentioned was the work that was done by the Harriman Committee. Everything points towards a good faith effort. Now, we did want to revive European trade, and we wanted to bring Eastern European trade in.

Again, there were conflicting views, but the dominant

[42]
view in the State Department from the very beginning, at the end of the war, was to bring Eastern Europe into a trading relationship with Western Europe.

WILSON: This in many ways was to the Soviet Union's advantage to take part in this national or international European reconstruction effort. The Soviet Union had suffered greatly from the war. The usual explanations and why the Russians didn't was that they viewed it as an ideological push, and that they were so secretive about their own economy they just couldn't give these things out. You had discussions, I guess, with the Russian representatives in this period? Did you? Did they ever say?

PORTER: I had discussions, but I never learned anything. The head of the Russian delegation was Zorin, who was then Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, and later to France. He became Deputy Foreign Minister still later.

I had invited him, at the instruction of Will Clayton, to have lunch with me on the first day of the first meeting, and he said, "I'll have to check with my secretary and let you know a convenient date." I heard nothing more though we sat next to each other for

[43]
two weeks. Well, the very last day of our meeting, he said, "I accept your invitation to lunch tomorrow." Meanwhile, my staff and I had planned to fly back to London. We had to change our plans. We stayed on. We had a well-lubricated luncheon the following day but never learned anything.

WILSON: Clayton, of course, was the man on the spot all during that summer. I got the feeling, the understanding, that the United States did not wish to dictate to the OEEC or to the CEEC discussions; that it did not wish to have proper representation, but that Clayton would come in from Geneva and use an alias.

MCKINZIE: Well, he used William Lockwood, is that the name?

WILSON: Lockhart.

PORTER: I didn't know that.

MCKINZIE: Lockhart. He didn't want his presence known. He tried for a while to register under the name of William Lockhart.

WILSON: He did that with the British and the French particularly. We had an impression that he pushed perhaps

[44]
too strongly, or pushed very strongly, to have this agency's organization carry forward his ideas about free trade, international free trade; and, indeed, the State Department nearly knocked him down. I mean the British and French were saying, "Hey, are you making this a condition of Marshall Plan aid?" And that the State Department did not repudiate, but called back some of the things Clayton was saying. Did you have a good deal of that when you were there?

PORTER: I had no knowledge of that.

WILSON: He left, I guess, in the fall of '47, because of his wife's illness.

MCKINZIE: One other question about the ECE: it went on, of course, continued; and Myrdal continued to try to make it an agency that would do some of the things that the OEEC was doing. He didn't get very far with this. I had the impression he saw himself perhaps a mediator between East and West?

PORTER: That's true.

WILSON: Did you get any support from the United States delegation?

[45]
PORTER: We gave him a great deal of support. We kept some of the functioning committees that preceded the Marshall Plan operating at Geneva. For instance, we never had a coal committee in the Marshall Plan. The coal committee of ECE, which had been formally the European Coal Committee. We did the same with the steel committee, much to the unhappiness of the British, and some of our other allies. Once it was decided that we would not use ECE for the Marshall Plan, they did not want to use ECE at all. But it was the U.S. that kept the coal committee, the steel committee, and the timber committee functioning in Geneva and really serving as the corresponding committees of the OEEC.

Then again, as a demonstration of our support for ECE and Myrdal's mediating effort, Averell Harriman attended the ECE annual session in 1950.

WILSON: I see. Yes, I remember that.

PORTER: I should have said 1949.

WILSON: He had the temporary position as the special repre-entative in Europe and also the head U.S. delegate...

PORTER: That's right, and he worked at it very industriously,

[46]
just cut himself off completely from Paris and immersed himself in the problems of ECE. Sometimes he called me at 6 o'clock in the morning.

MCKINZIE: That was his style, I think.

WILSON: Leland Barrows was telling us something about this. I guess he was sort of the administrative head of the Paris office in this period.

PORTER: That's right.

WILSON: Harriman's administrative arrangements were somewhat unusual, but they seemed to work.

PORTER: Yes. I set up meetings between him and some of the Eastern Europeans. They were really very good exploratory meetings.

MCKINZIE: You mentioned awhile ago the problem of East-West trade. This is one of the very difficult questions of this period, particularly 1950-51, with the congressional inhibitions on that question. Would it have made much of a difference?

