Title: Our finest hour : Will Clayton, the Marshall Plan, and the triumph of democracy /
Authors: Fossedal, Gregory A.
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press,
Year: 1993
Subjects: Clayton, Will,; Marshall Plan; Statesmen United States Biography.; Economic assistance, American Europe History; United States Foreign relations; Economic assistance, American Europe History
Abstract: William L. Clayton was "the principal architect of American postwar foreign economic policy," according to Newsweek, while a New York Times editorial declared "Mr. Clayton had more to do than anyone else with shaping postwar economic policy for the rest of the world as well as for the United States. He was the driving force in a score of efforts to bring order out of chaos ... a symbol of American constructive energy and faith in the future." Yet his seminal contributions to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the Marshall Plan, and the Truman Doctrine have been largely ignored over the past four decades. This gap in the story of free-world cooperation is filled by Gregory Fossedal's vivid biography. Clayton grew up in the South, in a household troubled by a series of farming and business failures. He left school and family at the age of fifteen to work as a secretary to a cotton merchant.^