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Oral History Interview with
October 31, 1970 Richard D. McKinzie
ANDREWS: What became the Point IV concept started a long time before the Inaugural Address of 1949. It actually started for a different reason than we afterward contended. This was during Mr. Roosevelt's administration when we had the big drive for food and materials for defense - the defense support program. The Japs had overrun the Pacific and the Germans were overrunning Europe, and our raw materials were getting awfully thin. So the United States, in its support of Great Britain and all the rest of them, turned to Latin America--largely for hemp, cotton, oil, seeds, minerals, everything that Latin America produces. Nelson
Rockefeller was named coordinator of that program. That involved the whole business. Well, it was not very long until he discovered that sick people couldn't do very much mining of tin, and all that sort of thing. Uneducated people were even worse to deal with. Then, when the food began to get short, you soon discovered that you had to have food out of those countries too. So they organized what was then called the Institute of Inter-American Affairs (the I.I.A.A.). Nelson Rockefeller was made head of it. He set up the Institute with help--industrial help--as an educational program primarily to assist in this war effort. In the meantime, over in the Department of Agriculture, the State Department, through the Smith-Mundt fund, was asked to take on a bunch of technical assistance programs in Latin America to increase food production. These ran separate from the I.I.A.A. I was never quite pleased with that deal, but anyhow that was done. What actually happened was, the first thing you knew you were running two diametrically opposed, differently operated programs.
MCKINZIE: Even during the war? ANDREWS: Oh yes. And what happened was that in order to control the money and in order to really keep the stuff under control (I'm not criticizing it as such), we set up what they called the "Servicio." The Servicio implied a Latin American and an American, and an international staff that went right down through to the bottom. But the Americans had the money. Which meant that everything the Servicio did had to have the approval of the Americans. The result was that the Americans pretty well brushed aside anything that the Latins wanted and set up our programs, instead. They were good programs, and they made fine showplaces because you had it absolutely under control. You set up machinery stations, and potato warehouses and all sorts of things, and it looked good. On the other hand, the Department insisted on going a slow route in research and extension. And so we would research a subject and then try to train extension workers. Those two programs ran for about eight years and they
were small. I think around five or ten million dollars was all that went into Latin America. When Mr. Truman made his inaugural address, all that came about was that he had said that we had to do something for the underdeveloped countries, the countries that were becoming new nations. He told his speechwriting staff to dig something up on that. The speechwriters began to scurry around about what the hell to have. And they come over to Agriculture and they went over to IIAA and everything else. Ben Hardy on the IIAA public affairs staff made a proposal for technical aid that was inserted in the President's address. When he made it, the State Department was caught flatfooted. They didn't have the faintest idea in terms of a program or anything else. So the bureaucracy began to debate on what in the hell this all means, and who would run it. The rivalry was between USDA and IIAA to take over the show--that's the truth. In the meantime then the State Department turned over $150,000 to Charlie Brannan, Secretary of Agriculture, and
Brannan told me to get on a bicycle and go around the world and see what one could work up in terms of a pilot program to give some pattern when the big deal went into operation. So, I took off and the first place I stopped was in Egypt. I called on the Social Welfare Minister and the Agriculture Minister. Education in Egypt was under Social Welfare. My pitch was: "The United States is thinking about a program for the underdeveloped countries and what are the needs in your country that you think the United States might help you on? We had two big ideas. One, the Minister of Agriculture wanted to establish a state dairy farm--state demonstration dairy farm. They wanted to increase the production of milk in the Nile Delta and for good reason. And the other one was the Aswan Dam. They wanted to do something about that. I found out, first, that the Agriculture Minister wanted to make his big 1600 acre Nile Delta farm the dairy demonstration farm. This meant that we'd put the money in that thing to make his farm larger. I didn't buy that. But I
did take it down; we could only make note of the Aswan Dam. I went on to Thailand, and sat down with the same ministers, agriculture and education. I found some people in Thailand who had been educated in the United States. One, the Minister of Agriculture, was a graduate of Cornell. In those days and still to some extent you've got to go through a ritual. You come into town and make your presence known to the government and you say what you want. Well, they set you up an appointment at say 3 o'clock in the afternoon. You go in and then meet the minister. He claps his hands and a servant brings in tea and you drink tea. And you start to talk. You have a lot of pleasantries, talk about families and the world at large, and the first thing you know the time is gone. He says, "At 10 o'clock tomorrow." So you go back at 10 o'clock the next day. The same routine occurs, and you begin then to get around to maybe what you want to talk about. By the third day they begin to tell you what they want and you get down to the business of your mission.
Well, they were very modest. The Minister said, "We're very proud of our rice. Thirty years ago our rice won the blue ribbon at the Calgary Cereals Fair, but we have not infused any new varieties or anything into it. Our production is going down and we want some work on rice. We've got to have an agriculture education system. Our education here is classical, Buddhaism and this. And we want somebody to help us on creating maybe an agricultural college. In the beginning we want them to do some experimentation on fertilizer. We haven't been able to use fertilizer successfully on our rice." "Well," I said, "that's very modest; have you got any suggestions on the kinds of people you'd like to have?" He said, "Yes, we do. There are two people in the United States that know us and we know them and we'd sure like to have them." And I said, "Who are they?" "Well," he said, "they are Dr. Love and Dr. Pendleton of Cornell." Love was in China on a long assignment with Cornell, and Dr. Pendleton was a
missionary in China and worked with Thailand and he knows our people. "We think they're still at Cornell. They're both elderly people." In those days one could move. I wired Secretary Brannan that night and I said, "Contact Cornell, get ahold of Dr. Love and Dr. Pendleton and see if they can be jarred loose to come to Thailand immediately." Mr. Brannan got into action; Ross Moore at OPAR took the ball, got in touch with Cornell, and by golly, within two weeks they were out there. We had a hell of a time getting them by--Dr. Love was 72 years old and Dr. Pendleton was 63--because of their age. But they were very vigorous people. We had to get all kinds of exemptions. Dr. Love and Pendleton went out there and went to work. They started right now and started at the grassroots with young people, and I'11 not go into that business. Something really fine came out of that. Then I went up to Burma. And Burma at that time had just become free and sovereign with a new
government. The first cabinet meeting had met without the astrologer's advice; some guy threw a bomb and killed the cabinet. There was practically no cabinet left. U N was the Acting Prime Minister. I talked with them and again they were also very modest. They said, "We're a socialist state, but we do realize that the socialist state cannot do everything. And we're looking for some sort of a compromise between socialism and capitalism. We think the coop idea is good, so what we'd like to have is some people out here who could help us in setting up coops, particularly rural coops. I found in the Ministry of Agriculture a graduate of Wisconsin University; I found also that he had spent a year at Crowley, Louisiana studying rice production and marketing. So I said, "All right, we'll see what we can do and get you somebody." Next stop was the Philippines. The Philippines at that time had become independent. And I put the same story to them. "Well," they said, "we're new and we've been under the benign rule of you people all these years and we've followed American
methods and adopted many of your ways." And I said, "Well, what do you think?" "We believe we need an extension service, something like your extension service. And on top of that we have a very serious mosaic disease that's destroying our henequin fibers. Can you do something about that I said, "I'll see." Again I was able to act quickly. I got hold of USDA and a chap by the name of Hapler was sent out there who went to work with them getting an extension law through the legislature. And I got a guy from Cornell who was a world authority on mosaic disease and had him out there pronto. Four pilot programs were in being and were running rather quickly. At about this time legislation to legalize the Point IV program got through Congress. It just barely did squeak through. It had open opposition from Tom Connally, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The State Department in theory was supposed to carry the ball on the
legislation. But Willard Thorp, State Department man, didn't have the faintest idea what it was all about. Finally in desperation, Brannan of Agriculture was asked to come before the House Ways and Means Committee and explain what this was all about. And I went along with Brannan and I was able to pick up after Brannan made his pitch. I explained some of the kinds of programs that the Philippines wanted. One Congressman said, "Well, my God," he says, "we've been having hearings here for two weeks and you're the first guy that has ever told us what the hell it is all about." MCKINZIE: Well, I was going to ask you when you made this pilot study, when you made this tour of Egypt and Burma and Thailand and Philippines, did you tell them at the time that there could be no industrial programs? Was that an issue? Underdeveloped countries, a lot of them, wanted to have steel mills and that sort of thing. ANDREWS: No, the only place an industry program hit us was in Egypt, the Aswan Dam. The Egyptians hit
us right hard on that. And the Thais wanted Dr. Pendleton to make some investigations on fertilizer with a view of maybe sometime establishing a plant. But that's all it was. And not a thing on any industrialization at this point. Maybe my initial contacts were too narrow. The State Department's high officials decided that they had to make at least four countries in Asia so-called strategic areas and entitled to a greater assistance than the Point IV program visualized. This would to some extent include industrialization, and rebuilding of roads and harbors and war reconstruction. The Griffin mission involved a newspaper publisher from California who was sent out with Sam Hayes of the State Department, along with a bunch of other people. They went around Asia. They picked Burma, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia as the so-called special treatment countries which would be a Marshall plan type of infusion of capital, rather than the so-called technical assistance. They took us out of those countries and the other little programs. In Thailand the original
agriculture programs went right ahead though. Old Dr. Love stayed there for, I guess eight or ten years. He created a miracle there; it's just fantastic. And Dr. Pendleton remained six years. Then that left Point IV with about forty countries. We finally got an appropriation through and then began the fight about who was going to run it and how. Willard Thorp normally was a fellow who would be the overseer in State. Les Wheeler, who used to be in OFAR, was his assistant and was in charge of the actual Point IV coordination. Les didn't get anywhere. The war between IIAA, USDA and the Marshall plan brought on a lot of confusions. There was a virtual stalemate. Finally, President Truman called in an ambassador from Guatamala, I forgot his name, and he tried to develop some agricultural programs. The bureaucratic struggle had him dizzy morning, noon, and night. This ambassador resigned. President Truman appointed Dr. Henry Bennett, of Oklahoma State University, to the job of real administration, to head the Point IV program as an independent unit in State. We'd
gotten the legislation through and had set up the Technical Cooperation Administration. Dr. Bennett was a very simple fellow and a very plain guy. He could handle Congress and he could handle almost anybody. He was to some extent scared of this deal because there was pressure all the time for more and more money. Some of the State Department people wanted to pour in a lot of money as did the Marshall plan people. It was finally then decided to consolidate military, Point IV and Marshall plan under Harriman, as head of the Mutual Security Administration--combining three agencies. In the meantime the struggle over methods continued between the USDA and the IIAA on the concept of how we would operate. Then we had the war on between the Technical Cooperation Administration and the Economic Cooperation Administration or the Marshall plan boys. ECA had set up an organization chart to handle TCA through the Marshall plan administration. That was another battle and Dr. Bennett was having one hell of a time.
