Letter from Frederick H. Boland to James J. McElligott (Dublin)
(Secret)

I am sending you a copy of the paper to which I referred in the course of our conversation the other day - Marris's¹ letter to Hall Patch² of the British Foreign Office.

Marris gave me a copy of this himself, asking me to treat it as top secret. The letter is of very considerable interest as showing how the idea of the Marshall Plan gradually took shape, but, as the letter was written on the 6th October, the views expressed in it are somewhat out-of-date in view of the discussions in Washington in the meantime.

This is particularly so as regards what Marris says about the likelihood of strings being tied to the Marshall aid. The biggest development on this point at Washington was the decision that any conditions attaching to Marshall aid would be a matter of bilateral agreement between the American Government and each of the sixteen participating countries separately, and not a matter of multilateral agreement between the United States and the sixteen participating countries acting as a group. This decision is, I think, good for countries like ourselves, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Portugal and so on, but may not be so easy for countries like France, Italy, Greece, etc. I think the British still have their fingers crossed on the question of the strings to be attached to the aid in their case.

The fact of the matter is, however, that, if the Administration is left reasonably free in the matter, the question of strings won't present any serious difficulty. The danger is that Congress, which is quite capable of conceiving the most naïve ideas about Europe, and the things that European Governments can be expected to swallow, may attach wholly unacceptable conditions to the appropriations over the head of the Administration. This is still a definite risk, although the State Department told us that, in view of the fact that all the most influential members of the relevant Congressional Committees had visited Europe during the summer and had, therefore, a fair idea of the difference between what European Governments were likely to stand for and what would definitely wreck the whole Plan, they did not think the risk a great one.