Open Season

To many Americans--both Democratic and Republican--foreign aid is a painful necessity at best, a downright giveaway at worst. This feeling has encouraged Congress to make a tradition of wielding an ax at presidential foreign aid requests. Last week, President Kennedy asked Congress to appropriate $4.9 billion for foreign aid in fiscal 1963, the biggest aid request since Dwight Eisenhower's $5.1 billion whopper in 1953. Noting that it is "always open season" on foreign aid, Kennedy insisted that the sum was "vital to the interests of the U.S." and "cannot, I believe, be further reduced." But after such customary formalities, the President made a spirited challenge aimed at softening the blows of the waiting ax, even if it cannot stay them.

"I realize," said the President, "that there are among us those who are weary of sustaining this continual effort to help other nations. But I would ask them to look at a map [see map] and recognize that many of those whom we help live on the front lines of the long twilight struggle for freedom, that others are new nations poised between order and chaos, and the rest are older nations now undergoing a turbulent transition of new expectations. Our efforts to help them help themselves are small in cost compared to our military outlays for the defense of freedom. Yet all of our armies and atoms combined will be of little avail if these nations fall."

Hard Look. Louisiana's Otto Passman, chairman of the House foreign aid appropriations subcommittee and a perennial foe of foreign aid, predictably called Kennedy's request "preposterous," and Kentucky's Republican Senator Thruston Morton warned: "A lot of us who have been friends of foreign aid are going to be looking at it mighty hard this year." Minnesota's Republican Representative Walter Judd suggested that the U.S. should "let a few of these countries go to the Communists" so that the others will not blackmail the U.S. into giving aid by threatening that they might also do so.

At his press conference, the President hit back at congressional rumblings. Sometimes, he said, those who "want to put the ax to foreign aid hardest are the ones who make the most vigorous speeches against Communism and call for a policy of victory." Anyone not interested in the fight against Communism, added Kennedy, should go ahead and cut the bill.

The Congress will almost certainly do just that, probably by the 15% to 20% that it usually lops off aid bills. But Kennedy's hope is to stave off deeper cuts in the face of general congressional weariness with foreign aid. To assuage the aid program's critics, he pointed out that the Administration's new aid program began only four months ago and has not had time to operate perfectly. Though he is sending a whole battery of top lieutenants to preach the new program's virtues to Congress, the chief job of making reforms and selling them to Congress falls on Fowler Hamilton, 50, a Wall Street lawyer who took over last fall as boss of the renamed Agency for International Development, has since won both Kennedy's and Congress' respect.

Tougher Largesse. Hamilton already has tightened up his staff, tirelessly buttonholed Congressmen to argue the merits of aid. Hoping to head off traditional gripes, he went to Capitol Hill last week to present his case to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Non-Communist Western countries have increased their aid 40% in the past five years to $2.3 billion a year, said Hamilton, and "these other free world countries are actually contributing a larger proportion of their gross national products to foreign assistance than is the U.S." Furthermore, said Hamilton, foreign aid does not appreciably affect the U.S. gold outflow: more than 80% of the procurement of goods under the program takes place in the U.S., and only 2% is spent in countries with which the U.S. has an unfavorable balance of trade.

The U.S. has already begun to be tougher in dispensing aid, now insists that aid countries pass social and economic reforms before they enjoy U.S. largesse. When one nation asked for U.S. money for better housing in its capital city, U.S. aides found that it intended to build the housing in a swank section. The U.S. insisted that the nation would get no money unless it attacked the city's slums--and the poor in one section of the city are now getting new housing, plumbing and electricity. Says Hamilton: "Money and progress march along together. If our requirements aren't met for each stage, they don't get the money." Just as important to the program, Congress also demands progress--and will need a lot more evidence of it before relinquishing its cherished role of examining foreign aid.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.