The Quiet Crusader

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AID. Anderson's goal is to make aid to underdeveloped countries a cooperative free-world undertaking. At the World Bank-IMF meeting in New Delhi in October 1958, Anderson sponsored a proposal to increase World Bank funds by doubling the member nations' commitments to guarantee World Bank bonds. At the same meeting, Anderson unwrapped a U.S. plan to set up an International Development Association (with the U.S. contributing one-third of the capital) to make loans that, unlike World Bank loans, would be repayable in the borrowing country's own currency, no matter how soft. At the World Bank-International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington in late September, Anderson pushed the plan, won over the World Bank's soft-loan-mistrusting board of governors.

To remind Western Europe and Japan that the Marshall Plan days were long since over, Anderson last month took the dust-stirring step of announcing that henceforth dollars lent to underdeveloped countries by the U.S.'s own Development Loan Fund (outgo: about $550 million a year) must be spent in the U.S. Protests rang out that Anderson was dragging the U.S. backward with a protectionist "Buy American" program (TIME, Nov. 9). But Anderson's essential purpose was to force Western Europe and Japan into providing loans to finance their own exports to underdeveloped countries. He would be happy to see Britain and West Germany set up their own development loan funds with "Buy British" or "Buy West German" strings attached.

TRADE. Anderson's drive to get other industrial nations of the free world to lower their trade barriers against U.S. goods has already brought dramatic results. At the late September meeting of the World Bank-IMF, Sweden's Per Jacobsson, managing director of IMF, agreed with Anderson that the "new situation' called for a "fresh examination" of international economic policies. The IMF executive board urged member nations with adequate gold and dollar reserves to end discrimination against U.S. goods "with all feasible speed." A few days later, the meeting of the 37-nation General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in Tokyo echoed the same theme. Fortnight ago. Britain, France and Japan all set about complying with the spirit of the IMF and GATT meetings. Britain wiped out quotas on most U.S. goods. France pared some tariffs on U.S. imports, scrapped a batch of import quotas, promised to get rid of the rest within two years. Japan promised to cancel restrictions on a wide array of U.S. goods by early 1961.

The Greatest Challenge. In pushing toward broader aid and freer trade, Anderson is serving, as he sees it, not only the interests of the U.S. but the interests of all the free world. In his global view, his policies at home and his policies abroad are interdependent, just as the U.S. and the rest of the free world are interdependent. By fighting for sound money at home, he can encourage freer world trade by keeping the world's reserve currency, the U.S. dollar, dependably stable. By persuading Western Europe to assume a fair share of the foreign-aid burden, he can help to slow the outflow of U.S. gold reserves and thus help to keep the dollar sound.

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