FOREIGN RELATIONS: To Cut or Not to Cut

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The Administration has no illusions about the tough battle it must fight to keep Congress from cutting deeply into President Truman's $7.9 billion request for foreign aid. Last week Mutual Security Director Averell Harriman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Omar Bradley wheeled into action. Before 40-odd members of congressional committees sitting jointly, the Administration's big guns laid down a barrage of painstakingly prepared statements.

Gist of the cannonade, in the words of Averell Harriman: "Any decision to cut [mutual security] is a decision to reduce the strength which is being built in the free world for our common defense against the threat of the Kremlin. A substantial cut would gravely impair our security."

Next day, when Harriman sat down before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the counterfire began. First potshots came from Texas' irascible old Tom Connally, the committee chairman.

Democrat Connally lost no time in letting it be known that he was not fooled by mutual security semantics, particularly by the substitution of "defense support" for "economic aid." It was all a "device," he cried, to prolong ECA aid, which was supposed to end in 1952. Harriman quietly insisted: "It is not a device, but a method of building up our military security."

At another point Connally shouted: "We can't go on forever appropriating large sums of money to the United Kingdom, France and other countries, and we're under no obligation to do so." Once Harriman spoke of the "very small sum" involved in mutual security. Connally glared, his big mouth popped open and his cigar tumbled ashes down his vest as he asked: "You call $7 billion a small sum?" Hastily Harriman explained he meant "relatively small" in comparison with the importance of strengthening the free world.

This week the hearings continued. Most congressional critics were not trying to stop a mutual security program, but only to hold its cost down. It looked as though the Administration fight for the whole $7.9 billion (besides Connally's committee, the request must go through the Senate Armed Services, House Foreign Affairs, Senate and House appropriations committees) would prove as tough, in its way, as getting France and Germany to link arms in Europe.