There had been the assumption that, again, during the war and immediately thereafter, that the revival

[47]
of prewar patterns of trade had done much to alleviate the problems of reconstruction. It didn't work out that way. And then the United States Government adopted a fairly rigorous stand on strategic items at least in East-West trade. Was that an issue often discussed in the ECE, the revival of East-West trade?

PORTER: Well, I had left by that time. In the beginning we tried to use the ECE as a mechanism to promote as much trade between Eastern Europe and Western Europe as possible. I never thought of it as having anything more than a marginal benefit, but I thought it was desirable to do it. Probably it started purely on a pragmatic basis. The Poles were major coal producers. We wanted their coal in 1945, and of course, in 1945 they were still not yet fully under Communist control. They were willing to participate and participated very helpfully in 1945 and '46 and from then on.

They were the only one of the Eastern European countries that wholeheartedly participated in efforts to re-establish East-West trade. We got mixed reactions from the Czechs, and only later did we get a positive reaction from the Yugoslavs, after their trouble with the Russians. The Czechs would cooperate in some areas

[48]
and not in others. That all depended on the person involved. It was an example of a government that was not fully integrated.

WILSON: Your career took a very different turn in 1949 when you became chief of the ECA mission to Greece.

PORTER: Yes.

WILSON: How did that come about?

PORTER: Well, before that promotion, let me tell you an amusing story about the Yugoslavs.

WILSON: Oh, yes.

PORTER: As far back as the first preparatory meeting of the ECE in May 1947, the Yugoslav delegate, Leo Mates, asked to talk with me after one frustrating day and outlined a compromise plan that made a lot of sense. But I was cautious, and without committing myself, I said, "What does Zorin say about this?"

And he said, "I have not discussed it with him."

And I didn't believe him. I just couldn't believe at the time that he would talk to me before he would talk to the Russians; but later, I'm convinced, that even then they were beginning to try to assert some measure of

[49]
independence. Actually the plan that they outlined was substantially the one that was eventually adopted.

Shortly before I left Geneva, upon arriving home, my wife greeted me with the question, "Who's this Mr. Filipovich who's sent us six bottles of Slivovitz?"

I couldn't remember, I said, "Well, it sounds like a Yugoslav name," and then it dawned on me that there had been a man by that name who several months earlier had attended a meeting of the coal committee at which the Yugoslavs for the first time had made a request for an allocation of coal, and almost routinely, Ralph Trisko, my associate made a motion to approve it because it made sense. About a week after we'd received a huge basket of flowers with six bottles of Slivovitz in the bottom of the basket, I received a call from the Yugoslav consul general in Geneva asking me if I would have dinner with him a few nights later and that Milenko Filipovich would be passing through.

And I said, "Certainly, I'll be glad to, and may I bring along an associate?"

And he said, "Of course," so I asked my CIA man to go with me, and we had a very pleasant evening. Around midnight nothing of any substance had been said.

[50]
Finally Filipovich said he was on his way to Washington to become the number two man in the Embassy, and he would very much like to talk with Mr. Harriman when he went through Paris.

I said I would be glad to call Mr. Harriman on the phone, and see if it could be arranged.

And he said, "Well, no," it wasn't anything he could discuss with me, he was very sorry, but he couldn't do it.

So, the next morning I called Harriman and told him of the incident. He said, "Should I see the man?"

I said, "I really don't know, but considering the way things are going in Yugoslavia now" (this was actually before the break, just a few weeks before, and we had some intimations of what was happening) "I would suggest that you see him."

So, Filipovich spent a half hour with Harriman and again said nothing. He went on to Washington, served very creditably there and later defected. He now teaches high school in Washington.

WILSON: Is that right?

PORTER: It wasn't until some years later I learned what was

[51]
the mystery of this call on me. His superiors apparently concluded that he had some unusual ability to work with Americans as a result of having received the allocation of coal. And so a rather minor bureaucrat was lifted out of obscurity, made the number two man in Washington in charge of economic affairs, and in order to make himself seem important to his government, because he had sensed that something was a little bit insecure in this relationship, he wanted to be able to tell them that he had had a talk with Harriman. Later, he told me the story.

