"The German Marshall Fund of the United States: A Brief History", researched and authored by Nicholas Siegel offers a look back at GMF's origins and details our rich history of work promoting closer transatlantic ties.
Read publication
The German Marshall Fund celebrated its 40th anniversary with a gala dinner at eWerk, an event space, in Berlin on Tuesday, May 22. Steffen Kampeter, parliamentary state secretary at the German Ministry of Finance, delivered a keynote address, drawing on the history of transatlantic relations and especially the strong relationship between Germany and the United States. Read more
On June 5, 1972, in speech at a Harvard University, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt announced that the West German government would give 150 million marks [$47 million] to establish the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) as a permanent memorial to the Marshall Plan assistance the United States delivered to Western Europe in the aftermath of World War II. The date and place of Brandt’s announcement marked a significant anniversary: the Marshall Plan had been announced exactly 25 years earlier in another Harvard speech by then-Secretary of State George C. Marshall. Read more
West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s speech at Harvard that established the German Marshall Fund of the United States came exactly 25 years after U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall announced the European Recovery Program (ERP) on the steps of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard on June 5, 1947. Marshall’s speech set the stage for the massive aid program – which became more famously known as the Marshall Plan — to revitalize the war-devastated economies of Europe after World War II. The plan would prove to be the largest and most successful peace-time foreign policy initiative launched by the United States. The Marshall Plan provided more than $13.3 billion in grants and loans as well as food, raw, materials and technical assistance to the 16 European recipient countries. Read more
In the months following Willy Brandt’s speech at Harvard, GMF’s Planning Group and Acting President Guido Goldman worked to select a president and staff and to otherwise lay the groundwork for the newly established organization. On January 31, 1973, GMF’s first Board announced the selection of its first president, Benjamin H. Read. Read had been the first director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution, and before that had served at the U.S. State Department as the top administrator under Dean Rusk during the Lyndon Johnson administration. In praising Read, GMF Chairman Harvey Brooks said, “He is a man of broad and distinguished public service whose recent experience of having built a successful, new institution will be of great value in developing innovative programs for the German Marshall Fund.” Read more
In its first years, GMF’s programs focused on domestic and international problems common to industrial societies and on European-American studies programs. Its Domestic Problems Program looked at urban affairs, land use, labor issues, and the media, which included early support in the United States to the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio, including the Bill Moyers show and Morning Edition with Robert Siegel. Its International Problems Program supported studies on inflation, parliamentary exchanges, workshops on alternative energy strategies, and a study on world food reserves. European-American studies programs featured a series of fellowships for U.S. and European experts researching problems of common interest to the United States and Europe. From 1973-1982, 106 U.S. and European postgraduate scholars received GMF support for individual research projects focused on common transatlantic policy issues. Read more
In 1981, GMF’s Trustees named Frank E. Loy as the organization’s new president. Loy had held various posts in the Department of State, and had had a markedly successful career in both government and private business. He brought to GMF a fresh and innovative approach at a complex point in history. Read more
GMF’s fourth president, Craig Kennedy, came from outside the traditional foreign policy community and was a bold choice for its Board of Directors. Craig Kennedy had an established career in non-profit management, having risen from program officer to president at the Joyce Foundation in Chicago and having started his own consulting firm for non-profit and public sector clients. As president, Craig Kennedy brought a new energy to the German Marshall Fund. From his earliest days at GMF, he engaged in a fundamental reassessment of the organization, its mission, activities, and direction. Read more
