THE dust had scarcely settled on the ruins of the Senate foreign aid bill when the Administration set out to rebuild the program out of the rubble. The White House started at once to try to reverse the stunning 41-to-27 defeat. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, in daily consultation with President Nixon, put together a high-level, high-pressure lobbying campaign that sent Cabinet members scrambling to the rescue of foreign aid. Secretary of State William Rogers pleaded with a hostile Senate Foreign Relations Committee to put the program back together. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird warned that the moment could not be worse for closing off the aid pipeline. From Bangkok, traveling Treasury Secretary John Connally chimed in. If aid is ended, he said, "all that we have done since World War II would go down the drain."
The unseasonably balmy Washington air was thick with pro-aid arguments. The basic premise: cutting off foreign aid now would undermine the U.S. position in the world at a critical period. As one White House aide put it: "Without foreign aid the President will have a more difficult time convincing the Russians and the Chinese when he's negotiating with them. If there is no foreign aid in the arsenal, you don't shoot as far." The simple assumption is that foreign aid makes friends for the U.S., and thus adds to the weight that Washington can wield vis-à-vis Moscow and Peking. If military aid to Cambodia and Viet Nam are cut back, the State Department suggests, it will delay American withdrawal from Viet Nam because the local military will not be strong enough to carry on alone. President Nixon has promised a new troopwithdrawal announcement next week —based on the assumption that the U.S. will continue to supply the Vietnamese with military hardware. Indeed, the argument goes, the whole Nixon Doctrine would be undercut by ending aid; the President's reduction of the U.S. physical presence overseas is designed to be offset by continuing—even temporarily increased—U.S. military and economic assistance.
Not all of the discourse was quite so elevated. Lobbyists for the Agency for International Development, which runs the foreign aid program, moved about explaining pointedly to Senators and Representatives that some 86% of all AID funds are spent in the U.S.—for salaries, services, commodities and goods.
Win by Proxy. To salvage foreign aid, the Administration put its weight behind a resolution approved last week by the House Foreign Affairs Committee that would simply continue aid authorizations at last year's $2.6 billion annual level. That will come before the House this week. The committee will also start work on a bill to replace the one that the Senate rejected.