Sixty years ago this summer, the miners of the Ruhr were starving. They were promised rations of 1,500 calories, but only received 700 or 800 worth. Then, one day in June, they heard some astounding news. The U.S. Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, planned an aid program so expansive as to bring them — and the rest of Europe — back to physical and economic health. “Assistance,” Marshall had said in a speech at Harvard, “must not be on a piecemeal basis.” Marshall’s goal was an ambitious one: spend, for years perhaps, if necessary, until Europe achieved total recovery.

The news caused a collective pause in Europe. Some felt wounded pride: Europe was being bribed. “When they sniffed dollars,” noted one Frenchman of his fellow French, “they dropped everything and came running like cats to fresh milk.” But others were simply jubilant. In London the British Foreign Secretary sat up in his sickbed at the words: “It was like a lifeline to sinking men. It seemed to bring hope where there was none. The generosity of it was beyond my belief.”

The Marshall Plan in total would spend some $13 billion, or one third of the American budget at the time of Marshall’s speech. It would reach from Norway and Holland to Greece, half of whose national production in 1950 was due to Plan Aid, and Turkey, where its tractors set about “changing an Asian way of life.”

Now, timed for the anniversary, comes a valuable biography of that Plan. In “The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe” (Free Press, 342 pages, $27), Greg Behrman provides compelling pictures of the diplomats who made the plan real, from General Marshall and William Lockhart Clayton on the American side, to Ernest Bevin of Britain and “Comrade Filing Cabinet,” Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic foreign minister. Mr. Behrman’s main failing is that he focuses on aid to the exclusion of trade. The author seems to forget that economic growth derives not only from actions by diplomats but also from small individuals — such as the desperate miners in Essen.

America played midwife to the cooperative entity that would become the European Union. The Economist magazine instantly saw the possibilities: Europe might use the aid to make its fractious self over as “a full customs union of the main countries of Western Europe.” Even, the editors dreamed, “something like a United States.”

In a Soviet version of Keynesianism, the Soviet economist Yevgeny Varga posited that the Marshall Plan was a selfish move, so large because that amount of spending was necessary to postpone an “imminent economic crisis” in America. Stalin turned his back on Marshall’s offer to include East European countries in his plan, and forced those countries’ leaders to go along with him. The Russian leader instead announced he was creating a “Molotov Plan.” Mr. Behrman’s good research enables him to capture the simultaneous brutishness and naïveté of the Russians. When Bevin and Frances’s Georges Bidault tried gamely to get Molotov to agree to Russian participation, Molotov said not “nyet,” but “No K,” which he thought was the negative of the American “OK.” Molotov was so arrogant that Bevin, fed up finally, called Molotov’s bluff. He explained that what he really was asking America to sign a blank check for him. And “if I were to go to Moscow with a blank check and ask you to sign it I wonder how far I would get with your end.”

Another crucial feature of the recovery landscape gets insufficient attention here. The first is that national government policies mattered as well. In the still-occupied zones of those starving miners’ Germany, economic minister Ludwig Erhard demanded and got free-market measures that carried over into the new Federal Republic. Within days of the famous German currency reform of 1948 came the announcement that income taxes would be cut by one third. That summer Germany also lifted price controls.

Mr. Behrman more or less brushes over this bold move, emphasizing, always, the funding side of the story. Yet as a result of pro-growth policies, German recovery was more dramatic than that of Attlee’s Britain or France. By late July, the Wall Street Journal printed a page-one story titled “Reich’s Recovery.” In France that autumn, by contrast, Prime Minister Henri Queuille asked the National Assembly to find a way to collect 50% more in tax revenue. The Britain of Clement Attlee was meanwhile moving toward the nationalization of steel. The differing policies of these regimes mattered, and trade contributed as much as aid to Marshall Plan’s success.

“The Most Noble Adventure” does get the most important point, which was that the Marshall Plan, as symbol of the Western alliance, mattered more than anything. Lulled by too many stories of intellectuals at Les Deux Magots, we today tend to forget a crucial aspect of the France at the time: the reasonable fear that the Russians, welcomed by France’s own numerous communists, might march in. “I wake up in the night sometimes in a cold sweat,” wrote the novelist Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh. “Thank goodness for having no children, I can take the pill and say good bye.” Along with the Berlin Air Lift, inaugurated just as Erhard was liberalizing, the Marshall Plan proved that America would defend Western Europe from the Kremlin. How close the “Adventure” came to being a “Misadventure” we are only just beginning to know.

Miss Shlaes, a Bloomberg columnist, is a trustee of the German Marshall Fund. She is the author of “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” (HarperCollins).