Wealth & Money Quote by W. Averell Harriman

Power, in Harriman's telling, is a mix of arithmetic and intimidation. The line reads like a budget dispute, but it's really a miniature of postwar statecraft: dollars as leverage, and "support" as the real currency. The immediate context is the U.S.-led reconstruction era when aid wasn't charity so much as an instrument for shaping a European order Washington could live with. The comparison - Holland versus Belgium - signals that the allocation isn't neutral or purely needs-based; it's strategic, and it will be sold as necessity.

Harriman's intent is to frame coercion as stewardship. "How could you justify" is the setup for a moral accounting, yet the justification arrives through pressure, not persuasion: "I put it up to them" performs deference, then instantly collapses into command. Their warning - "it would destroy them" - is the key reveal. The recipients are not negotiating equals; they're pleading for economic survival. Harriman's blunt reply, "they had to do it", turns sovereignty into a rhetorical formality. You can almost hear the Cold War logic humming in the background: if the plan demands sacrifice, resistance becomes irresponsibility.

The subtext is that the "they" in question aren't just governments; they're domestic constituencies, coalition partners, parliaments - the messy democratic constraints that American planners often treated as obstacles to be managed. The last clause, "got support from Hoffman", shows how these decisions actually move: not by democratic consent abroad, but by alignment among a small cadre of officials at the top. It's technocracy with teeth, narrated as inevitability.