"With Both Hands"

"When the Marshall proposals were announced," said Ernie Bevin in Britain last week, "I grabbed them with both hands."

So did Europe.

To the French, Marshall's intimation that the U.S. was at last going to seek "a cure rather than a ... palliative" for Europe's troubles was the best news since the Allies landed in Normandy. It mattered little that le plan Marshall was vague."Today there is something new in the lives of Frenchmen," breathed President of the Republic Vincent Auriol.

As for the Russians, they seemed to be in a box, for once. If they joined Britain, France, and the rest of Europe in really working for a continental recovery plan, they would be conforming to U.S. initiative; if they stalled and sabotaged, the responsibility for a divided and impoverished Europe would fall clearly on the Kremlin.

Dinner in Paris. When Ernie Bevin padded across Westminster's central lobby one day last week, M.P.s looked anxiously at each other. Why was he wasting time in London? But Ernie had merely dropped into the House for a quick lunch. That afternoon, his twin-engined Dakota set him down at Le Bourget. Behind a motorcycle escort with whistles blowing, he and a carful of mild, bespectacled Foreign Office experts drove to the British Embassy on the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore. For three hours Bevin and British Ambassador Duff-Cooper sat in low armchairs overlooking the Embassy gardens, comparing notes. Then Premier Paul Ramadier and dapper, London-tailored Foreign Minister Georges Bidault arrived with their experts. Eleven French and eleven Britons got their heads together over the veal,* adjourned to the garden veranda later for whiskey, brandy, and more happy talk.

Beyond the laurel bushes Paris buzzed with approval. Realistic Frenchmen rejoiced especially that le plan Marshall seemed to have a grain of candid U.S. self-interest. The liberal daily Combat was glad that "it is not because of Europe's beautiful eyes that America wishes to help. . . ."

Doubts of le Pere Noel. Gallic skepticism had not gone to sleep. Henri Clery, 48, who rents boats on the Seine at the St. Cloud bridge, scratched his unshaven chin. "It seems too good to be true," he said. "But does Mr. Marshall really speak for all Americans? You know, I stopped believing in le pere Noel a long time ago."

In conservative Figaro, France's former Ambassador to Berlin, Andre Franc,ois-Poncet, also worried. He wrote: "What may be clear to an American elite may be less clear to the majority in Congress and, a fortiori, to the mass of electors. . . . There are plenty of people in America for whom Europe is a sort of lunatic asylum, a basket full of peevish crabs. . . ."

But these wholesome doubts and cautions had to be understood against the background of the basic French reaction. TIME'S Paris Correspondent Andre Laguerre summed it up: "The fear that Americans may not back Marshall to the limit is the only factor tempering the enthusiasm of French opinion--just as the fear that the D-day landings in 1944 might not be successful added anxiety to that great news. In the French mind, the two events can be compared without injustice."

Hints of Great Enterprise. "What is generally understood by 'the Truman Doctrine' was never thoroughly popular in France. The doctrine seemed too brutal, even if logically brutal. It seemed to consecrate the ineptitude of the U.N. organization, and above all it seemed a negative policy. Le plan Marshall does not have these drawbacks for the French--this is something with a ring of nobility, a hint of great enterprise, something constructive which combines realism and humanism in a manner the French find irresistible.

"Not to get too overenthusiastic about it, it makes sense to the French--such blinding sense."

It also made sense to invite the Russians into the great enterprise. Bevin and Bidault quickly saw that. So did Jean-Jacques Granier, 28, a Paris bank clerk currently on strike. Said he: "If the Russians want to come in, that's fine. If they don't, tant pis. That's their business. Ours is to take this chance--mais tout de suite." Although the Communist press grumbled at the Marshall plan, observers believed that even the majority of French Communist voters welcomed it and saw in it the one hope for a stable, peaceful Europe.

Bevin flew back to London two days later, and in a memorable speech in the House of Commons he made official Jean-Jacques Granier's reaction. Pounding a dispatch box with his heavy hands, Bevin said: "The reply of the Soviet Government is awaited . . . [but] I shall not be a party to holding up the economic recovery of Europe by the finesse of procedure, or terms of reference, or all the paraphernalia which may go with it." Bevin added that he as Foreign Secretary of Britain had been helpless because he had "neither coal nor goods nor credit." The immediate problems of Europe were "food, coal, transport, houses, opportunities for people to have a decent life."

All of these were brought into prospect by the Marshall suggestion. Europe had a chance to work out a blueprint of how the U.S. could save Europe whole--which would cost the U.S. much less than trying to save it piece by piece.

Economic conferences would start immediately. Moscow, after some-confusion, decided to pull up for a closer look. The Russians complained that they did not know what the Marshall plan meant--or what Bevin and Bidault had been up to--but they agreed to a British-French-Russian exploratory conference in Paris, this week.

*A minor disappointment. Bevin had asked for snails (which he learned to like during the Paris Conference last summer), but had not given the Embassy chef enough notice. At dessert, fruit had to be substituted for strawberry melba, be cause, at the last moment, the iceman (striking for five francs more an hour) did not come.

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