FOREIGN RELATIONS: Hit Hard

A year ago the U.S. Congress volleyed and thundered for five months over EGA. Last week it barely managed a show of interest in ECA’s $5½ billion bill for the next 15 months. Summoned to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Dean Acheson waited for ten minutes before Chairman Tom Connally showed up, then waited ten minutes more for enough other committeemen to make a quorum. Finally Connally snapped at an attendant: “Go out and see if you can find any more Senators wandering around, and bring them in.”

EGA was suffering not from a lack, but from an excess of support. Congress was well aware that the commitment had been made. They could only examine the books, and assess its achievements. Was EGA succeeding? The Administration’s answer was a triumphant yes.

Flowing Hope. Its success, witness after witness asserted, could not, and should not be measured in economic terms alone. The impact of EGA, said Secretary Acheson, had altered “the political atmosphere of an entire continent.” Added W. Averell Harriman, ECA’s European ambassador: “Hope, and the will to resist tyranny, were ebbing in Europe in 1947. They are flowing again today. It is this—the will to live as free men and to go forward toward a future which, while it cannot be precisely foreseen, can yet be believed in—which has arrested the spread of reactionary Communist aggression . . . The pressures in Europe are beginning to reverse.”

EGA Administrator Paul Hoffman, an able and confident witness, detailed the facts & figures. Said Hoffman: “We can now say with assurance that Europe is through the first phase of its economic recovery.”

Western Europe’s output from mines and factories was up to prewar level and 14% above 1947. Exports were up 20% over last year’s. Electric power output and freight traffic, despite all of war’s dislocations, were now far above prewar levels. Said Hoffman: “This is the time to hit hard for European recovery—time for the Europeans to take drastic and sometimes painful steps necessary for real recovery, time for the U.S. to back their efforts to the full.”

Arms Are Extra. The cost of hitting hard, Hoffman declared, would be $4,280,000,000 for the fiscal year beginning July 1. This was $730 million less than the $5,010,000,000 spent in ECA’s first twelve months of operation ending April 1. For the three-month gap from April 1 to the start of the new fiscal year on July i, Hoffman asked an additional $1,150,000,000. These figures did not include military aid to Greece and Turkey, nor aid to China, which is now on a “day-to-day” basis; nor did they include whatever the U.S. would spend as the arsenal of the North Atlantic pact. The bills for these measures would come later.

Under questioning, Administrator Hoffman admitted frankly that he could not furnish final breakdowns to show where all of the EGA money would go, but he emphasized that the totals had been revised “downward again & again.” Few seemed inclined to dispute him. Ohio’s Republican Senator Robert A. Taft, a man with a burning aversion to blank checks, conceded that the estimates looked “just about right.”

MILLIONS FOR RECOVERY

Spent Asked

1948-9 1949-50†

United Kingdom $1,319.1 $940.0

France (and colonies) 1,058.5 875.0

Benelux (and colonies) 699.0 555.0

Scandinavia 222.2 268.0

Western Germany and Austria 729.2 716.0

Italy and Trieste 598.9 567.0

Greece 172.0 170.0

Turkey 44.8 30.0

Other Countries 109.3 79.0

Miscellaneous Operating Expenses 57.0 80.0

Total EGA Program Funds $5,010.0 $4,280.0

† Does not include interim appropriation request of $1,150,000,000.