I had worked with Dr. Bennett for twenty years and I was head of OFAR at the time. He often came over in the Department of Agriculture, and tried to work out things, and almost every afternoon he'd call me up and say, "Stanley, how'd you like to have some coffee?" And I said, "Well, I'd like to have some coffee." He said, "Meet me at the roof of the Washington Hotel." I'd go over there and we'd sit until sunset really trying to figure out how we could work a program out of all the mess. MCKINZIE: This was after they had passed the authorization for the TCA, but before they actually had anything going in the field. Had a little bit of money, authorization, but no program. .ANDREWS: In the meantime we began to send out groups of people, about three or four, to various countries and they would do what I tried to do on my original trip, find out what each country felt it needed.
For instance they sat down with the King of Saudi Arabia, and said, "Now, sir, what do you think that might work out here?" Most of the original Point IV programs were promulgated and were actually developed that way. When the appropriations came through, the ambassadors were given the leeway to make representations that this sort of aid was available to these countries. The ambassadors seeing that maybe this would make some political hay, sometimes oversold Point IV and made us a lot of trouble. They made a lot of promises which we couldn't carry out. Anyhow, that was the way the thing was done. The organization that was finally put together was made up of castoffs from the other bureaus. Dr. Bennett was about the only new guy in it. The rest of them were the Interior Department, Agriculture Department, the Treasury, the Budget Bureau and Public Health. In some cases the Department dumped their surplus over to us. I was still in the Department of Agriculture, where a portion of the Latin American program was
administered. We finally got a little organization; I think it had less than 300 people set up. And so Doc said, "Well, Stanley, we've got a lot of stuff here on paper, but what have we got in the field?" "Well," I said, "I don't know." "This authorization has given us 50 million dollars for India. I don't know how to spend 50 million dollars. I believe you know how to spend it. So, I want you to take a minister's rank and go to India and administer the Indian program." "Well," I said, "damn it Doc, I have been three years and nine months in Military Government. I've been away from my family and I think I've done my share." He said, "This is something pretty big." I said, "Unless I'm ordered, I'11 not go. On top of that, I don't want any damned minister's rank." He said, "Stanley, you need that." I said, "Hell, I was a lieutenant colonel in Military Government; I could outtalk General Clay and
I can outtalk these ambassadors." "You know," he said, "I want you to have elbow room. Now you know John Tolbert out in Oklahoma. old John is a great poker player and he chaws a lot of tobacco. I was over at Oklahoma City one morning about sunup and walking along the street and old John came out of the Skirnin Hotel. He just looked like he'd been drug through a sewer--and I said, 'John, what in the hell has happened to you?' He had tobacco spit all over his pants and all over the front of his shirt. He was just a terrible mess. "Well," he says, "You know, Henry, I like to play a little poker. I come in here last night and the boys they kinda laid for me; we played poker all night. This was so damn tough I couldn't turn my head to spit. And," Doc said, "I want you to have a rank where you can turn your head and spit." At that time I had been assigned as head of the delegation to the FAO meeting in Rome and Doc Bennett said, "I'm going to go out, see what we've got in terms of program."
I said, "Well, let's meet in Rome. I'm going to be in Rome (I had to go over there for a couple of weeks ahead of the FAO meeting) to a World Food Council meeting." Doc and his top staff, Ben Hardy and the five or six others flew into Rome. We got Doc before the FAO, got him on CBS radio. He knocked them over; he really went to town, with a simple direct statement on what Point IV hoped to accomplish. We also got Dean Acheson before the session. At that time Acheson made one of these famous off-the-cuff speeches, "There's no politics in food, and I would welcome the Eastern European people to take part in FAO." That was quite sensational at the time. Dr. Bennett wanted me to go with him on this trip. I told him in the first place I had been sitting here for two weeks listening to people talk and I'm so damned tired of doubletalk that I want to go home to kick a clod, if nothing else. I just don't want to go along." He said, "Meet me over at the Grand Hotel in the morning for breakfast." He was going to
take off that afternoon. So we went up to breakfast, and he again brought up the trip around the Mideast. I said, "There are several reasons why I won't go. One is what I told you yesterday; I'm so tired of this sort of business that I just got to get out and kind of get squared out and earthy again. And the other is that you ride on most any damn old plane that will run. And I just don't like to ride the kind of planes you like to ride." He had ridden a plane earlier from Ethiopia over an hour to Jordan, one of these Cessna jobs where the pilot had to put gas in it as they flew in the air. And I said, "I just don't ride that kind of an outfit." "Well," Doc said, "Stanley, you know when a fellow's time comes you're going to go anyhow." I said, "Yeah, that's right Doc, but he might call you when I was not ready." We parted on that note. His party took off with their final stop in Beirut, Lebanon. Then over to Jordan and ending up in Iran. He took off in a plane out of Iran, a DC-4 with a pilot who had never been checked out on a night landing. There weren't any instruments
at the Teheran airport; there was equipment there, but there wasn't a man in Iran that could run it. They arrived in a snowstorm and on a turn into the runway it crashed. The whole party died right there. Everything that Doc Bennett had promised or developed, in these countries that he had met up to then, died with him. There wasn't a record or anything. Just some sketchy stuff that some of the fellows had sent in to Washington without any idea of a report. This happened at Christmastime and I was down in Arkansas hunting ducks; I always go down there every year until recently to hunt ducks. I got a telephone call from Mr. Brannan. He said, "Get in here as quick as you can. The State Department wants to see you. There are some things going on here that I want to check you on." I said, "I'll drive in just as quick as we can." On arrival I went in to see Brannan. The State Department wants to borrow you to handle Point IV until they get an administrator. I went
over to State and into the office of James Webb, Under Secretary of State. His pitch was simple. The death of Dr. Bennett and his immediate staff had thrown the whole program out of gear. Not only was there confusion in the field on just what the situation was but State was preparing to go before Congress for its next appropriation and very little was known just what the congressional presentation would involve. Jonathan Bingham had just come in as deputy to Dr. Bennett but he had hardly gotten settled in his chair. Dr. Bennett had left a memo instructing the staff to prepare a budget for a rather simple and slow moving program modestly financed to support the prospective projects that had been set up in some 29 countries. Since I had worked with Dr. Bennett on the development of the overall concept of what Point IV would do I was requested to go out and pick up where he left off and make a general survey of the situation in each of these countries in preparation for the hearings that were to soon begin on the 1953 fiscal budget.
In a matter of hours I was on the way with Dale Clark, one of the assistants in the Middle East division of the then Point IV organization set-up. Since none of the promises or comments of Dr. Bennett's visit to the first three countries in the Middle East had been sent to Washington, I started with his first stop out of Rome--Lebanon. On arrival in Lebanon I was greeted with quite a display of protocol. Our Ambassador was out with greetings and transportation--several Lebanese officials were at the red carpet greeting at the airport. We were whisked to the Embassy where we were briefed on the situation and given our itinerary for meeting the various ministers and officials in Lebanon. This turned out to be a rat race. From about 4 in the afternoon until 10 o'clock at night we met variously with the President of Lebanon, the speaker of the house of representatives, the Vice President, the Minister of Reconstruction, the Minister of Agriculture, the Prime Ministers and a host of others, it seemed, in never ending rounds of fleeting contacts.
