A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  There followed a year of disappointment. Changing the direction of an agency while it continues its day-to-day operations is one of the hardest tricks in government; it has been likened to performing surgery on a man while he hauls a trunk upstairs. AID, despite the new legislation and leadership, remained sluggish and appeared ineffectual. The President often grew exceedingly impatient over its seeming inability to act, especially in Latin America. Returning ambassadors would tell of the enthusiasm with which the local governments had proposed one program or another, the excitement of planning, the filing of applications—and then the endless silence, interrupted only by the arrival of new technical missions or the request for further feasibility studies, until the government lost interest in the project and faith in Washington. Loan processing sometimes took as long as a year and a half. This was not entirely AID’s fault. Congress, in an honorable desire to protect the funds of the taxpayer, wanted to make sure that the money would be spent efficiently; and the resulting standards inscribed in the legislation made the bureaucratic process even more laborious and rigid.

  AID’s apparent failure to show significant results during its year of grace gave Passman a chance to return to the battle in 1962. He did this with undiminished zest, even keeping one hapless regional director on the stand for a hundred hours of detailed and derisive interrogation. At the same time, Wayne Morse, Ernest Gruening and other liberal Democrats in the Senate, alienated by the persisting emphasis on military aid, began to fight against the program. All this produced a congressional mood that cut the President’s 1962 request from $4.9 to $3.9 billion and reduced development loans by more than 20 per cent.

  The President was coming to the conclusion that the basic weakness lay in the program itself and its execution. It was mostly in this respect that he found Hamilton wanting. Hamilton had taken on the assignment as a lawyer takes a case; he even occasionally spoke of the President as “my client.” But he had no special knowledge of the technical intricacies of the development effort; and his activities as reorganizer, recruiter and salesman left him little time to worry about the substance of AID’s work. Then the congressional debacle of 1962 weakened his standing as the program’s attorney. He came to feel, I think, that he was losing the confidence of the White House and failing to score points with the President—as, indeed, he was. We had the sense in the White House that he decided in the autumn to prepare his own exit before anyone else had a chance to ask for it. He finally left in November to the accompaniment of newspaper stories that he was the victim of a campaign by ‘liberals’ in the White House; one or two of the stories named me. I found this puzzling, since Hamilton was an old friend and I had had little to do with AID; but no doubt it was all part of the strain of life in the bureaucratic jungle.

  In any case, Hamilton had presided over the organizational transition with considerable success. Yet at the end the program was substantively no more convincing than before and politically weaker than ever. This situation convinced Kennedy that extreme measures were necessary to get the aid bill through Congress in 1963. He was having difficulties with the business community for other reasons, and he resorted to the familiar device of a blue-ribbon panel of bonded conservatives set up to cast a presumably cold eye on the aid effort and then to recommend its continuance as essential to the national interest. He became convinced for some reason that General Lucius Clay was the man to head the group. He also wanted Robert Lovett and Eugene Black, and Clay himself nominated some quite conservative business friends, including Eisenhower’s last Secretary of the Treasury. George Meany was put on as a gesture to the left.

  At the same time, the President had to choose a successor to Hamilton. This time Dungan’s search was for someone to do the substantive job, and it centered in government rather than among the tycoons. There was strong feeling in the White House in favor of Sargent Shriver, who had made such a brilliant success with the Peace Corps, but Shriver indicated he would rather stay where he was. The other obvious candidate within the government was David Bell. Bell had exceptional qualifications. His work with Galbraith and Mason in the Harvard seminar in the fifties had given him a first-rate technical grasp of development doctrine; he had the practical experience of having run the Ford Foundation mission in Pakistan; and his superb record as director of the Bureau of the Budget had won him the total confidence of the President. Bell himself was dubious, arguing to Kennedy that he had no particular talent or experience in influencing members of Congress or carrying the program with the public. Kennedy responded that, so far as he was concerned, the best way to put the program over was to make it work. As someone observed at the time, “You can’t sell Ivory soap if it sinks in the bathtub.”

  Bell, who did not much like the idea of the Clay committee, proposed that Edward S. Mason at least be added to it. Dungan had not liked the idea either, and Kenneth O’Donnell was profane and explicit in pointing out its danger and futility. But Kennedy had confidence in Clay; and in January 1963 the committee began its inquiry. It held extensive hearings and did a conscientious job. But the group was for the most part narrow in its ideas and negative in its reactions. Of the members who knew anything about aid problems, Black had never much liked bilateral programs, preferring his old institution, the World Bank, and Mason disappeared overseas in the concluding stages. Lovett’s main contribution lay in elegantly sarcastic phrases: “There had been a feeling that we are trying to do too much for too many too soon, that we are overextended in resources and under-compensated in results, and that no end of foreign aid is either in sight or in mind.”

