Foreign Aid: First AID

A couple of weeks ago, Administration insiders leaked the news that Fowler Hamilton, an international lawyer and an old Government hand, would soon be appointed director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, succeeding Allen Dulles. Later, the word came that Wall Street Banker George Woods would soon be named head of the new Agency for International Development. But under the New Frontier, such predictions are often unsafe until the actual swearing-in ceremonies. When President Kennedy last week announced the appointment of Fowler Hamilton, it was not to the CIA but to the AID job.

In fact, the President had seriously considered Hamilton for CIA. But Kennedy wanted a long-term intelligence chief, and Hamilton, a man of many affairs, was reluctant to make a career out of CIA. Similarly, Woods was a genuine candidate for AID. But as chairman of the First Boston Corp., one of the nation’s largest investment banking firms, he was anathema to several liberal Democratic Senators: it was First Boston that had arranged the financing for the abortive Dixon-Yates contract in 1954. When those Senators threatened to fight Woods’s nomination, his name was dropped and Hamilton’s substituted.

Wise & Long-Range. In his new job, Hamilton will inherit an agency with a lineage going back 20 years to the old Lend-Lease Administration. In its newest form, AID will replace the International Cooperation Administration and the Development Loan Fund, with responsibility for most foreign-aid functions. Hamilton will have close to $4 billion to distribute among needy nations—and the special assignments of persuading them to spend their dollars wisely, on long-range programs of economic development.

A native of Kansas City, Mo., Fowler Hamilton, 50, got his law degree as a Rhodes scholar, at Oxford’s Christ Church College—where he developed a taste, which he still indulges, for Savile Row suits and old port. After a brief turn as a Kansas City lawyer, he went into Government service in 1938, as a special assistant to Attorney General Homer Cummings. During World War II, he helped select German economic targets for air raids and sabotage, as chief of the Economic Warfare Division of the U.S. embassy in London.

Fluent Heavyweight. After the war, Hamilton became chief legal consultant of the Justice Department, later returned to private practice (mainly international law) in Manhattan, where he now lives. A confirmed Democrat who gets along well with Republicans, he backed Stu Symington for President, helped write a report on the Defense Department for John Kennedy immediately after the election.

An inveterate globetrotter, Hamilton has firsthand knowledge of many of the countries he will deal with. He is a dark-browed heavyweight (195 lbs.), an aggressive administrator and a fluent conversationalist who is brusquely intolerant of small talk. “I think I have a very good understanding of foreign problems,” he says, “and I welcome this opportunity.”