Part II
U.S. Foreign Aid in the
Last Half of the Twentieth Century
88
Chapter Five
Point Four, the Cold War
and the Legacy of Vietnam
“AID!” the farmer cried. “Look at you....” He pointed, sweeping
his finger from one charred remembrance of a home to another.
“Here is your American AID!” The farmer spat on the ground and
walked away.1
In retrospect, however, foreign aid reached its peak in 1960s.2
America is what everyone here wants to be like….3
We have “discovered that the need to influence these countries is
far less than we imagined.” We now know that the economic
development of the poor countries will be “very slow.”4
Thousands of pages of mimeographed reports and documents sent
from Saigon have been piled haphazardly in out-of-the-way files in
the University library, un- catalogued and unused.5
Origins in the Cold War
Foreign Assistance before 1950
Foreign aid, after 1950, did not develop in a vacuum. There was a two hundred year
legacy of state and non-state action which preceded it. Two themes are reinforced here as we
examine the first decade of institutionalized foreign aid. First, there was a long history of
financial transfer and exchange that in part defined international diplomacy. Secondly, between
1500 and 1960, colonial empires defined a system of international governance including
overseas support that impacted on international assistance in the last half of the twentieth
century.
International assistance at the end of the Second World War was intended to be
humanitarian and temporary, and over in two or three years. Early foreign assistance was limited
to post-war Europe and her colonies, China, Japan and the Philippines (and other members of the
U.S. informal client states). U.S. monetary assistance was expected to finance the transition to
peace.6 After that time, the reconstruction organizations could be dissolved; the technical
personnel sent home. The situation changed with the decision to expand foreign assistance
worldwide after 1948 though the early designers of foreign aid continued to view assistance as
temporary.
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In the period after World War II, the U.S. developed certain “rules of the game” for its
foreign aid.7 The systems of operations and commodity procurement were based upon those that
had developed in wartime and through the operations of the Interim Aid Group in the State
Department and the Office of International Trade in the Department of Commerce. Much of the
contracting was based upon military models, well developed by World War II. The grants
process which provided money for non-profits working internationally likewise had its roots in
the aftermath of World War I.
The Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) was created on April 3, 1948 to
administer foreign aid under the Marshall Plan. It operated on the assumption that they were gap
filling at a point where there was a financial deficit in the war torn countries of Europe and Asia.
The ECA originally was programmed to end in 1952. Two aspects of foreign aid policy had
their origins in the ECA: there would be strict scrutiny of all individual transactions and the
foreign aid regulations would require that the agency would buy American.
After 1948, there were a number of components to foreign aid and technical assistance as
the U.S. government moved toward a more comprehensive, but perhaps more naïve, growthoriented approach to foreign aid.8 These included the assumption that development was based
on a model of self-help, private enterprise and individual initiative. To many development
theorists, it was the absence of individual initiative that caused underdevelopment. Humanitarian
aid had to be changed to incorporate developmental principles in order for it to be successful.
Wise guidance to indigenous peoples on the part of the change agent was built into this principle.
Prior to 1950, large-scale economic aid was only available to a few non-European
countries, excluding China and the Philippines, in the form of loans provided by the ExportImport Bank, established in 1934, and from the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development.9 By 1950, however, according to Jacob Kaplan, the leaders of the war time
alliance began to hear a clamor for foreign aid from the “underdeveloped nations of the earth
who were already blaming their circumstances on the “exploitation by the colonial powers and
the industrialized countries.”10
U.S. assistance to the Philippines had begun again in 1946 as the country gained its
independence. Other countries outside of Europe that received foreign assistance just after
World War II included Morocco, Libya, Ethiopia, Tunisia and Somaliland. In South America,
Columbia and Venezuela were early recipients. Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, and Indochina in Asia
received support. Initially, in Asia, as in Europe, it was thought that international assistance
would be required only on a temporary transitional basis, as countries moved from war to peace.
International assistance would be humanitarian in nature and would provide at least
minimum amounts of consumers’ goods and raw materials so that war-devastated countries
could reactivate their agricultural and industrial productive capacity and restore or reconstruct
their communications systems. Secretary of State Dean Acheson also promoted the link between
foreign aid and foreign trade markets.11
U.S. attitudes in the late 1940s “expressed a sense of omnipotent capacity with which the
United States emerged from World War II.”12 As U.S. foreign aid policy developed after the
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Second World War, “ what U.S. officials did in the reconstruction of Europe [and after]
continued to follow the American’s impulse to address other people’s problems by concentrating
on one-shot solutions, usually by applying their own experience to them.”13 It was an optimistic
beginning to the last half of the twentieth century.
The 1950 Point Four Program
The Point Four Program of foreign aid was proposed by President Harry S. Truman as the
fourth point in his Jan. 20, 1949, inaugural address. Truman “called for a ‘bold new program’ for
making the benefits of American science and industrial progress available to ‘underdeveloped’
countries.”14 Early assessments of Truman’s Point Four speech made clear that:
United States foreign aid has been a powerful instrument for strengthening
orderly social processes in an era during which the exploitation of poverty, of
bleak economic horizons, and of frustration of even modest national aspirations
threatens both our own national security and the peace of the world.15
The Point Four Program came directly out of the experiences of the Marshall Plan. U.S.
assistance was organized by policy makers linked to the Economic Cooperation Administration
(ECA) but the Point Four legislation created a separate Technical Cooperation Administration
(TCA) to administer foreign aid outside of Europe. There was to be no duplication between the
two programs.
The foreign aid industry overall was well developed by 1950, the year that the Point Four
Program began. A bibliography of international administration published shortly thereafter
noted that there were 215 organizations around the world involved in international development
work in that year.16 By 1951, foreign grants, worldwide, amounted to almost 34 billion dollars.
The foreign aid programs employed 630 Americans and more than 800 Europeans in the
development and administration of its programs by 1950.17 Supporters of Point Four suggested
that missing from many developing countries were skills and that technical assistance, the focus
of the new program. “American Know How,” as Esman and Montgomery laconically point out,
would end the skills gap.18
The Point Four Program shifted international assistance from post-war Europe to the
developing world. U.S. foreign policy focused on the principles of modernization of the
countryside which was, “an important part of so-called nation-building throughout the post-war
period….”19 It also committed the U.S. to a policy of what Jacob Kaplan called “enlightened
self-interest” and moved the foreign aid system towards a more permanent and coordinated set of
institutions. As Walter Sharp put it:
What are the underlying assumptions of Point Four? First, that the United States
should assume leadership in a cooperative effort to raise the living standards of
more than a billion of the earth’s peoples who are now the victims of
undernourishment, disease, and ignorance. Second, through such an effort the
economies of both advanced and underdeveloped countries can eventually be
strengthened. Third, that technical assistance and capital investment can be
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combined in a program which will help the underdeveloped areas to attain a
balanced economic development while avoiding the evils of exploitation and social
disruption. Fourth, that the peoples of such areas can thereby be rallied to the cause
of democratic freedom and against Soviet communism.20
The final legislation for Point Four was approved by Congress on June 5, 1950. Initially,
the Point Four Program was only intended to provide technical assistance. Developing countries
were to seek foreign financing for their development programs from private programs and the
World Bank.21 Only a limited amount of capital was available for Indochina and a number of
dependent overseas territories. This proved unworkable, however, and funding became a part of
the TCA mandate.
The Point Four borrowed significantly from pre-War precepts of international assistance
provided by American missionaries, private agencies and the State Department offices which
administered international assistance prior to 1948. 22 The big difference after Point Four was
that the U.S., and eventually most developed nations, would create huge aid bureaucracies in
order to implement their programs.23 In 1950, in recognition of the need for specialized
professional expertise in non-Western countries, the Truman administration established the
separate organization, the Technical Cooperation Administration, to fund (under grants and
contracts) foreign and technical assistance.
The Cold War prevented the demise of the Economic Cooperation Administration and it
merged with the Technical Cooperation Administration and security assistance agencies to form
the Mutual Security Administration in 1951. The Mutual Security Administration initially
became the Foreign Operations Administration under President Dwight D. Eisenhower and in
July of 1955 was renamed the International Cooperation Administration. In September 1961, the
Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 created the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID).24
In 1950, in addition to the Cold War, the world leadership inherited the twin legacy of
colonialism and imperialism that had defined international technical assistance for more than a
century. The entry of the U.S. into institutionalized foreign aid in the 1950s coincided with the
disintegration of the old European Empires and the proliferation of newly independent countries
in Asia and later in Africa. Also part of the legacy was a new alliance system that was disturbed
and mistrustful and a citizenry in Europe that was edgy and rebellious.25
Various critics of the Point Four Program warned of impossible promises made in the
Point Four speech; some calling it both foolish in the modesty of the amounts promised and a
“hoax” played on the poor nations of the world.26 As the United States approached the Point
Four Program in the post-war period, Curti and Birr warned policy makers to learn from the past.
“[If] American experience in the past is neglected or overlooked and the mistakes of previous
missions are repeated, Point Four may turn out to be merely one more grand scheme that
failed.”27
Direct assistance continued to the defeated powers of Germany, Austria and Japan until
the mid-1950s. By the early 1950s, in addition to Japan, the U.S. was providing assistance to a
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number of Asian countries: Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines,
Indochina and Burma. A number of U.S. administered territories, including trust territories in
the Caribbean and the Pacific also received assistance. The proposed 1952 financial
authorizations are provided in Table 5.1.
Table 5.1
U.S. 1952 Financial Authorization by Region28
Europe
Military assistance
Economic assistance
$5,293,000,000
1,675,000,000
Asia and the Pacific
Military assistance
Economic and technical assistance
Korean reconstruction under UN
555,000,000
262,500,000
112,500,000
Near East and Africa
Military assistance
Economic and technical assistance
415,000,000
125,000,000
American Republics
Military assistance
Technical assistance
40,000,000
22,000,000
TOTAL
$8,500,000,000
The origins of Asian foreign aid lay in the aborted Chinese and Korean rehabilitation
programs. China had fallen to the Communists in 1949. As Sharp has noted, of a total of $230
million that had been made available by 1950, only $139.5 million was authorized for
procurement, and only $81 million was actually spent when the mission to Korea ceased to
function in the wake of the Korean War.29 “The remaining $44 million,” Sharp went on,
“became the basis for a new aid program in Burma, Indonesia, Thailand, and the three
Associated Indo-Chinese States of Laos, Cambodia and Viet-Nam.”30
In six Asian countries: Formosa, the three Associated States of Indochina, Thailand and
the Philippines, Economic Cooperation Administration programs (under the Marshall Plan) were
“accompanied by military assistance programs, the latter being administered by United States
Military Assistance Advisory Groups.”31 In order to “operate the program in the field, ECA
organized country staffs known as Special Technical and Economic Missions (STEMS). ... More
than twice this amount ($535 million) was concurrently allocated for military assistance to “the
general area of China (including the Philippines and the Republic of Korea).”32 When China fell
to the Communists this money was reprogrammed for East and Southeast Asia.
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Critics of foreign aid began to look back into history for lessons. There was a pre-war
experience with Latin America in the 1930s. Foreign assistance in Latin American was a
disappointment and among Latin Americans by mid-century there were both disagreeable
memories as well as perceptions continued U.S. interference and political pressure in Latin
America’s internal affairs. Both were often cited as reasons why foreign assistance failed.33
Everett and Helen Hughes, writing as early as 1950 were blunt:
The exportation of technical skills and capital to unindustrialized areas is not a
new thing under the sun. In the past its characteristic form has been the
exploitation of colonial territories by imperialist powers.34
Despite these warnings, there existed an optimism that defined foreign aid in the middle
years of the twentieth century. “In an atmosphere of freedom and goodwill…,” Curti and Birr
went on, “Americans can, through Point Four and its successive programs, be of great help in
bringing some of the blessings of liberty and well-being to needy peoples of the world.”35
By the early 1950s, the Economic Cooperation Administration had expanded its
operations to the Asia region by combining commodity grants with specific technical assistance
projects. These were, given the nature of the developing Cold War, not targeted just at general
economic development but also to stimulate the production of strategic materials needed for the
defense sector. “With its vast superior bargaining power,” According to Sharp, “the United
States can induce certain underdeveloped countries to accept economic aid on conditions
designed to promote a particular U.S. foreign policy objective; e.g. increased production of
strategic raw materials.”36
Table 5.2
United States Foreign Aid by Program for 1945-1948
(in million dollars)37
1945-1948
Program
Gross Grants
Gross Credits
Lend-lease
1,957
Civilian supply
2,360
UNRRA
3,172
Greek-Turkish aid
165
Philippine rehabilitation
130
China aid
120
Technical assistance
66
Surplus property
1,234
British loan
3,750
Export-Import Bank
2,087
Others
299
Technical assistance, in its contemporary form, began with the Point Four Program in
1950. As Paul Mosley points out, “It is in the early 1950s that one sees the beginning of aid in
94
its present-day sense, as a transaction between sovereign states, with the beginning of the U.S.
development program in Southeast Asia.”38 This program, over the next twenty years would
define both foreign policy and foreign aid in the post-war world. Table 5.2 presents figures for
U.S. Foreign Aid by Program for the years 1945-1948 while Table 5.3 below provides a
summary of U.S. grants and loans under Point Four terms. Table 5.4 gives the numbers for U.S.
foreign aid in terms of gross grants and credits, for the period 1945-1957.
Table 5.3
U.S. Foreign Aid Grants and Loans
Grants in 1952
(Amounts are shown in millions of dollars)39
Lend-lease (for civilian supplies)
UNRRA, post-UNRRA and Interim Aid
Civilian supplies, Occupied Areas
Greek-Turkish Aid
Philippine Rehabilitation
Chinese Stabilization and Aid
Korean Aid
European Recovery Program (ECA)
Technical assistance and Inter-American aid
(including Point Four)
Other Aids
Total Grants
$ 1,968
3,444
5,104
670
635
524
237
10,998
159
368
$24,107
Loans
Lend-lease (excluding settlement credits)
Special British loan
Export-Import Bank loans
Surplus property (including merchant ships)
European Recovery (ECA)
Other loans
Total Loans
TOTAL – all forms of economic assistance
72
3,750
2,688
1,339
1,219
603
$ 9,671
$33,778
Table 5.4
United States Foreign Aid--Gross Grants and Credits, 1945-1957
(in million dollars)40
Year
Gross Grants
Gross Credits
Total
1946
2,289
3,245
5,534
1947
2,049
4,183
6,232
95
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
4,078
5,363
4,173
4,586
4,794
6,317
4,929
4,247
4,423
3,999
1,444
690
453
428
825
712
387
401
484
980
5,522
6,053
4,626
5,014
5,619
6,029
5,316
4,648
4,907
4,979
The First Decade
The early foreign assistance period for the U.S. was characterized by by its advocates as a
success. Despite a modicum of criticism, especially linked to Latin American sensitivities, a
broad consensus had developed around the goals of foreign aid. The post-war world, as Stephen
Browne has pointed out, was thoroughly Keynesian. The goal under Point Four and subsequent
aid programs was the promotion of industrial growth and the creation of a skilled labor force in
Less Developed Countries.41
Concerned over the menacing spread of Communist influence in the Far East, the State
Department, in the early spring of 1950, sent a survey mission to Southeast Asia to examine the
potentialities of an American program of economic and technical aid in that area. 42 Unlike
Western Europe after the war, the region of Southeast Asia did not need large quantities of
dollars for its import requirements. Analysts concluded that its capacity to absorb capital was
limited. Rather its needs lay in “managerial and technical resources to carry forward necessary
programs of reconstruction, rehabilitation, and development.”43
The International Development Act of 1950 centralized the supervision of “military,
economic, and technical assistance programs…entrusted…to the director for Mutual Security
[created in 1951] in the Executive Office of the President, thus reflecting lack of confidence on
the part of Congress in the wisdom of the Department of State in handling the allocation of
program funds.”44 There was also a movement for the Technical Cooperation Administration
(TCA) to take over the management of technical assistance as well as grants in aid.45 By 1953,
American foreign aid policy stressed both “military and political considerations and minimize[d]
the purely economic and humanitarian motivations of foreign assistance.46 As a result of the
Cold War, and particularly the U.S. intervention in Korea, U.S. foreign aid increased
significantly under President Eisenhower.
As the Cold War evolved, foreign aid went from being a tool, though benign, of foreign
U.S. anti-communism in the late 1950s, to include a “social evangelism forming around the idea
of American-financed economic development in the Third World….”47 As Townsend Hoopes
has noted, “Gradually it dawned on wiser heads that our military assistance provided far less
influence and leverage…than did our economic aid….”48 This policy became a part of the Cold
War struggle. “Nearly all democratic theorists of the time expected social reform to pre-empt
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social revolution,” according to John Montgomery. 49 Foreign aid became a weapon rather than a
resource. As had been the case during World War II, America requested bases and staging areas
in return for large amounts of American assistance.50
From the early post-war period, the assumption was that technical assistance was
temporary. As a result, during the 1950s, foreign aid underwent almost continuous
reorganization. Loans were dispersed and coordinated separately from grants and technical
assistance, each of which also had different organizational structures. Special jurisdictions in the
U.S. foreign aid process were defined for the Departments of Agriculture, Labor, Commerce,
Health, Education and Welfare.51 The assumption was that countries would graduate from
foreign aid as they approached the mysterious take off point identified by development
economists.52
During the first decade (1950-1960) technical assistance was very hands-on and “the
administrators of the Technical Cooperation Administration programs [expected] most of their
field employees to work with foreign people in villages and rural areas.”53 Modernization of
rural sector activities was important and “the spread of technology to economically backward
regions of the globe [was] a by-product, if not a direct aim, of the overseas activities of religious,
philanthropic, business and governmental organizations for a long time.”54
During its early years there was a state centric focus to foreign aid both among donors
and in recipient countries. The goal of international aid was to assist developing countries in
what was in the 1950s called the breakthrough, or take off point, to higher levels of capital
accumulation.55 In the countries targeted for this breakthrough, foreign aid and technical
assistance would fill the gap. The concern overall during this period was state capacity building,
particularly in terms of development administration.56 The private sector however was seen as
available to do development work.57
U.S. foreign aid institutions were still seen as temporary in the 1950s and their continued
function was formalized on a year by year basis. Even after the creation of USAID in 1961,
foreign assistance was still considered by many to be a temporary process. 58 Because of
uncertainties about the future, the foreign aid maxim of aid agencies (often unstated) was to
move money quickly.
Staffing Foreign Aid
In 1951, reflecting the Cold War atmosphere at the time, the Economic Cooperation
Administration was reconstituted the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) in 1951, headed by W.
Averill Harriman. This brought military and economic assistance under one umbrella. 59 In 1953,
under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, MSA was renamed the Foreign Operations
Administration under the stewardship of Harold Stassen. In these early post-war years,
development specialists often focused “their attention on flows of commodities, capital or labour.
They [said] less about flows of knowledge, culture and institutions.”60 Particularly under
Eisenhower, economic and social assistance was left to the university community and nongovernmental Organizations.
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Two more name changes occurred over the next decade (1953-1963). The International
Cooperation Agency (ICA) was created in 1955. It would be renamed again in 1961 the U.S.
Agency for International Development (USAID). That name stuck. Earlier organizations had
been temporary and functionally specific. ICA/USAID operated on the assumption that the
national interest required a long term international development program with greater operational
flexibility.61 Despite the creation of ICA, however, a negative image of foreign aid had
developed in some sectors of public opinion by the late 1950s, particularly among political
conservatives.
Table 5.5
Areas
Agencies
All
Agencies1
State
ICA
USIA
Defense
Treasury
Commerce
HEW
Agriculture
Paid U.S. Civilian Employees of the Federal Government in Foreign Countries
By Agency and Area (June 30, 1958)62
Near and
Far East and
Latin
Middle East
Southeast
All Areas Africa America Europe
South Asia
Asia
Undistributed
32,805
1,840
2,548
13,837
3,172
11,335
73
6,462
3,338
1,168
20,926
122
434
191
164
361
349
55
990
1,096
771
134
325
10
103
47
62
2,666
136
361
10,395
87
118
27
47
1,187
893
287
614
4
114
49
24
1,149
1,119
331
8,602
21
52
44
17
3
70
47
24
14
1
ICA- International Cooperation Agency, USIA- United States Information Agency, and HEW (Health, Education and Welfare.
Much of the actual work of technical assistance was provided by other U.S. departments
such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Office of Education, the Department of Labor,
the Department of Commerce and the Department of the Treasury. The U.S. Department of
Agriculture’s role in foreign aid has long been particularly important. Elements of inter-agency
involvement in foreign aid continued to exist in these agencies, funded out of the foreign aid
budget throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Table 5.5 provides a breakdown of
employment in international service in 1958.
In 1958, there were more than 2,235 Americans overseas in private firms, universities
and NGOs carrying out the work of the International Cooperation Agency. The ICA had at the
beginning of 1959 a total of 84 active technical service contracts. 63 During the same year, 184
universities carried out 382 international programs and 234 of these programs sent university
faculty abroad.64 The overseas American in the private and non-profit sectors had just “like the
government worker and the missionary…drifted into a deep involvement in the domestic affairs
of other nations.”65
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The foreign aid system had become a large operation. In 1960, 40,000 people worked
internationally for the U.S. government worldwide. In the Asia alone there were 1,200 employed
by the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), 1,200 employed on ICA contracts, 420
employed by the U.S. Information Service and 1,200 employed directly by the Department of
State.66
For much of the 1950s, while foreign aid funds were allocated through the Mutual
Security Agency and later the International Cooperation Administration, other foreign assistance
was dispersed through a number of different organizations, including the Development Loan
Fund, the Food for Peace Program, the United States Information Agency (USIA), and the
Export-Import Bank. Large numbers of people came to be involved.
USAID employed more than 18,000 people per year around the world in 1971. At any
given time, over 20 percent of them served in Vietnam alone. That said, USAID “had great
difficulty in recruiting young development economists and all of the technicians that it need[ed]agronomists, hydrologists, and mechanics.”67 The bulk of those hired were through contractors
on short-term employment. More than 5,000 were hired on direct contract or personal services
contracts by the Agency itself. Ten years later that figure would shrink by 25 percent.
Twenty years later, in 1990, USAID had approximately 4,300 direct hire employees, a
figure down from the 1971 high and a total that had remained stagnant for the past decade.68
These administrators managed a foreign aid program “highly contingent upon multiple internal
and external factors.”69 With the wholesale intervention in Eastern Europe about to begin the
organization was asked to do much more with an organizational capacity level little different
than had existed at the end of the Vietnam War. Those who made careers in Africa, Asia or Latin
America were abruptly transferred to the uncharted waters of Eastern Europe.
Over time and especially after 1960 there began to be complaints about the quality of
technical assistance experts, one observer calling them “the bottom of the barrel.”70 The
politicization of the foreign aid process during the Cold War might have contributed to this.
Edward Weidner identified one of the major problems for donors as the inability, given the
nature of service conditions, to recruit high quality people. Many of those recruited, Weidner
suggested, were second rate.71
The Eisenhower Legacy and Criticism of Foreign Aid
As it evolved, foreign aid to the Less Developed Countries (LDCs) was much more
complex than aid to Europe. The donors, led by the United States in 1950s, embarked in effect
on a vast program of international social engineering.72 In style, and sometimes in substance, the
missionary model persisted into and beyond the Cold War period. President Harry Truman had
called U.S. foreign aid workers, “technical missionaries” and according to James Thompson,
“technocracy’s own Maoists...have given new life to the missionary impulse” of U.S. foreign
policy.73 There were similarities in background and world-views of missionaries and colonial
officers and the first generation of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers in the early 1960s.
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It was in the late 1950s, that a Republican backed “Retrenchment in Aid” campaign
began to criticize foreign aid as romantic and at a time when the U.S. economy was in recession
claimed that, “American taxpayers [were] being fleeced to placate ungrateful nations.”74 The
answer, never fully successful at that time, for advocates of international assistance was to
recognize the role that economic assistance played as a tool of national security policy.75
Controversy developed over the use and abuse of foreign aid at the end of the 1950s.
William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick published a highly influential (and controversial) book,
The Ugly American, with its livid portrayal of cultural insensitivity and corruption within the
foreign aid community.76 The British novelist, Graham Greene wrote a better but more critical
novel, The Quiet American which lambasted U.S. foreign aid policy in Vietnam.77
The novelist Paul Theroux was comparing foreign aid workers to Tarzan, the imperialist
symbol who defined his society as part of a small superior group, white and strong while in
reality being just an ordinary person.78 Critics from the developing world were even harsher in
their descriptions of American and European expatriates. One intellectual complained that
foreign aid workers were like pesky “white ants.”79 Critics expressed concern that technical
assistance specialists were “involving themselves in the ‘internal affairs’ of other nations.”80
By the end of the Eisenhower administration, foreign aid also suffered from the lack of a
domestic constituency in the U.S. There was only a vague belief among some academics and
practitioners that that foreign aid was a quick fix to stimulate rapid and predictable economic
growth. There were two assumptions that have predominated among advocates of foreign aid
since the 1950s. First, foreign aid can lead to economic growth. Second, economic growth can
and often will lead to politically developed and stable democratic societies.81 Both of these
assumptions have been proved to be problematic.
Prior to 1960, observers identified the self-sustaining growth of institutions as a primary
goal of foreign aid.82 However, despite this, U.S. foreign aid policy was often characterized by
fragmentation and contradictory goals. It was possible to distinguish between elite projects that
allowed only an indirect impact on development and grassroots activities which, though limited,
would impact directly on disadvantaged peoples. The latter were more difficult to implement
successfully.
During the first decade of the foreign assistance era (perhaps unfortunately according to
some foreign aid critics) development planners had accepted macro-economic planning theories
as the basis of their action. Conservative critics suggested that this brought command economics
to development thinking. The assumption was that a rationale for economic stability and growth,
the twin goals of U.S. foreign aid, could be identified. This assumed that countries ready for
economic take off could be decisively influenced, at the appropriate point, by massive amounts
of foreign aid. The tactics for this were Keynesian macro-economic rationalities and planning
tools. These new economic planning strategies assumed that one could measure a country’s
needs by calculating capital investment opportunities and gaps in foreign exchange.
These macro-economic assumptions replaced the technical assistance and bottom-up
style of foreign aid that had characterized the Truman and to some extent the Eisenhower
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administrations.83 However, as John Franklin Campbell points out, “To preach a doctrine of
minimum conflict and constant political stability on the one hand and fast economic growth and
social change on the other is to insist on the most jumbled self-contraction.”84 This was
particularly the case when U.S. resources were spread so thin around the world.85
Following from this, crucial to development, was the need within societies to reduce
social tensions and where possible foster understanding between and among groups.86 Conflict
resolution was at the center of discussions about political development and later governance
components of the development effort and has been a constant in terms of USAID policy since
the 1950s.
There has long been support for private sector development within foreign aid circles.
However, no strategy developed to stimulate the growth of a competitive private sector in LDCs.
By the early 1950s, moreover, a very narrow form of cost-benefit analysis came to be embedded
in U.S. foreign aid and technical assistance practice.87 Throughout the 1950s, it was the
philosophy of science that seemed to point the way for foreign aid. It was, according to Joseph
Buttinger, “the engineer and technician with an anti-political turn of mind who provide the
solutions for all major problems.”88 For many practitioners, foreign aid was apolitical.
As foreign aid programs began to expand throughout the 1950s, both skepticism and
criticism of implementation strategies grew.89 Skepticism was widespread among program
managers and planners in LDCs as well as, for different reasons, conservatives in the business
community in the U.S. and among international professionals. As a United Nations official put
it, “No one [working in foreign aid programs] is seeing the forest from the trees in either UN or
AID. Technicians are being sent over to do particular jobs, but these jobs do not have any
relation to a meaningful whole.” 90
Institutionalizing Foreign Aid
The Situation in 1960
By the end of the Eisenhower administration, foreign aid had developed a series of
contemporary (and security focused) norms. Security assistance was on the ascendancy under
the Mutual Security Agency (1951-1953). U.S. foreign aid programs by 1960 could be divided
into several elements including military assistance, defense support, development and technical
assistance and the provision of mutual security grants. Foreign assistance also included the
Public Law 480 (food security), the Presidential contingency fund, non-mutual security foreign
aid programs, and export-import bank loans.91 Of the whole, approximately 50 percent went for
military assistance, 33 percent for defense support, 7 percent for development assistance and 14
percent for the rest including administration.
Coordination of foreign aid was an issue for U.S. policy makers from the beginning.
There were “several overlapping programs, of varying substantive and geographic scope and
reflecting a mixture of emergency and long-range objectives that were then being implemented
by a loosely coordinated set of administrative arrangements, some of them of a rather makeshift
character.”92 During this period, before mass communications, “the knotty problems of any
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headquarters-field relationships [were] multiplied by distance and compounded by cross-cultural
misunderstandings.”93 A report that was
submitted by the International Development Advisory Board under the
chairmanship of Nelson Rockefeller, supported a similar thesis. To quote the
vigorous language of this document: “A unified agency with a new point of view
is needed. A mere on-paper shift of existing agencies and functions will not
suffice. Nor will it do simply to transfer additional functions to the Economic
Cooperation Administration.…”94
The shortcomings of existing arrangements for program planning and field operations
were not difficult to discover. As early as 1952, Walter Sharp summarized them for U.S.
programs as follows:
1. The allocation of agency roles was not always clearly defined in program
terms;
2. Within the Point Four Program proper responsibility for project formulation
and supervision sometimes seemed unnecessarily diffuse;
3. In the management of foreign aid there was too little provision for basic
program planning and assessment particularly in terms of the entirety of the
government’s technical assistance activities;
4. Relations of overseas field missions to the staffs of the U.S. diplomatic
missions in countries where economic and technical aid programs were in
progress were sometimes unclear;
5. Finally, officials had not given sufficient attention to ways and means of
correlating U.S. government lending policies with the probable financing and
maintenance requirements of developmental technical assistance projects
when completed.95
By 1960, the foreign aid program faced difficulties. As Edward Weidner noted, “At the
beginning, there was almost a total lack of appreciation on the part of the host country personnel
of what the [foreign aid] program was supposed to do.”96 Not surprisingly foreign aid met up
with the vagaries of political obstacles from the beginning of the post-war era. “Divergent views
emerged as to where and how the line should be drawn between the exchange of technical
knowledge and skills and the provision of capital investment. Which should come first? Or
should they go hand in hand?”97 One of the factors slowing the foreign aid process was related
to Congressional delays in appropriating funds. The result was pointed out by Walter Sharp:
The difficulties, added to the regrettable delay with which Congress appropriated
initial funds for Point Four operations, led to disillusionment over what were
regarded as “unfulfilled” American promises. The sense of disappointment was
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heightened by the decided modest amount of money made available for the first
phase of the program.98
The Kennedy Reforms
Foreign aid grew 24 percent during the Kennedy administration.99 Though John F.
Kennedy projected an image of idealism, by 1960, the articulated goal of foreign aid was “to
resist Communist military aggression” and other forms of competition.100 By the end of the first
decade of post-war foreign aid, both official and unofficial Americans had a political mission,
“to promote by military, economic or educational means the security and welfare of the
American people.”101
By 1960, realists had become dominant at the policy making level linking foreign aid to
the Cold War. Despite Congressional criticism, by 1961, the U.S. had come to see the Third
World as an important ideological battleground in the Cold War. Throughout the Cold War, the
numerous political actions, technical assistance, and foreign aid projects came to be seen by
foreign aid’s critics as “manipulative interference in other people’s business.”102
Ideologically, advocates of foreign aid were divided between realists and moralists.103
There were increasing numbers of critics of foreign aid on both the left and the right. Domestic
critiques also expressed concern about whether foreign aid had a positive or a negative impact
upon the U.S. economy. Government oriented reports often justified foreign aid because it
helped the American economy.
In Cold War terms, however, beginning with the Presidency of John F. Kennedy, the tone
of speeches about the Soviets became “much more secular, humanistic, scientific, and
negotiable.”104 The Kennedy administration was closely identified with the realism or realistic
security approach to foreign aid. As incoming Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it:
I think the principal point is that a change in administration gives us a chance to
take a fresh look at a good many of our policies, to make fresh approaches, and to
see whether we are going in the direction in which we as a nation really want to
go.105
Though there had been a number of critical reappraisals of foreign aid during the
Eisenhower administration, it was the criticism of the Clay Report that jolted the international
assistance community. In December of 1962, Kennedy appointed General Lucius D. Clay, the
hero of the Berlin airlift, to head a “Citizens’ Committee” to investigate foreign aid. The report
has been described as “draconian,” as having a “shock-effect” and as an attack on the romantic
notions which motivated some in international assistance.
The Clay Report raised crucial questions of foreign aid “in part as a way to foster a more
economic ideology.”106 In augmenting the role of the private sector and free enterprise, the Clay
Report introduced development loans, investment guarantees, and small business provisions. It
also introduced a contracting process to utilize private enterprise in policy implementation.
More than anything else, the Clay Report recommended an agency machinery (through USAID)
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that defined foreign aid as an instrument of the State Department, with an implementation
process modeled on the kind of contracting that dominated in the defense and security area.107
The publication of the Clay report to many advocates of developmental assistance,
created a catharsis of despair about foreign aid that began what would later be called donor
fatigue.108 Following from the Clay Report, part of an increased emphasis on the security mode
for foreign aid, according to James P. Grant, was “to minimize the direct role of the U.S.
government in the large-scale transfer of capital for development and increase the role of the
U.S. private sector.”109 As Usha Mahajani, notes, “the tone of the Report, with its heavy stress
on U.S. security interests as the basis for aid and on private enterprise worldwide, might be
misunderstood abroad….”110
From a security perspective, John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress also illustrated the
new emphasis on realism and the Cold War. It proposed an accelerated foreign aid program for
Latin America in order to ensure that there would be no more Cubas in the western hemisphere.
Moreover, the Alliance also worked from the start to strengthen Latin American armies and
defend U.S. business. In the end U.S. policy helped Latin American elites stave off basic
political reforms.111
The Alliance for Progress was far from successful however as the Brazil case illustrates.
Before 1961 and the Alliance for Progress, “Brazil had relied for its external financing mainly on
private sources, including suppliers’ credits, and on bilateral and multilateral public institutions
lending at near-commercial rates, such as the U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIMBANK) and the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IRBD).”112 Its debt levels were large
but manageable. Speaking of the Alliance for Progress in Brazil, as one critic put it:
During the Alliance years, Brazil received substantially larger official inflows, or
aid. However, because of unfavorable initial conditions, a large external debt
with short maturities, and Brazilian policy choices on how to deal with them, a
reluctance to lose financial respectability by heavier reliance on debt
rescheduling, these inflows resulted in lower level transfer of real resources than
had occurred during the 1950s.113
Despite the money provided through the Alliance for Progress, the major problem for
many Latin American countries was political and economic instability during the 1960s. 114 As
Carlos F. Diaz-Alejandro points out, again speaking of Brazil, “[T]he ‘good guys,’ in the
Brazilian case an impressive group of economists, although grateful for the additional funds,
usually claim the macro-policies would have been the same without them.”115
During the 1960s, the Military Assistance Bill had again become a component of the
Foreign Aid Bill.116 Despite Kennedy’s rhetoric of realism, foreign aid came to take on an
increasingly ideological and a moral dimension vis-à-vis the Cold War.117 At the same time,
foreign aid experts were less and less sure of the formula for social and economic
development.118 Being introduced through foreign assistance programs was a political ideology
of democracy and an economic ideology of free enterprise. According to long time observer,
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Stanley Hoffman, during the 1960s, “Foreign aid like foreign policy more general became the
orphans of [the policy of] containment.”119
The Creation of USAID
The decade between 1951 and 1961 was a high watermark in terms of idealism as it
related to foreign aid and what it would achieve in terms of international development. In 1961,
U.S. President John F. Kennedy stated, that the U.S. would give aid to the Third World, (the term
normally used to describe the developing world at this time) “not in order to contain the spread
of communism, not because other nations are doing it, but because it is right.” 120 In particular,
President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress (1961) represented a new dynamic in foreign aid. 121
U.S. foreign policy, according to Stillman and Pfaff, claimed to rest on a moral component. That
morality in turn
rests in action rather than in the profession of remote, if high minded goals….
But the influence of the [policy maker] interventionist’s naïve historicism is so
large today that we see are increasingly ruthless with the obstacles we see as
standing in the way of our irreproachable but distant goals.122
The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 created the U.S. Agency for International
Development on September 4, 1961. As a result, for the last 45 years USAID, a “temporary
agency” labeled by the Kennedy administration, managed the U.S. development assistance
program.123 The primary focus of USAID was to be support for health, education and training,
transportation and agriculture, and economic development. Legislation called for the use of
domestic federal agencies to support these activities.124
U.S. foreign aid, after the creation of USAID in 1961 took three forms: direct dollar aid
to supply foreign exchange for the purchase of imports, funds for economic development in the
form of either loans and grants, and technical assistance provided by skilled professionals in
residence for varying periods of time. U.S. missions negotiated bilateral agreements with host
countries either delivered support directly through the mission or increasingly via contractors and
grant holders. The new USAID had a decided preference for large, physical projects. These
would best move money in a single calendar year, it being critical from a bureaucratic
perspective to move as much money as possible in a short period of time.125
USAID has long had several ways to move money. First, it could directly transfer money
to multilateral organizations, such as the United Nations or the World Bank, or occasionally,
directly to countries, most infamously to Israel. Second, it could give grants to organizations,
usually non-governmental, that were doing humanitarian or developmental work. Third, it could
award contracts for particular purposes, to for-profit or non-governmental organizations, to carry
out specific activities, labeled projects. Fourth, it could give money to individuals or
organizations to support scholarships or other kinds of participant training. Finally, it could
develop cooperative agreements, a kind of co-managed activity, which would last for a fixed
period of time.
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A major stated emphasis of the new agency was to encourage popular participation in
democratic public, private and local institutions that promoted economic and social
development.126 The stated goal of the agency in the legislation was
to strengthen friendly foreign countries by encouraging the development of their
free economic institutions and productive capabilities, and by minimizing or
eliminating barriers to the flow of private investment capital.127
The creation of USAID reflected an upgrading of foreign aid and placed the agency in the
hands of what David Halberstam ruefully called the “Best and the Brightest” of the foreign
policy establishment.128 By 1962, a basic mode of operation had evolved that did not change for
the next five decades. Within the structures of USAID, the system operated on what John
Montgomery called a virtual master plan, with standard forms of organization, personnel
systems, contract mechanisms, and eventually “a rigidity that inhibit[ed] adjustment to local
circumstances.”129 By 1969, there were 5,324 direct hire employees of USAID in service.
By 1963, USAID managed a $3.6 billion per year program, up from just under one billion
in 1960.130 However, the mid-1960s were a peak in terms of foreign aid spending. All too often,
project grants and loans made during 1961 through 1967 by both bilateral and multilateral
organizations could not be seen as part of an obvious coordinated development strategy.131 By
1967 the foreign aid budget dropped to below $2.0 billion for the first time since 1960 and by
1968 it dropped to $1.4 billion. By 1970, support for foreign aid had fallen off significantly with
little protest from the business or academic world.
Vietnam
Early Years and Assumptions
The Vietnam War was a direct outcome of French colonial rule in Indo-China. America’s
participation in Vietnam “originated from ignorance and excessive optimism and escalated even
though officials became dubious of eventual success.”132 Despite the anti-colonialism of the
Roosevelt and Truman administrations, however, in 1946, “the communist domination of the
Vietminh prevented the United States Government from treating Indochina as a colonial
question.”133
The Truman Doctrine allowed the U.S. to assist colonial and other governments fighting
local revolutionaries who were Communist inspired and on February 2, 1950, President Truman
recognized the French dominated Protectorate in Indo-China and began to provide economic and
military aid to France in their fight against the Vietminh. From the beginning there was
Congressional resistance to U.S. involvement, among those who thought that anything proposed
by France was colonial and oppressive. Resistance to U.S. involvement though was small until
1964.
The British had successfully put down the Communist uprising in Malaya, the only
successful counterinsurgency model produced by a Western power in Asia and had brought a
rural revolt “the Mau Mau,” under control in Kenya. It was the Malayan model that influenced
U.S. policy and proved to be the unfortunate model for the U.S. in its intervention in Vietnam.134
106
Americans defined their mission in Vietnam in terms of transformation and
modernization and of gaining control of the revolutionary process. There was no common
assumption about the meaning of democratic governance. Vietnamese, both North and South,
spoke in terms of freedom from colonial exploiters. Americans talked of good government and
complained that much of the foreign aid “trickled away into the pockets of profiteering
officials.”135 The idea that there was a shared concept of democracy worldwide was to many
critics, an “American delusion.”136
During the period prior to the heating up of the Vietnam War in 1965, U.S. foreign policy
agencies had very good access to academics with development policy and administration
interests. Particularly, during the 1950s, they spent significant time in the Southeast Asia region
which had become a laboratory for foreign assistance.137 Civilians in Vietnam normally served
18 months as compared to a year for military personnel. Vietnam itself, prior to the military
build up was part of a golden age in foreign aid.138
Initially, in Indochina, focus was on humanitarian aid, food assistance and resettlement of
refugees from the north. Later focus of the U.S. Operations Mission was on agricultural
development, security assistance and land reform.139 During the Diem period, U.S. technical
assistance focused on social reform. U.S. representatives made a number of attempts to
introduce village level reforms, including farming cooperatives, self-help projects and village
level democratic elections.140 By 1960, as Frances FitzGerald notes, the foreign aid team had
provided some infrastructure assistance, malaria control and relief for refugees. Little else
seemed to stick.141
In the early 1950s, those administering the Vietnam assistance program appeared to have
a missionary zeal, in searching for a third force between communism and colonialism. 142 With
the withdrawal of the French, the United States embarked on an exercise in nation-building (the
creation of a viable state with legitimate political authority, a functioning economy and a sense
of community) in South Vietnam. Among different social strata, religions and ethnic groups, the
U.S. dilemma was clear: How would it foster an independent Vietnam that would not become
totally dependent on American assistance?143
To many, but not all, serving in USAID in Vietnam, the real war “was with poverty and
social backwardness, and with the selfishness of that minority of men who stand in the way of a
‘world of freedom and opportunity for…the whole human race….’”144 The U.S. “persistently
attempted to damp down political crises or buy off revolutionary forces with foreign aid
programs.”145 The fundamental myth of foreign aid was that economic development and
industrialization leads to social peace.146 The use of the terms underdeveloped and developed
perpetuate the myth that all human societies are moving along a single road when the societies
that aid is designed to transform were anything but uniform in their culture, politics and needs.
From the beginning of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, there was no attempt by
the military to explain the conflict.147 According to the journalist James Reston, what the U.S.
was creating in Vietnam and “throughout the world [was] an idealistic nation [the U.S.] that was
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coming more and more to rely on pure power.”148 There was continuity between the 1960s and
the post-millennium in this sense.
The U.S. political and military intervention in Vietnam after 1960 was a high watermark
in the United States’ tidal impulse towards patterns of unilateral political-military intervention
during the period following the Second World War - that is until the period after September 11,
2001. The involvement in Vietnam was based on the assumption that both Russia and China
were, under Communist leadership, both expansionist and the cause of Communist revolutions in
Asia.
Many of the early foreign aid programs in Southeast Asia, both humanitarian and
developmental, appeared to be successful. Early assessments and evaluations confirmed this. As
a result, foreign advisers in Vietnam, “were inserted into every part of the [Government of
Vietnam] bureaucracy with the authority not only to advise but to insist on the adoption of new
programs.”149
There was real success particularly in the 1950s. Charities, mainly religious NGOs such
as Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services and the International Relief Committee were
involved in what was called the “miracle” of relief work in South Vietnam in the 1950s.150
“Operation Exodus” moved hundreds of thousands of refugees from North Vietnam to the South
in the 1950s and was dubbed a success by contemporary observers.151
Support for military assistance and foreign aid were intimately linked during the Vietnam
War particularly during the Kennedy/Johnson period. As David Maraniss points out in his
remarkable book about the period, Souvanna Phouma (of Laos) once persisted in asking
President Lyndon Johnson “whether he could get assistance for refugee care and defense needs,
the president advised him to talk with Secretary McNamara.”152
Foreign aid, as such, would no longer be seen as temporary but as part of the arsenal of
foreign and security policy tools available to the U.S. government. However, with this kind of
logic, as one observer put it, “We have been conditioned by our social science training not to ask
the normative question; we possess neither the inclination nor the means with which to question
and judge our foreign policy.”153 One critic would ask, “Where is the source of serious
intellectual criticism that would help us avoid future Vietnams?”154 There was a one hundred
year legacy in the origins of U.S. policy in Vietnam, based on assumptions of modernization,
industrialization and individualism that had their origins in nineteenth century European (and
American expansion) into what was still in 1950 called the non-Western world.
In Vietnam, as in much of this “non-western” world, as Frances FitzGerald points out,
traditionally people were directed both by the tradition of the family and by the impact of the
state.155 At the village level, focus was on community development. The USAID Civic Action
Project was a rural development effort designed to encourage villages to rebuild war damaged
public facilities.156 For a decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, until the U.S, intervention
became militarized, large numbers of foreign aid officers were involved in Vietnam.157
According to FitzGerald, U.S. efforts to promote social change and economic development
108
became justification for U.S. military intervention in Vietnam and USAID itself became
associated with the Vietnam War.158
Observers were initially optimistic about the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. In 1960,
Joseph Buttinger could claim, “Vietnam…is the first country in Asia where the West, by
replacing imperialism with policies of aid, has stopped the ‘Russians’ without firing a shot.”159
“War or Peace,” Buttinger went on, “survival or annihilation, may depend on the skill with
which we use, in Asia and elsewhere, the weapon of foreign aid in the pursuit of our political
aims in the international arena.”160
Kennedy, Johnson and Vietnam
During the Cold War, a logical step was to link foreign aid to proxy wars, first in Korea
and Indochina, and then throughout Asia, Latin America and Africa.161 To critics of foreign aid,
it was during the 1960s that foreign aid seemed to support dangerous liaisons between the U.S.
as a donor and a venal and violent set of dictators.162 In the mid-1960s critics of U.S. foreign
policy revealed “a fifteen-year CIA program to subsidize secretly the foreign activities of
American student, labor, religious, academic and philanthropic groups.”163 These revelations did
much to discredit U.S. foreign aid and foreign policy internationally.
The Vietnam generation of U.S. leadership, whether in leadership positions in the
military, foreign affairs or foreign aid policy, were born during or immediately after World War
II and were shaped by that era, “the age of Kennedy’s Camelot.”164 All in the Kennedy
generation were infused with “the missionary idealism [Kennedy] had awakened in us.” 165 The
Kennedy generation went overseas full of illusions, for which the intoxicating atmosphere of
those years was as much to blame as their youth.166
Yet security issues were at the heart of the intervention process in Southeast Asia. In the
Kennedy administration, “economic aid administrators of all ranks were required to take a
‘counterinsurgency course’ before being posted to underdeveloped countries.”167 The basis of
training in these programs was that “[p]acification involved nothing less than political counterrevolution in the interests of democracy.”168 Security assistance in Vietnam was based on the
hearts and minds theories of John J. McCuen, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who
advocated “counter guerrilla and ‘middle group’ support to counteract revolutionary forces.”169
In 1961, the Cold War was real and U.S. policy makers such as Walt Rostow believed
that Third World countries were a new battle field in the war.170 In focusing on Southeast Asia,
the U.S. concern was that area’s suffering “from the ravages of recent or incipient war and
troubled by unsettled political conditions…have weak, inexperienced, and unstable governments
woefully deficient in administrative and financial capacity.”171 Foreign aid to Indochina
according to one USAID official was not so much “a development program but, in effect, a battle
field action where a certain amount of waste is inherent under the crisis situation….”172
At the beginning of 1964 there was “no central guiding philosophy in foreign
policy….”173 The foreign policy leadership was pulled by the extremes of the foreign policy
debate and “there seemed to be no logical stopping point between isolationism and globalism.”174
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However, the U.S., according to its critics, suffered from a missionary compulsion to guide the
South Vietnamese toward United States policy objectives.175 Above all, however, U.S.
intervention meant pacification. Vietnam, as Frances FitzGerald, wryly notes became an
archeology of pacification with strategic hamlets, new life hamlets, and finally “Really New Life
Hamlets” being introduced.176
BOX
In a Time of War
In early 2004, “Donald Gordon MacDonald, 82, a top administrator of the
Agency for International Development who directed the AID mission in Vietnam
during the peak years of the Vietnam War, died of esophageal cancer Jan. 12 at
his home in Washington.”177 The Washington Post noted the massive size of the
Vietnam assistance program, “It involved tens of thousands of people and
hundreds of millions of dollars--$684.9 million in 1966, the top spending figure
of Mr. MacDonald’s Vietnam leadership.”178
The U.S. intervention in Vietnam both in military and in foreign aid terms had rules of
engagement. Though the original purpose was to manage and limit the military engagement, the
model would influence foreign policy and foreign aid from that time. Above all, as Caputo points
out, within the rules of engagement, there “seemed to be a matter of distance and technology.”179
One could not go wrong if your mistakes were at great distance from their impact and if they
involved sophisticated methodologies. At close range, “[t]here was no one out there to stop me
from actually doing it[killing the innocent], no one and nothing except that inner system of moral
checks called conscience.”180 Similar, though less dramatic authority existed within foreign aid
programs.
Above all, for political reasons, the U.S. wanted speedy results, a quick fix. In 1964, the
Johnson administration committed to a three year program of military and economic aid and
established an unworkable program based upon “an advanced agreement in writing with the
South Vietnam Government on details involving specific, measurable goals.”181 This led to the
infamous body counts and became the basis of a quantifiable cost benefit analysis for U.S.
foreign aid.
For the first time however, after 1964, academics and intellectuals begin to question the
moral implications of U.S. actions in Vietnam and other parts of the Third World and as the U.S.
involvement in Vietnam deepened, U.S. political unease became the source of increased moral
unease. This unease increased throughout the remainder of the decade as academics became a
central component of the anti-war movement. Political dissent followed. In September of 1965,
Senator J. William Fulbright broke with the Johnson administration, and characterized the U.S.
intervention, as the “arrogance of power.”182
By 1965, the U.S. came to dominate both civil and military policy in Vietnam, a country
that it claimed to want to make independent. This was a development that most policy makers at
the time, both in Vietnam and Washington, were comfortable. Policy elites in Vietnam in turn
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came to take U.S. aid for granted.183 U.S. expenditures on refugees alone came to $30 million a
year. By the end of the 1960s, Vietnam received almost half of U.S. overseas development
assistance.184
The reality however was that Robert McNamara’s system of security oriented
performance budgeting had crept into USAID and cost-effectiveness effectively limited choices
and narrowed options for the various programs under AID administration.185 U.S. foreign
policy to its critics was a policy influenced by game theory and systems analysis pushed by
“whiz kid” technocrats such as Alain C. Enthoven and Robert McNamara himself. On the
ground, however, many Vietnamese saw the Americans “merely as the producers of garbage
from which they could build houses.” 186
BOX
MSU and Madame Nhu
Excerpts from Ramparts Magazine
Foreign aid policy was discredited both domestically and internationally in
Vietnam. During the Vietnam War a left wing magazine, Ramparts published an
article revealing the extent to which Michigan State University had become
involved in U.S. support for South Vietnam. This involvement became
symptomatic of the intersection of foreign aid and military policy.
In 1955, Dr. Wesley Fishel, of Michigan State University, had established an
extensive technical assistance program focused on public administration and
security.187 The Michigan State team consisted of some 50 academics including
public administration experts who came to assist in the reorganization of the
police, the civil guard and the public service. Prominent among the strategies was
the creation of “agrovilles,” protected rural development centers.
In June of 1955, a team of CIA specialists knowledgeable in solving intractable
problems of a political nature arrived in Saigon. They, at least in part, came
under the cover of a Michigan State University advisory group funded by the
International Cooperation Administration, the predecessor to the U.S. Agency for
International Development.188 The intervention by Michigan State University in
Vietnam ultimately disturbed many at the University. According to Ramparts,
“One lesser-known, and perhaps more unpleasant task of the MSU professors was
to provide a front for a unit of the United States Central Intelligence
Agency….”189 However, according to one participant, none of those directly
involved were “significantly troubled by the fact that our Project had become a
CIA front.”190
Writing about the phenomenon of what Ramparts called “MSU and Madam
Nhu,” Walter Hinckle has noted, the leaders of the project saw “the future of the
social science in the world-wide scope of the “action” projects [they are] now
directing—in Formosa as…in Vietnam.”191 According to Ramparts, however,
“The same disastrous vacuum of information occurred in this country [Vietnam]
111
only a decade before when the China experts, almost to a man, were purged as
Reds and comsymps, and yahoos were all the public had left to hear.”192
“The professors found their colleague [Wesley] Fishel and General Edward
Landsdale of the CIA maneuvering furiously to consolidate Diem’s support, an
effort that culminated with the endorsement of Diem by the United States
Security Council in the spring of 1955.”193
The magazine continued: “This residential ranking attests to [Wesley] Fishel’s
importance as head of the Michigan State University Group in Vietnam, an
official university project under contract to Saigon and Washington, with
responsibility for the proper functioning of Diem’s civil service and his police
network, the shaping up of the 50,000 man ‘ragamuffin’ militia, and the
supplying of guns and ammunition for the city police, the civil guard, the palace
police, and the dreaded Surete—South Vietnam’s version of the FBI.”194
It is important to note that the MSU Vietnam Project ended rather abruptly in
1962.195 That was, of course four years before the escalation of the war, when
U.S. efforts were primarily directed at foreign aid rather than military
intervention.
The Militarization of Aid
In 1965, Vietnam had both the largest U.S. aid mission and the largest military assistance
program in the world. Despite this however, and unlike the situation in Taiwan and Korea, most
of the funding did not go for development activities. Approximately 90 percent of the entire
USAID foreign aid budget every year went to military forces, the civil guard and the intelligence
services and only a minute fraction went to industrial or agricultural development.
During the Lyndon Johnson years, in its public face “the foreign aid program was
celebrated as a global war on poverty that in a short time could be expected to eradicate disease,
illiteracy, and the other age-old problems of mankind.”196 The U.S. goal in its unilateral political
and military interventions beginning with Vietnam was overtly the realization of what it called a
liberal, social and political revolution.197 As early as 1966, Stillman and Pfaff identified this as
the “near ultimate folly of American interventionism.”198
The practical implications of U.S. involvement in Vietnam caused alarm as “billions in
aid…poured untold quantifies of every conceivable commodity into a simple, fragile economic
system….”199 All of this was aggravated by half a million Americans spending incredible
amounts of money on necessities and pleasure. By 1966, the military involvement reached such
a point that “[t]he shooting war on the ground…proceeded with full autonomy, subordinating by
its sheer weight [and undermining by its sheer destructiveness] the political efforts aimed at
pacification, reform, and nation-building.”200
112
Critics of U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam suggested that the United States, “drawing upon
[an] old missionary tradition, was obsessed by a zeal to improve Asia [and was] reanimated by
the anti-Communist crusade.”201 Policy makers in Vietnam also were focused on the impact of
individuals and individual personalities as the overthrow of Diem made clear. Preoccupation
was with the personality of the leadership in South Vietnam.
It was during the Vietnam War period that the idealism of the Marshall Plan gave way to
the strings attached by Congress and the Executive branch whether of a political or a commercial
nature (the purchase of U.S. goods or protecting small business or agriculture). 202 The American
operational framework in South Vietnam had a colonial flavor to it throughout the period of the
war. Planners in Washington continued to see “Vietnam as a source of raw materials and cheap
labor and as an outlet for manufactured goods.”203
Aid was offered to North Vietnam as a carrot to entice the enemy into peace negotiations.
In April of 1965, the U.S. government offered to participate in a billion dollar development
project for Southeast Asia centering on the Makong River.204 As the war Americanized,
Vietnamese elites and the urban middle class, particularly in Saigon, grew more and more
dependent upon donor aid.205
Much of the security concerns in Vietnam were primarily military in nature not internal.
Most importantly, as the war expanded little American aid actually trickled down to the village
level, despite the fact that prior to 1965 this was the most successful component of U.S. foreign
aid policy in Vietnam.206 The focus of foreign policy concerns by 1965 was on the threat of
peasant rebellions. Poverty breeds communism which was a “disorder caused by social evil, a
parasitic growth feeding on injustice.”207 To quote President Lyndon Johnson:
The roots of…trouble are found wherever the landless and the despised, the poor
and the oppressed, stand before the gates of opportunity seeking entry into a
brighter land. They can get there only if we narrow the gap between the rich
nations and the poor - and between the rich and the poor within each region.208
By 1965, USAID had turned to retired military officers as a logical source of manpower
for service in what was an increasingly risky country. The professionals who staffed the USAID
mission, called the U.S. Operations Mission, in Vietnam where increasingly fearful that their
agency was being taken over by the military. At the beginning of 1966, “USAID… [and the
Public Affairs Office of the U.S. Embassy] alone included hundreds of people ranging from
agricultural experts to hospital administrators, film makers, sociologists, artificial limb
manufacturers, and water pollution experts.”209 Many existed in the twilight between civilian
and military activity.
John Paul Vann in the late 1960s symbolized U.S. special operations in Vietnam.
Overtly he was an USAID official in the office of Civil Operations and Revolutionary
Development Support (CORDS).210 In 1965, John Paul Vann, who had served several tours in
Vietnam, approached senior officials in USAID to join the civilian pacification program, the
Strategic Hamlet program. In 1966, Vann was promoted to deputy director of USAID operations
113
in the area north of Saigon.211 The strategy was to combine military control and authoritarianism
with social reform.212
Ostensibly, John Paul Vann’s job was to support community efforts in raising hogs,
supporting refugees and civilian pacification projects; in reality he was a senior operative in U.S.
special operations in Vietnam and operated the Vietnamese special operations that tried to
control the rural countryside and came to represent the duplicitous nature of U.S. intervention.
Though technically a civilian, he covertly shared command over 158,000 South Vietnamese
troops. He maintained his USAID cover until his mysterious death on October 9, 1972.
The Strategic Hamlet program was one of the products of U.S. foreign aid in Vietnam.
The assumption here was that security had to be combined with social change. The Vietnamese
government needed schools and health facilities in order to restore the loyalty of the
community.213 It was the role of the USAID manager in the secure villages to train specialized
teams of Vietnamese pacification workers, who wielded both carrots and sticks at the village
level. After 1966, village elections were held in militarily secure areas in Vietnam. 214 In the
aftermath of the successes of the National Liberation Front, (the Viet Cong or Communists) the
bottom up tactics of the guerilla movement influenced community based models of development
management throughout the developing world.215
By 1967, Vietnam “was inundated with social scientists working under contract to the
Defense Department” and USAID.216 According to Frances FitzGerald, “In laying out the
groundwork for the reorganization, groups of social scientists set out to research the economics
and sociology of the Vietnamese as well as every aspect of Vietnamese government operations.”
217
In the next decade, USAID came to sponsor the South Vietnamese police, security and
intelligence services.218
The answer to each new social or political problem appeared to be the introduction of
new foreign aid workers. By the end of the 1960s, the U.S. “had a small bureaucracy in each
[province], comprising of pig experts, rice experts, market and gardening experts, AID
administrators, International Voluntary Service workers, English teachers, city planners,
accountants, doctors, police inspectors, welfare workers, handicraft consultants, psychological
warfare and counterinsurgency experts.”219
Vietnamese elite reaction to U.S. foreign aid activity was a mirror image of U.S.
perceptions. Many concluded that the U.S. had designed its foreign and security aid to advance
its own geopolitical interests. By the middle of the 1960s, the U.S. found itself in a morass in
Vietnam. A turning point in the war, from a foreign aid perspective, was the resignation in
September of 1967 of four staff members of the International Volunteer Service in protest
against the war.220 They had come to realize that “the main efforts of the United States in
Vietnam were destructive rather than constructive.”221 The anti-war resistance, some of which,
as Barbara Tuchman put it, was “mindless,” tinged the whole image of foreign involvement in
international development throughout the remainder of the century.222
“The ineffectuality and unpopularity of [the Vietnam Government] conditioned the
effectiveness of American Aid,” according to Barbara Tuchman,223 and ultimately neutralized
114
any impact it might have had on Vietnamese society. Operationally, U.S. officials initially were
concerned about corruption in Vietnam. However, little was done to address the issue. Foreign
aid professionals began to voice discouragement with the whole operation. As Frances
FitzGerald has put it:
Americans assumed a particular kind of relationship with the Vietnamese; they
had expected the Vietnamese to trust them, to take their advice with gratitude, and
to cooperate their mutual enterprise of defeating the Communists.224
It didn’t happen.
The Legacy
In 1971, Foreign aid had been available to “to the poor nations for nearly 20 years...but
[had] become increasingly controversial”225 as it became linked to U.S. defined international
conflicts. It was also directed toward a multilateral agenda in the definition of international
development goals. For much of the period after World War II and during the Cold War, the U.S.
had opted for collective action, a multilateral approach based on collegial action among allies.226
By 1975, with the end of the Vietnam War, elements of a more unilateralist approach began to
appear in U.S. foreign aid policies. The shift between multilateralism and unilateralism pattern
would continue characterize foreign policy and foreign aid debates into the twenty-first century.
Even as the U.S. withdrew militarily from Vietnam in 1973, it left behind thousands of
civilian contract advisors and a massive foreign aid program both committed to ensure that the
Saigon regime survived. This burden was short lived given the collapse of the South Vietnam
regime on April 29, 1975. When the final evacuation took place, USAID officials and advisors
were among the last to leave.227 What remained in the minds of the many who worked in
Vietnam were the experiences, both good and bad, and the experimental nature of much U.S.
foreign aid on the ground.
From a foreign aid perspective, Vietnam in turn, had significant influence on U.S. foreign
policy for a generation or more. This might not have been such a bad model from a
developmental perspective had it not been part of the disastrous consequences of the Vietnam
War. From a foreign aid perspective, Vietnam became a model both for what foreign aid could
achieve and for the foreign assistance failures that seemed inevitable. Rural development and
basic needs were two aspects of foreign aid policy that had their origins in the Vietnam War.
The models developed in Vietnam influenced thinking about rural development in the
1970s. During their period in Vietnam, American aid officials focused “almost exclusively on
the development of policies and programs and [worked] with organization and reorganization….
In part, [this] came from the American – or Western – view of government as a complex
machine.”228
U.S. foreign aid continued to include a component of it’s funding for security supporting
assistance to countries which played a strategic role in U.S. foreign and security interests. 229 By
the mid-1970s, USAID estimated that more than a million foreign police officers had received
115
training or supplies through its “public safety” program.230 After 1975, the U.S. came under
increasing criticism for its training of police and security forces in repressive regimes.
In crisis areas such as Southern Africa, during the 1970s and 1980s, aid consisted of cash
grants, sector import loans and physical infrastructure. USAID provided security assistance in
the form of an Economic Support Fund (ESF).231 In security threatened areas human needs
issues tended to be overwritten by the need for dependable allies. In ESF countries, the State
Department, and in particularly sensitive cases the National Security Council, took a more direct
role in setting country priorities.232
The legacy of Vietnam down to and through September 11, from an ethical perspective,
was that the United States’ intervention had been perceived by its many critics domestic and
internationally as “acting stupidly-and cruelly: employing…immense strength in increasingly
expedient ways, in pursuit of causes that are remote and intrinsically unserious – indefensible in
terms of historically and political reality.”233 An outgrowth of the Vietnam war was an increased
anti-Americanism in LDCs.234 From a foreign aid perspective the legacy is perhaps more
complex.
Vietnam was the model both for and against foreign aid and military assistance during the
remainder of the twentieth century. From the Indochina period to the end of U.S. involvement in
Vietnam, most of what came to be the U.S. technical assistance pool of professionals cut their
teeth on foreign aid in Southeast Asia. A whole generation of foreign aid professionals gained
grassroots project experience in Vietnam and spread throughout the world. This duality
suggested to critics a moral ambiguity to foreign aid as it related to recipient nations.
Ultimately, the U.S. in Vietnam operated with what Tuchman called the “march of folly.”
The U.S. government sometimes “reacted to intimidation by the rabid right at home and the
public dread of Communism that this played on and reflected...in them lie the roots of American
policy in Vietnam.”235 At other points the administration appeared to fear the left dominated antiwar coalition.
Ultimately, the foreign aid problems coming out of Vietnam were institutional and
reflective of a more general pattern. The high level officials in the U.S. mission “had created a
system by which they could receive no bad news.”236 USAID reports, assessments, and
evaluations since that time have often reflected a good news view of the world. As Frances
FitzGerald has put it in describing technical assistance in Vietnam:
The officials of AID obviously believed…that the United States could win the
war and “modernize” the country to the point where it would pass the “phase” [of
the] rural insurgency movement. They had, it appeared, learned nothing and
forgotten nothing….237
With the end of the Vietnam War and the collapse of Iran on February 5, 1979,238 U.S.
foreign aid concerns shifted towards basic needs still influenced by many of the assumptions
established in Southeast Asia. The United States began withdrawing rather than expanding
overseas in terms of foreign aid and technical assistance, a withdrawal that would continue until
116
September 11, 2001. This withdrawal was the first time that had happened since the end of the
Second World War.
As a result of the Vietnam War, both in terms of foreign and development policy, the
U.S. began to swing away from the very concept of a global role as a country. This withdrawal
would have significant consequences, and the debate as to whether Vietnam was a foreign policy
or military defeat would continue through the end of the twentieth century. 239 With a much less
global foreign aid policy, LDC elites became suspicious of the twin goals of stability and
modernization that had defined foreign aid through so much of the Cold War period.240 The
fateful events of September 11 would restore U.S. concern for international affairs.
Conclusion
During the immediate post-war period, the purpose of foreign aid was to restore war-torn
countries, strengthen the military and political defenses of “free” nations and weaken the appeal
of communism.241 There was a messianic element to the enterprise. By the end of the 1960s,
foreign aid as reform “had lost its evangelistic tone and taken on a legal flavor.”242 The failure
of foreign aid often was based upon strategic rather than developmental considerations during
the Cold War period. There may be a lesson for those who see foreign aid as a part of a war on
terrorism. As a result, it is not unlikely that there may be similar perceptions of failure in future.
The shift towards government to government aid represented a major change in
international assistance after World War II and was defined in the period between 1948 and
1961. Governments now at least in theory assumed that the redistribution of wealth
internationally was part of their responsibility. The goal of policy makers in the 1950s was to
create a foreign aid system that included a unified administration and policy formulation, longterm planning and financing and integrated country level programming.
The legacy of Vietnam for the Third World was to solidify in the minds of LDC
intellectuals and elites an image of the West which made no distinction between the United
States and the Western European former colonial powers.243 Both Europe and the U.S. were
seen as “colonial exploiters” and white.244 As the Vietnam War illustrates, in both isolationism
and interventionism, the United States needed an evangelical vision and a moral role in
reforming and developing the world.245
There was a tendency among Americans “to believe (and insist) that America’s wants
and values are universal.”246 Americans, as Stillman and Pfaff pointed out, are fundamentally
optimistic and they believe in the science of society.247 Internationalism meant historical
commitment, compromise, and recognition of the inherently political nature of the international
process. This remains difficult for many American policy makers who see moral choices in
international interaction and leads to difficulties in distinguishing between “the declaratory and
the real.”248
117
Endnotes
1
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York:
Random House, 1988), p. 562. The comments were presumably directed at USAID.
Larry Chang, “Foreign Aid and the Fate of Least Developed Countries,” (Unpublished Paper,
1986), p.2.
2
Mark Hertsgaard, The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World
(New York: Picador Books, 2003), p. 4.
3
4
John Franklin Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory (New York: Basic Books, 1971),
p. 113.
Warren Hinckle, “The University on the Make.” Ramparts, Volume 4 No.12, April 1966,
pp.11-22. Quote, p. 22.
5
Jacob J. Kaplan, “United States Foreign Aid Programs: Past Perspectives and Future Needs,”
World Politics, Volume 3, number 1 (October, 1950), pp. 57-58. Entire article: pp. 55-71.
6
7
Steven W. Hook, National Interest and Foreign Aid (Boulder Col.: Lynne Rienner, 1995), p.
20.
8
Edwin A Bock, Fifty Years of Technical Assistance; Some Administrative Experiences of U. S.
Voluntary Agencies (Chicago: Public Administration Clearing House, 1954), pp. 2-3 and p. 15.
9
Walter R. Sharp, International Technical Assistance (Chicago: Public Administration Service,
1952), p. 7.
10
Kaplan, “United States Foreign Aid Programs,” p. 68.
11
Nissen, “Building the World Bank,” in Weissman, ed., The Trojan Horse, p. 39.
12
Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Viet Nam (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1984), p.p. 293.
13
John D, Montgomery, Aftermath: Tarnished Outcomes of American Foreign Policy (Dover,
Mass.: Auburn House Publishing Company, 1985), p. 47.
14
David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 730.
Kaplan, “United States Foreign Aid Programs,” pp. 55-71. Quote, p. 55.
Katrine R. C. Greene, Institutions and Individuals: An Annotated List of Directories Useful in
International Administration (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1953).
15
16
17
Martin Wolf, “Marshall’s Lasting Legacy,” Financial Times, June 3, 1997, p.12.
118
Milton J. Esman and John D. Montgomery, “Systems Approaches to Technical Cooperation:
The Role of Development Administration,” in Public Administration Review,
(September/October, 1969), pp. 507-539. Quote, p. 511.
18
Harvey Cleaver, “Will the Green Revolution Turn Red?” in Weissman, ed., The Trojan
Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid (Palo Alto, CA.: Rampart Press, 1974), p. 179.
19
20
21
Sharp, International Technical Assistance, p. ix.
Kaplan, “United States Foreign Aid Programs,” p. 67.
22
A Reference Volume on Technical Assistance Programs with Particular Emphasis on the
Work and Responsibilities of Voluntary Agencies, Study Sponsored by the American Council of
Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service (Washington D.C.: May, 1953), p. 6.
See Steven W. Hook, “Preface,” in Foreign Aid Toward the Millennium, Steven W. Hook, ed.
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996), p. viii.
23
24
Vernon W. Ruttan, United States Development Assistance Policy: The Domestic Politics of
Foreign Economic Aid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, passim for a
discussion of these changes.
Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, Power and Impotence: The Failure of America’s Foreign
Policy (New York: Random House, 1966).
25
William Vogt, “Point Four Propaganda and Reality,” in American Perspective, vol. iv, no. 2
(Spring, 1950), p. 124. Article, pp. 129-138.
26
27
Merle Curti and Kendall Birr, Prelude to Point Four: American Technical Missions Overseas
1838-1938 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), p. 218.
28
Sharp, International Technical Assistance, p. 56.
29
Sharp, International Technical Assistance, p. 45.
30
Ibid., p. 46.
31
Ibid., p. 48.
32
Ibid., p. 49.
Daniel Cosio Villegas, “A Latin American View of Point Four,” in American Perspective, vol.
iv, no. 2 (Spring, 1950), p. 138 and pp. 140-141. Article, pp. 138-145.
33
119
Everett C. Hughes and Helen M. Hughes, “Sociologists View Point Four,” in American
Perspective, vol. iv, no. 2 (Spring, 1950), p. 129.
34
35
Curti and Birr, Prelude to Point Four, p. 218.
36
Sharp, International Technical Assistance, p. 124.
37
Source: Sidney Sonenblum, and Herbert Striner, The Foreign Aid Programs and the United States Economy
1948-1957 Staff Report (Washington, D.C.: National Planning Association. May 1958), pp. 8-9.
38
Paul Mosley, Overseas Aid: Its Defence and Reform (Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf Books,
1987), pp.22-23.
39
Sharp, International Technical Assistance, p. 8.
40
Source: Sidney Sonenblum, and Herbert Striner, The Foreign Aid Programs and the United States Economy
1948-1957 Staff Report (Washington, D.C.: National Planning Association. May 1958), pp. 8-9.
41
Harlan Cleveland, Gerard J. Mangone, John Clarke Adams, The Overseas Americans (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 113.
42
43
Ibid., p. 45.
Ibid., p. 47.
44
Ibid., p. 57.
45
Ibid., p. 57.
46
Ibid., p. 346.
47
Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention: An Inside Account of howthe Johnson Policy
of Escalization in Vietnam Was Reversed (New York: David McKay Company, 1969), p. vi.
48
49
Ibid., p. 43.
Montgomery, Aftermath, p. 60.
50
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New
York: Vintage, 1972), p. 51.
51
John D. Montgomery, The Politics of Foreign Aid: American Experience in Southeast Asia
(New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 152-153.
52
Speech by Arthur Z. Gardiner, September 22, 1960.
120
53
Sayre and Thurber, Training for Specialized Mission Personnel, pp. 23.
54
Sharp, International Technical Assistance, p. x.
55
Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960).
56
Barbara Ward, The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), p.
31-34.
57
58
Ibid., p. 100.
Cleveland, et al., The Overseas Americans, p. 275.
59
Wallace S. Sayre and Clarence E. Thurber, Training for Specialized Mission Personnel
(Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1952). pp. 2-4 provides a discussion of this early
period.
60
Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for
Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. xxii.
H. Field Haviland, “Foreign Aid and the Policy Process: 1957,” American Political Science
Review, vol. 52, no. 33 (September, 1958), pp. 689-724.
61
62
Table from Cleveland, et al., The Overseas Americans, p. 71. The source of the table was
“Improvement in Standards of Language Proficiency and in Recruiting for the Foreign Service,”
Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on S.1243, April, 1959, page. 59.
63
Cleveland, et al., The Overseas Americans, p. 109.
64
Ibid., p. 194.
65
Ibid., p. 100.
Joseph Buttinger, “Fact and Fiction on Foreign Aid,” in Dissent, vol. vi, no. 3 (Summer,
1959), pp. 319-367. Quote, p. 349.
66
67
Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory, p. 188.
68
Hook, National Interest and Foreign Aid, p. 118.
69
Ibid., p. 166.
121
Rowland Egger, “Technical Assistance at Home and Abroad,” in Institutional Cooperation for
the Public Service: Report of a Conference (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1963), p.
49.
70
71
Edward W. Weidner, Technical Assistance in Public Administration Overseas: The Case for
Development Administration (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1964), pp. 69-70.
72
Stillman and Pfaff, Power and Impotence, p. 167.
73
Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory, p. 178 and 181.
Usha Maharajani, “Kennedy and the Strategy of Aid: The Clay Report and After,” Western
Political Quarterly, vol. Xviii, no. 3 (September, 1965), pp. 656-668. Quote, p. 663.
74
Grant, “Towards a More Effective Domestic Political Base for American Economic
Assistance Abroad,” p. 4.
76
William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: Fawcett Books,
1960).
75
77
Graham Greene, The Quiet American (New York: Random House, 1992).
78
Paul Theroux, “Tarzan is an Expatriate,” in Transition, no. 21 (1967), pp. 13-19.
Okot p’Bitek, “Foreign ‘Experts’ and Peace Corps swarm the Country Like white Ants.”
Transition, no. 21(1967), p. 20.
79
80
Cleveland, et. al., The Overseas Americans, p. 4 and p. 287.
81
George Liska made this point as long ago as 1960. See his The New Statecraft: Foreign Aid
in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 1.
82
Cleveland, et al., The Overseas Americans, p. 167.
83
Montgomery, Aftermath, p. 63.
84
Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory, p. 183.
85
Ibid.,, p. 184.
86
Bock, Fifty Years of Technical Assistance, p.3.
87
Esman and Montgomery, “Systems Approaches to Technical Cooperation,” p. 512.
88
Buttinger, “Fact and Fiction on Foreign Aid, p. 352.
122
89
Edward W. Weidner, Technical Assistance in Public Administration Overseas: The Case for
Development Administration (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1964), p. 7.
90
Ibid., p. 46.
91
Sidney Sonenblum and Herbert Striner, The Foreign Aid Programs and the United States
Economy, 1948-1957 (Washington D.C.: National Planning Association, May 9, 1958), p. 7.
92
Sharp, International Technical Assistance, p. 51.
93
Cleveland, et al., The Overseas Americans, p. 151.
94
Sharp, International Technical Assistance, p. 54.
95
Ibid., p. 52.
96
United Nations, Technical Assistance Administration, Training in Public Administration (New
York: 1958), pp. 33-34, quoted by Weidner, Technical Assistance in Public Administration
Overseas, p. 22.
97
98
Sharp, International Technical Assistance, p. 25.
Ibid., p. x
.
William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures
in the Tropics (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2001, p. 106.
99
100
Kaplan, “United States Foreign Aid Programs,” pp. 55-71. Quote, p. 64.
101
Cleveland, et al., The Overseas Americans, p. 143.
102
Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory, pp. 28-29.
103
Buttinger, “Fact and Fiction on Foreign Aid,” pp. 319-367.
Judith Hoover, “Ronald Reagan’s Failure to Secure Contra-Aid: A Post-Vietnam Shift in
Foreign Policy Rhetoric,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. xxiv, No.3, (Summer 1994),
p.536.
104
Dean Rusk, “A Fresh Look at the Formulation of Foreign Policy,” Reprint from the
Department of State Bulletin (February 20, 1961), p. 1.
105
106
107
Maharajani, “Kennedy and the Strategy of Aid,” p. 668.
Ibid., pp. 656-668.
123
108
Ibid., quote, p. 665.
Grant, “Towards a More Effective Domestic Political Base for American Economic
Assistance Abroad,” p. 13.
109
110
111
Maharajani, “Kennedy and the Strategy of Aid,” quote p. 657.
Steve Weissman, “An Alliance for Stability,” The Trojan Horse, p. 73.
Carlos F. Diaz-Alejandro, “Some Aspects of the Brazilian Experience with Foreign Aid,”
(Center Paper No.177, Yale University Economic Growth Center, 1972), p. 444.
112
113
Ibid., p. 450.
114
Ibid., p. 450.
115
Ibid., p. 462.
116
Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, p. 197.
117
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 411.
118
Ruttan, United States Development Assistance Policy, p.p. 86-87.
Stanley Hoffmann, “What Should We Do in the World?” The Atlantic Monthly (October
1989), p.85.
119
120
Mosley, Overseas Aid, p.27.
121
Hook, National Interest and Foreign Aid, p. 26.
122
Stillman and Pfaff, Power and Impotence, p. 169.
Ralph H. Smuckler and Robert J. Berg, “New Challenges New Opportunities, U.S.
Cooperation for International Growth and Development in the 1990s,” Michigan State
University, August 1988, p.29.
123
124
Speech by Arthur Z. Gardiner, September 22, 1960.
125
Judith Tendler, Inside Foreign Aid (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975),
p. 88.
126
Agency for International Development, U.S. Government Organization Manual (Washington
D.C.: U.S. Government Printer, 1972), pp. 326-329.
124
127
Public Law 87-195 as published by the United States Government Printing Office,
Washington, D.C., September 4, 1961.
128
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1972).
129
Montgomery, The Politics of Foreign Aid, p. 166.
Edward K. Hamilton, “Toward Public Confidence in Foreign Aid,” in World Affaris, vol.
132, no. 4 (March, 1970), p. 287.
130
131
Diaz-Alejandro, “Some Aspects of the Brazilian Experience with Foreign Aid, p. 467.
132
Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 30.
133
Ibid., p. 30.
134
Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977)
135
Tuchman, The March of Folly, p. 256-257.
136
Ibid., p. 256.
137
Caputo, A Rumor of War.
138
Montgomery, Aftermath,, p. 76.
139
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 106.
140
Ibid., p. 224.
141
Ibid., p. 129.
142
Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 54.
143
Ibid., p. 48.
144
Reinhold Niebuhr quoted in Stillman and Pfaff, Power and Impotence, p. 13.
145
Ibid.,, p. 43
146
Ibid., p. 67.
147
David Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, in Vietnam and America,
October 1967 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), p. 4.
125
148
Quoted in Ibid., p. 194.
149
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 154.
150
Tuchman, The March of Folly, p. 274.
151
Montgomery, The Politics of Foreign Aid, p. 44.
152
Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight, p. 445.
Stanley K. Sheinbaum, “Introduction” to “The University on the Make,” Ramparts, Volume
4 No.12 (April 1966), pp.11-22. Quote, p. 13.
153
154
155
Ibid., pp.11-22. Quote, p. 13.
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 14.
156
Montgomery, The Politics of Foreign Aid, p. 70.
157
Ibid., p. 47.
158
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 291.
159
Buttinger, “Fact and Fiction on Foreign Aid,” quote, p. 339.
160
Ibid., quote, p. 351.
Montgomery, Aftermath,, p. 50.
161
David Sogge, Give and Take: What’s the Matter with Foreign Aid? (London: Zed Books,
2002), p. 11.
162
163
Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory, p. 151.
164
Caputo, A Rumor of War.
165
Ibid.
166
Ibid.
167
Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, p. 14.
168
Ibid., p. 69.
169
John J. McCuen, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War: The Strategy of Counter-Insurgency
(Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1966).
126
170
Schulzinger, A Time for War, pp. 98. and 107.
171
Sharp, International Technical Assistance, p. 47.
Grant, “Towards a More Effective Domestic Political Base for American Economic
Assistance Abroad,” p. 14.
173
Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, p. 1.
172
174
Ibid., p. 16.
175
Tuchman, The March of Folly, p. 287.
176
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 425.
177
Barnes, Bart, “AID Official Donald MacDonald,” Washington Post, Jan. 15, 2004, p.B6.
178
Ibid.
179
Caputo, A Rumor of War.
180
Ibid.
181
Schulzinger, p. 104.
182
Ibid., p. 220.
183
Ibid., p. 165.
184
Hook, National Interest and Foreign Aid, p. 122
185
Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory, p. 75.
186
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 5.
187
Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 89.
188
Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 187.
189
Ibid., pp.11-22. Quote, p. 14.
190
Sheinbaum, “Introduction” to “The University on the Make,” pp.11-22. Quote, p. 13.
191
Warren Hinckle, “The University on the Make, p. 22.
192
Ibid., p. 21.
127
193
Ibid., pp.11-22. Quote, p. 17.
194
Ibid., pp.11-22. Quote, p. 14.
195
Ibid.,, pp.11-22. Quote, p. 21.
196
Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory, p. 73.
197
Stillman and Pfaff, Power and Impotence, p. 48.
198
Ibid., p. 175.
199
Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, p. 118..
200
Ibid., p. 62.
201
Tuchman, The March of Folly, p. 302.
202
Montgomery, Aftermath,, p. 74.
Banning Garrett, “Post-War Planning for South Vietnam”, in Weissman, ed., The Trojan
Horse, p. 137.
203
204
Ibid., p. 292.
205
Ibid., p. 299.
206
Ibid., p. 157.
207
Stillman and Pfaff, Power and Impotence, p. 12.
208
Ibid., p. 51.
209
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 335.
210
Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight, p. 339.
211
Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 614.
212
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 97.
213
Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 517.
214
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 224.
128
215
Ibid., p. 181.
216
Ibid., p. 453.
217
Ibid., p. 107.
218
Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, p. 662.
219
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 435.
220
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 451.
221
Ibid., p.452.
222
According to Tuchman, The March of Folly, p. 323.
223
Tuchman, The March of Folly, p. 308.
224
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, P. 368.
Sarah Jackson and Joe Kimmins, “Thunder from the Left:
The Radical Critique of
Development Assistance,” Communique on Development Issues, (Washington D.C.: Overseas
Development Council, no.4, Jan. 1971), p.1.
225
Akio Watanabe, “First among Equals” in What Does the World Want from America?
International Perspectives on U.S. Foreign Policy Alexander T. J. Lennon, ed. (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 18.
226
227
See Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 322-327.
228
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, pp. 34-35.
229
Lenny Siegel, “The Future of Military Aid” Weissman, ed., The Trojan Horse, pp. 206-207.
Nancy Stein and Mike Clare, “Police Aid for Tyrants” in Weissman, ed., The Trojan Horse, p.
221.
230
231
Caleb Rossiter, The Bureaucratic Struggle for Control of U.S. Foreign Aid: Diplomacy vs.
Development in Southern Africa (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1985), pp.2-3
232
233
Rossiter, The Bureaucratic Struggle for Control of U.S. Foreign Aid, p.162.
Stillman and Pfaff, Power and Impotence, p. 181.
129
234
235
Edward W. Weidner, Technical Assistance in Public Administration Overseas, p. 65.
Tuchman, The March of Folly, p. 269.
236
FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 454.
237
Ibid., p. 545.
See Robert Fisk’s discussion of this calamitous event in his monumental book, The Great
War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp.
92-138.
238
239
Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory, p. 11.
240
Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory, p. 12.
241
Montgomery, The Politics of Foreign Aid, p. 12. See also Tuchman, The March of Folly, p.
261.
242
Montgomery, Aftermath, p. 72.
243
Stillman and Pfaff, Power and Impotence, p. 163.
244
Ibid., p. 163.
245
Ibid., p. 17 and p. 21.
246
Ibid., p. 23
247
Ibid., p. 40.
248
Ibid, p. 59., p. 62 and p. 129.
130