The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

on the World Today

THE first six months of the Kennedy Administration have been hectic. There has been a high degree of improvisation, of trial and error, yet there is a pattern now visible in the Kennedy program, though its effectiveness is as much in doubt today as were the first results of the Roosevelt program nearly three decades ago.

In the domestic field, Kennedy’s pattern was evident even before his inauguration. The program which the 87th Congress has produced was foreordained in the Kennedy task-force reports and in the President’s messages to Congress. It is essentially a middle-of-the-road effort to “get this country moving again,” as candidate Kennedy so often said last year.

The longer-term measures, both those enacted and those so far stalled in the Congress, will have to be in effect for some time before they can be adequately evaluated. But none are radical departures from the moderate welfare measures which began under F.D.R. and which the Republicans in the Eisenhower years concluded were here to stay. How many of Kennedy’s domestic proposals are enacted into law during the two sessions of the present Congress, the one this year and the one which will meet next January, will depend on a number of factors, among which the state of the federal Treasury is a prime consideration. Kennedy is relying on an upsurge in the economy which will bring in, at present tax rates, enough added revenue to finance his program.

The belief is that it can all be done with nothing more than creeping inflation, though the conservative economists and politicians in Washington are highly skeptical of this. But if revenues are on the increase, the result undoubtedly will answer the cries of “How will you pay for it?” which have been hurled at every new spending measure.

In the past couple of years, there has been a growing acceptance of the thesis that the federal government has a major responsibility for improving the public sector of the economy — schools, highways, hospitals, and public works of all kinds which individuals alone cannot handle and which states and local communities are unable to finance. The groans of the homeowner over increasing local real-estate taxes in every corner of the nation have accelerated this process.

The cost of the space program

Spending for domestic needs is only fractional compared with the soaring costs of defense and space activities. There has been a lot of grumbling at the idea of embarking on a multibillion-dollar program to send Americans to the moon when so much remains to be done for Americans here on earth, including their protection from the Communist threat. Yet, from the moment the President said, in his second State of the Union address to Congress on May 25, “I believe we should go to the moon,” it was only a matter of time before the program would be voted. No Congress, certainly no Congress as closely in tune with a President as this one is with Kennedy, could turn its back on such a public presidential commitment.

The money involved in the moon effort alone was estimated by the President at from seven to nine billion dollars over the next five years. But the scientists who produce such estimates are the first to concede that the figure is no more than an educated guess, that the total could run far higher. Past experience in spending for both defense and space indicates that the bill will be a shocker by the time it is all paid. Only sustained economic growth can provide the money.

The decision to try for the moon, however important it may be in terms of both science and military potential, represents, above all, a psychological move. The Soviet success in the first Sputnik shot, compared with the initial foot dragging on the part of the United States, demonstrated how badly our government had misjudged the psychological factor. As Kennedy saw it, when the time came to make up his mind about going to the moon, there really was no choice; it has to be done, and an effort has to be made to get there before the Communists do.

Mobilizing for economic development

In international affairs, the Administration has embarked on what could be the single most important move it is likely to undertake in all its four years. This is the effort to coordinate the economics of the free nations of the world, first by creating the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and second, by launching the Alliance for Progress for Latin America. The O.E.C.D., an outgrowth of the machinery of Marshall Plan days, was initiated by the Eisenhower Administration, with the then Undersecretary of State, Douglas Dillon, now Kennedy’s Secretary of the Treasury, playing a leading role. Dillon’s successor at the State Department, George Ball, has become the Kennedy Administration evangelist for O.E.C.D.

This is an organization of the United States plus Canada and eighteen Western European nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization group plus the neutrals: Austria, Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as Spain, a non-NATO member having its own military arrangements with the United States. Japan, the industrial power in free Asia, is aligned with O.E.C.D. through the Development Assistance Committee, a grouping of the ten major industrial nations of the free world plus the European Economic Community Commission, which runs the European Common Market.

What these bodies are trying to do, and they have now for many months been under the most intense pressures from Washington, is threefold: to rationalize and improve their own economic development, to rationalize and increase by a major factor economic and technical assistance to the underdeveloped nations in the southern half of the globe, and, finally, to increase world trade among all free nations.

The Alliance for Progress is a Latin American measure with similar goals — chiefly to improve the lot of the Latin masses and do so with increasing rapidity. One of the Administration’s aims is to relate the O.E.C.D. effort to the Alliance for Progress program, and this was stressed, among other things, in the Kennedy-De Gaulle talks in Paris early in June.

European union?

Central to this global economic reform effort is the development of the Common Market in Western Europe. The speed with which it has moved has astonished all but its most enthusiastic backers, such as Jean Monnet, long known as “Mr. Europe.” The critical issue for the last half of 1961 is British membership in the Common Market. Here far more than economics is involved, though it is the pressure of economics which is driving the Conservative government of Prime Minister Macmillan toward membership.