MCKINZIE: He made a career there.

PORTER: Yes, and after all that when he had a chance to live there for a few years decided that he wanted to remain. Well, I thought you'd be amused by the story. What caused me to go to Greece?

WILSON: Right.

PORTER: Well, I got a sudden call to go to Paris. It was on a Saturday, and it was late Saturday afternoon before I had had a chance to see Harriman. He asked me to take over as mission chief in Greece. He said

[52]
John Nuveen (who was the present mission chief) would be flying through Geneva on his way to Athens, Monday evening and I would like you to be on the plane with him and take over on Tuesday morning.

Well, it was rather a mixed story. There was conflict between Nuveen and Henry Grady, the Ambassador, and also Harriman felt that because I had a labor, socialist background, that I might be a little bit tougher on the Greeks and some elements in the Greek Government, than Nuveen had been. But that, I think, is as much of an explanation as I have.

WILSON: The problem, the Greek problem, is very complicated. I had a chance a year and a half ago to go to Athens and talk to a few people, a few Greek officials. There was one man named Spyros Markezinis...

PORTER: Oh, yes.

WILSON: ...who had claimed that he was responsible for a great many things.

PORTER: His claims are larger than his achievements.

WILSON: Yes, I gather that. It was a very interesting

[53]
time. This was a situation in which there might have been considerable leverage used by the United States Government, to do certain things, the obvious kind of things, land reform, and currency reform. How would you assess that experience? What latitude did you actually have as a representative of the United States Government to influence, or to direct, I guess, the operations of this other state?

PORTER: I was supported on everything I proposed, by Paris and Washington, that is by Harriman and Hoffman, and I had very good working relationships with the Ambassador. Our big problem was the capability of the Greek Government to do what needed to be done. They were just so disorganized and a lot of things that we recognized needed to be done couldn't be done. We did try to reduce the influence of the rightwing group and force them to take a liberal attitude towards the Greek trade unions. Land reform, though, was not a major problem. Except for one or two very large farms, nearly all of the land was held by small holders.

WILSON: I was thinking it was indeed something of the opposite, to try to rationalize Greek agriculture.

[54]
But there was the currency problem and the corruption .

PORTER: Yes.

Well, see, agriculture was hard to rationalize, because the condition of the soil, the nature of the crops that can be produced. There are some things, like introducing rice, and very quickly they became self-sufficient with rice. We were able to increase some other cereals. We did help to diversify agriculture. We worked out a paper for the general system of small loans to farmers, but the National Agricultural Bank was pretty inept in its operations. Here again was a breakdown of capabilities, but not of the intent.

The currency reform was a very difficult problem. Practically my first act there was to make the decision on the amount of the devaluation. I arrived on Tuesday and on the Sunday evening following I was listening to the BBC 9 o'clock news broadcast and heard that the British had devalued. Suddenly it dawned on me; "This is a problem that I had better be concerned about."

So, I called the Ambassador and suggested that he call the Prime Minister and ask that the banks be closed the following day, which was done. Then we

[55]
had a meeting of top staff people to recommend the amount of the devaluation. All decisions like that the Greeks were leaving to us. As long as they had a free hand in patronage and pensions, they wanted us to make the hard decisions.

WILSON: Several Greek officials with whom I've talked suggested that general American policy -- the general thrust of the OEEC approach to bring about integration of the European economy and to bring about more efficient utilization of the sources -- tended to place countries like Greece into permanent dependency. That is tended to say, "Okay, the Greeks are better, or best suited, to produce olives, to produce certain agricultural goods. So, let's not be concerned about bringing industry to Greece, making Greece self-sufficient." This, either as an accident, or as official policy of the United States, tended to hurt the Greeks. You see, these people were very much arguing for industrialization as a sequel or as a solution for their problems. Did this come up at the time?

PORTER: Yes. In several ways, but I don't accept that appraisal. They had several problems that were pretty

[56]
difficult problems to deal with. One was government instability. In the 14 months that I was there I dealt with seven governments.

Now, often it was a game of musical chairs, the same ministers in different jobs, but still seven different governments. And it was very difficult at that time to get the Greeks to accept responsibility, which I felt was one of the biggest things I had to do for us to get out, because I knew we couldn't keep on running the country, and that it would be highly undesirable for us to do that. We were doing too many things anyway, such as trying to reform how they chose their archbishop. I felt we ought to stay out of that sort of thing and stick to the essentials.

