Reports had been circulating for weeks that Fowler Hamilton, head of the Agency for International Development, was on his way out as the U.S.'s foreign aid chief. But Hamilton did not credit the rumors, and it was with some confidence that he sat in President Kennedy's office early this month, reviewed his foreign aid plans for fiscal 1964, and suggested that if a change of management was wanted, now was the time to make it. Kennedy listened stonily, said only: "Well, I'll think it over."
As of that instant, Lawyer Hamilton knew that the rumors were right. When he took the job a little more than a year ago, he said that he would remain only "as long as the client is satisfied." Now it was obvious that the client was dissatisfied. And a few days after the confrontation came the inevitable announcement: the President had accepted Hamilton's resignation. Likeliest successor: David E. Bell, 43, sometime Harvard economist, currently director of the Bureau of the Budget.
Great Expectations. Hamilton had worked hard—and fruitlessly—at tidying up the administrative mess that has long persisted in the agency. He lost face on the New Frontier when Congress slashed the President's $5 billion foreign aid request to $3.9 billion. Hamilton emerged frustrated—but in that he was in complete company with his predecessors in what has become known as "the most thankless job in Washington."
The foreign aid agencies have undergone many changes of name, structure and purpose over the last 15 years—with calamitous effects on administrative efficiency and morale. "Things are so confused I don't know who to be nice to," an
AID bureaucrat said recently. AID staffers are painfully aware that the public and Congress are tired of foreign aid and put up with it mostly because Presidents keep insisting that it is necessary.
But the grittiest difficulties of a foreign aid chief lie in dealing with the aided countries themselves. When the U.S. started handing out economic aid to underdeveloped countries in the early 1950s, it seemed reasonable to hope that relatively small infusions of aid would lead to great strides of economic development, just as Marshall Plan aid was splendidly effective in helping to restore the war-battered economies of Western Europe. But economic development presupposes skills, motivations, ethical standards and discipline that are lacking in most underdeveloped countries. Accordingly, the results of economic aid have fallen far short of the early expectations.
"Bums & Beggars." Within the Kennedy Administration, a process of rethinking the ends and means of foreign aid is under way. The inevitable New Frontier "task force" has been appointed, and among its basic texts is a tough-minded article by the University of Chicago's Professor Hans Morgenthau in the June issue of the American Political Science Review.