June 5 · This Day in America
On June 5, 1947, on a mild afternoon in Harvard Yard, Secretary of State George C. Marshall delivers a commencement speech that runs under eleven minutes and changes the postwar world. Europe is starving and bombed flat. Marshall proposes something almost without precedent for a victor: that the United States help its former enemies and battered allies alike rebuild — not as charity or conquest, but because "our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos." Over four years America would send roughly thirteen billion dollars across the Atlantic. A continent that had twice set the world on fire was helped back to its feet by the country that had just helped defeat it. It remains one of the most generous acts a powerful nation ever chose.
Source: www.marshallfoundation.org
Also on this day · 1968
Just after midnight on June 5, 1968, having won the California primary, Robert F. Kennedy leaves the Ambassador Hotel ballroom through a kitchen passage and is shot. He dies the next day at 42. In five years the country had lost his brother, then King, now him — three men who had stood for the idea that it could still be better. The grief of that summer is hard to overstate, and it was met, by many, with a stubborn refusal to stop trying.
Source: www.history.com
“Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.”George C. Marshall, 1947