Now, so far as industry was concerned, there was little basis for industry without electrical power. The industries they had were very inefficient industries, but we helped. I would say one of the biggest things we did was to help them establish their national power network. This cost altogether about a hundred million dollars. We put up nearly all the money. The Italians put up some out of reparations. Another thing was to build a road system. Well, the military wanted a road

[57]
system, while the civil war was still on; they thought that was needed. But we also wanted a road system, because we felt that it was essential to the economy. There had to be basic things like that. Now that did make it possible for certain types of industries that we hadn't foreseen to develop. When I was there, you could never get fresh fish more than ten miles inland. This was no further than the fish could be carried before it started to spoil. Now you can get fresh fish in any village in Greece.

Several companies have been set up and operate off the West Coast of Africa, and catch fresh fish, put them in another ship that processes them, then in another ship that transports them back to Greece, and then deliver them on the good road system by refrigerated truck for community lockers, or community refrigerators. Very few people in the villages even yet have a refrigerator. They are beginning to, because the Greeks now make refrigerators. Things like that were done.

We did help them establish a very good textile industry. They are not only now self-sufficient in

[58]
textiles but are now one of the textile exporting countries. We helped them quite a bit with certain types of mining, bauxite, lignite. We took a very negative attitude towards them setting up a steel industry. I finally had to tell them, "Well, that's your business. If you can afford a steel industry, obviously you don't need as much aid as we're giving you, and so whatever you feel that you can invest in the steel industry we can reduce the amount of our aid." That killed that project.

MCKINZIE: How much of this assistance to Greek industry was in the nature of technical assistance? I have a feeling that the ECA in Greece probably involved more technical, technicians to be exact, than it did, let us say, in Western Europe.

PORTER: Yes.

MCKINZIE: That is, "how to do it" people.

PORTER: Yes. When I went there we were giving aid at the rate of 270 million a year, which was about 20 percent of their GNP. And we averaged about one man in the aid mission for every million dollars. And well over

[59]
two-thirds, I think, were there as technical assistance people. Probably more than that; I can't remember now just what the ratio was.

WILSON: This is a very delicate game that goes on in a nation such as Greece, the problem of attempting to obtain necessary reforms and improvements in administration and other things, involving people who have interests. How did it work? There was that on the other side, too. I'm sure that if you suggested delicately that the Greeks went ahead to do something that you thought not in their best interest and then you would have to reduce aid in a way, that's using leverage. Then the Greeks might probably, if I might conjecture here, come back and say, "Well, if we don't do this then we're going to lose this territory to the Communists, that sort of thing." Is the game analogy chess, or whatever is appropriate to something like that?

PORTER: It was occasionally. I don't think it was often. For the most part we had a pretty smooth working relationship. There were a few instances where we had to get tough, but we never got tough except with the encouragement of people within the Greek Government, who'd say

[60]
this is the way to do it.

We always were sure that we had some backing for what we were doing. For instance, one of our big problems was to get the shipowners to pay taxes. They were about three years in arrears in taxes, and this represented a pretty large sum of money. Finally, we had to insist that the Government refuse shipping documents to any Greek shipowner who was in arrears in taxes.

Now, it took a lot of arm twisting to get the Government to agree to that. Always within the Government were people pressing us to twist their arms even more. It was actually a pretty courageous decision for the Greek Government to make considering how dependent so many of the Government officials were on the shipowners, and also interlocked with them by marriage, family relationships. The amount of taxes that were collected was about 17 million dollars in one week.

WILSON: How far did the missions go in supporting groups, organizations within the political system, favorable to the purposes of the mission? Did you covertly provide funds for newspapers, provide funds for labor unions and so on?

[61]
PORTER: We published a weekly magazine that was sort of a house organ of American aid to Greece. That was all quite open. We were identified in the newspaper as the publisher of it. I have no recollection that we ever gave any money covertly to trade unions. We found other ways of making it clear that we wanted to see trade unions strengthened. We had two trade union men in the mission.

