Washington Report

...But the more knowledgeable diplomatic observers here, remembering the many failures at Soviet-American rapprochements, are content to await patiently the results of the travels of the next few months...

...If there is to be a significant change in American foreign aid emphasis, it will probably have to await the installation of a new administration in January...

...Yet few Americans were probably even aware that this year's final defense and foreign aid decisions were being made...

...The committee did not get around to completing and issuing its study on economic assistance until the foreign aid authorization and appropriations bills were well on their way through Congress...

...If, as the President says, the United States cannot afford a sizable housing program, the argument goes, why should Congress not reduce foreign aid appropriations...

...which the nine-man committee thought should be increased...

...Its first two reports discussed military aid...

...The defense budget and the foreign aid programs, which were considered by Congress as the Vice President made his way through the Soviet Union and Poland, probably will have a greater effect on the ultimate outcome of the East-West conflict than the globe-trotting of Nixon, Eisenhower and Khrushchev...

...too often the rest of the world remains a Congressional afterthought...

...Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D.Minn...

...It is always a long and sometimes a tortuous way from the appointment of a study group to the implementation of its recommendations, but in the past Jackson has demonstrated a commendable tenacity...

...The Russians have probably made as many errors of judgment in their foreign aid programs as has the United States...

...Most Congressmen seem to feel as helpless in trying to evaluate defense needs as are most other Americans, to whom the Pentagon appears to be an impenetrable but necessary evil of life in a world made unsafe for democracy by the Soviet Union...

...Congressmen still like to take care of their own constituents first...

...There seems to be no question that aid money has been misused, particularly in Laos and Vietnam...

...Foreign aid has been perhaps the greatest disappointment in this session of Congress...

...The reaction to this President-to-Premier approach to diplomacy has been generally favorable, however...

...Indeed, the Vice President's luck is phenomenal...

...a former Undersecretary of the Army...

...Furthermore...

...Although Vice President Richard M. Nixon's remarks in Moscow about Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev's appalling misconceptions of American life and misunderstanding of our intentions amounted to a broad hint that he was set for a barnstorming trip through the United States, few persons in Washington thought that they would be seeing him in September...

...The principal recommendations of the Draper Committee for economic aid would place the program on a long-term and better organized basis...

...Economic aid alone, of course, will not win or end the cold war...

...The debate on Capitol Hill was about as desultory as the national interest in these programs seems to have become, except among military contractors and others who have a dollars-and-cents concern with missiles and the machinery that is the hardware of so much economic aid...

...Despite all the criticism in Congress earlier this year of the Eisenhower defense program, the President got in a $39-billion military budget—no more and no less than he had requested...

...If he can combine that ability with some of the luck of a Nixon, economic assistance as well as other aspects of American foreign policy may be placed on a firmer and more effective foundation before such reconstruction is too late...

...The Presidential-election-year Congress of 1960 is unlikely to be interested in taking vet another new look at foreign aid...

...There is...

...But there often appears to be a better, if cynical, understanding of the importance of economic aid in Moscow than there has been in Washington in recent years...

...The committee was headed by William H. Draper Jr...

...1961...

...One encouraging development on Capitol Hill, however, is the establishment of a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Henry M. Jackson (D.-Wash...

...The Presidential candidates whose natural habitat is the Senate will be seeking more glamorous issues than the shipment of wheat to India or the dispatch of farm experts to the Middle East...

...may still hold the world's record for presidential-candidate talkathons with the Soviet leader, but who besides Nixon can take into the 1960 campaign a kinescope (in color, too) of a toe-to-toe debate with Khrushchev...

...During his trip little news was being made in Washington, and the Geneva Foreign Ministers' Conference was plodding toward the inconclusive climax that had been anticipated since it began in May...

...to study the Federal Government's policy-making machinery...

...Foreign aid champions looked especially toward the reports of the Draper Committee, which the President set up last year to appraise the aid programs...

...Jackson is concerned with the cumbersome bureaucracy which he believes has stifled American initiative in responding to Soviet cold war gambits...

...Perhaps it is the traditional American optimism that is sustaining the hopes which have been raised by the announcement that Khrushchev is at last coming to the United States and that President Eisenhower is going to the Soviet Union...

...Nevertheless, there probably would be far fewer cases of waste if Congress paid more attention to foreign aid and if the legislation authorizing the assistance programs allowed more careful public scrutiny of them...

...however, a rare kind of agreement in Washington that Nixon's visit to the USSR and to Poland has immensely enhanced his political status...

...Unfortunately, the proposals came too late in the session and only after the President himself had cooled toward the plans he had once advanced for a permanent economic aid program which would not be subject to the vagaries of annual appropriations...

...but when such assistance is considered in humanitarian terms as well as in the context of the East-West conflict the argument for increased amounts of assistance seems to be unassailable...

...There was a considerable amount of head-shaking at the first reports of the Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate, but the questions raised about diplomatic proprieties were soon forgotten in the aura of personal triumph which quickly enveloped the Nixon mission to Moscow...

...The constant reminders that the visits are unlikely to change the temperature of the cold war have not quelled the speculation about their probable outcome...

...President Eisenhower has taken an interest in the project and has even assigned a senior staff member of the National Security Council to work with the subcommittee, which includes Humphrey and Senator Karl E. Mundt (R.-S...

...This year, however, there was an expectation based on more than just hope that U.S...

...East-West Visits Overshadow Defense, Foreign Aid Budgets By Julius Duscha THE SPEED with which the Eisenhower-Khrushchev cultural and political exchange program was set up caught the capital by surprise...

...The perennial charges of waste in foreign assistance have also taken their toll on the aid appropriations this year...

...The friends of foreign aid are used to indiscriminate reductions in budgets for both military and economic assistance...

...foreign aid would better reflect the economic and military realities of the Soviet challenge, as well as the genuine needs of the newly free Asian and African nations...

...Nixon is now the man who not only helped clear the way for Khrushchev's trip to the U.S., but he is also the man who talked back to the Kremlin boss...

...Some of the Democratic members of Congress who have never been particularly keen about foreign aid have taken delight this year in throwing the Presidential strictures against excessive Government spending back at Eisenhower during the foreign aid debates...