(6 of 9)
Reawakened Zeal. "Of all the men in the Cabinet." says one Cabinet member, "the President feels closest to Anderson and relies on him more than on anybody else." Back in 1955 when Anderson was still Deputy Defense Secretary, the President told a White House visitor that Anderson was "big enough to handle any job in this country," and by that he meant the presidency (but both Ike and Anderson know that Anderson's quiet behind-the-scenes methods would be a handicap in politics).
Anderson's arguments for balanced budgets and sound money appeal to the President's basic conservatism, and they have brought into focus goals and principles that had become somewhat blurred. Result: last year's marked conservative shift by the President and his Administration. Ike committed himself to the balanced budget with reawakened zeal, threw his personal prestige into a public campaign against spending, and carried the country with him so decisively that he held the whip hand over the last session of Congress.
The World's Banker. If Secretary Anderson had done no more than fight and win his battles against a recession tax cut and for balanced budgets, he might well be ranked as a great Treasury Secretary. But his campaign to rebuild the U.S.'s foreign economic policies could turn out to be his greatest achievement.
Anderson's move into foreign economic policymaking has been widely misinterpreted. The prevailing image that emerges from Democratic speeches and newspaper editorials pictures him as an intruding bull amid fragile foreign-policy china, endangering foreign aid and freer trade policies in a narrow obsession with sound money. That image is wildly inaccurate. Anderson wants, as he has often made clear, to see world trade become freer, not less free; he wants to see the underdeveloped countries get more development capital from the West, not less. Far from viewing the U.S.'s economic relations with the outside world through a balanced-budget peephole, he views domestic economic policies in a global perspective.
One of the strongest motives behind his battle for a balanced 1960 budget was his conviction that a stable U.S. dollar is necessary to the economic health of the entire free world. After discussing international economic problems with foreign officials on a trip around the world in the autumn of 1958, Anderson came back to Washington profoundly impressed with the depth of the free world's concern about the stability of the dollar. "The U.S. has become the world's banker," says Anderson. "In every period of history there has to be some sort of international reserve currency. It used to be the British pound. Today it is the U.S. dollar." Preserving the stability of the dollar, he argues, is a basic U.S. obligation to the free world, just as important as helping underdeveloped countries with foreign aid.
Flowing Gold. As Anderson sees it, U.S. foreign economic policies in 1959 and beyond have to deal with two basic, inescapable realities, one old and familiar, the other comparatively new:
1 The underdeveloped countries of the free world, caught in an explosive ferment of rising expectations, need foreign development capital—not dollars, but capital, whether provided as dollars, pounds, francs, marks or yen.