Paragon for AID

Budget Bureau Director David Elliott Bell is the very model of a New Frontiersman: he is youngish (43), brainy, liberal (in a pragmatic way), and he taught at Harvard. Above all, he is loyal to The Chief--to the point that he last week agreed to change jobs, take on the most unsought-after assignment that the Government has to offer. Starting sometime in late December or early January, Bell will become the new U.S. foreign aid chief, replacing Fowler Hamilton, whose resignation last month had been encouraged by President Kennedy.

Prophetic Number. A college professor's son, born in North Dakota and raised in California, Bell has always been smart. Once, when he brought home his inevitable straight-A report card, his mother remarked: "It doesn't mean a thing. You were born that way." Bell got an M.A. in economics at Harvard in 1941,tutored there for a year, then went to Washington as a Budget Bureau analyst. After wartime service as a Marine intelligence officer, he returned to the Budget Bureau, moved on to become a White House assistant and one of Truman's top speechwriters. Departing from Washington in the Democratic exodus of early 1953, Bell went back to Harvard. In 1954-57, between stints of teaching economics, he served in Pakistan as head of a team that Harvard, with Ford Foundation money, sent out to advise the Pakistanis on how to manage their economy.

When President-elect Kennedy began looking for a Budget Director in late 1960, Lawyer Clark Clifford, who had been Harry Truman's No. 1 White House aide, told Kennedy that he knew of a man superlatively qualified for the job. Clifford reeled off a long list of qualifications and virtues. "And who is this paragon?'' asked Kennedy. Bell, of course.

Shortly after Bell was picked for the job, a press photographer asked him to "make out like you're saying something: say one, two, three, four." Said Bell, with a dry smile: "Forty-five billion." The bigness of that number proved to be prophetic. As Budget Director, Bell regarded spiraling expenditures and gaudy deficits with a cheerfulness that enraged congressional conservatives. Last summer Virginia's Democratic Senator Harry F. Byrd called upon Kennedy to dismiss Bell because he lacked the "requirements of fiscal responsibility and discipline." Far from firing him, Kennedy counted Bell as one of his most valuable advisers.

Windswept Job. Bell was reluctant to move from the familiar, congenial Budget Bureau to the stormswept Agency for International Development. Foreign aid is unpopular with the public and with Congress; morale at AID is badly eroded, and basic concepts of foreign aid are in flux (TIME, Nov. 23). The administrative lines at AID are so snarled up after repeated reorganizations that Lawyer Hamilton, despite extensive personnel changes, was unable to get it operating effectively during his year in the job. He also lost prestige when Congress slashed the foreign aid budget a lot more heavily than usual. Hamilton did not really do anything wrong as AID's director--but neither, by Kennedy's lights, did he do anything very right. Before Hamilton, nine men served as foreign aid chiefs since the start of the Marshall Plan in 1948,* and most of them found the job frustrating and thankless.

When asked what changes he plans to make at AID, Bell says he will not know until he gets there. But it is safe to bet that he will not reduce the dollar total.

His one notable public pronouncement on foreign aid before his appointment was the opinion, expressed in a speech last year, that the U.S. could afford to double the amount it was laying out for aid.

*1948-50 Paul G. Hoffman, businessman.

1950-51 William C. Foster, businessman, now head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

1951 Richard M. Bissell Jr., economist.

1951-53 Averell Harriman, heir in Government service, now Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs.

1953-55 Harold Stassen, politician.

1955-57 John B. Hollister, lawyer.

1957-59 James Hopkins Smith Jr., businessman.

1959-61 James Riddleberger, career diplomat, now Ambassador to Austria.

1961 Henry Labouisse, career diplomat, now Ambassador to Greece.

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