In each meeting the Mideast protocol was followed. After greeting and sitting down at a table, that black syrupy Arabian coffee was served--sometimes with a lemon rind tea as a chaser. Before the evening was over I was literally groggy and thankful that the Arabs as a rule do not serve or drink alcoholic beverages. On the following day we began serious discussions with the technical ministers on what they felt Point IV might do in Lebanon and particularly what Dr. Bennett had promised or told them. There was something of a different version of what Dr. Bennett had said among the various groups, but when asked what Dr. Bennett promised, we got the reply, "He told us that he was going to try to help us on the Litani." I said, "What is the Litani?" South of Beirut, the Litani River rises in Mt. Hermon, a snow-capped mountain section. For 5,000 years it has flowed down through a limestone gorge very much like the Grand Canyon except not as large, onto the Balbec Plain, where the Romans used to have the great bread basket. "We want to build a
dam to hold the water for irrigation," they said. I said, "What's this dam going to cost?" They said, "It's estimated it will cost 30 million dollars." I took that one under note and then I said, "Anything else?" "We want to pipe water up to a residential and a tourist section up on the side of Mount Hermon. It's fine ski slopes. We want to build a road and install a water system up there." I said, "What's that going to cost?" "'It will cost 6 million." Finally when we got around to the final conference, I had to tell them, "In the first place, we don't have that kind of money. We only got less than a hundred million for all of the Mideast and Asia." I advised the Lebanese group, the Minister of Construction, the Minister of Agriculture, the Minister of Social Welfare, that our program didn't visualize financing development projects of a resort nature at that time, and we didn't have 30 million dollars
to put into Litani. What I could do, I could allocate on the spot the necessary money to make a study of this gorge and to conduct borings to find out whether a dam would hold if it was put here. We might also develop the necessary economic and engineering studies to see whether the development were feasible. They said, "How quick can you do that?" I said, "I'll have people out here in two weeks." I allocated on the spot 800 thousand dollars and wired the Department of Interior to send their water, irrigation and dam construction engineers out there. It was a good psychological thing. When the U.S. engineer and survey group arrived we put them in tents right on that gorge. The people could see that. The group developed three things. One, what is the nature of the base? Will it hold water or will it break out into limestone caverns? Second, where should it be located? Third, the flow. How much water flows in it and what, how much will it irrigate? Finally the
economic feasibility of using the water that flows out of the dam for electric power was studied. It took this group two years to do it, but when you had that done you had a complete picture to lay before any banker or finance agency for credit. It was placed before the International Bank. The International Bank informally estimated they could loan around 35 million dollars on that deal. I made a U.S. commitment, "We will try to put in the sweetener if you have to have a little more money, but we want you people to put in some money." They didn't know whether they could do that or not. There was opposition from the French. The French owned the power monopoly. And they controlled the power into Lebanon and all the cities. They were afraid this dam producing power would knock them out of business. It got into the Parliament--quite a fight about it. This project was moving forward in a very effective way when the Eisenhower administration came in. And Mr. Stassen fired the country
directors in all of the Middle East countries. The project floundered for years and years. We didn't put anymore money into it. It was finally picked up by the World Bank and in the meantime the Lebanese got excited about it and put 20 million of their own money in it. To make a long story short, just five years ago the first water went through the dam and down to the Balbec Plain. The water flows through a conduit under the mountain and over into another part of Lebanon. The Litani project is a showplace as well as a great economic resource. It's now a big deal. It was started with nothing except the feasibility idea. Getting back now to where we were with these surveys. The purpose of these surveys was to fix up a program we could justify the appropriations upon. Still nobody was settled on what we were trying to do. There was still the fight with IIAA on the Servicio technique. There was still the fight with Marshall plan people. They wanted to take over. When the Mutual Security Act was originally introduced in
Congress, it made a broad sweep about foreign aid, but did not even mention Point IV. And so Dr. Bennett came to me and said, "My God, Stanley, we're out. Without a title designating the Technical Cooperation Administration as a part of this bill, we haven't got anything; we're gone and the Marshall plan takes over. The boys made a pretty shrewd move there on the bill." [Mutual Security Act set up three separate programs--TCA, Marshall plan and Military Aid under a director of Mutual Security--Mr. Harriman became the director. It was non-administrative but with authority to shift funds between the various agencies on proper justification.] I said, "What do you want Doc?" He said, "We've got to have a title in that bill," I said, "Well, will you fix up the title you want and I'11 go over to Senator Fulbright and talk to him about it." We fixed up a title to be inserted in the bill and I went over to Senator Fulbright and told him the same. "I don't know if you know it or not, but this bill that's before your committee doesn't even have Dr. Bennett's organization or program in it at all. It's completely out." He said, "I didn't know that." He asked that we fix up a title to be inserted. "I took my piece of paper out of my pocket, and handed it to him. He put it in his pocket,
and went over that afternoon to the Foreign Relations Committee and inserted this new language, and Point IV was born. That's just how close we came to getting left out." After that was done we did have a title, and a right to exist and a mission to perform. How are you going to perform it? Lot of people in the State Department and the people almost to a man, in the Marshall plan, felt that the only way to do this was to infuse massive amounts of capital. Dr. Bennett argued that you couldn't, that the countries couldn't spend the money even if they had it and do it wisely. And so it eventually worked down with the 100 million dollar appropriation, and our program was going to be on the basis of an attack at the grass-root level on the three basic needs of mankind; food, health and education. In the industrial area we could put up capital for demonstration processing plants and not major development. We did put a lot of small demonstration plants in. So that's where we started and we were looking for a name all the time.
And finally Delia Kuhn, who was our public affairs girl in Dr. Bennett's office said, "let's call it Point IV because this is Mr. Truman's deal." That's where the Point IV business came in. Technical Cooperation Administration was the legal name, but it went by Point IV. Still the issue wasn't settled. You had people in the State Department that were pressing all the time for more and more money and for more and more of what I call building shit houses that you can see instead of slow educational patient work. It got so bad the whole State Department and the Marshall plan and Point IV were so mixed up, we had to make some resolution, so we went to Mr. Truman at the White House and asked him to give us some guidance. MCKINZIE: Who's we? ANDREWS: Well, Dr. Bennett was the real boss. I had known and worked with him on rural problems when he was at Oklahoma State and I was a farm editor in Arkansas for twenty years. Since the major
agricultural programs in Latin America were being handled by USDA through the OFAR which I headed I sat in with him on many sessions trying to work out some sort of a program which could be carried out with our resources and which would meet the approval of the American people. As in all bureaucratic wrangles, and Point IV was no exception, save possibly it went on longer than some of the others, somebody, some time has to crack the whip. Mr. Truman had directed the State Department to call in representatives of other relevant agencies, Agriculture, Public Health, Interior, Commerce and bureaus in Commerce to work out a program. It was quite a conglomeration and most management people argued that any system based on such a wide variety of interests was bound to fail. Since nobody seemed to know just what was involved in the final hammering out of what we were to do, it was mutually agreed that we should go to the White House and present the various views. This was done before Mr. Truman in the Cabinet Room. State Department, Marshall plan and others all had
their say on what kind of a program we should undertake in this new venture. Dr. Bennett made his presentation last. Armed with a sheaf of telegrams and letters from church organizations, country bankers, educational groups and farm organizations, he turned to the globe which Mr. Truman always had around his office and the Cabinet Room and briefly sketched out what he thought were the greatest needs of the new nations at that time emerging in the world as the outcome of World War II. He had been to Ethiopia in the summer before he was appointed administrator and had looked over the marvelous natural resources of that African nation, steeped in poverty, disease and hunger. He argued quite persuasively what a down-to-earth program might do to lift the living standards of the people of that country with the assertion that about two-thirds of the population of the world were living in the same conditions and that they had to be given some hope if free government were to survive. He coined a rather telling phrase which stuck around for quite awhile. "These people," he said, "must have a chance to at least
glance into the door of the Twentieth Century." Mr. Truman turned to the group and said simply, "That's the kind of a program I was talking about." So that was that and we went away and began to build on that principle. The only main exceptions to this was a system of studies of possible resource developments which if carried out would contribute to the welfare of the people of these underdeveloped countries. These included the Aswan Dam project in Egypt, the development of the Jordan River in the Middle East, several big irrigation and development projects in India, a tube well program in the Ganges basin and the desalting of the Indus basin in Pakistan where more than 100,000 acres of alluvial land were lost annually. All of these got underway with studies by technical people from the United States. All of them have in the years since been developed into major and viable projects in varying degrees. The system followed was very similar to our description of the Litani project described earlier in this interview. Probably the most dramatic of all the studies and recommendations was the Jordan River
scheme, designed mainly to use all of the waters of the Jordan River for the benefit of all the people along its banks in the Middle East. That project never did get underway in totality but parts of it have been implemented both in Israel and Jordan. President Eisenhower gets the credit for that, because Eric Johnston, who made the first tour out there for Mr. Truman, made the second tour for Eisenhower and got all the publicity. Point IV put up $300,000 to a Massachusetts engineering firm that drafted broad plans for the Tennessee Valley Authority. They made the study and drafted the Jordan River scheme. The idea was to use the waters of the Jordan for all the people out there. It was divided up; the Yarmak water would go into Jordan and certain water out of the Galilee would go to Israel. As you recall, there was a revolution in Egypt and General Naguib became the boss there. The first mission that Johnston went around on he got the technical approval of the Egyptians, the
Syrians, the Jordanians, the Israelis, everybody in the Jordan basin. The technicians agreed the scheme was feasible and ought to be done. It had to be sold politically. Israel was a little hesitant but they said, "We'll go along with it." In Egypt, Naguib said, "I've got a revolution on my hands and if you'll just give me a few months here to get this revolution settled then we'll think about what we can do on that scheme. We'll also talk about the Gaza Strip and resettling the refugees." Naguib was in office only a short time. Nassar and his colonels threw him out. In the meantime then we were on good terms with Egypt and they were still pressing us for the Aswan Dam. We asked, "What do you know about the structure; what do you know about the gorge? I mean this is an international thing. You're going to flood a lot of Sudan, you're going to flood a lot of Ethiopia. What do these countries say? And how far up? If the dam is high how far back are you going to back this water up?" They did not have the answers.
