The Most Thankless Job

Reports had been circulating for weeks that Fowler Hamilton, head of the Agency for International Development, was on his way out as the U.S.'s foreign aid chief. But Hamilton did not credit the rumors, and it was with some confidence that he sat in President Kennedy's office early this month, reviewed his foreign aid plans for fiscal 1964, and suggested that if a change of management was wanted, now was the time to make it. Kennedy listened stonily, said only: "Well, I'll think it over."

As of that instant, Lawyer Hamilton knew that the rumors were right. When he took the job a little more than a year ago, he said that he would remain only "as long as the client is satisfied." Now it was obvious that the client was dissatisfied. And a few days after the confrontation came the inevitable announcement: the President had accepted Hamilton's resignation. Likeliest successor: David E. Bell, 43, sometime Harvard economist, currently director of the Bureau of the Budget.

Great Expectations. Hamilton had worked hard--and fruitlessly--at tidying up the administrative mess that has long persisted in the agency. He lost face on the New Frontier when Congress slashed the President's $5 billion foreign aid request to $3.9 billion. Hamilton emerged frustrated--but in that he was in complete company with his predecessors in what has become known as "the most thankless job in Washington."

The foreign aid agencies have undergone many changes of name, structure and purpose over the last 15 years--with calamitous effects on administrative efficiency and morale. "Things are so confused I don't know who to be nice to," an

AID bureaucrat said recently. AID staffers are painfully aware that the public and Congress are tired of foreign aid and put up with it mostly because Presidents keep insisting that it is necessary.

But the grittiest difficulties of a foreign aid chief lie in dealing with the aided countries themselves. When the U.S. started handing out economic aid to underdeveloped countries in the early 1950s, it seemed reasonable to hope that relatively small infusions of aid would lead to great strides of economic development, just as Marshall Plan aid was splendidly effective in helping to restore the war-battered economies of Western Europe. But economic development presupposes skills, motivations, ethical standards and discipline that are lacking in most underdeveloped countries. Accordingly, the results of economic aid have fallen far short of the early expectations.

"Bums & Beggars." Within the Kennedy Administration, a process of rethinking the ends and means of foreign aid is under way. The inevitable New Frontier "task force" has been appointed, and among its basic texts is a tough-minded article by the University of Chicago's Professor Hans Morgenthau in the June issue of the American Political Science Review.

Morgenthau takes a scholarly scalpel to the concept of economic development aid. It has, he says, "a very much smaller range of potentially successful operation than is generally believed." Many underdeveloped countries "suffer from deficiencies, some natural and insuperable, others social and remediable, which no amount of capital and technological know-how supplied from the outside can cure." There are "bum and beggar nations" that, unless a "miraculpus transformation" of character takes place, cannot or will not use foreign aid for genuine economic development.

Here & Now. In some underdeveloped countries, the people and the rulers care little or nothing about long-range economic development. What they want is highly visible, here-and-now projects that provide an appearance of modernity and progress. The classic example, cited by Morgenthau and much quoted within the Kennedy Administration, is Afghanistan's request a few years ago that the U.S. pave the streets in Kabul. U.S. aidmen declined on the ground that the paving would not really contribute to the country's economic development. Instead, the U.S. built the Afghans a costly but little appreciated hydroelectric dam. So who paved the streets in Kabul? The Russians. And in political terms, they got a lot more credit than the U.S. for a lot less money.

What Morgenthau proposes, and what the Administration is considering, is that the U.S. set aside illusions about the potentialities of economic development and realistically re-examine foreign aid in terms of the U.S. purposes the aid is supposed to serve. "The problem of foreign aid is insoluble if it is considered as a self-sufficient technical enterprise of a primarily economic nature. It is soluble only if it is considered an integral part of the political policies of the giving country."

Foreign aid, he says, can serve valid purposes other than economic development, such as supporting pro-Western governments, winning good will or even bribing governments to do something the U.S. wants. Whatever the particular purpose, the aid should be tailored to fit it. Where the receiving country is really capable of economic development, and where the leaders really want it, it may make sense to build dams and other massive projects in the backlands. But in many underdeveloped countries, argues Morgenthau, the U.S. might serve its own ends better by paving streets.

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