407. Memorandum from Hansen to the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, April 31
SUBJECT
- Statement of State/AID Relationships
This morning at the Bundy staff meeting I mentioned to Mac our meeting with Hamilton and Lingle on this matter. Mac indicated that he was troubled by the key provisions in the draft memorandum with regard to handling of disputes between Assistant Secretaries and Assistant Administrators. I shall not try to cover his entire argument, but essentially he made the following case:
1. It is too much to expect, given the current staffing of AID that Hamilton and his principal assistants will be able to make the kind of over-all judgments that the memorandum implies; i.e., neither the Chenery-type economic criteria boys or the IBM businessman have enough knowledge or experience to be permitted to “sign off” on all these aspects of political-military on AID matters.
2. The process contemplates a procedure whereby “appeals” would have to be made over the head of Hamilton by the Assistant Secretaries—and at the least this would inhibit an adequate process of decision making.
3. We must engineer this process around the facts of the personalities involved now that we have a greater appreciation of their attributes and shortcomings, and this would on the basis of performance appear to preclude giving such rigid and final authority to the AID people.
4. It would be preferable to handle this kind of problem by having such a mechanism as a weekly or bi-weekly meeting between Hamilton and Ball so that these matters can be discussed without the appearance of an appeals procedure.
We had a short discussion of the other considerations involved in this matter; i.e., the need to reverse the previous situation whereby many of the so-called “political decisions” rode roughshed over long-term economic considerations, the situation whereby the assistance [Typeset Page 1670] agency was not even in fact a junior partner to the decision-making process, and the fact that the new AID criteria and our new policy approach call for more steadfast adherence to the longer term criteria for a better foreign assistance program.
I suggested to Mac that there be a more thorough discussion of this matter between you and him before we got too far down the road, and I [Facsimile Page 2] urge that this be done as soon as possible.
Jake Lingle called me this morning with regard to the memorandum, and indicated that he was pressing Hamilton to attempt to have a meeting with Rusk and Ball (with you present) because he felt that Rusk particularly should get into this question before we attempted to negotiate out further language on the memorandum. I told him that we would certainly concur in any move which would bring Rusk, Ball and Hamilton together on this important matter so that there could be a meeting of minds in substance before any piece of paper were further negotiated.
I therefore recommend:
(1) An early meeting with Mac Bundy and Ralph Dungan on this question before Hamilton/Lingle proceed too far in the State Department, and
(2) A real look at this question ourselves in terms of the pragmatic considerations which Mac Bundy raises and with which we have increasingly been concerned in our own reviews.
I continue to opt for a written statement of these relationships along the lines we have proposed, since I believe that regardless of the problems of individual competence we cannot really develop the country program approach, which is the keystone of policy formulation, without active continuous debate between so-called economic and political elements of the Department.
- Statement of State/AID Relationships. Administratively confidential. 2 pp. Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Kaysen Series, Foreign Aid, General, 5/62–11/63, Box 373.↩