We flew out to the proposed dam site and had a big session with all Egyptian members concerned. I told them, "I can't commit the United States for a lot of money, but I can commit enough money to make an aerial survey of the Nile gorge up to Lake Victoria, and maybe begin basic emergency studies." We got a Houston. firm almost overnight and they were in there making that aerial survey in short order. I went back through Egypt on another mission for FAO. The ministers found out I was in town. So, I went to the Sphinx Club with our ambassador and other Embassy people. They came and pulled me out of the Sphinx Club. One said, "Listen, what are you going to do about the Aswan Dam?" He said, "We have the gorge survey finished; what are you going to do on the rest of it?" "Well," I said (at this time the Eisenhower administration had come in and I was a holdover), I said, "I can't do much, because I can't commit this administration. But I'll tell you what I
will do. I have a commitment to the new administration that I'll carry the Point IV appropriation through the Congress. If I do that I'll see that 20 million dollars is in the appropriation that'll help you build the beginning of the bypasses after you have completed the borings for the site location." Well, they were pleased. I was on very good terms with the Egyptians and the whole civilian bureaucracy, many of whom had been educated in the United States. I came back then to the United States and reported to Mr. Dulles. And I said, "Mr. Dulles, I haven't firmly committed you or the United States to a program on the Aswan Dam. But I did promise the Egyptians that 20 million dollars in this appropriation bill will be earmarked for further studies and bypasses on the Aswan Dam." Well, you'd of thought he was going to give me a medal. He thought this was a wonderful job and commended me highly. I went through the congressional hearings.
The bill in Congress was passed and the 20 million dollars for Egypt were in the bill. I was on a good relationship with the Egyptian ambassador in Washington and every time I'd met him, he would call and ask about the 20 million. "What's happened? I can't get anybody to talk to me about that 20 million dollars. They just stall and stall." Shortly after that Dulles and Stassen went out with that gold-plated pistol for Nasser. This in the Egyptian culture was an invitation for him to commit suicide. After this Under Secretary of State Hoover went on to Britain and something happened. Nobody knows; some day maybe it will come out. At that time, Nasser was trying to get the British out of Egypt. We were sympathetic with him on it. At the same time the Abadan Oil Consortium was in real trouble under Mossadegh out in Iran. Somewhere between Egypt and London, somebody decided to make it pretty tough on the Egyptians kicking the British out. The British let the U.S. oil companies in the consortium, and our
CIA helped overthrow Mossadegh. The Union Oil Company, Mr. Hoover's company, got into that consortium. I'm not saying it was a scheme but that's what happened anyhow. The Egyptians never could get Dulles to move on this 20 million. The Egyptians invited the Russians to come in. The Russians put out a big lot of noise about the technical assistance to Egypt. And that's when Shepelev came out and went down to the mouth of the Nile. This got headlines in the New York Times. And I was in Washington at the time eating lunch with one of the ICA bureaucrats. And I said, "Looks like the Russians are stealing the march on the administration on this." And I said, "Did you ever see the survey of the Aswan Dam gorge?" He said, "No, I never heard of it." I said, "Well, Point IV paid a Houston, Texas air photograph firm $200,000 to make pictures of the gorge all the way up to Lake Victoria in
Ethiopia, and that survey in great detail is somewhere in the files. This survey was the preliminary work which we had agreed to do so that the engineers in Egypt and whoever else was involved would have this basic data to work on in terms of how high the dam might be and where it might be best located. The low level dam at Aswan, largely an irrigation impoundment for holding back a minimum of the Nile flood waters, was generally thought of as the proper place. Engineers later determined that the base of the flood dam was not a sufficient base for the proposed high dam. Point IV had agreed to help the Egyptians on the basic design and planning of the dam. There was a great deal of informal discussion and projections on how the whole scheme would be financed. Egyptians would provide the labor and the local costs. The Germans would put the machinery in and take cotton for twenty years to pay for it. The International Bank would loan 350 million dollars. The whole thing blew up when the Russians took over. We eventually got 4,000 technicians out
to various countries, in Agriculture, Public Health, Education and a few industrial arts craftsmen in 38 countries and coop people. And we were running along pretty well. We were quite popular with Congress. Congress always gave me more money than we asked for. So, came '53, why, Congress decided Point IV ought to have Burma and Indonesia under our wing. MCKINZIE: What was the basis for that, do you have any idea? ANDREWS: Well, they thought we were doing a better job. Also Point IV was a cheaper operation. That's perfectly honest. This Point IV idea to some extent was a white knight business. This was doing something for people. It was an antidote to war. MCKINZIE: Well, ECA said they were doing the same thing. ANDREWS: Right, but they didn't, that's the point. They poured their money into big breweries--and nothing wrong with it--light plants, and flour
mills and mines and timber. There's nothing wrong with it, but it missed the people completely. We were trying to move millions of people half an inch, rather than moving a few clear through the ceiling. That was the idea. MCKINZIE: I don't know whether this is a point to interject this. The State Department was never very interested in an operational agency within the State Department, were they? ANDREWS: No. What happened is, they just let me run it. Dean Acheson says, "Well, Stanley, you know about these damned country boys and the pie in the sky that you're peddling. You go ahead." He backed me up, as for example, when the Congress said Point IV should take over Burma and Indonesia. I was absolutely resolved that I was not going to have the bureaucratic squabble on the transfer from one U.S. agency to the other. The ECA was putting about 20 million dollars a year in Burma and about 30 million a year in Indonesia plus a hundred million dollar loan. Point IV had less
than a million dollars for either one of those countries. It was going to be some shock to have to tell these people of this fund cut. I went out first to Burma and called in Burmese and talked to U Nu, the Prime Minister, and his advisors. I said, "Now, this may seem unusual to you, but the Congress has transferred this program out of the ECA into another agency which does not have much money, but has a purpose of technical assistance with small amounts of money. It's a question in my mind whether you even want to continue it or not. The most we can give is probably a million dollar program which would be mostly technical assistance." U Nu said, "Well, we had more or less anticipated that even great America would find a time when it would have to cut down on its money. We have been very fortunate in selling our rice this year and we have 100 million of money that we can put into the programs and carry them on. You tell your President that we need your technical help far more than we need your money."
