THE PRESIDENCY: Life or Death

The President seemed at his folksy best as he talked to his fellow Americans, via television and radio, from his White House desk. He tripped clumsily here & there as he read his message, but mostly he exuded persuasive sincerity, pugnacious impatience with critics, and flat sentences full of importance for the nation.

Harry Truman wanted the people to get behind his $7.9 billion foreign aid program. He called it neither "foreign" nor "aid" (two words without public appeal), but "mutual security . . . against aggression and war—through mutual effort, through the effort of many nations . . ."

Warned the President: "The action the Congress takes on that [$7.9 billion] request has a great deal to do with our chances of avoiding another world war. It may make the difference between life and death for many of you . . ."

Enthusiasm. Proposed U.S. "contributions" to other countries, explained Truman, fall into three categories:

¶ $5.6 billion worth of straight military equipment.

¶ $1.7 billion worth of "defense support," i.e., raw materials or finished goods needed to support the military effort. "For example, we might send steel to help another country make its own guns instead of sending it the finished weapons."

¶ $600 million worth of Point Four economic and technical assistance, mostly for underdeveloped Asia and Africa.

The Point Four funds were obviously closest to Harry Truman's heart. "Stomach Communism," he observed, "cannot be halted with weapons of war ... It is only a fraction of the amount I have asked for military purposes, but who can say that in the long run it may not have a greater effect?" With happy emphasis, he told his hearers some Point Four success stories—a $75,000 project for diesel-powered pumps in IndoChina's Red River Valley that assured a $2,000,000 rice crop, the work of nine American experts in raising Turkey's grain production by 50% and cotton production by 300%, the agricultural modernization being brought to 3,000,000 village farms in India.

Derogation. From defense of his mutual security proposals, Harry Truman shifted to an advance attack on the critics that he knew were waiting for him. "There are those among us," said the President belligerently, "who say we can't afford it. We've heard that one before . . . The figure of $7.9 billion . . . was not just taken out of the air ... I would not recommend that the Congress spend a single dollar more than our national security requires." This, too, was typical Truman—at his worst. Actually, his estimates are —and have to be—very rough approximations of what is needed. Truman's long feud with Congress is rubbed raw by the President's open assumption that his estimates are exactly right and any others wrong. A humbler man would have outlined the problem, given his figure, stood ready to defend it in detail—and avoided tactless, advance insistence that every dollar he asked was essential.

"It is awfully easy to 'demagogue' in favor of economy and against what is scornfully referred to as 'foreign aid,'" said Truman. "Congressional action on our Mutual Security Program will be a real test of statesmanship . . ."