Standing in a Giant's Shadow

Rickert gazes up at Secretary Marshall, while future Secretary Dulles looks on.

On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall delivered his famous speech at Harvard University proposing the recovery plan for war-torn Europe that would bear his name. Between then and April 3, 1948, when President Harry Truman signed into law the Economic Cooperation Act establishing the Marshall Plan, Congress and the public engaged in lively debates over how to help Europe get back on its feet. Although the isolationism of the 1930s had receded with the growing communist threat in Europe, the plan represented an untried, unprecedented approach and was thus the topic of heated national discussion.

As a young boy growing up in Washington, DC, I heard my parents and their friends talking about the crisis in postwar Europe and Secretary Marshall's proposal. I knew little about Europe or the plan, but I certainly knew who General Marshall was: Winston Churchill had dubbed him the war's "organizer of victory." I was a 10-year-old boy soprano in the Washington Cathedral choir and, when I learned that Secretary Marshall (and Republican foreign policy expert John Foster Dulles) would speak about the plan at a special evening service there on March 11, 1948, I was excited at the prospect.

After we choirboys had donned our cassocks for the evening service, we heard a commotion in a corridor just outside of the cathedral’s Bethlehem Chapel. Pressing closer, we spied a gaggle of press photographers photographing Marshall and Dulles. Flashbulbs popped and were discarded on the stone floor as journalists fired their questions. Wanting a better look, I pressed ahead of the other choristers until I was just a few feet from the two men. At that point, a journalist said something like "put the choirboy in the picture." Before I knew it, I was standing between Marshall and Dulles, who I knew had to be important to share the platform with Marshall. As I gazed up nervously at the Secretary, he looked down with a serene, grandfatherly air that made me feel comfortable as the flashbulbs popped. It was a moment to remember.

Rickert displays the framed photograph of his meeting with Secretary Marshall.

The service and the speeches were a blur as I longed to get home to tell my parents about what had happened. It all was real enough the next day, however, when the photograph of the two leaders, with me between them, appeared in the Washington papers and around the country. At the suggestion of Margaret Hicks Williams, a family friend who worked at the State Department, I wrote a note to Secretary Marshall, enclosing the photo and expressing my hopes for the recovery plan's success. I then thought nothing further about it.

Much to my surprise, a few days later I received a thick envelope from the State Department. It contained a friendly note signed by Secretary Marshall, a signed Harris & Ewing portrait photograph of the Secretary and the newspaper photo, carefully autographed in pencil (so as not to damage the paper). I have had all three items in a frame hanging over my desk for many years, a reminder of my unexpected brush with greatness. While I cannot say that my early meeting with Secretary Marshall caused me to pursue a Foreign Service career, it was a contributing factor. And the Secretary, his vision and achievements remained an inspiration during my 35 years as a Foreign Service officer. 

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