That really set things off in good shape and, of course, ECA had taken over a five story building there and each morning thirty cars, from Cadillacs to Fords, with a driver inside brought the office force to work. The first thing I did, I cancelled the whole damn business. When you got to a party, a reception, there'd be thirty ECA cars with a Burmese driver and the Burmese were all on bicycles. They didn't have such things as a car at that time. We cut down our own bureaucracy to the bone. I went on down to Indonesia and I found in Indonesia we'd been operating two years in Indonesia without an agreement on what we were supposed to do. We had put about 16 to 18 million dollars in there plus a 100 million loan. The Indonesians hadn't used any of the hundred million and I wanted to find out why. In the first place there was just no agreement on what we were to do. The ambassador was pushing them trying to get something, but nothing was moving. And so I said, "All right, Mr. Ambassador, I want to talk to the Cabinet." And
of course this was right after they'd had their sovereignty you know. These fellows looked like a high school cabinet, but sharp fellows. The Dutch had all left; 4,000 Dutch technicians had just walked right out of the country. The Ambassador came in and Sukarno was the President at the time and he introduced me and said, "This man is from Washington and wants to talk about your aid program." "Well, gentlemen, we're coming under another type of agency which your people will probably not be very happy about, because we've got a minimum amount of money to spend and you've been spending considerable money here. The first is whether you want to go ahead with any program or not; and second, I've been told by my government that we will fulfill to the letter every single commitment that has been made by an American. But from this hour on there will be no more commitments until we agree on what we're supposed to do." Well, the Ambassador like to fell out of the chair. The Cabinet, they whispered around the table, finally
saying, "You'd better come back tomorrow." We went back the next day and after a lot of talking, we actually got an agreement and it was signed. The program went on in Indonesia. I thought maybe I'd played hell, but I checked with Acheson and he said, "Stanley, if you did it it's done." Washington backed me up. The first thing we did was get some technicians down there to show them how to make up an application for a loan. MCKINZIE: You indicated that Dr. Bennett and you and President Truman accepted the idea that there wouldn't be any political overtones... ANDREWS: Yes. MCKINZIE: ...in this, but the fact that TCA was in the State Department, did that made any of these people suspicious? ANDREWS: No, it didn't make any difference because only the ambassadors bothered us in various countries wanting some pet project. Mr. Acheson didn't. We always had a conference ahead of going before
Congress. The procedure is to lead off with the top man, with the little boys coming in later. Acheson would ask, "Stanley, tell me what I'm supposed to say for this damned pie in the sky program you got." The political overtones were that we would do those things that the country wanted to do to the end that living standards could be raised and political stability should be improved. Take in Indonesia, their railroads went to pieces when the Dutch left. Docks were clogged up from hell to breakfast with goods. A ship would have to sit out there six weeks before it could get unloaded. We recruited an old retired locomotive engineer, one man. He went down there and crawled in those boilers and fooled around these engines. He found that the water they were using was crusting the pipes. The boilers wouldn't make steam. He straightened that out just right now. With his help the railroad and port organization were in real operation there in six or eight weeks. The Indonesians in the meantime had insisted on having a national
airline. Like all new countries they wanted the best. The Convair had just come out. We tried to let them buy some surplus DC-3's for $600 each, but, oh no. "We want six Convairs." They went ahead and bought them, but there wasn't any maintenance, so they bought 25 million dollars worth of machine shop equipment. Theoretically, Holland was going to put in technicians and repair the planes in Indonesia. Holland found out it was easier to repair them in Holland. So the Convairs had to be sent up to Holland to be repaired. This was expensive. So they cannibalized the parts out of planes in Indonesia. When I was down there the second time four of the Convairs were on the dead line. There were only two of them in operation. Well, we were fortunate again. About that time the American Airlines that had an overseas service consolidated with Pan-American. They let loose a lot of mechanics. We found and got an old mechanic and he went down there and trained the Indonesians to
do their own work. He took the machine shop out of the box. It was a repair facility and it put those planes in the air. The last time I was in Indonesia that line had as good a load factor as any line in the United States. Just one man helped do that job. He made mechanics out of those kids. They were all eager to try. Too often we Americans tend to brush the locals out of the way. And we do it ourselves. But he couldn't; he was one fellow. They've got a repair plant down there that takes care of the present lines. MCKINZIE: Yes. ANDREWS: And the irony of it is on my first trip to Amsterdam en route to Jakarta, as I was on the way down a guy in an Afghan cap sat across the aisle from me. I thought he was just some Indonesian businessman. As we stopped along the way I noticed the airline people gave him a good deal of attention. In those days you flew for 18 hours and then stopped at a host house for rest and then flew another 18. We stopped in Cairo, and in Thailand
and stayed over night there. When we arrived in Jakarta there was the damdest crowd of people you ever saw, a brass band and everything else. I thought, "This can't be for, me." You see how my ego was working. There's a good deal of scurrying around and the little guy was Sukarno coming back from Amsterdam where Indonesia had won her independence. These are somewhat isolated instances of how technology and know-how properly used worked out. One of the big weaknesses of the whole concept, and I'll take responsibility for it along with Dr. Bennett and other people, is that we felt that we could quickly transfer a lot of the really advanced know-how into these countries. It can't be done. You've got to train a lot of little people step by step. One can go out here and build a fertilizer plant, but if they can't run it, you don't do anything. We've got monuments all over the world where millions were spent, but it takes years to develop a genuine industrial complex. For instance, the fertilizer plant in
the Philippines was ten years before it got moving beyond 20 percent of capacity. Cost 80 million dollars. Such things have got to move as the people move and are educated to make the best use of them. MCKINZIE: Let me ask you this: When the first legislation for the Point IV program was introduced into Congress, there was a companion bill, which provided for investment guarantees ANDREWS: That's right. MCKINZIE: ...for industries, fertilizer companies and development of resources. ANDREWS: That's right. MCKINZIE: For example, I might go down and set up an 80 million dollar plant. As always happens the bill for investment guarantees got sent off to banking and currency and the other bill got sent off to foreign Affairs. They got all split up and it was never considered a package by Congress. I was under the impression that it went in there
as a package. That Technical Assistance would work sort of in conjunction with guaranteed outside investments. ANDREWS: Of course, that was the philosophy. I talked this over with Fulbright. I guess it is just as well I point out here how I got to be the last administrator of Point IV. You may have read it in the Truman Library, you may not have. After Dr. Bennett's death I held the thing together; I made this 29 nation tour and came back and presented our case to Congress. If I do say it myself, we won. We got more money than we asked for. In the meantime, a search was on for an administrator. You remember at this time Mr. Truman was very unpopular, and there wasn't any big Democrat that wanted a political future who would listen to him, and the Republicans wouldn't either. I recommended five or six. I searched for people that could bring competence to Point IV as well as dignity, and a name. Nothing seemed to happen. At one time it looked like Dr. John Hannah, president of Michigan
State might take the job. As a matter of fact, the State Department already had his biography, and everything made up. But Hannah then came out for Eisenhower in Life magazine. The farm organizations' principal organized backers of Point IV protested, "This can't be." They went to the State Department or Mr. Truman, I don't know who, and the idea was dropped. In the meantime we were trying to move and we were moving. I was only acting, but brother I acted like I run the show. And so one day, I think in April '52 or sometime about that, I got a call from Dawson at the White House. He says, "The Boss wants to see you." I had just come back from a trip around. I did lots of travel because I wanted to see what was going on out there. You can't do anything in Washington but read reports and shuffle papers. I said, "What does he want to talk to me about?" "Well," he said, "he wants to talk to you about Point IV." I figured he wanted a report on my trip.
I said, "Fine. When does he want me?" He says, "Come up right now." Well, I shuffled around right quick and got a lot of pictures that had been taken on this trip so to visualize what this thing was all about. I went into Dawson's office and he says, "Now don't talk to anybody when you get out of here, and tell me about Point IV." This old country boy, I just spun it out like nobody's business. And directly the bell rang and he says, "The President wants to see you now." I walked in and Mr. Truman was sitting in his office scratching on some papers and he looked and he said, "Well, there were three of my Cabinet members in here this morning whom I respect and they tell me that you're the man to run Point IV." I said, "My God, Mr. President, I'm nothing but an Arkansas apple knocker and I already submitted people in here who could bring dignity to it and as much competence as I can, and I think they would be a better deal." "Well," he said, "these fellows I've got confidence
in and they say you're it. And," he says, "you're it." He says, "I want you to take it." He says, "If I'm ever remembered fifty years after I'm dead, it will probably be because my name is associated with some of these programs. And I want you to run that thing like you own it. If any of my men come around to tell you what to do, you tell them I've got your telephone number and if I want to give you any orders, I'll give them to you. If you come into any tough decisions that'll embarrass you to make, you tell me and I'll make them for you." My God, you could do something on that. MCKINZIE: Did you ever call him and ask him to make a decision? ANDREWS: Hell no, I just made them. And he backed me a hundred percent. You could work on that without looking back over your shoulder. He also said this important thing. "Don't ask a man his religion, his color or his politics, but find a man who can do the job that you want done." You could go; you didn't
have to fool around. When the Congressmen came over to get some lout a job, you just say, "Very sorry, we haven't got room for that kind of a guy." And I didn't have anybody to put on any political appointments, at all. Even Mr. Truman's brother tried to wrangle in there into a big job. I said, "If Mr. Truman tells me to put you on, I'll put you on, but he'll have to get another administrator tomorrow morning." I said, "That's perfectly all right. We have only got a little shop and the orders are to do a job and we're trying to do it." The only political overtone we had was that this was a longtime political program so far as foreign policy was concerned. We were to stay away from projects that would be set up to woo some political position. We had a hell of a time with some of our ambassadors. They saw this as a big thing for them to build good will upon. Our very good ambassador in Pakistan didn't know what this thing was all about. He went to the Pakistan Foreign Office and got them all fired up that we were going
to write big checks and kick up a lot of dust. I went out to sign the agreement. We signed the agreement, took the pictures of the ambassador and the Foreign Minister and things were easy. At the reception after the signing the director of the Economic Council of the government, Said Hassan, was there. I had known him for a number of years off and on through FAO and other international meetings. And he said, "Well, now that that's done, let's get down to business. Here are the projects we want financed." So I remarked, "My God, Dr. Hassan, we haven't even discussed what your programs are. What are they?" "I want 10 million dollars for a sugar mill, and I want 13 million for a fertilizer plant," and right on down the line. I said, "There's been some mistake somewhere. If anybody has indicated to you that we have that kind of money it's just wrong." A very, very tense situation developed. We finally convinced him of what we were trying to do. If we take it
slow we'd find out if they had any brown coal to run the fertilizer plant. We'd find out whether they had any sugar to refine. See if they have the cane fields and production to back up a mill. You've got to have a planted acreage and so forth. He was pacified and they started a nice little program there and it moved on. We put in the initial amount of the seed money that eventually put in a fertilizer plant, but that fertilizer plant was eight years before it ever paid off at all. I was going out of the administration and Point IV was being consolidated into the International Cooperation Administration under Stassen. And a whole new deck of cards was shipped up. Stassen didn't believe in the Point IV concept. He said, "Stanley, you got a bunch of nice little chicken feed stuff here that sounds good, but what does it amount to?--I didn't come in here as Mutual Security Director to liquidate the foreign aid program; we're going to make it bigger." And that was when I had made a commitment to Bedell Smith, in the State Department, that I
would stay and see the appropriation through. And Bedell said, "Arkansas, you're the only guy that knows a damned thing about this and you just got to stay with it." In the meantime, I knew that the politicians were going to fire me sooner or later. I had resigned three or four times to Mr. Eisenhower, but they'd pigeon-holed my resignation. Anyhow, they came around then to the appropriation that I was supposed to put up to Congress. So, we had a meeting in Bedell Smith's office. The State Department always has these meetings to renew plans for congressional hearings. The State Department came up with a 900 million dollar deal. And I said, "Well, hell, if that's the kind of a thing that you people want me to present to Congress I can't do it. I'm out." "Well," they said, "this has got to be," and we had really a bad knockdown. The India desk men argued, "We're just not going to be responsible for India going into Communism and then losing Asia. Now, we've got to have this money."
