When Power Chose to Heal

In June 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall stood before Harvard's graduating class and proposed something the world had never seen. Instead of punishing a defeated enemy, the United States would pour thirteen billion dollars into rebuilding the shattered nations of Europe — including Germany, the very country it had just fought to defeat. Skeptics called it foolishness. But Marshall understood something ancient: that true greatness is measured not by the accumulation of power but by its redemptive use.…