The Brain

"I," says France's Robert Marjolin, "am an international official." He is so international, in fact, that his own countrymen have accused him, behind their hands, of being more European than French. As permanent secretary general (i.e., top man) of OEEC (Organization for European Economic Cooperation), boyish, 37-year-old Robert Marjolin is in the first rank of a new group of civil servants, whose master is not a state but the idea of international cooperation. Last week he arrived in Washington with 18 French, British, Dutch, Belgian and Austrian aides to help ECA put its case to the 81st Congress, from which the Marshall Planners want $4.5 billion for the next year.

The 1,000-page report which ECA is readying for Congress will be a U.S. product. But ECA's Assistant Deputy Administrator Richard Bissell wants the benefit of Marjolin's experience while the report is reaching final form. Marjolin's admiring colleagues sometimes call him The Brain.

"A Wonderful Job." Son of a Paris upholsterer, Marjolin left school at 14, worked for six years at office and factory jobs, then entered the Sorbonne. After a year at the Sorbonne, Marjolin won a Rockefeller scholarship for a year's study at Yale. One result of this trip was a treatise entitled "The Evolution of Trade Unionism in the United States from Washington to Roosevelt."

Back in Paris, he became a bigwig at the Scientific Institute of Economic and Social Research, a writer on economics for Leon Blum's Socialist paper, Le Populaire. In 1941 he escaped from occupied France and joined Charles de Gaulle in London. The Free French sent him to wartime Washington where he was the right-hand man of famed Economic Planner Jean Monnet in the French Economic Mission, later headed the French Purchasing Commission. Although a Socialist, Marjolin does not believe in spreading socialism indiscriminately over Europe; he favors letting private enterprise alone where it works well, e.g., in Belgium.

It was largely due to Marjolin's energy, patience, faith and quiet charm that OEEC passed an important milestone--apportionment of U.S. aid among the European nations (TIME, Sept. 20). When Averell Harriman heard of it, he called Marjolin on the telephone and blurted, "Bob, you've done a wonderful job." Britain's Sir Stafford Cripps expressed the same sentiment in a letter.

In Paris, Marjolin often works a 14-hour day before getting home to his wife and two children in Neuilly. Mme. Marjolin is a U.S. girl from West Virginia, the former Dorothy Smith.

More Austerity. No backslapper, Marjolin was gaining the confidence of Congressmen last week by telling about his student days at Yale. He was honest enough to say that he does not expect Europe to be able to paddle its canoe by 1952, the year in which Marshall Plan aid is scheduled to end. Production in Europe is now almost as high as before the war, but Europe's plight is not solely due to the havoc of two wars and the fear of a third. It is partly due to a shift of economic forces (against Europe) which has been going on since the 19th Century.

Europe cannot redress the balance but it can, Marjolin hopes, adjust to it. The U.S. will have to help by letting Europe buy more from nondollar areas and export more to markets which the U.S. now dominates, particularly Latin America. Europe will have to help by more austerity of the British type.

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