Council members and this was reflected in their actions.

Between the spring of 1947 and the spring of 1948 there was undoubtedly a sea change in popular and congressional attitudes toward the Plan, so that whereas large poll majorities were at first opposed, Congress finally accepted and fully funded the Marshall Plan in the spring of 1948. What active Council members did was further the idea and help its dissemination to the American people at large, always an important function the Council had aspired to fulfill. In any case, I believe almost every school of history has recognized that the Marshall Plan was at once the most generous and the wisest single move by the United States in the postwar era.

In that same eventful spring of 1947, the countryfound a rationale for its basic policy toward the Soviet Union through an article published in Foreign Affairs. The story of George Kennan's "X" article has long since passed into history. The sequence ran from James Forrestal asking Kennan to set down his view of the Soviet Union anew, following the general lines he had spelled out in a famous "long telegram" of February 1946; Kennan writing such a paper and delivering its essence at a Council meeting; George Franklin, the Council's Executive Director, calling the session at once to the attention of Ham Armstrong; and Armstrong quickly arranging to publish in the July 1947 issue the resulting article, reluctantly accepting the very temporary anonymity of the author, who had just taken on the Policy Planning role at