"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.
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 began his tenure by working to set GMF’s programmatic priorities. Between March and September 1973, GMF staff and trustees gathered information about the work of other organizations dedicated to similar purposes. More than a thousand experts and several hundred institutions were canvassed in the United States and Europe during the planning period. Early on, GMF also benefited from sharing office space and common facilities in Washington with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, thanks to Carnegie President Thomas Hughes.
Resource constraints and the breadth of GMF’s stated purposes necessitated difficult policy choices. In keeping with the essential achievement of the Marshall Plan, the Board adopted the following statement of goals:
“The purpose of the German Marshall Fund is to assist individuals and organizations in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to understand and to resolve selected contemporary and emerging problems common to industrial societies, both domestic and international.”
GMF would have a three-part mandate and support grantmaking concentrated on:
1) The comparative consideration of problems of advanced industrial societies in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere.
2) The study of problems of international relations that pertain to the common interests of Europe and the United States.
3) Support for the field of European studies.
View summary of founding Statement of Purpose (click images)
“We didn’t want to have a flavor-of-the-month charter that would handicap us down the road,” said Guido Goldman. “So we decided to take a broad view.”
The Board of Trustees designated priorities among common domestic and international problems on the basis of several key criteria. Are the problems of central and widespread current concern to peoples living in industrial societies? Are the problems similar enough in different societies to warrant efforts to find common solutions or to share information and experiences about alternative solutions? Are the problems not being addressed adequately by others?
Operations began with the announcement of first programs and projects on January 11, 1974.
The initial payment arrived at the time of the gift, and all subsequent installments of 10 million Deutschmarks were transferred in dollars on June 5 each year from 1973 through 1986 at the prevailing exchange rate. Installments totaling $9.89 million were received over the first three years, and the trustees set aside and invested most of those in an endeavor to accumulate a residual fund that would be sufficient at the end of the 15-year period to assure income to enable some GMF activities to continue.
