LETTERS
Letters Watergate Marjorie Boyd’s “The Watergate Story” [April] is perhaps the best piece I have ever read on how power in Washington really works. I’ve seen it from the Hill and the White...
...There is now a similar role to be played in foreign aid...
...Further (although I was, mercifully, spending a few blissful months of respite in Europe during the election), the campaign seemed to me as symbolic as any I have observed...
...With regard to our own book, I agree with most of your criticism...
...For many years I’ve tried to convince our aid people to focus on some of these areas rather than concentrating on GNP growth rates...
...In support of his belief that we can make our aid effective, Mr...
...and “keep looking” for aid projects which will have a chain effect of development...
...I’ve seen it from the Hill and the White House and she has hit the truth right on the head...
...Treires really want your readers to believe that increases of about $2 billion in defense and $4 billion in space spending from 1961 to 1965 had more power in generating recovery and growth than $14 billion of civilian budget increases and $15 billion of tax cuts...
...The problem is, no one cries ouch anymore...
...As to our “national interest,” I regard it as one of our political tragedies that men with the capacity for moral leadership do not exercise it, confining themselves instead to taking small-bore measurements of the popular attitudes and then aligning their own positions thereto...
...It’s as simple as that...
...Do you and Mr...
...Realerpolitik I’ve read your review of American Gov.ernment texts in the March issue of The Washington Monthly [ “Realerpolitik: The Texts Are Getting Better,” by Luke Popovich] . It is really very good-far better than most of the “academic” reviews (with the exception of a review in the Journal of U. S. Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences which praised our “realism,” but still condemns us as bourgeois capitalists...
...WALTER W. HELLER Minneapolis, Minn...
...In absolute numbers, it went up rapidly from $47.4 billion in 1961 to $53.6 billion in 1964, and then fell to $49.6 billion in 1965...
...If you will check the facts, you will find that Heller succeeded in conning you by using the old absolute-relative, shifty-baseyear ploy...
...DONALD M. FRASER Washington, D. C. Donald Fraser is a U. S. Representative from Minnesota and serves on the House Foreign Affairs Commit tee...
...In this chapter, Dye and I wrote separate, signed, statements, So you can now find out who likes elites and who wants to re-distribute political resources...
...Here are the detailed facts for the 1961-65 period: .Mr...
...JAMES J. TREIRES Arlington, Va...
...BILL MOYERS New York, New York Foreign Aid I’ve read your March article on foreign aid [“Busting Our Mental Blocks About Foreign Aid,” by James Fallows...
...I agree with your complaint that the book lacks a feel for the day-to-day nuts and bolts aspects of governmental life, and will take your objection very seriously in future editions...
...The option of minding our own business and letting Africans and Asians pursue their development free of any outside influence is no longer open to us...
...But first, what I don’t agree with is your notion that the Nixon-McCovern election doesn’t square with our description of elections as symbolic devices to cement the masses to the established order...
...As to the failure in prescription, welcome to the club...
...Fallows would have us undertake to reduce tribal and racial animosities within poor countries...
...Perhaps there are good and persuasive answers to these questions, but they have yet to be put forth...
...And if the partisans of traditional, bilateral aid hope to persuade Congress and the people of their program’s continuing validity, they are going to have to come up with something better than the discredited bromides of the past...
...The nearly unanimous response to the first edition was: if these guys are going to complain so much, what alternatives do they propose...
...So the challenge I tried to discuss was how we could find ideas that would foster a healthier form of development than that we now observe...
...Walter Heller is Regents’ Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers...
...Fallows never does engage with the question of our national interest in foreign aid...
...Heller said defense spending went down as a percent of Gross National Product from 1961 to 1965...
...These suggestions, I might add, are consistent with my own proposals of October 197 1-dismissed by the writer as “a few throw-away lines”except that I would also provide technical assistance grants and “substantial United States contributions” to such international lending agencies as the World Bank and the various regional banks...
...They seem well-conceived to relieve human suffering and to have a marginal effect on development-which in fact are all we can hope to accomplish in relation to the developing countries...
...The author replies: I did not, as Senator Church suggests, recommend “unprecedented intervention...
...However, we’ll have to wait until more detailed survey analysis of voter perception is available...
...For the four years, the government spent $17 billion m r e on defense than if it had maintained the 1961 level of spending...
...All we have to do is to recast the culture, history, and life-styles of the poor countries and they will be on their way to industrial and agricultural modernization...
...So, the second edition, which appeared in 1972, contains a new chapter entitled, “What to do about the establishment...
...You too quickly agreed with Heller’s main point-that defense spending did decrease during that administiation...
