Ideology vs. the IAF:

...Augustine found the fact of silent reading unusual enough to comment on it...

...Both were men of unusual vision, integrity, and experience...

...When the public debates and big decisions take place, they occur within a context established by many small and less public choices...

...The new president will be crucial...

...One wonders what more they require...

...The IAF had been naive, the report argued, for putting into practice its belief that "they know how" -- that Latin Americans at the grass roots knew best what they needed and could take responsibility for their own initiatives...

...As the Heritage Foundation has put it, "development" will mean not working with "socialistic" projects such as cooperatives but rather those under the guidance o f " suitable local businessmen...

...The firing of its president portends a larger campaign, but the IAF has not been dismantled yet...

...There is no indicator, they declare, that will "tell us where and by how much hunger has gone up in recent years...

...That implied, in Congress's view, independence from the constraints of official diplomacy and short-term foreign policy...

...On one hand, they assert that we can control and manage social change in Latin Amrerica, that it can be "incremental" and not "convulsive" -- in effect, that "we know how," not they...

...The administration showed particular animus toward Bell, a former Deputy Undersecretary in HEW and Ford Foundation official (director of the office in Chile that moviegoers will remember as an island of decency in Missing...

...El Salvador is likely to be the test case...

...policy, and was insufficiently responsive to our embassies abroad and the local organizations they were backing...

...It is difficult for us to imagine an age in which students and teachers commonly read aloud, even when studying alone...

...They suggest a radically different approach to development for the IAF -- one which seems to have considerable fit with the broader conceptions of the Kissinger Commission...

...Its military approach is as clear as the Teddy Roosevelt-like naval task forces off both Central America's coasts, the 3,000 U.S...

...Augustine says, "When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still...

...Disbursing 1,600 grants for $170 million in 25 countries, it was widely praised for actually reaching the poor and identifying the United States with humane and constructive change...

...In its dozen years of operation, the IAF has been recognized as a singular success...

...This column will come to no firm conclusions...

...For three years it has attempted to change the IAF's key personnel and basic purposes...

...Isn't it worth legitimating a U.S.commitment to such values, even if the price is continuing military aid...

...Socrates worried that the advent of writing would sap the power of memory by allowing'people to rely on the crutch written words provided...

...Henry Kissinger, at the center of the policy process in those days, was tough but correct in his public pronouncements toward Allende's government in Chile...

...In addition, the IAF had shown a willingness in some cases to support groups which, if not actually linked to Communist or other leftist parties, were certainly not friends of the Reagan administration...

...The Reagan administration, however, has been hostile to the Inter-American Foundation since the day it came into office...

...But what of the other side of the compromise, the unprecedented program of aid, the concern for "democracy" and "human development...

...But there are strong pressures from the administration to increase our aid there greatly and to target it explicitly to our "friends...

...They do not allow us to work with anyone who shares our values but insists on his or her integrity, anyone who does not give us ritualistic reassurance of client status to our patronage...

...it was written in order to be proclaimed...

...It has enjoyed unusually broad congressional support -- from conservatives such as Jack Kemp (R-N.Y...

...It has cut the U.S...

...But sustaining a I l l I 1 I I I II II I Of several minds: John Garvey defense of its autonomy and character will not be easy...

...it was good advice then, as it is now...

...One of these is staffing...

...Finally, the report concluded, the IAF operated with autonomy from official U.S...

...The government's own official statistics show that poverty has risen dramatically since 1978, and the poverty line is, by definition, an estimate of people with less income than what is thought to be needed for "an emergency short-term diet when funds are very low...

...In Augustine's time it is clear that the written word was still close to speech...

...But behind the scenes, as we learned later, he was willing to do virtually anything to sabotage the Chilean experiment...

...Central American Development Organization, headed by a United States official holding veto power...

...In addition there have been the medical studies, the state and local studies, the reports by national church and voluntary organizations, and the testimony of elected officials at federal, state, and local levels...

...Institutionally that means "closer coordination" of the whole U.S...

...All could approach him freely and it was not unusual for visitors to be announced, so that often, when we came to see him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud...

...The Kissinger Commission on Central America has presented its recommendation as a "bipartisan consensus...

...The IAF was founded in 1969 on the initiative of Congress as an experimental alternative to unwieldy existing aid programs...

...NANCY AMIDEI (Nancy Am~dei is director of the Eood Research and Action Center in Washington, D.C., and formerly served as deputy assistant secretary for welfare legislation at HEW...

