Foreign Relations: Trouble for Tito

Flying from his home field near Dallas to Perrin Air Force Base near Sherman. Texas Air National Guard Major Harry C. Knickerbocker Jr. hoped to obtain some used ground-training equipment for his outfit’s F-86 jets. Knickerbocker would be welcome to the equipment, said a Perrin officer, except that it was being used “by the class with the Yugoslavs in it.” Recalls Knickerbocker of that late September incident: “It didn’t hit me for a few minutes. Then you might say I got a real jolt.”

Knickerbocker’s jolt led him to write a letter to Texas’ Republican Senator John Tower, protesting “a treasonous situation” in which four Yugoslav pilots and four maintenance men were being trained at Perrin in the use of the F-86. By last week angry Texans had formed a “National Indignation Convention” that was drawing crowds of 2,000 and more at its rallies. And the fuss stirred up by Texan Knickerbocker was making national headlines about the policies of three U.S. administrations on military aid to Communist Yugoslavia.

Those policies go well beyond the mere training of Yugoslav airmen: under the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, the U.S. sold, at discount rates, tanks, guns and some 550 jet fighters, fighter-bombers and training aircraft to Yugoslavia. Upon departing from office. President Eisenhower left for John Kennedy a list of several programs he would want to review. Among them was a proposal for selling 130 F-86D jets to Yugoslavia for $10,000 each (original cost: about $345,000). The sale of those planes, listed as obsolescent (cries Texas’ Knickerbocker: “The ‘obsolete’ F-86 is the same plane I’m flying”), was approved by the Kennedy Administration in March.

Last week, in the face of a rising outcry, both the Kennedy Administration and Dwight Eisenhower were defending their transactions with Yugoslavia. The theory behind the program is that U.S. aid helps Yugoslavia’s dissident Communist Tito from falling into the Soviet Union’s smothering embrace. Such aid, said State Secretary Dean Rusk, has unquestionably helped Yugoslavia to stay independent of the Soviet bloc. The sale of the planes, said Ike, was “in the best interests of the United States.”

But despite its defense of the jet sale, the Kennedy Administration has taken the overall question of aid to Yugoslavia under close review. President Kennedy was angered by the hostility Tito displayed toward the West at the Belgrade conference of neutrals last month. Requesting a 500,000-ton shipment of surplus U.S. wheat to supplement their poor harvest, Yugoslav officials were informed last week by U.S. Ambassador George Kennan that no such commitment would be made—at least for the time being. Clearly, the choice was up to Tito: whether to be at least reasonably friendly toward the U.S. or to forgo its much-needed aid.