If you have the time, one good man to talk to would be Alan Strachan, who was the top trade union representative there. He's from the Auto Workers, and his recollections would be much better than mine. He lives in Washington.

WILSON: When you were a mission chief, one of your functions, of course, was to deal with visitors and American dignitaries. What kind of experience did you have with congressional junkets? How important is that?

PORTER: We didn't get nearly as many there because Athens was further removed. When I was in Paris I had far more of them to entertain. But we had a fair number coming through. My first experience was a pretty disastrous one. I had been on the job less than a

[62]
week when thirteen Senators arrived, and I was pretty poorly informed in responding to their questions, and some of them were getting a little bit rough. Finally one Senator said, "I understand you've only been here a few days, just a few days longer than we have been." And this took me off the hook.

WILSON: We talked with Dean Acheson last summer and he gave -- as you might have expected -- a very determined and pessimistic, I suppose, view of the knowledge and capability of individual Congressmen about foreign affairs. Indeed, he said, "Most Congressmen in his experience were non-educable." Congress, of course, was passing annual appropriations measures to deal with foreign aid...

PORTER: Yes.

WILSON: ...and still is, may not be any longer. So, it tends to get the negative side.

PORTER: Yes.

Well, I suppose his judgment is harsher than my own. We had some who were quite clearly just junketing,

[63]
but I found that most of them, if we were patient and tried to understand what was bothering them, and tried to respond to them, they would be responsive. Now, maybe I got a more select group than he did, luckier at least. But at that time most Congressmen were pretty sympathetically disposed towards the Marshall plan.

MCKINZIE: Did you have any feeling that some of these Congressmen expected more out of the Greek program than they might have out of some of the others, because after all, Greek aid was the first aid given and by 1949 or 1950 they would expect to see some great gains? Was the fact that it was first important?

PORTER: Well, I really don't recall. I think they all expected larger accomplishments than could be shown, but that's understandable.

WILSON: You came back to Washington in 1950 and became Assistant Administrator of ECE...

PORTER: Yes.

WILSON: ...and this was before Paul Hoffman left?

[64]
PORTER: No, he had just left.

WILSON: I see.

PORTER: And Bill Foster had just taken over and Bill had asked me to come back and be his assistant administrator, and Dick Bissell, who had had the job, had been moved up to deputy administrator. This was at a time when many of the goals were set for the ECA, for the Marshall Plan, plans had been reached or were within reach.

WILSON: It's also the time when there's some considerable shift in the purposes of assistance to Europe. The military program was growing, with NATO and all this. What might be your assessment of the attitude, the morale, the direction of ECA itself at the time you came back? Did it still have that impetus that...

PORTER: Yes, it was still strong, but the outbreak of the Korean war skewed everything. That and the continued alarm over the Russian moves in Europe were already precipitating the planning for NATO.

WILSON: Several people have told us it's their belief that

[65]
the Department of Defense financed the Korean war out of the foreign aid program. It was never really clear. You couldn't get much information about just what was going on in the Department of Defense; but things didn't work out as they had been planned. The production that was hoped for to build NATO forces in Europe, the end item deliveries never materialized, at least didn't materialize at the levels they had anticipated. Did you have problems working with Armed Forces people?

PORTER: I can't recall that.

WILSON: One question I wanted to ask you. I won't keep you much longer, but you made a speech, I think, or gave a newspaper interview in 1950, and you used the image of an imaginary country, "Rostock." Do you remember that?

PORTER: I'd forgotten it until you mentioned it. I'm not sure what I said, but I think I did...

MCKINZIE: We quoted you at great length in a paper one time.

WILSON: It was a very, very interesting and amusing statement. The thrust of it boiled down to that inevitably, or it

[66]
seemed to you, that in this kind of situation always far too many people came in. It was decided that country "X", Rostock, should produce more shoulder patches -- I think that was your image -- and in order to produce more shoulder patches, some agency in Paris examined why, what the problems were and they decided, well, it was because Rostockians weren't getting enough beer. So, hops production had to be stimulated, and then other things had to be stimulated, and we had more people coming in, more agencies. Did this reflect what was happening, or was it just a metaphor for what might happen unless vigilance were maintained?