...There is something defen...

...Its intentions have been spelled out quite clearly for this small agency, and they speak volumes about its conception of our broader role in Latin American development...

...The fate of the Inter-American Foundation is in the hands of Congress...

...There are traces of words-as-proclamation in political speaking and on newscasts...

...In December 1983 it used its new majority on the IAF's board (in a straight partisan vote, the first in its history) to fire the organization's president, Peter Bell...

...The military side of the proposed bargain is clear enough...

...In the absence of other more sophisticated studies, it is a very good surrogate for a "hunger count...

...Over the years the IAF recruited a staff that belies the reputation of government agencies -- it is energetic, idealistic, experienced, efficient...

...President Reagan's task force apparently wishes to see a return to those days...

...To read silently, to regard reading as a private act, had to be explained...

...embassy in Latin America after Mexico), the hundreds of millions in training and mat&iel to E1 Salvador, the covert aid to the congas, and the studied refusal to foreswear an invasion of Nicaragua...

...and the backing of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations...

...Task force members carded on a discussion at their final meeting that made clear their ignorance of the programs, their history, and even of the recommendations on which they cast their votes...

...The criteria for "target groups" will also be made explicitly political, bringing them "in tune with U.S...

...We would sit there quietly, for no one had the heart to disturb him when he was so engrossed in study...

...to liberals such as Michael Barnes (D-Md...

...How would such a new development organization operate...

...ALEXANDER WILDE (Alexander Wilde, who formerly headed the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., is now Senior Fellow at the Helen Kellogg Institute, Notre Dame...

...The report lauded the IAF for its low overhead and cost-effectiveness but castigated it for three basic sins...

...The Inter-American Foundation operated on very different premises through its first dozen years...

...After the new president is named, there are several key areas which will indicate whether the administration is continuing to follow the Heritage Foundation scenario...

...THE IAF AN OMEN FOR FUTURE AID A DOZEN YEARS ago, the Nixon administration used to respond to critics of its foreign policy by asking them to "watch what we do, not what we say...

...That does pot seem to be the context Reagan policy is constructing...

...The IAF has believed that the violence and politicization of conditions in recent years have necessarily limited its useful role there...

...The past three years give a fair basis for forecasts about a (second) Reagan administration...

...It faces a formidable coalition of ideological and bureaucratic forces that would like to remake it...

...And it must compete for congressional attention with the large issues of war and peace that now have such unfortunate immediacy...

...Our foreign policy, however -- what our government actually does abroad -- is to a large extent determined in dozens of specific arenas within a vast institutional apparatus...

...Across the country, members of the press have done their share in documenting hunger in reports carried on the front pages of newspapers nationwide...

...Our real policy -- what our government actually did -was quite different from our declared policy...

...But the administration's concerns are more institutional than personal...

...It essentially endorses what the administration is already doing (as it reflects Kissinger's own Hobbesian world view...

...The President's Task Force may have no "indicators" that hunger is a problem, but millions of Americans have the evidence of their own experience to tell them otherwise...

...The Reagan administration may well accept these Commonweal: 72 recommendations in some form...

...Our policy, it says, must address the needs both of security and development...

...I hope it will reveal something of the oddness of our situation, the strangeness of our relationship to words...

...With Kissinger back in our Latin American policy again, it is worth bringing out the old Nixonian advice -- particularly since Reagan's administration, unlike Nixon's, considers the hemisphere a matter of "vital national interest...

...So, too, should any changes of criteria for grant making...

...Peter Bell and his predecessor, William Dyal, were selected after screening by an outside consulting agency...

...Significant clues are provided by the way the administration has dealt recently with a small, widely respected agency called the Inter-American Foundation...

...When words became an interior commodity, something private and detached, a profound shift happened...

...It was meant to support grass-roots projects directly, bypassing governmental bureaucracy...

...That is why there are national standards and federal programs today: because of compelling evidence that food programs operating under state and local controls left many people hungry and malnourished...

...I I I I I I I 1 I I l l I It was probably the invention of movable type and the democratization of literacy tl~at led us to separate the word from its place in the public and physical world --- by which I mean the place in which words had to do with the the human voice and social role of the person who proclaimed them...

...We should "foster h o p e . . , for a better fife," but a hope "based on a realistic understanding that progress occurs gradually and incrementally," not in "convulsive and chaotic shifts...

...They display an odd mixture of arrogance and lack of confidence...

...foreign policy" and excluding support to organizations judged "socialist or Marxist-Leninist...