"Well," I said, "I can't present this to Congress with a straight face. You guys get somebody else." Then Smith called on all the people around the table. Each made their big pitch. And so it finally came to me. "Well," I said, "Mr. Smith, I guess I'm wrong, but I can't see the maximum that you could possibly spend under any circumstances in the underdeveloped countries at this time more than 300 million dollars." I said, "I'd rather set a sight on 200 million a year for 20 years instead of 300 or 900 million in one year." Well, anyhow, we had a big row and finally Smith said, "Well, Arkansas, in my heart I think you're right, but here are some smart people who say that you're wrong." He says, "What in the hell am I to do?" He says, "I'm going to take this to Mr. Dulles." Dulles cut it back to 300 million, and it went over to the White House and Stassen went over and intervened with the Budget Bureau at the White House and added another 50. I told them, "All right
now, you say you've got the money to spend; you've got to show me where you want to spend it." They said, "You get on a bicycle and go out through the Middle East and Asia and you'll find projects for which this is needed." So, I went to Egypt. Of course, they were going to spend a lot on the Aswan Dam and there was a mysterious hundred million dollars in there for the Middle East. I couldn't figure where in the hell you were going to spend a hundred million dollars in the Middle East. I went on out to India and I looked at the dams and river developments the Indians had underway and you could, by twisting your conscience a little bit, say, "Well, we can go along with it." And so I came back and presented it to the Congress. The damn thing went through. That hundred million dollars for the Middle East, I didn't know at the time, was put in there by the people in the State Department who were interested in the oil deal, and the big oil companies to protect this oil in the Middle East.
MCKINZIE: Political overtones. ANDREWS: Yes, that's right. That money was never spent until Eisenhower sent the Richards mission. Richards was a former chairman of House Appropriations. He went out through the Middle East with that hundred million dollars in his pocket. He dropped 40 million in Ethiopia, so much in Jordan, so much in Egypt, so much in Syria, so much in Iraq. As far as I know, eight years later, they had never agreed on how they were going to spend the 40 million in Ethiopia. And there's some of the money, I'11 bet you, still lying around not spent in some of these places. That was the beginning of the Eisenhower doctrine. You remember Eric Johnston went out and resold the Jordan River scheme. And we had landed Marines in Lebanon and then Eisenhower made his big pitch before the United Nations for immediate solution. Well, I was asked to come up by the then ICA. What was first the Foreign Operations Administration was now ICA. I sat down with the ICA
people and we drafted Ike's speech for the United Nations. And seven of the eleven points that I had in my draft Eisenhower used in that speech. But that was purely political. Not a single thing happened. We made this big splash, big news; we blamed the Arabs for not moving. They blamed us for not moving. MCKINZIE: Now, how did Africa fit into the picture? ANDREWS: Well, Africa at this time was under colonial rule, with the exception of Ethiopia. We had programs in Ethiopia. Other African areas were coming out as new and sovereign states. There was a sort of a tacit agreement that we would let European countries have the leeway in those areas. That we would support it and follow, but we would let them take the lead. And for quite a long time that was the way it was done. Only recently, well, I would say after Kennedy came in, did we begin to give serious attention to these 56 new countries in the African Continent.
In the meantime the Chinese and the Russians walked in all over the place. We were wanted in Africa very much because a lot of their leaders had come up to Ethiopia and had seen particularly what had happened there in education and health. Ethiopia has got one of the finest health programs in the whole of Africa. And it was done, frankly, by Point IV in defiance of all the bureaucratic and congressional rules. MCKINZIE: How so? ANDREWS: The United Nations had a big medical mission there, Czech, Russians, British, Slavs and all kinds of people, medical people, who were working in that area. The United Nations had limited funds and many technical people, and we had money and very few technicians. We set up a joint operation to move step by step and at the pace that Ethiopia could finance most of it. It was a complete, united outfit. I got hell for it because I was putting some of our materials and some of our money in a United Nations deal and also our technicians. But
they didn't fire me. The Ethiopian program had a clear-cut plan. One is, you started first on the airborne diseases, principally malaria and dysentery; then you stepped up to waterborne diseases. You set up clinics and health centers only as fast as you could train Ethiopians to run them. You'd set up maybe 50 centers a year and over a period of five, ten years, the country was blanketed with a well-coordinated, cracker jack of a health service, which Ethiopia was supporting. The only bust in Ethiopia, on the health and sanitation side, was in the village well program. We could have escaped that if we'd just been thinking. The first thing health people look at when they get into a village is the water supply because that is a carrier of diseases, principally typhoid and dysentery. The big problem was sanitary water. We set up a big well drilling campaign. We put out crews with modern drilling rigs into these villages. We asked, "Would you like to have a well?" The villagers maybe would say nothing or say, "Si si"--"yes." The crews would
go out and drill a well, put a casing in it and a Meyers pump on it. The mayor and his wife would come out and pose for a picture of it. This would come back to Washington as so many wells have been drilled and so many villages have sanitary water. We drilled hundreds of those wells. I went out there ten years later to find out what happened to the health program, and particularly the well program. In 90 percent of the cases, the pump was pulled out and lying on the roadside somewhere and the pipe was lying around there all bent up, and in most cases the well itself was filled full of rock. I began to ask, "Why, what the hell happened here?" In the first place, any country boy knows that a Meyers pump that's made in Ashland, Ohio has a rocker arm on it. And that rocker arm is the first thing that wears out. When you put a village well in and maybe a thousand people use that well, that pump has got to run 24 hours a day. And that rocker arm went out and the only place that you could get a rocker arm was in
Ashland, Ohio. And so they tried every way and they couldn't do anything, or maybe the leathers wore out. They jerked the pipe out and then tried to dip water out of the well. They didn't have those long canisters that you could dip in the old-fashioned dipper well. On top of that, this ten inch casing was just about the size for a kid. to get his head stuck in. They just filled them up all over the whole country. That was a bust. If you read it here in Washington, that program was out of this world. We asked some of the mayors, "Why didn't you use the well in your village?" They replied, "You didn't ask us about it and it isn't in the right place. We didn't want it there; we want it up here, and so they're not using it." On the other hand, the Point IV well program in Taiwan was done right, because we had some smart Chinese to help us. In Taiwan you went out and talked to the village, "Would you like to have sanitary water?"