PORTER: I had completely forgotten it until you mentioned that. I think I must have been rather frustrated from actual experiences rather than looking forward. Yes, there was a tendency to duplicate and to expand a lot of things that probably weren't necessary.

WILSON: Your assumption was that a lean organization was more efficient or less wasteful? I'm not sure those two are contradictory.

PORTER: What I think I meant to say, whether I succeeded in

[67]
doing so or not, was: let's concentrate on the important things, and that we are getting into some things that really don't make very much difference one way or another but take up a lot of time of ourselves and the government that we are trying to help (their time was also valuable, and they usually had fewer people to work on it than we did). I think that's probably what was in my mind.

WILSON: It's been very helpful to us, it's been excellent. Well, how would you look back on this experience? It's amazing the quality of the people who were brought in. Do you think that people like Harriman, yourself, and Richard Bissell, and Foster and all of these people who were involved, Milt Katz and others, that they did this in a large part because they thought, "Well, here now is an opportunity to really make a contribution." Was this true all the way down the line? Was there this sort of morale, this belief that if ECA and other interests succeeded that it had a unique possibility for a contribution?

PORTER: Yes. I would describe them as the most rewarding years of my life. Because I had the good fortune that

[68]
every agency that I was associated with had a high sense of mission, and of course, we were in that sense somewhat unique in Government. I didn't really realize it until after I retired from my own company, and I took on a consulting job for the Department of Commerce, and I saw what a big difference there is between an old line agency with a very weak sense of mission, and those that I had been associated with like the War Production Board, the part of the State Department that I was with, and then the Marshall plan.

MCKINZIE: I think we've taken up enough of your time; it's been very helpful for us.

WILSON: Yes. I might ask if there is any other comment that you might want to make, I'm sure we've missed a lot of things.

PORTER: Oh, I think we covered the essentials. I'm very impressed with the questions you've asked.

WILSON: Well, we do this...

MCKINZIE: Maybe you shouldn't say that until you see what we write. Any general views on aid?

[69]
PORTER: Well, I've always believed that aid people should do a job and get out. A protracted presence would not be good for us or for the other country. I also felt that we should regard gratitude as the least durable of political sentiments and not expect any gratitude for what we were doing. We shouldn't have done what Connally did a few weeks ago. The important thing was to create a better degree of order that would make it possible for the countries that we were helping to solve their own problems. We couldn't stick around indefinitely. Even to try to collect the IOU's would be a mistake for us. I felt we ought to do everything we could to encourage the unification of Europe.

WILSON: The question that we wanted to ask and I neglected to ask is: A theme that runs throughout this period was the American interest in European unification? Did the United States push this as strongly as it could have done?

PORTER: I would have pushed it a little more strongly than we did, but I couldn't take strong disagreement with the people who said, "You can overdo it." It was a matter of judgment. I had proposed that we try to get a

[70]
discussion of a common European currency and we did spend part of a meeting of chiefs of Marshall Plan missions in 1950 discussing it. I wasn't proposing that we force this upon them but simply that we ask for a serious discussion by the Europeans. Well, now, they're talking about a common currency ten years from now. They might have done it sooner if we had raised the issue at that time. I don't think they would have had it quickly, but I think they might have had it by this time.

WILSON: The British were the most reluctant to consider these ideas. Some people have argued that the British took advantage of something that was often called the special relationship; that is, the British believed that the United States would not push too far on some of these issues -- such as the unification of Europe -- and thus the British didn't go as far as they might have gone. Is that fair? I'm not sure we know what more might have been done by the United States to persuade the United Kingdom.

PORTER: I don't know whether we could have done more then than we did. The labor party was losing its grip on

[71]
British affairs and was becoming increasingly cautious about what they would do. My recollection was that Bevin was pretty well out of things.

MCKINZIE: That's right. He was.

PORTER: And I think Cripps was pretty well out of things. They were the two strongest men within the labor government, and were most prepared to take a different role. So, under those circumstances perhaps there wasn't a great deal that we could have done. And when the conservatives came in, they were pretty cautious also. Eden didn't have the imagination that Bevin had. In fact, Eden's reputation was made in the thirties, but he was a very weak leader when he came in as Foreign Secretary in 1950. [Winston] Churchill was getting old. They were experiencing the traumatic shock of losing the empire, and not yet ready to do what they now have finally done, which was to join with Europe. I'm not sure that we could have had any major influence to them to do other than we did.

