JW: It was surely the most memorable part of my active life. I was young man; we were engaged in exciting work. We were up against crises frequently. I should mention these gold sovereigns and some of the crises that these involved. I suggested that these were barometers of people's faith in the future and of the curren... in their economy and their currency. Periodically there would be a scare, and people would run with their drachmas to the Central Bank and buy these gold sovereigns. We would then have to fly in sovereigns to replace those leaving the Bank of Greece; we would have to fly them in from the Federal Reserve in New York. During the Depression and during the war, World War II, most of the gold had found its way to New York, and that was our source of the British gold sovereign. There was more than one occasion when the plane bearing our re-supply of those sovereigns was sure to arrive too late, too late to prevent the Bank of Greece from running out. And I should tell you one or two stories about these occasions, because we had to put on some theatre sometimes, to prevent panic. If we had run out of gold sovereigns, and the windows had shut, every price in Greece would have changed overnight; every shelf in every store would have been emptied overnight. The entire structure of a delicate, fragile sense of confidence would have evaporated, and it was vital that we protect the sense that people could indeed take their drachmas and exchange them for these gold sovereigns. On one occasion, we got word that the plane was down in Shannon, Ireland, with motor trouble, that it would not arrive in time, that we would run out of gold and would not be able to meet the demand on the street. An elaborate scheme was developed - needless to say, this is with the co-operation of the Prime Minister's office, the Embassy, the Ministry of Co-ordination; everybody is involved in something like this - an elaborate scheme was developed, whereby the senior labour union leader of the Bank of Greece Tellers' Union would get into a staged fight with one of his managers, and walk out and close the Bank of Greece, on strike, and that would allow enough time for the plane to come in and re-supply us. But these were typical of the kind of crises that we went through; and they were very real and very scary. But the stabilisation programme, which was the last chapter of the Marshall Plan in Greece - and this went from 1951 through the year '52 and up to the spring of '53 - created such a new and healthy atmosphere, that the gold... the gold sovereigns began to flow back into the Bank of Greece, as people found that they could indeed place their faith in the new drachma and in the new country which they had at that moment. By the summer of 1954, the last year of the Marshall Plan in Greece, the sense of confidence and well-being in the country, was positively palpable. It was... one could sense it was there, it was present. It was a new sense of confidence.

JW: It was surely an exciting agency. It was not an old-line agency, it was brand-new. It had a limited life; it had a specific dedication, a specific timetable, a specific goal. And it was a midnight-oil-burning agency of tremendous brains, tremendous energy, tremendous drive. I would have to say that all of us were children of the New Deal. The Department of Agriculture people in the Marshall Plan assigned to the agriculture division of the mission in Greece, the mining engineers from the Department of the Interior, the Transportation people from the Corps of Engineers - these were all men... who had grown up in the New Deal, with a sense that there was a creative liberalising, liberating, modernising role for government in enlarging an economic pie, in creating a fairer distribution of economic benefits, in... having a government which was a leading kind of locomotive for the rest of the society. These were the new... this was the New Deal ethos; it was that which we had all grown up in. And we brought that to bear on the Greek ministries; and we were restless and energetic and hard-driving. And I think in many ways... we may have deeply affected our Greek associates and counterparts with whom we worked. I think in many ways it was a kind of a synergism, in which this New Deal spirit combined with a Greek vitality, to create a formula in which one plus one equalled three.