When the Potsdam declarations were made public, Anne O'Hare McCormick (in her column in the New York Times of August 4, 1945) commented: “The scale and novelty of the great experiment is breathtaking. Stalin, Truman and Attlee may be remembered longer than the original Big Three, the war-leaders, because their names are affixed to this document.”
The general public, on this side of the Atlantic, is as yet hardly aware of the full implications of the Potsdam declarations. The economic consequences of Potsdam have been widely debated in Britain, but they have received little attention in this country. Yet, the plan decided upon in the former city of the Prussian kings is due almost entirely to American initiative. In the words of Raymond Daniell: