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Warm Invitation. Mrs. Gandhi left Washington with several specific aid promises from the U.S. To expand education in India, the President announced plans for an Indo-American Foundation, to be financed by $300 million in rupees held by the U.S. in Indian Food for Peace payments. To alleviate India's food shortage, he proposed shipping an additional $500 million worth of U.S. surplus commodities to India by year's end ($500 million worth is already scheduled) and appealed to other nations to match the U.S. contribution.
Mrs. Gandhi extended a warm invitation to the President to visit India, then moved on to Manhattan for a brief stop before flying to London to see Prime Minister Wilson. She gave a poised speech before the New York Economic Club, inviting private enterprise to socialist-leaning India and maintaining that India's troubles, though serious, are not really as bad as they are sometimes portrayed. With foreign assistance, she said, "we shall tide over the famine without too great suffering."
The result of Mrs. Gandhi's visit was primarily a new mood of increased warmth and understanding between the U.S. and India. She and the President decided during the week that they were going roughly in the same direction and that they could accomplish things together without making demands on each other. Mrs. Gandhi proved to be not only "a very proud, gracious and very able lady," as the President called her, but a fiercely independent ruler with a determination to equal his own. As if to illustrate that independence, she flew off from London in a Soviet plane to visit Russia's rulers in Moscow before returning to India.