Basic to the Common Market dream, in the minds of Monnet and others, is political unity, the development of a United States of Western Europe. The Coat and Steel Community broke ground; the Common Market is carrying the idea much further. The Franco-German ties of De Gaulle and Adenauer, on the one hand, are central to economic unity for the six Continental nations which make up the Market (France, Germany, Italy, and the three Benelux nations), but, on the other hand, De Gaulle’s nationalism opposes the logical political unity.

Washington hopes that the Common Market will become so strong, the process so irreversible, that it will lead ultimately to political unification, though this may have to await post-De Gaulle France. At any rate, the trend is in the right direction. British membership in the Market would mean submerging British independence to a degree that London historically has always rejected. Yet the economic power of the Common Market plus the shadow of the Sino-Soviet bloc, both politically and economically, cry out for Britain to take the plunge.

The United States has officially said it is friendly to both the Common Market and the European Free Trade Area, the grouping of seven other countries which Britain hastily drew together once the Market was a reality. The problem for the political neutrals is difficult, but, viewed from here, not impossible. The key nation is taken to be Switzerland. If the British join the Market, it is felt, the Swiss will have to. And if the Swiss do, then the Austrians and the Irish and the Swedes will be able to. Only Finland, associated with the Free Trade Area group by special permission of Moscow, will be left dangerously exposed.

All of this line of argument contains a high degree of optimism. But unless the free world can better coordinate its own economy, both within the developed nations and in its aid to the underdeveloped lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Communist penetration will be inevitable. The tangled maze of new international alphabetical agencies may seem dry as dust to the mass of Americans; yet, in their success — and this includes the manifold banking and trading agencies, such as the World Bank and the U.S. Development Loan Agency — lies the hope of the free world. On this front, the Kennedy Administration deserves good marks.

The President’s talks

American foreign policy, however, includes political as well as economic and military factors. The President’s long, intimate talks with General de Gaulle produced a new sense of Franco-American communication, which has lasted far beyond the last trumpet call of the ceremonial visit to Paris. The true test will be in the hard work of finding methods of consultation on world political problems and methods of solving the dilemma of nuclear weapons for NATO. Fortunately, there was no effort at Paris or after it to cover up the Kennedy-De Gaulle differences. Likewise, there was no effort to cover up the Kennedy-Khrushchev differences at or after the Vienna encounter.

It is evident that Khrushchev, convinced about the eventual triumph of Communism, will keep up the pressure on the United States and its allies. Berlin will be the focal point this summer and fall. Eventually there will be another EastWest conference, but if the Americans have their way, the topic will be Germany and Berlin, not Berlin alone, so that at least Khrushchev will be put in the position of having to refuse a free-elections plan for all of Germany, just as the West will refuse to buy his so-called “free city" proposal for West Berlin.

No one here can see any light at the end of the Berlin tunnel. Central to the avoidance of a conflict is an appreciation by Khrushchev and his associates of Kennedy’s determination to fight, if necessary, to protect West Berlin. Official Washington, from the President down, hopes that Khrushchev knows how dangerous it would be to create a direct confrontation of power between the two major nuclear nations.

The troubles of the Reds

Washington and, indeed, all Western capitals too often see the world in terms of the problems their own leaders must deal with. The secrecy the Communists can maintain often covers their own internal difficulties. One of these is the agricultural failure in Red China. One does not have to take the word of refugees arriving in Hong Kong; the fact that Peiping has bought nearly a half billion dollars worth of grain from Canada and Australia with sterling hard to come by is proof enough of the catastrophe in Red China. Moscow’s own criticisms of Soviet farm deficiencies only add to the problem, for the Soviet Union is not in a position to meet the needs of its major ally.

Add to this the ideological differences between Moscow and Peiping, differences which are very real in terms of how to proceed to destroy the free world, and one sees that the Reds have their own problems. If Washington can rationalize and improve its economics, if it can achieve closer political consultation and policy making, if it can improve its ability to cope with conventional warfare and with guerrilla attack on its weaker friends, if it can create a sense of hope and movement among the masses of India and Pakistan, of Brazil and Bolivia, if it can sustain the United Nations as an instrument to protect the small from the pressures of the large, free men everywhere will take heart.

Perhaps the most that can fairly be said after the first half year of the Kennedy Administration is that it has made a start in this direction. Cuba and Laos were setbacks, but they were peripheral to the main problem, and, fortunately, the Administration knows this, however much it wants to keep Laos at least neutral and however much it wants to contain Castro’s Cuba. Rough times are ahead, but as the Administration’s efforts begin to come into focus, there is some reason for hope.