"Oh, yes, we'd like to have sanitary water." "Well, what can you do?" "Well, we might be able to help dig the well, but we got no cement, we got no tools." "Well, we'll get you the cement and maybe the tools. Will you dig the well?" You discussed what kind of well they wanted. In Taiwan they want a cistern type about six feet around and around this a cement platform about 15 feet square, with a rim around the well up about eight inches above that platform. In most African or Asian countries going to the well is a big deal, in all of these societies. The women dress up in their best clothes and go down with a bucket or jar on their head. Instead of having to wait for somebody to pump a bucket and move, four of them could dip their water out at one time. They could bring the kids down there and wash them; they could wash the vegetables, and everything else on that platform. It was their well and they took care of that well. Today you can go out there and they're all
over the place being used. But we didn't have sense enough to do this, and the hell of it is, what makes me mad, is we made the same mistake in South Vietnam and Laos and came near doing it in Thailand when the Thais stopped us on it. MCKINZIE: You mean on the well program? ANDREWS: Yes. MCKINZIE: And your argument is they didn't have local people involved... ANDREWS: That's right. MCKINZIE: ...in the actual drilling and care of the well? ANDREWS: All right now you got to do this work. And we'll do this if you'll do that. And boy it was an amazing thing. Then it becomes "our well." This pump that went down out there in Ethiopia was the Point IV pump to the people, not theirs. It was a Point IV well. The psychology has entirely shifted. If you recall the Peterson
report on aid that's theoretically where we're going to start now, twenty years too late, involving people in the program. After the Point IV shifted to Stassen, although you kept technical cooperation in the picture, it was a case of it being just a little tail on the dog that once in awhile could wag. Big money changed the emphasis. If a mission director knows he's got 50 million dollars he can spend, it's a whole lot easier for him to commit a check than it is to tell a country, "All right now, if you'll do this, we'll put the rest in." You improve your own image, you see, when you put that 25 million dollars in, and not the image of the other guy. What these developing countries want is improvement of their own image. This was true in Latin America. Hell, we went down there and started solving problems before you got off the plane. When Eisenhower went through about two or three years trying to get an appropriation for foreign aid, he called six of his Cabinet members and in real mule skinning language said, "I want
to know why in the hell it is that ten years and [at that time] 90 billion-dollars later, we're less thought of, we're more hated and more uncertain throughout the world than we were when we started. I want you guys to come up with some answers." Like all Cabinet members they got together to find somebody to do the work. At that time--I've forgotten what the name of the office was--but it was headed by a fellow from Time and Life magazine, and they were doing a kind of psychological type warfare in the so-called cold war at a very high level. They'd about run out of anything to do. So, they assigned this job to that agency. When they began to figure how they were going to do it they decided to do some of it themselves and hire land grant colleges or individuals to do some of it. Some way, some how, they got ahold of my name. They called me up to Washington and said, "Would you undertake a part of this study? There's only going to be six copies of it made; we're
going to survey the entire world and we're going to try to find out what the image of the United States is." They said, "We're going to try to find out what the image of the soldier is, the image of the businessman, the image of the diplomat, the image of the educator, and we want you to find out how the village people view the agricultural and educational worker that goes to the villages." And they said, "We'll give you a hundred dollars a day and travel money." "I'll do it if Michigan State doesn't object." I was at Michigan State at the time, and President [John Alfred] Hannah said, "That's fine, go to it." I went to work and I surveyed people, not Americans, but other people from 22 countries, including quite a number of Latin-Americans, Middle Easterners, and Asians and made a short report I'll try to find that report. I've got it somewhere. It was my little part of the big report. You remember in the Kennedy campaign, they were always trying to get a report theoretically out that showed
how the United States stood. Well, Jim Hagarty knew what Kennedy was shooting at was this study. But Jim Hagarty switched him off to the Voice of America survey which you could pick up in any Library. This report was never made public. It was seen by some of the Cabinet members but it was locked in the White House. And when Eisenhower left there it was either burned or taken. There's no copy of the total report. I've got my little piece of it. MCKINZIE: Was this a critical study? Was Eisenhower right? Was he right in thinking that the United States was thought of worse ten years later? ANDREWS: Oh hell yes. When you go to people in strictest confidence and let them tell you their story you get some very ear burning material. I'11 give you one little incident, then we'll go in and eat. I landed in Peru and went around to see the Minister of Agriculture. And I said, "What is your view of the Americans, particularly the
agriculture and educational field, and how they worked here and in your country?" "Well," he said, "you Americans are wonderful people. You're generous, you've given us all kinds of money, but," he says, "you never listen. You come into our country here and treat us as second-class citizens as if we know nothing and you brush us aside and go ahead and make damned fool mistakes." And he said, "If you would just listen and work along with us, together you'd--we'd save us a lot of trouble. We appreciate, and you've done wonderful things for us, but we could have done so much more together." I go out to India and down to a village, "What is your image of the agricultural man that works in this area?" "Well, he was the man who was here yesterday with a camera." That is pretty damning. Although in another instance a man, Hans Cardell, in one district of India there's a monument to him. Just one man, a Dane, who was in the Michigan State Extension Service that understood how to work with
groups. He transformed 80 million people in that area in their agriculture and the rural communities. But he did it patiently working with the people and among other things gave them confidence in themselves. And he's almost a god down there in that particular province. I'm not just saying that all over the world it was bad; I'm saying that we could have done so much better if we'd just stopped and thought the thing through. MCKINZIE: Do you think the small programs that were in operation while you were directing them were better received than the ones in operation now? ANDREWS: Well, they were better received for the simple fact that people knew what we were trying to do. We made lots of busts--we made all kinds of mistakes and all I'm bellyaching about is that nobody paid any attention to our mistakes. We could have saved millions of dollars and all kinds of trouble if we'd just profited by the Point IV mistakes. Dr. Bennett and I were wrong; we thought we could send
a county agent out and immediately put in an extension service and agricultural college system and transform things overnight. You can't do it. The people who were the most effective in these early programs were the vocational agricultural teachers and public health people. They knew this business of teaching young and old people. They were the most effective people in the whole darn business. They took it slow. In the health program in the places where we had people we learned that to be effective a person had to stay there a long time. I've fought, bled and died for the principle that when a man is assigned to a country, and works up with the country a program, he stays there until that program is reasonably successful. But you have this damnable two-year rotation. In public health now, for instance, the man that went to Thailand was there eight years. That man created miracles. Thailand has the finest public health service in all of Asia. And it's the labor of this man, plus the willingness of the Thais. They've not only got a public health system
manned by Thais, they've got medical schools; they've got the whole environmental business in health. It's good. But that man held those fellows' feet to the fire for eight years. A lot of times in early Point IV we'd say, "Well, here's a man that's a good chicken man. I sent him down to Guatamala. He's going to solve all the problems with chickens," and I could tell you a chicken story that'll knock you over, about Guatamala. He stays there two years and gets them going and has some nice reports and comes home. You wait around for two or three months to get another chicken man there. The new man says, "This thing is crazy, we got to go this way." The people are awfully baffled on that sort of business. And another phase of this--I'll mention this and then we'll quit until this afternoon. Under the Marshall plan, the orientation of the people that went out was about the economics of the country. How many factories, how many cats, how many cows, how this, the whole orientation program
could be summed up in "knowledge about." It was very evident that that sort of thing wouldn't work in our sort of program. "Knowledge about" didn't do you a damned bit of good. And so I sent some anthropologists out and said, "Tell me how you transfer know-how to people who can't read or write, can't even speak their own dialects, or understand their dialects. How do you do it?" Well, they come back; Margaret Mead was one of them, and this fellow from Michigan State, really distinguished top people. They come back with a great big report advising on the barriers to what we were trying to do. I said, "My God, what you're saying is probably true, but it'll take us ten years to even begin to start, let alone do anything. Here's Congress, wanting me to come up next year and say what we've accomplished. If I don't, we get no appropriations." And I said, "All we'll have to do is just to hope that we don't make enough mistakes that we discredit ourselves. We're going to have to move the best we can."
I decided then the thing to do is to give these Americans that go out a touch of anthropology. We made a contract with the Foreign Service Institute and I paid the Foreign Service Institute $350 to give a six weeks training course to each American that we sent out. It was a heavy dose of anthropology. I thought that would solve the problem. It just didn't. It just played hell because you made a bunch of amateur anthropologists who began to look at the differences between our culture and theirs and not at the likes. We had fellows still sitting out observing another culture at work and you were hanging presents on the Christmas tree on the outside of it. A tree doesn't grow from the outside, it grows from the inside. That anthropology gamble was a bust. It didn't work. MCKINZIE: But you'd still agree that the concept was a good one, that if you could have made... ANDREWS: Oh yes, that's right. But it takes lots of training, you see. MCKINZIE: Yes.
