Anger over Aid

Each year the U.S. Congress kicks, squirms and squeals more lustily before finally swallowing its bitter medicine--foreign aid-- in just about the dosage the President has prescribed. Last week the House authorized a $4.6 billion aid program for next year, and the 250-164 vote was hailed as another triumph for foreign aid. But this time the cries were so loud and the kicking so hard that the U.S. aid bill took a drubbing that not even the top-heavy vote could conceal. For an angry Congress, one member of the House summed up the prevailing attitude toward nations who receive U.S. money: "If they knock us, cut off their aid."

Congressmen are mad at Yugoslavia's Tito for snarling at U.S. nuclear testing during the Belgrade Conference while continuing to ask for U.S. aid. They are angry at India's Nehru for gobbling up Goa and for seeking Russian arms that his country could not afford without U.S. aid. They are mad at Brazil for expropriating a U.S. telephone subsidiary, and at Ghana's Nkrumah for his Marxist chatter.

They are also mad at some 70 nations who have a voice in the United Nations but who have not bothered to pay their share of U.N. operations in the Congo and the Gaza Strip--which are largely supported by U.S. funds.

Drastic Measure. This anger earlier had led the Senate to slash aid funds to India by a crippling 25%, a cut the Administration had to scramble to restore.

The Senators also cut off all aid to such Communist nations as Yugoslavia and Poland (relenting only to allow surplus food to be sent) and blocked aid to any nation that seizes private U.S. property without prompt steps toward compensation. Last week the anger welled up in the House to produce a similar expropriation penalty, including a retroactive clause to punish Brazil--and thus put a damper on the Alliance for Progress. The House also rushed through a drastic amendment denying any special U.S. aid to the United Nations until all other nations had met all of their U.N. financial obligations--a ban that, in effect, would give any nation a veto over field operations of the U.N.

With all that on the books, the aid program would have been severely hampered. The Administration got busy to try to stop the House from whacking out the one thing that Kennedy wanted most: freedom to try to pry some nations loose from Moscow with aid. The President summoned congressional leaders of both parties to the White House. Aid Administrator Fowler Hamilton personally pleaded with some 100 Congressmen, and Ambassador George Kennan flew home from his post in Belgrade to make a pitch to the House. The Administration even got key help from Pennsylvania's champion anti-Communist Francis Walter, who argued: "For years one of the major deterrents to World War III has been the resistance of enslaved people to their Communist masters. Help Moscow break that resistance, and you increase the potentialities of Communist aggression." The House still insisted on being recorded against such aid, but it finally gave the President, by a vote of 277-4, the power to waive the ban.

Gaining Power. The Administration hopes to remove some of the other hobbling amendments when a conference committee compromises the House and Senate bills, but the evidence of congressional anger was too loud and clear to be ignored. Foreign aid funds will certainly be cut when such aid-haters as Louisiana Congressman Otto Passman get their hands on the actual appropriations bill--but the Administration expects that. More alarming was the evidence that, despite the foreign aid program's considerable successes, its critics are gaining power in Congress--which one day may balk at taking its bitter medicine at all.

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