...Meanwhile, their principal finding amounted to an exercise in trivializing a serious national problem...

...The cadences of a political speech would be clearly out of place in casual conversation (as would the curious habit of politicians who refer to themselves in the third person" the governor of Illinois, Jim Thompson, will sometimes refer to Jim Thompson, as if he himself were absent - - a habit very little children also have...

...troops already in Honduras (with the biggest U.S...

...The liturgical settings which we are used to in synagogues and churches arose in their original form during a time when words were meant to be proclaimed...

...Augustine offers several possible explanations for Ambrose's curious habit of reading quietly and concludes that "whatever his reason, we may be sure it was a good one" (Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin, Penguin Books, 1961...

...On the other hand, they show a deep lack of confidence in our own judgment and in our own character as a great and liberal nation...

...Whether a new president will reaffirm those strengths -- or change them -- should bequickly apparent...

...IDEOLOGY VS...

...In November 1981 the Heritage Foundation issued a report on the IAF which has proven an accurate guide to administrar r tion action to date...

...They assert that we can serve the national interest and know our friends only with a political litmus test, administered by the White House...

...The Heritage Foundation language may be ideological, but the assumptions of its analysis are widely shared in the Reagan administration...

...At a minimum it tells us whether there are more or fewer people at risk of hunger, and the general magnitude of the problem...

...It remains to be seen whether the current search committee, all appointed under the 10 February 1984:73 Reagan administration, will follow the same process or will find someone of the same quality...

...Until now, the Inter-American Foundation, in its modest way, has suggested that the United States could genuinely cooperate with Latin Americans in their own development, not merely patronize or manipulate them...

...And the picture in 1982 was clear: between 34 and 46 million Americans had incomes so low as to put them at risk of hunger...

...The administration makes no mystery about its use of military instruments (and indeed takes palpable pleasure over its exhibitions of pumping iron...

...A duty to "promote the concepts and practice of free enterprise" goes with the "responsibility to develop democratic institutions...

...The written word itself is very new in terms of the whole of human history...

...It has worked with exceptional morale and a fruitful delegation of authority...

...They and the hungry deserved better than this $350,000 presidential amateur hour 'on hunger...

...I I I WHEN WORDS GO PRIVATE A REVOLUTION ALTERING OUR SENSE OF THE SACRED W RITING of Ambrose, St...

...Now the Kissinger Commission has recommended a five-year, $8 billion regional development program...

...The Inter-American Foundation has defended its record against these criticisms, but what is important here is the philosophy behind them...

...The answers turn on what our government, in the name of those values, will actually do...

...today we consider a man who moves his lips when he reads to be barely literate...

...The report speaks of "a possible exception" (to the general rule that undemutfition is not a problem), of "some people" who "have difficulties with access to food," and of "children who are sometimes sent to bed without food...

...How would it actually use such aid...

...Imagine the tone of voice and wagging head motions of television anchorfolk Commonweal: 74...

...Three projects of the Chilean church were singled out for special criticism...

...sive about Augustine's assertion that Ambrose's quiet reading must have had a good reason behind it...

...Altogether it was a shabby performance...

...Its approach to development may be less obvious...

...The general impression left by the report is of rare occurrences, of the sort of occasional lapses in coverage that are naturally found in any large system...

...III II I IIIli I illli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Latin America & the U.S...

...development effort of private and governmental organizations...

...Once before, food programs were optional, and many local governments refused to provide any food assistance at all or, in some places, refused food during seasons when there was fruit to be picked, or to people who worked in voter registration drives...

...contribution for World Bank loans to the poorest nations (IDA), but it has also put through a Caribbean Basin Initiative worth $350 million (some $75 million of which is targeted to El Salvador...

...In the days before there were national standards for food stamps, malnutrition was widespread among the poor and reports of civil-fights violations in the provision of food aid were common...

...It has suggested a new...

...There are other strange hints in the lives of various saints --- they are said to have prayed aloud frequently, and this is commented on matter-of-factly, as if it were more common to pray out loud than to pray quietly...

...Without arguing that the shift was a good or bad thing, I want to suggest that we have not considered it enough...

...What has happened is not, I think, a matter of human evolution so much as it is a radically changed relationship with words...

...The House Foreign Affairs hearings at the end of January may help clarify the administration's intentions and mobilize the IAF's congressional supporters...

...Much of what we consider a silent, interior thing -- reading or prayer, for example -- was at one point rather noisy...