WHEN SECRETARY OF STATE George C. Marshall announced his monumental plan for post-war European recovery at Harvard's 1947 commencement, he was taking a risk. He gambled that his appeal to America's enlightened self-interest would overcome the reluctance of a public whose sentiments were increasingly averse to economic commitments abroad. Today, 40 years later, West German President Richard von Weizsacker will take his place on the steps of Memorial Church to address the Class of 1987. His presence reflects the enduring success of Marshall's plan.

Even more than the international monetary and financial system established at Bretton Woods or the strategic policy of containment enshrined in the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan remains the preeminent symbol of American liberal internationalism in the postwar era. It exemplified how capitalism's ends could be served by humanitarian means and provided the prototype from which domestic "Great Society" programs and Third World development assistance schemes, such as the Alliance for Progress and the Caribbean Basin Initiative, were later designed. A testament to the power of dollar diplomacy, it has helped to shape and maintain U.S. leadership in world affairs.

Not only did the Plan achieve its immediate aim of stabilizing Western Europe against potential incursions by radical political movements--especially Soviet--supported communist parties--it also created frameworks for European economic cooperation and the Atlantic Alliance. Yet today the Plan's legacy has been all but exhausted. European economic strength has not led to diplomatic unity or military independence, and Marshall's capital-intensive recovery strategy has been misapplied with disastrous results in the Third World.

But if the plan was an overwhelming success in economic regeneration, not all the strategic objectives of its originators were as adequately fulfilled. George Kennan, appointed by Marshall to head the State Department's Policy Planning Staff in drafting the initiative, hoped that the Plan would be the first step toward a politically unified continental Europe. He envisioned French leadership of a continental federation, with a reunited and disarmed Germany serving as a buffer between East and West. Britain would join with Canada and the U.S. in an allied but separate political coalition. Eastern European states would be wooed into the neutral continental center, so the tripolar division would stabilize the international system and serve as a buffer in any East-West confrontation.

But as it happened, Kennan's vision of a politically neutral or centrist "Mittel Europa" was not fulfilled in the post-Hiroshima world, and the fate of the continent has remained in thrall to U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. While the U.S. did not attempt to dominate Europe economically either during or after the Marshall Plan, our military position on the continent has influenced all aspects of Western relations, including economic agreements. Misuse of American strategic power in the region threatens to undermine the Western alliance which Marshall helped to create.

Today members of the European Economic Community can resist some American economic pressures, such as our recent demands for tariff reductions and coordination of fiscal and monetary policies, but they remain at the beck and call of U.S. military planners. U.S. pressure to "share" SDI technology has left many European leaders, who remember the Maginot Line, frustrated at the extravagence and rigidity of American planners. At the same time, Reagan's wild unilateralism at the Reykjavik summit has raised fears that defense plans for Europe are too little dependent on European consent--and too much on American caprice.

The Marshall Plan's rapid and measurable impact on European GNP soon led many economic planners to try similar schemes in the Third World. But bad politics and bad planning have crippled American attempts to replicate its European strategies elsewhere. Anti-communism has too often dominated aid choices in Africa and Asia, while commercial lending to Latin America has never allowed its regional economies the breathing space which the Marshall Plan created for Europe.

Even where strategic concerns have not dictated economic choices, planners have misjudged the needs and capacities of post-colonial states. Pumping in capital for the creation of heavy industry, "development experts" in the 1950s often seemed to think they could replicate Europe's 300-year industrial revolution in three years of revolving loan plans. Rather than providing the resuscitating slap on the back which postwar dollars gave Europe, these "modernization" loans went to finance unproductive and hopelessly uncompetitive urban industries. The result was merely to add the new weight of debt to the previous burdens of colonial exploitation.

Some of the best aspects of the Plan--for instance its emphasis on foreign government priority-setting free of American interference--were not applied to Third World development programs. Equating wartime destruction in Europe with the ravages of colonialism, Western planners confused a temporary dislocation with a systemic problem. While European nations had suffered from a break in "business as usual" at the hands of fascism, Third World nations had suffered from the inherent inequalities of imperial capitalism. "Normal" peacetime industry could not be instituted in nations which had never had a solid industrial base to begin with.

The American failure to analyze Marshall's vision goes beyond economic and political miscalculation. How much of the prestige that attaches to the Marshall Plan is really a misunderstanding of its genesis and intent? The Plan itself provided only a broad sketch; among its most important guiding principles was pluralism, a willingness to let the Europeans experiment with both private enterprise and socialism in their recovery efforts. It was the Plan's lack of ideological rigidity that made it so profoundly useful.

As Marshall defined it, his program was "directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos." In an era when the Truman Doctrine has been supplanted by the Reagan Docrtrine, and our foreign policy seems to lurch from one knee-jerk reaction to communism to the next, we might best remember the Marshall Plan not as a bastion against the East, but as a foundation for the open development of the West. The broad strokes Secretary Marshall painted here four decades ago remain an object lesson in how to overcome the limits of ideology for a greater social good. They should also remind us that no policy guideline is worthy to stand eternal and uncorrected in a complex, changing world.