Bell's Toll

For years, the task of running the U.S. foreign aid program was known as one of Washington's quickest routes to early retirement. In its first 13 years, the program consumed no fewer than nine directors, none of whom lasted longer than two years. By such standards, the program's tenth director has been an exemplar of endurability. Last week, when David E. Bell, 47, turned in his resignation as administrator of the Agency for International Development, he had put in a record three and a half years on the job.

"Bushed & Broke." Bell, who will become vice president in charge of international programs for the Ford Foundation, confessed that his long-running performance had left him "bushed and broke." AID, by contrast, is in surprisingly good shape. In the face of persistent Congressional assaults on the program, Bell, a Harvard-trained economist who was summoned to Washington in 1961 as President Kennedy's first budget director, helped trim the fat by rejecting the notion of aid as "a worldwide welfare program" and insisting on "self-help."

Bell's tough-minded approach has paid off. "There is now ample evidence," he writes in the current Foreign Affairs, "that those countries will develop fastest which rely most heavily on multiple sources of private and local initiative--incontrast to countries which rely most heavily on central direction and control."

Back to Work. When Bell departs at month's end--by which time the $3.4 billion foreign aid program for 1967 should be well on its way to enactment--he will have the satisfaction of leaving a hand-picked successor in his place: William S. Gaud Jr., 58, who has been AID'S deputy administrator since 1964. A Yale-educated lawyer, Gaud (pronounced Gowd) began his public service as assistant corporation counsel for New York City under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who thought Gaud was qualified to become mayor himself some day. An army colonel in charge of lend-lease operations for the China-Burma-India theater during World War II, Gaud put in a brief postwar stint as special assistant to War Secretary Robert Patterson, then went into private practice in New York City. Not until 1961 did he return to public service to direct aid programs for the Middle East and South Asia. "I've had a 15-year rest," he said then, "so it's about time I got back to work."

Despite his reputation as an able administrator, Gaud's qualities as an innovator are unknown, and his ability to get along with the President has yet to be tested. But his attitude toward aid meshes well with L.B.J.'s own insistence on "action, not promises" from recipient nations. "You've got to help other countries build up their independence until they can stand on their own feet," says Gaud. "Sure there are problems involved, but none is as bad as what would happen to them if they lost their independence."

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