Traces the history of the Marshall Plan and the efforts to reconstruct western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritarianism during a two-year period that saw the collapse of postwar U.S.-Soviet relations and the beginning of the Cold War.

Prologue -- Crisis -- Rupture -- Plan -- Trap -- Unity -- Persuasion -- Sausage -- Subversion -- Passage -- Showdown -- Division -- Success? -- Echoes -- Appendix A: Truman doctrine speech -- Appendix B: Marshall's Harvard speech -- Appendix C: Data -- Appendix D: Maps.