WILSON: The strand of American interest, or the idea of a United Europe. This is suggested constantly. Some

[72]
people we've talked to, such as yourself, have demonstrated by comments that they've made that the Americans recognized it was a very complicated and difficult problem. Some of the rhetoric of the time suggested, or tended to suggest, that certain Americans at least thought, "Well, it's just a matter of deciding to do it." That, then, was a parallel to American history, how after the confederation period the Americans got together in the Constitutional Convention. Now, were there people on the spot that were that crude about it?

PORTER: Well, not after they had been on the spot very long.

WILSON: Okay.

PORTER: They soon realized that there were a great many different languages spoken, quite different cultures, and that European unity would be a very different thing than the organization of the American states.

MCKINZIE: You stayed on in Europe until the end of the Truman administration. Is that right?

PORTER: That's right, yes.

[73]
MCKINZIE: Did you have a feeling of great accomplishment, considering what you had seen since you went there in 1945, or '44, at the end of the war?

PORTER: Oh, yes. I thought we were over the hump. I felt that except for the concern about the Russian threat in Stalin's last years, except for that, I thought we were over the hump by around 1951. That it was going to work out. We couldn't quit; we had a lot yet to do, but I thought we had passed the critical period.

WILSON: How successfully did the transition go between the Truman administration and the Eisenhower administration?

PORTER: Not too well. A lot better in Europe than it did in Washington, because Bill Draper and Fred Anderson stayed on for six or eight months. Dillon was the new Ambassador, and he was a easy man to work with. So, I think the transition in Europe went very smoothly. But Stassen was a "bull in a china closet." He succeeded in alienating a great many people.

WILSON: Through the last year we've been allowed to use Governor Harriman's papers and he does have some

[74]
information about the last, oh, year or so. There was an impressive effort on the part of the Truman administration, in effect, to prepare for the transition. The documentation seems to us to have been extremely good and helpful and we got the impression that it was not used, that Stassen and his people rejected these kinds of offers to smooth the transition. Then, there were problems about loyalty investigations and that sort of thing.

PORTER: Yes. Stassen was pretty poor, but Dulles was worse.

WILSON: One last question occurs to me. Your background has been that of a Socialist, a very liberal person. The Truman administration was Democratic, and yet so many of the people who performed such great work, in his aid programs, had a business background. Did you find any incongruity in that at all? This is not at all a rightist or conservative or business approach?

PORTER: I never encountered any conflict at all there. Many were curious and wanted to know more; but we hit it off very well.

WILSON: Our impression is that it just didn't work to say,

[75]
"Okay, because "x" number of ECA, top level employees, top level people, had business backgrounds, Wall Street bankers, and so forth, which means therefore, that there was this kind of orientation at the top level." These people were...

MCKINZIE: There is a school of historians, we think, making too much out of backgrounds of these top administrative people in the Truman administration, that they, because of their business orientation, imposed a kind of business-oriented public policy on these people with whom they dealt.

PORTER: No, that was just not the case at all. Certainly not in any area where I had experience. In the State Department, Clayton was more of a free trader than anyone else, than most of the professionals. And by very deep conviction, and we probably wouldn't have gone nearly as far in the organization of GATT if it hadn't been for Clayton's leadership. That was a very personal leadership. He did things personally. He answered his own telephone and things like that.

WILSON: Oh, yes.

[76]
PORTER: And anything he was interested in, he wanted to be right in the middle of it.

Now, in the Marshall Plan, the dominant force was Harriman and Hoffman. Harriman most of all. Hoffman was the salesman, he was the man who sold it to the Congress. Most of the planning was under Harriman, that is the basic decisions were his; and the people that he had around him like Milt Katz, was not a businessman, but a law professor. Now, the businessmen who were brought in were really quite a remarkable group of men with flexibility and pragmatism.

The man who was the principal advocate of a public power system in Greece was Walker [Lee] Cisler who was chairman of the board of Detroit Edison. But he could see that it was impossible to have a power network in Greece unless it was publicly owned. He faced that problem. He said, "All right," he would sell it. And I'm not sure that anyone who didn't have his standing in the power industry could have put it across, or at least, they would have had much more difficulty in putting it across. But because he was accepted as one of them he was able to have an influence that I couldn't have had.

