American History Revised (60 page)

No question, the Marshall Plan for rebuilding post-World War II Europe was America’s most successful aid program. But people who think that the amount of money was what made the difference are in for a surprise.

Look at the numbers. In the three years from 1945 to the beginning of the Marshall Plan in 1948, the United States spent more than $9 billion in various aid programs for Europe—$3 billion per year. The 1948–52 Marshall Plan was $13.4 billion—$2.7 billion per year. Hard to believe, but the United States spent
less
money on the Marshall Plan than it had on previous aid programs. In fact, when Marshall announced his plan, it was no big deal: the
New York Times
printed only a modest headline. Why, then, was the Marshall Plan so successful?

Rather than continue giving away billions of dollars to individual countries, General Marshall and his advisors created a comprehensive multilateral plan, managed by the Europeans themselves, for economic rehabilitation of the entire region. This insistence on self-help was based on the recent American experience with New Deal welfare programs, the wartime Lend-Lease program for the UK, and the postwar aid programs for European countries, which had all started as short-term projects but later seemed to develop lives of their own. The United States was determined to avoid another large, self-perpetuating scheme.

“The critical difference was in the conditionality attached to the aid, which required Europeans to help themselves by dismantling the restrictions that had been blocking their mutual trade … the revival of intra-European trade launched the European recovery.”

But make no mistake about it, the Marshall Plan also had conditions. Said the U.S. ambassador to France, if the Communists got into the French government, France could not expect “a single dollar bill.”

Today, as the United States gives away enormous amounts of money in foreign aid, there is no Marshall Plan. In 1994 the
Wall Street Journal
delved into history to see what could be learned in order to give aid effectively to the Eastern European countries emerging from the shackles of communism. It concluded:

Definitely it helps to have a plan. After allowing for inflation, $13.4 billion in 1948 is equivalent to $115 billion today. But that figure greatly underestimates the percentage burden on the economy. The gross national product has increased six-fold since then, so an equivalent burden now would be almost $700 billion—a large number, but still far less than what the U.S. spent trying to promote democracy in another part of the world: Iraq.

1961
When Roger Maris hit sixty-one home runs, breaking Babe Ruth’s 1927 single-season record of sixty home runs, the baseball commissioner ruled that Maris’s record be marked with an asterisk. The rationale was that Maris had had an unfair advantage in that he had played in an expanded, 162-game season, whereas Ruth had played in a 154-game season (indeed, Maris’s total at the end of his 154th game had been fifty-nine—one short of Ruth’s record).

However, baseball in the 1960s was a different game from the baseball of the 1920s. “Ruth, not Maris, should have an asterisk,” says the baseball columnist Alex Patton. “Anyone who played in the majors before 1947 wasn’t competing against the best players available.”

Baseball in Ruth’s day was a white man’s sport; blacks played in the Negro Leagues. The Negro Leagues had outstanding ballplayers, as witnessed by the level of play quickly introduced to the majors by Jackie Robinson, Monte Irvin, Roy Campanella, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. By not having to play against great players like these, Ruth had an advantage. “Baseball instantly became a better game when blacks were given the opportunity to show their hustle, determination, and smarts to their white peers,” says one historian writing about the Negro Leagues.

“Imagine if Maris had faced only white pitchers like Ruth did,” says Patton. “He might have hit seventy home runs.”

“Add an asterisk next to Babe Ruth’s career,” says the
New York Post’s
baseball columnist, Mike Vaccaro, “because every one of his 714 home runs was hit against pitchers with white faces.” But race was not the only cause for an asterisk. Consider, if you will, the greatest pitching feat of all time in baseball, “a game of inches”: Afro-American Bob Gibson’s 1968 season, in which he completed twenty-eight out of thirty-four starts and had an ERA of 1.12. Unheard of. Said Joe Torre, later manager of the New York Yankees, “Trying to hit Bob Gibson was like trying to hit a pebble with a piece of string.” Gibson was helped by the fact that in those days the pitcher’s mound was raised six inches—“as tall as a three-story building,” said Torre. “It seemed that way to a lot of hitters.”

“I don’t believe I ever broke Jim Brown’s record,” said Walter Payton when he topped Brown’s NFL career rushing yards in 1984. “I didn’t do it in the amount of time Brown did. I had more games and I played longer. So I didn’t break it.”