  The first draft was sour and niggling. But Clay, despite his own restricted views, did not want to let down Kennedy or, for that matter, David Bell who had deeply impressed him in the hearings. He finally acquiesced in a revision of the report which, without altering the substance, conveyed a more positive spirit. The impact of the document as finally issued in March 1963 (George Meany dissenting) was to suggest that aid operations had to be improved and aid magnitudes reduced, but that at the same time aid was indispensable to national security. The exercise was not, I suppose, without its benefits. Bell sat through the hearings and received a briefing in his new responsibilities which he could hardly have got elsewhere and which helped him in the future. The report endorsed the development orientation and expressed the hope that military aid could be reduced. It also shaped up certain ideas which later proved useful in AID legislative presentations, notably those of concentrating on the countries which could make effective use of assistance (a proposal for which Chester Bowles had argued within the government in 1962) and of discontinuing programs which were no longer needed.

  On the other hand, the committee provided more ammunition to the enemies of AID than to its friends. Otto Passmann announced himself “surprised and pleased.” And buried in the report was a systematic hostility to forms of development which did not yield private profit. Most of the changes it proposed were intended to promote American private investment. Some abroad read the document as a statement of the thesis that the point of foreign aid was to facilitate the penetration of the developing world by American business. Ken O’Donnell could hardly have been more right. The President himself remarked, “I am so busy protecting my flank from right-wing criticism that I sometimes wonder where I am getting anything done.”

  There was a short debate within the administration whether to accept or reject the report. Those in favor won out on the argument that General Clay would then testify for the program; rejection, it was feared, would deliver him to Passman. The original 1963 request had been for $4.9 billion; but in a background briefing for newspapermen just before the report was released, Clay, contrary to an understanding that he would not talk figures, left the impression in responding to a question that the program might be cut $500 million. Kennedy, who read the story in the Sunday newspapers out at Camp David, was briefly furious. Clay later did his best to hold the line at $4.2–4.3 billion and then at $3.9 billion; but the bill
was on the downward slide. Before the slaughter was over, it was saddled with restrictions and then slashed to $3.6 billion.

  And this was only the authorization: the eventual appropriation went down even further, to $3.2 billion—the largest cut in the history of the program. By the end of the Kennedy years foreign aid was at its lowest point so far as funds were concerned since 1958. Yet philosophically and operationally the program was in better shape than it had been for some time. A comparison of the 1961 and 1963 messages showed how the ideology of foreign assistance had moved out of the cold war into the context of development. And David Bell gave both conception and execution more stability and purpose than they had had since the time of Hoffman and Harriman. His intelligence and force greatly strengthened AID’s morale and performance; and his sober optimism offered hope for the future.

  Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1963, he could point out that, of the forty countries which had received the major share of American development aid since 1945, fourteen no longer depended on external assistance and ten others were steadily reducing such dependence. In these twenty-four countries, Bell said, “democratic institutions have been strengthened or less democratic regimes liberalized”; and of the whole lot of forty countries he observed, “Although the possibility of economic progress leading to political backsliding cannot be ruled out, there is no clear case of this phenomenon among the countries to which we have extended substantial amounts of development assistance. The relationship is overwhelmingly in the other direction.” He concluded with characteristic precision that, while economic progress could not guarantee democracy, “it seems clear that without economic progress the chances for strengthening democratic processes in the less developed countries would be greatly diminished.”

  The success of the aid program—both in getting support at home and results abroad—remained as elusive as its continuation seemed imperative. But David Bell more than vindicated Kennedy’s confidence. In the end, he stayed longer as aid administrator than anyone else in the history of the effort.

  4. DEVELOPMENT VS. POPULATION

  The struggle for economic growth encountered more than the well-advertised obstacles of ignorance, disease, corruption and inertia. Even when countries had the will to reshape attitudes and institutions, there was still the constant threat that population would increase faster than output, producing a decline in per capita income and therefore in the savings available for capital formation. Indeed, this threat actually became more acute as nations began to modernize. Improvements in sanitation and public health—from the boiling of water and the swatting of flies to penicillin and DDT—often neutralized the old Malthusian checks before economic growth could take up the slack.

  In Venezuela, for example, from 1957 to 1963 the gross national product, according to the UN, grew at a rate of 4.5 per cent, but population grew at a rate of 3.8 per cent, reducing the net gain in per capita income to .7 per cent; in Uganda, the figures were 3.4 and 2.5 per cent, leaving the per capita gain at .9 per cent.* “Like a thief in the night,” said Asoka Mehta of the Indian Planning Commission, “population growth can rob us of all that we achieve, day after day, in economic growth.” One AID economist calculated that in certain countries every dollar invested in birth control would be 200 times as productive as the same dollar invested in foreign aid.

  This problem had nagged the consciousness of foreign aid people for some time. In the very long run, industrialization and affluence might bring down the birth rate (though even this was not certain; the United States, after a period of decline in the thirties, now had as high a rate of population growth as India); but in the short run the situation seemed to require a more specific and purposeful attack. In 1959 one of the recurrent blue-ribbon reviews of aid policy, this one chaired by General William H. Draper, courageously recommended that the United States assist birth control programs in developing countries. When the Draper report provoked a strong counterstatement by the Roman Catholic bishops, President Eisenhower quickly said, “This government will not . . . as long as I am here, have a positive political doctrine in its program that has to do with birth control. That’s not our business.”* An ICA directive promptly banned birth control assistance or even consultation.

  The election in 1960 of a Roman Catholic President might have been supposed to place population control even further outside the realm of public policy. The President-elect’s interregnum task force on economic aid hardly mentioned the problem in its report. When one of its consultants, Richard N. Gardner of Columbia, soon to become Harlan Cleveland’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs, pointed this out, his intervention only produced pitying smiles from those who assumed the question closed in the Kennedy years.

  Actually Kennedy had long been concerned about the implications of population growth for economic development. In 1959, for example, John Cowles made a speech on the population problem, arguing that “unless we want to see the conditions that exist in India and in Egypt spread over the rest of the world, the scientists must find some method of simple, inexpensive and effective fertility control”; and Kennedy inserted it in the Congressional Record as “a challenging panorama of the developments abroad which will shape our foreign policy during the next decades.” Asked on Meet the Press early in 1960 what he proposed to do about countries where people were multiplying faster than production, Kennedy replied that the solution was “for the United States and other powers to help them get ahead of their population increase. If they make a judgment that they want to limit their population under those conditions, that is a judgment they should make, and economic assistance which we give permits them to make that judgment, if that is their choice.” In his first foreign aid message, he noted that “in Latin America, for example, population growth is already threatening to outpace economic growth.”

  In the summer of 1961 George McGhee confronted the State Department’s Policy Planning Council with the problem. One result was a cautious paper saying in effect that the problem was real and that, while the United States could not come out for population control, it ought to do something, though no one was ready to say what. Another result was the designation of Robert W. Barnett as the Department’s population adviser. Over the next year Barnett pressed the problem in the Department, with occasional public speeches defining the issues and arguing for government support of demographic research.

  In the autumn of 1962 Sweden laid before the UN General Assembly a resolution calling on the Secretary-General to conduct an inquiry on population problems. This meant that, for the first time, the General Assembly would debate population policy. Richard Gardner, whose concern was unabated, volunteered to handle the topic for the U.S. Mission. He thereupon drafted a speech welcoming the Swedish initiative and declaring it “absolutely essential that we be concerned with population trends.” American policy, as Gardner went on to state it, opposed “any effort to dictate to any country the means to be employed in dealing with its population problem”; but at the same time “the United States believes that obstacles should not be placed in the way of other governments which, in the light of their own economic needs and cultural and religious values, seek solutions to their population problems.” Gardner then said that the United States would “upon request” help other countries “to find potential sources of information and assistance on ways and means of dealing with population problems.” He also affirmed on behalf of his government the need for additional knowledge on these matters, including “more facts about alternative methods of family planning.”

  Gardner first submitted his draft to Dean Rusk, who made no objections, and then to Ralph Dungan. Dungan, a thoughtful Catholic of the John XXIII school, was the White House liaison with the dignitaries of the Church and the resident expert on Catholic doctrine. He was, in addition, a man of wisdom and experience. He had, I think, a certain skepticism about the birth control zealots in the United States; the organized movement had for him a little
too much the aspect of a crusade of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants determined to stop non-WASPs from propagating lest the WASPs be overwhelmed. (Kennedy may have had the same feeling; as he once put it, most people think “that it is other people’s families that provide the population explosion.”) On the other hand, Dungan had a realistic understanding of population issues; and he gave the speech prompt White House clearance.

  A few days later the United States voted for the Swedish resolution in the General Assembly, balking only at a section calling for UN “technical assistance” on population problems; we abstained here because the UN already had all the authority it needed to give its members technical assistance and the inclusion of this superfluous language might raise fears that the UN was about to go into the business of distributing contraceptive devices. This action took place, however, during the New York newspaper strike of the winter of 1962–63, and no one seemed to notice it. The State Department quietly circulated the Gardner statement to foreign governments, and AID soon adopted it as a directive, superseding the Eisenhower ban against action on population questions. This activity slowly awakened public interest. In April 1963 someone asked Kennedy at a press conference whether he thought the United States should supply funds for international birth control studies. The President replied: “If your question is: Can we do more, should we know more about the whole reproduction cycle, and should this information be made more available to the world so that everyone can make their own judgment, I would think that it would be a matter which we could certainly support.”