Aid in Need of Aid

Congress split wide open last week over the $8.8 billion foreign aid bill--last major Administration item on the legislative docket. In the Senate, the bill received relatively tender treatment, emerged with all its basic features intact, including the hotly debated provision giving the White House a free hand to borrow from the Treasury for the next five years without recourse to Congress. But in the House after three days of debate, the foreign aid bill was thoroughly mangled.

Borrowing. The crucial test in the Senate was the Byrd amendment, which would have denied the asked-for borrowing authority. Having passed that hurdle (TIME, Aug. 18), the bill was gentled past a pride of inhibiting amendments, finally approved with an $8 billion authorization. This was not what President Kennedy requested, but enough to satisfy the Administration. (A clause proposed by New York's Jacob Javits--and later included by the House--encourages loans to private corporations as well as governments.)

On the other side of the Capitol, a Republican-Southern Democratic coalition, firmly opposed to the long-term borrowing authority, was out for blood. Sensing imminent disaster. White House Liaison Chief Larry O'Brien unleashed a classic vote roundup, dispatched lobbyists to wavering Congressmen, kept his staffers on the telephone, for three days shuffled anxiously through the Capitol corridors in search of votes. Visiting firemen were pressed into service: when Amon Carter Evans, the new publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, turned up on vacation in Washington, he was hustled off for a busy afternoon on the Hill, talking to members of the Tennessee delegation in support of foreign aid.

But, from his field headquarters in Speaker Sam Rayburn's office, O'Brien candidly admitted that he could not line up enough support to save the President's bill. He and the Democratic leaders hastily hammered out a compromise measure, lopping off two years of borrowing authority and $3.2 billion from the original bill -- and hoped to head off the conservative onslaught. But before the compromise version came to a vote, disaster struck, from a surprising source.

Beguiling. Up rose California's Dalip Singh Saund, a liberal Democrat and a naturalized American who was born and raised in India. Saund, who had previously gone along with every foreign aid request, offered a drastic amendment that would knock out long-term borrowing altogether, trim loans to $1.2 billion for fiscal 1962. "We must admit," he said, "that our efforts to promote democracy and build strong, free societies in many of the underdeveloped countries of the world through massive expenditures of U.S. funds have not been, to say the least, successful.

"The cause for this lies not in the failure of Congress to supply the necessary funds to the executive branch, but in inadequacies of administration of the program itself ... It seems more important than ever that the program should undergo thorough study and careful scrutiny each year by the Congress."

As Saund sat down, the Republicans gave him an ovation. Beguiled by his amendment, the House could not be stopped. Next day the Administration gave up the struggle, and Saund's version of the foreign aid bill was passed by voice vote. As the bill headed for a joint Senate-House conference, Larry O'Brien & Co. pinned their hopes on getting a compromise that would restore most of the original bill's basic features--possibly on a three-year basis--and would still squeak through the House.

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