One would expect nothing less of Walter Payton, whose nickname, given to him by his teammates, was “Sweetness.” Payton, unlike most sportswriters and fans, was not obsessed with statistics. He easily could have argued that even though he played in more games, for almost his entire career he had played on a losing team and confronted much bigger linemen than Jim Brown did. It didn’t matter. What mattered was paying tribute to a great athlete, Jim Brown.

Statistics can take one only so far. Viewed in context—the impossibility of “comparing apples with oranges” (professional sports in an earlier era with the high-powered, big-money sports of today)—most sports records probably need an asterisk of some sort. Just whose record deserves the asterisk is a subject that fuels many a heated beerparty debate among sports fans.

1964
History gets filtered down to us through the interpretations of many people, including those who were present. One only has to look at the assassination of President Kennedy to see how unreliable most witnesses are—victims of the “Rashomon effect” (named for the Japanese story and film
Rashomon)
, in which observers of an event offer contradictory but thoroughly plausible accounts of what they saw. To this day, despite several massive investigations and the help of numerous on-site photographs and hundreds of witnesses, many people disagree about how many bullets were fired, from where, or by whom. Yet if the Warren Commission and subsequent historians had used their imaginations and paid closer attention to the number of seconds
before
and
after
Oswald’s alleged three shots in 4.6 seconds, they would have figured out how Oswald did it—and put to rest many years of conspiracy theories.

The members of the Warren Commission concluded that JFK had been killed by a lone gunman. But they couldn’t figure out how a lone gunman could do the job, nor could they establish any political motive for such a horrendous crime—just that Oswald was a nut with marital problems.

The American people didn’t buy it. Since the Kennedy assassination, there has been an outpouring of more than two thousand books and tens of thousands of articles each year, raising more and more conspiracy theories. Compared with 1964, when 56 percent of Americans believed the Warren Report, now 70 percent of the public believes there had to be some kind of conspiracy involved.

“Conspiracy” is what people resort to when they want an easy answer. Professional investigators don’t give up so easily.
Had the Warren Commission been more thorough, it would have saved Americans a lot of aggravation.

Forget esoteric conspiracy theories and shadowy “second gunman” figures lurking in the grassy knoll; let’s focus on the hard evidence: the Zapruder film. Thanks to the latest computer technology, it is now possible to time the sequences of individual pictures of the film with exact precision.

The key issue dominating the lone-gunman-versus-conspiracy dispute was the issue of timing: how could a man fire three bullets and hit his target twice in just five seconds? The last shot, which almost everyone agreed hit the president’s head and caused the fatal wound, appeared on frame 313. Two other bullets were fired, one missing and the other going through Kennedy’s throat and Governor Connally’s chest. Of the first two shots, everyone figured it was the first shot that hit, and the second one that missed. The reasoning was that firing three shots in a hurry was such a difficult exercise that obviously the most accurate attempt would be the first one, when the assassin had all the time in the world to get ready and poise his aim.

The time between the two hits—shots one and three—was 4.8 to 5.6 seconds. But the time required to operate the bolt of Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was almost 2.3 seconds. This meant that shot number one took place at second 0, shot number two at second 2.3, and shot number three at second 4.6 (actually 4.8 to 5.6). Possible. Likely? No way. Professional Army sharpshooters tried to duplicate the feat and failed to hit two out of three. Critics thereupon scoffed at the Warren Commission’s claims that Oswald—no super marksman—could have pulled off such a feat, and looked at possible conspiracy theories of a second gunman.

When lawyer Gerald Posner reexamined the issue in 1993, he took a fresh approach. He rephrased the question: suppose it was the first shot—the “easy” shot—that missed? Under this scenario, the first shot appearing on the Zapruder film, which hit the victims in frames 160–166, was not the first shot but the
second.
This would make the time for the three shots 8.0–8.4 seconds—enough “for even a mediocre shooter to aim and operate the bolt twice.”
*

The logic is reasonable. Most athletes will admit that the first try, when the whistle blows to start the game, is often sloppy because of nervousness. Only after the first kick/hit/throw do they calm down and become more precise and accurate. The first rifle shot is not the easiest to do—as the unathletic Warren Commission members assumed—it is the hardest. The second and third tries are much easier.

Despite the proof of the above numbers, assassinations also need a justifying motive to make them credible. In a letter to the
New York Times
in 1993, William Manchester, author of
Death of a President
, identified the key source of the public’s skepticism that Oswald was the sole killer: