Why Foreign Aid Was Cut

After 23 years in Congress, South Carolina's tall, grey-thatched James Prioleau Richards, 61, looks longingly towards the end of the year, when he will relinquish his House seat, go back to his 500-acre cattle farm at Heath Springs (pop. 700), there "lie down on my back and look up at the moon and wonder what's up there." Last week, while the State Department gasped and the Defense Department groaned, Dick Richards decided the Administration was reaching for that same moon and asking too many sixpence in foreign aid next year. So he led his Foreign Affairs Committee in a scissoring, slashing assault on the mutual-security bill.

Narrow-Eyed Interest. The committee lopped $1.1 billion off the $4.7 billion authorization requested, most of it from military aid, and refused an Administration request for power to make long-range commitments. Some additions were written in: another million to the $2,000,000 earmarked as the U.S.'s share of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization budget, $5,000,000 more for Guatemala.

What caused the cuts and the 18-11 committee vote ordering them? Dick Richards eagerly ticked off deep-down, long-smoldering reasons. For one, Congressmen consider Pentagon bookkeeping atrocious, listened with narrow-eyed interest last week when Comptroller General Joe Campbell journeyed to the Hill to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the $400 million surplus from the 1954 foreign-aid appropriation that the Defense Department refused to turn back to the Treasury. (Retorted the Defense Department: "a technicality.") Even after his committee's cuts, said Richards, "there's enough money in here with the carryover of $5.2 billion [in funds previously appropriated but unspent] to give them all they can possibly spend . . . for the next 2 3/4 years."

Distinct Wilt. But more basically, Dick Richards, long a bipartisan-minded supporter of the Eisenhower-Dulles foreign policy, feels a distinct wilt of enthusiasm because the Administration has never made ringingly clear where it is headed in foreign aid after this year. Said Richards: "Germany is lagging on rearmament. France is using NATO divisions and NATO equipment in North Africa. Great Britain is cutting down her own defense establishment and talking about abolishing the draft. Italy is talking with emphasis on economic and not military aid from now on. If that's going to be the attitude we'd better slow up before sending good money after bad."

Alarmed by the House committee cuts, the Administration stiffened its resistance to further cuts and summoned NATO's retiring commander, General Alfred Gruenther, to rebut Richards' arguments this week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But prospects of success were poor; in the absence of White House direction, sentiment in both houses is much as Dick Richards crystalized it.

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