[77]
Clarence Randall was a man who later became chairman of Inland Steel, and he was one who almost was ready to say, "Okay, let's go for nationalization of the German steel industry." He was holding out on it; but he was on the fence. He wasn't a strong ideological opponent. Now, you have to recreate the times to understand this. You have to realize that Europe was in a very desperate situation and they didn't know what would work. They didn't have the wisdom that we now have. They were groping, but they were willing to be quite non-ideological in their approach.

WILSON: That's very interesting. Thank you very much.

• Acheson, Dean, 62
  Alsop, Stewart, 6-7
  Army, U.S., unsuitability of personnel for postwar German occupation duty, 12-13

  Beloff, Nora, 40
  Bevin, Ernest, 19-20, 25-26, 37
  Bissell, Richard M., 23, 64
  Bonesteel, C. H., 34

  Cisler, Walker, 76
  Clay, Lucius, 11, 13, 26, 27
  Clayton, Will, 31-33, 43, 75
  Coolidge, Thomas, 23
  Czechoslovakia, 38

  East-West trade, postwar Europe, 46-48
  Economic Commission for Europe, 22, 30-32, 35-37, 39-40, 44- 48
  Economic Cooperation Administration, 63-67
  Eden, Anthony, 71
  Eisenhower, Dwight D., 6-7, 12-13
  Emergency Economic Committee for Europe, 15-16
  Europe, postwar economic reconstruction of, 18-20, 30-47
  Europe, unification of, 69-71
  European Coal Organization, 5, 15
  European Inland Transportation Organization, 15-16
  Export-Import Bank, 18

  Filipovich, Milenko, 49-51
  Foreign aid, inter-agency coordination, 21-24
  Foster, William, 64
  France, postwar German policy, 10-11

  General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 31, 75
  Germany:

  • coal production, postwar, 4-5, 16
    Communist influence in postwar, 4, 6, 7, 8
    economic reconstruction of, 15-17, 25-29
    trade unions in, postwar, 4, 5-6, 28-29
    U.S.-French policy difference in postwar, 10-11
    U.S. military government in, 4-14
  Gimbel, John, 10
  Gordon, Lincoln, 34
  Grady, Henry, 52, 54
  Great Britain, postwar economic recovery of, 20-21, 24-25, 70-71
  Greece, Marshall plan mission for, 23, 51-63, 76

  Harriman, W. Averell, 23, 29-30, 34, 45-46, 50, 51-52, 76
  Hoffman, Paul, 76

  Jeffrey, Newman, 29

  Keenan, Joseph, 29
  Krug, Julius, 3

  Lend-lease, 21
  Lychowski, Tadeuz, 38

  McCarthy, Joseph, 6-7
  McNeil, Hector, 19-20, 37, 38
  Markezinis, Spyros, 52
  Marshall plan, 33-45
  Mates, Leo, 48
  Mazaryk, Jan, 38
  Morgenthau, Henry, 7
  Myrdal, Gunnar, 39, 44

  Nelson, Donald, 3
  North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 64-65
  Nuveen, John, 52

  The Observer, 40

  Poland, 38
  Porter, Paul R., background data, 1-4
  Presidential transition (Truman-Eisenhower), 73-74

  Randall, Clarence, 77
  Roosevelt, Franklin D., 3
  Rusk, Dean, 23
  Rutz, Henry, 29

  Saposs, David, 29
  Shipbuilding Stabilization Committee, World War II, 2
  Snyder, John W., 23-24
  Soviet Union:

  • Marshall plan, opposition to, 35-36, 38, 42
    policy in postwar Germany, 10, 11
  Stassen, Harold, 73, 74
  State Department, U.S.,
  • Policy Planning Staff, 34
  State Department, U.S., policy in postwar Germany, 11-12, 19
  Strachan, Alan, 61

  Treasury Department, U. S., postwar policy in Germany, 7-8
  Truman, Harry S., 21

  U.S. News-World Report, 17, 33

  War Production Board, 1, 3-4
  World Bank, 18

  Yugoslavia, 48-51

  Zorin, Valerian, 42-43