Day of Disillusion

June 26, 1961

When the foreign-aid program was first proposed by Secretary Marshall in 1947, its chief declared purpose was to repair the ravages of war in Europe and to promote a swift recovery. Later, the declared purpose was to raise living standards in the recipient countries. Later, a chief declared purpose was to halt the spread of Communism. Another announced purpose was to win allies or at least friends for the U.S. Another was to raise U.S. prestige. Another was to promote stable democratic government in the countries aided.

In the light of the fourteen-year record, these announced purposes now seem ironic. True, the European countries originally aided have recovered from the ravages of war. But history shows that countries always recover with surprising rapidity from the ravages of war. And the countries that we aided least, like Germany and Japan, made far more rapid recoveries than countries that we aided most. As for living standards, the only way to raise them is through increased formation of capital, seldom encouraged by governments of underdeveloped countries.

Communism has spread to an appalling extent since the foreign-aid program was launched. We have lost friends every year. Our prestige abroad has been falling at an accelerative rate. We have been powerless to promote stable democratic government even where our aid and intervention have been greatest. To recall what the foreign-aid program has not accomplished, it is enough to mention Laos, Cuba, Korea.

HARM UNFORESEEN

But the foreign-aid program has brought results that its sponsors failed to foresee. Even before the program started to promote socialism abroad by direct encouragement, as in India, it made its continuation possible by subsidizing governments that carried on socialistic projects. It has systematically bred unfriendliness to the United States. Every little “strong man” who receives aid from us is forced to show his own people, by snubbing or denouncing us, that he is not giving up his independence or the national pride in return for our aid. Since the end of World War II our foreign aid of all sorts has reached the fantastic total of $90 billion. A simple statistical comparison shows that it has been responsible for our whole net budget deficit since the program was launched, for the whole net increase in our national debt since then, and for an increased tax burden besides. It has been the chief fiscal cause of the inflation, of the unfavorable balance of payments, and of our loss of gold.

Yet the Kennedy Administration not only wishes to increase foreign aid substantially, but to avoid the necessity for annual Congressional approval by authority to borrow $7.3 billion for it over the next five years.

FOREIGN AID IN TROUBLE

In The New York Times, Cabell Phillips reports growing signs that the economic-aid program of nearly $3 billion for this year “will encounter greater difficulties with Congress than aid programs have met in many years.” He attributes this largely to “articulate and well- organized . . . lobbies working against the bill.” The only lobby he finds room to discuss is the Citizens Foreign Aid Committee, headed by Walter Harnischfeger, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, and Clarence E. Manion, which consists of only 44 members and operates on a budget of around $50,000 a year. “There is not, on the other side,” declares Phillips, “a comparable lobby with the same singleness of purpose or the same resources to propagandize at the grass roots.” This statement astonishingly overlooks the government foreign-aid agencies themselves, with their thousands of employees and millions of the taxpayers’ own money to propagandize the full year round for the continuation and expansion of their activities and funds.

If a tiny organization like the Citizens Foreign Aid Committee, with a Multigraph machine, can have real success in bucking this full-time bureaucratic lobby, it must be incredibly “articulate and well-organized.” Yet with all due admiration, its success may, perhaps, be attributed to an additional factor. It may just be that congressmen recognize that what the committee is saying is true.