...Fallows recommends that we offer “alternate models” to old, unproductive life-styles through such means as a revived Peace Corps...
...Why, our constituents now ask, is it appropriate or necessary to expend large sums on the military and economic requirements of foreign countries when our budget and balance-of-payments are in extreme deficit, when the dollar is repeatedly devalued and under attack, and the Nixon Administration is drastically reducing social programs at home on the ground that we cannot afford them...
...This is the criticism Senator Church might have made against his colleagues who were slow to join him in opposing the war: too many were afraid of getting ahead of the voters...
...If we draw back from this task because of fears of cultural imperialism or intervention, it is worth remembering that our culture and others will continue to intrude everywhere whether we like it or not...
...Heller shows that he still retains the analytical flexibility required for an economist’s survival in Washington...
...FRANK CHURCH Washington, D. C. Frank Church is a U. S. Senator from Idaho and serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Commit tee...
...In support of his belief that we should undertake to modernize the poor countries of the world, the writer offers no arguments at all, taking it as axiomatic, it would seem, that foreign aid is in the national interest of the United States...
...It ought to be beneath your dignity to publish claptrap like that...
...In denying this by using only the 1965 data, Mr...
...Even if we could overcome our scruples about the “culture-busting”Mr...
...I’m convinced that the three points you mention, reducing racial and tribal animosities, encouraging ambition and individual motivations and developing a sense of group effort are central to the development process...
...Fallows offers certain grandiose propositions amounting to unprecedented intervention...
...I was particularly impressed by the clarity with which you traced the evolution of texts from traditional description through pluralist behavioralism to elite theory...
...alter the terms of trade in favor of the raw material exports of the poor countries...
...Fallows says somebody is going to do that anyway-can anyone suppose such a program to be remotely within our national capacity...
...Letters Watergate Marjorie Boyd’s “The Watergate Story” [April] is perhaps the best piece I have ever read on how power in Washington really works...
...To help bring about these epochal changes, Mr...
...too few took the risk of trying to explain their qualms to the public...
...Harmon Zeigler is co-author, with Thomas R. Dye, of The Irony of Democracy and teaches political science at the University of Oregon...
...It is indeed true that space and other programs grew even more, but it is also obvious that the defense budget was a mainstay of the Kennedy-Johnson prosperity...
...The anti-Communist argument for aid is bankrupt, and the development argument is weakened by failures...
...These are unexceptionable proposals, modest and sensible, but they fall far short of the “culture-busting’’ goals advocated by the author...
...Treires is correct in pointing out that defense spending rose from $47.4 billion to $49.6 billion, or $2.2 billion (but he is dead wrong in representing me as saying that defense spending had decreased during that period...
...In his recent article on foreign aid, Mr...
...To win, keep well within the confines of the center...
...But these red herrings pale by comparison with the rise in civilian expenditures over the same period from $49.7 billion to $63.7 billion, a rise of $14 billion (of which health, education, welfare, and manpower accounted for half...
...The Washington Monthly editor is also correct in asserting that space spending rose during that period-from $0.7 billion to $5.1 billion, or $4.4 billion...
...He would also have us emphasize “forms of aid we know to be effective” such as food relief...
...Heller on Defense In your February 1973 letters column, Walter Heller insisted that the KennedyJohnson Administration had not increased defense spending, but had created healthy economic growth through other means, such as the tax cut, etc...
...Instead, 1 pointed out that the world’s cultures are already so mixed and opened up that “intervention” is impossible to reverse...
...Perhaps it is thought to be obvious, but the American people do not seem to find it so, nor do increasing numbers of their elected representatives...
...Men who have themselves witnessed the extremes of poverty in the world, and who therefore sense the humane obligation we in this affluent nation bear, should try to explain this obligation to the voters of this country...
...encourage “ambition,” “individual motivation,” “the entrepreneurial spirit” and “pleasure in work...
...HARMON ZEIGLER Eugene, Ore...
...It seems to me that 1972 is a pretty goad illustration of the validity of our chapter on parties and elections, illustrating the durability of consensus...
...Professor Heller replies: Oh come now...
...and encourage the development of “that sense of community, or group effort, which distinguishes China from the Philippines, North Vietnam from the South...
...Add to the $14 billion boost in civilian spending the $15 billion of income tax cuts in 1962 and 1964, and one can readily see that defense and space increases totaling $6.6 billion were economic pygmies in the presence of giants...
...Just as Goldwater’s “radicalism” induced a massive electoral shift, so did McGovern’s...
...James Fallows avers that, despite past failures, we both can and should sustain a large-scale foreign aid program...
...In order to make our aid work, Mr...
Vol. 5 • May 1973 • No. 3
