(See Cover) A mild midwinter sun glinted on the sumptuous Uruguayan resort town of Punta del Este, 65 miles east of Montevideo. It was an odd setting for talk about poverty, but there last week, in the blue and white assembly hall of Punta del Este's Cantegril Country Club, the economic ministers of 21 hemisphere nations gath ered to launch a historically dramatic new program of massive aid for Latin America's underdeveloped nations — the Alliance for Progress (see THE HEMISPHERE).
The U.S. spokesman was Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon. While Cuba's spinach-bearded economic commissar, Che Guevara, glowered in his chair, Dillon opened the conference with the most gen erous offer of help in U.S. history. In a flat, toneless voice that failed to hide the tre mendous promise of his words, Dillon vowed that the U.S. would take the lead in securing $20 billion in low-interest loans over the next ten years to raise Latin America's living standards. "We welcome the revolution of rising expectations" he said, "and we intend to transform it into a revolution of rising satisfactions.''
Plans & Policies. Over the years, the U.S. has been an indifferently good neighbor to Latin America, misunderstanding and misunderstood, pledging much but producing little in the way of desperately needed capital investment. But there was a new tone to the U.S. commitments made at Punta del Este—and this tone reflected the convictions and attitudes of both Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Douglas Dillon. As custodian of the world's richest treasury. Dillon presides over the fiscal plans and policies of a nation with a record gross national product of $515 billion; as the fiscal housekeeper for the U.S. Government, Dillon works within the roomy confines of the largest peacetime budget in history—$87.7 billion. But unlike most of his Treasury Department predecessors, Dillon does not consider himself simply a watchdog of the taxpayer's dollar. "He believes in good housekeeping," says a Treasury staffer, "not just to admire the house, but in order to utilize it.'' To Dillon, the U.S. economy is a dynamic weapon in the cold war, an arsenal of dollars that must be strategically employed against world poverty to halt the spread of Communism. Under Doug Dillon, the staid U.S. Treasury is no longer just the Government's check-cashing and revenue-gathering arm: it is an active, shaping force in U.S. foreign policy.