Word: eca
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...this it had added immeasurably to the chances of the U.S. and the world for enduring peace and prosperity. In the words of its chief, ECAdministrator Paul Gray Hoffman, it was on the way to proving itself "the best bargain the American people ever bought." Time to Breathe. ECA's most spectacular birthday present was the North Atlantic pact; it marked the flowering of economic cooperation into a joint plan of Western defense against Communist aggression. As Britain's Sir Stafford Cripps had said: "In one year EGA has done more for European unity than was accomplished...
Sometimes, when entertaining at home with his art-collecting wife, Marie Whitney Harriman, ECA's European chief finds his guests distracted from weighty conversation. His salon is hung with a pink Renoir, a blue Picasso, a Van Gogh bowl of yellow tulips, and a Gauguin. Said one of his dinner guests, later: "God, how could I concentrate on what he was saying, with those around...
...imagination of men." He preached the gospel of productivity, the continuous planning of improved production techniques. He found that European industrialists had a bias against new methods, just as U.S. producers had a bias in favor of them. In America's cities he told his hearers of ECA's success in stopping Communism, of what was being done and what remained to be done...
David Bruce, 50, hale and pink-cheeked, directed ECA's mission to France. Onetime son-in-law (now divorced) of Andrew Mellon, a prudent man of varied experience (law, A.E.F., consular service, banking, corporate affairs.* Red Cross, OSS, Virginia legislature, U.S. Department of Commerce), Bruce had become bound up, to the exclusion of almost everything else in his thinking and feeling, with the problems, virtues and defects of France...
...Annex overlooking the Place de la Concorde. "The trouble with this weather," he complained lightly, "is that it makes the French too optimistic about their economy. Rain would be better for their crops." Many an EGA man believed that France, with her chronic slipshod finances and Communist sabotage, was ECA's biggest problem. Bruce was sure France could also be ECA's biggest triumph...