ANDREWS: And I think we could have done it better if you hadn't had such high level anthropology if you'd had a practical fellow, that understood psychological and ethnic cultures with more knowledge of human behavior. Human behavior's pretty well the same all over the world. We're all searching for a certain amount of ego involvement and dignity. In the meantime I'm out of Point IV in the Eisenhower "walk away." I go down to Michigan State, go to work with the national project in Agriculture Communications. The idea was to study how you get an idea from one person to another and how does an idea move through a social system. So I said, "Oh, I've got the answer now; communications is the answer." I went up to Washington a couple of times. They wanted me up there to make some statements before congressional committees and I went to see Senator Fulbright. I said, "Senator, the big story here is communication and an American who can't speak the language is just lost out there. So therefore I want you to insert in this bill a sum of money that will require every American going
out to at least have a smattering of the language of the country to which he is assigned." By golly, eight million dollars went in and eight million dollars then set up training systems everywhere. A lot of people--they were paid to go to these schools--spoke and learned the language, some of them very fluently, and some of them not very good. That was also a bust in part. Psychologically wrong, because this little fellow who's confronted by a six foot, two hundred pound American, while he's 80 pounds, colored and ignorant, is groping for some power over you. If you can speak his language as well as he could, or even smattering, brother you just made the thing that much worse. But if you could go to him and say, "Listen, I don't know a thing about your language, will you help me?" Then the other fellow feels a little dignity on his own. We worked that out. I'll tell you about it a little later in the International Voluntary Services, when we sent these young people out into these villages, and that's another phase of Point IV we'll
talk about. We said to these young people, "The first thing we want you to do is find a Vietnamese or a Laotian, or a Nepalese, or an Indian who wants to learn English. You teach him English and he'll teach you his language. That's the first thing you do." Well, anyhow, to make a long story short, I decided mere language training was not enough. At Michigan State we began to get into this communication problem in depth. We looked at communications in terms of how people behave. We stumbled onto something that if we could have had it when we started we might have done a better job in Point IV. It looked like we were going to get AID to try out the behavioral communications idea. It went clear up in the Eisenhower administration, to the last man, and he said, "Well, damn it, this looks like something awful good, but you know we've got so many things I'll just have to put it off for awhile." And the fellow that was carrying it through the bureaucracy was sent to Africa and the whole thing collapsed. One fellow
in education out in Thailand got 250 thousand dollars into the AID budget out there to introduce this concept of training for people. When that came into Washington they knocked it out. The whole thing collapsed except for one little training program which is still going on down in Virginia, in which you give foreigners that come over here a debriefing session as they go out. This training makes them face up to the fact, "Now you've been to the United States, now you've seen all these places; what does that mean to my country?" You put them into a situation when they will finally say, "My God Almighty, what does it mean to my country and how am I going to relate this to our problems." It's been very successful and it is one thing that AID bought that's still running. This system has been used by Michigan State people to train Dow Chemical, Standard Oil and company personnel going to foreign assignments. We've never been able to get it into the orientation for Government people going out. If I had my way I
wouldn't let a secretary go out without going through that training. It gives an entirely different concept of human behavior and it doesn't exaggerate the differences in human beings. It finds the common denominator that's between me and you as a black man and a white man. It emphasizes the likeness rather than the differences. MCKINZIE: Does this bother you that they didn't think of these things earlier? I mean you learned to think of this in the long range. ANDREWS: Yes. The point is, I didn't think of it. I'll be perfectly frank, I didn't. I know we were wrong somewhere but I didnt know how in the hell to do it. I was searching for something. When I got to Michigan State we had this million dollar Kellogg Fund. We were to find out how an idea spreads among people. At least 50 percent of the rural population is completely untouched by our agricultural programs in the U.S.A. It all stops at the bottom of the lower middle class. How can we expect to reach the millions in these
underdeveloped countries without going on down through to people; people participating. Two more things and talk for the rest of the day, but I think we ought to quit with these two and ask your opinion, let you ask questions. As we said in the beginning, this Point IV idea was a kind of a white hope to church people, to just good solid American citizens who were willing to do good. Young people wanted to come and work in the Point IV program. Most of them were highly motivated from the various religious organizations. There were about 75 religious organizations that had various kinds of programs all over the world. I may have arrived at an erroneous conclusion that the missionaries were a place at least where you could begin to get a foothold. They probably knew more about the real situation than the other groups. I courted opinions from the missionaries and in one case I gave the Presbyterian Board of Missions money to run a hospital in Thailand. They were doing a good job; they were having a hell of a time with money, and I said, "You can do a better
job than we can so take it." They took it one year and then said, "No, we can't do that, because we're a tax exempt organization and for other reasons cannot take government money." Well, people from these 75 organizations were always coming in saying, "What can we do for you?" You can't see 75 people every day. I said, "I'll tell you what I'll do. You say, and I know there are thousands of young people who would like to get into this program. What I am up against, the minute that a Form 57 comes in here on one of those young people to the personnel office, the first thing they ask is, 'What is the experience?"' Some old duffer with a bald head and gray hairs and with a big record here is hired immediately. They wouldn't hire these kids. I couldn't get them by State Department. I suggested to the group, "You people all get together and form a non-profit organization and set up a board of directors and select a thousand of these young people who want to go out. The idea
is to work in the villages, not in towns, right out in the villages. I'11 find them something to do." And this was getting pretty close to the end of my regime in Washington. I took Dale Clark out of the Mid-east staff and put him over with what we called the International Advisory Development Board. He worked with these organizations to set up some sort of a central organization which could speak for all of them. We put some money over there and Dale set out to organize these people and to see what we could do. They went to work and one day they came in the office and said, "We've got an organization; we have some money of our own and we've got a thousand people that want a job." I said, "Okay, what kind of people are they?" "Well, they're all kinds: agriculture, public health, education and so forth." I said, "All right, give me a little time and I'll get them a job." And the policy then was to send them out under a senior citizen. He was to be the boss, because they were not going to have
any contact with the TCA mission in town. They were going to have limited contact with the government agencies only to the extent that the government was involved in these village programs. Well, I wired our country director in Iraq, ''Find a place way out in the boondocks for seven people with these qualifications -- agriculture, public health, education, sanitation, and rural development." I allocated $150,000. At that time I could allocate it direct out of general funds. I didn't have to go through bureaucratic procedures. "Now you take this money and you spend it, but spend it wisely and when this is out ask for more and I'll send you more." Well, they went out and by golly, really miracles happened, and awfully quick. In the meantime then the Eisenhower administration came in and Stassen fired everybody. The country director heard about this program and wanted to get his hands on it.
It became a big struggle; this little mission had made terrific rapport with the people and also with key people in the Iraq ministries who were interested in rural development. ICA wanted to have the budget run through the central ICA office. There was a big row. I was gone by this time, but the little IVS group stuck it out for about four years. A11 the time ICA was trying to kill it. Finally with the help of the Egyptians they did kill it, because the Egyptians were trying to infiltrate that part of the area and they were carrying on a campaign against the Americans out in that area. The mission was pulled out, but Henry Weiss who was the country director under Eisenhower says, "That was the most effective little group of people that we've ever dealt with." In the meantime we put others in Nepal and Egypt and several other countries including Vietnam. When Stassen got through with his land grant college business, he wanted to know something about IVS. When I showed him the board of directors of
IVS, eleven of the great missionary and philanthropic organizations that in their total membership represented about 75 million people: Presbyterian Board of Missions, Methodist Board of Missions, and Friends Service, the Bretheren's, and the Land Grant College Association, the Rockefeller Foundation, and so forth, he got excited and he said, "Oh, this is something great." And he said, "How much money do you think this thing needs?" I said, "It doesn't need too much, but it does need top level support because the people in ICA down below hate us and are trying to kill us off." He said, "I'll take care of that." And so he allocated a million dollars to the program and said, "Go ahead and make it great." I said, "I'm not going to be here very long and I don't think we want to go too fast. The idea is to start in with three or four people and if they justify themselves we'll put in four more. And five more and," I said, "in five years you might have 50 people in Iraq, but it must go that way."
That was too little for him. He did set aside a million dollars and about the time this began to turn, Stassen was fired. Hollister came in. Hollister was put in there by Herbert Hoover, Jr., to liquidate the ICA. By this time I was at Michigan State and he called me up at Michigan State and said, "Andrews, how would you like to come back in the Government?" "Well," I said, "I'm pretty well set out here and I'm not very much interested in leaving this program." "Well," he said, "you're represented to me as being an economical operator." And he said, "I want to cut this God damned thing down to size and I want you to come up here and do it." "Well," I said, "Mr. Hollister, I'll go on one condition, and that is if President Eisenhower calls me into his office and says, 'Stanley Andrews, I want you to do this specific thing,' I'll do it. But I'm not going to get mixed up in this, and besides more money will have to be spent, not less. I know damn well that Mr. Eisenhower doesn't operate
that way. He puts it on the staff to hire and fire." That ended the conversation. I went to see him once and talked to him about some other matters. He brought up a lot of stuff about ICA and IVS. It was plain he wanted to liquidate it. He looked over this one million Stassen had set aside for IVS and immediately chopped it off. Then began an almost superhuman effort to survive as a little voluntary organization. Hell, we got money from Rotary Clubs and churches and private citizens and we just hung on. It wasn't long till Hollister got fired and Jim Smith came in. Smith was administrator. Smith was a pretty damned shrewd fellow and a sharp duck, and we were about to liquidate. By this time I was out and on the board of IVS. And these people were all discouraged and felt they must liquidate. I said, "Let me just take one more shot at this." I wrote Jim Smith a personal letter and I said, "I think that I can speak for a little organization that you ought to be interested in and
I wonder if you'd be willing to meet three of our board of directors? I don't want to even be in the group." Well, I got a letter back from him, "Sure, set the time and we will see you." Our group went over and we laid on the line what we had. The fellow that was in charge of technical assistance in ICA was one of these supply-demand fellows. He sat and watched the gross national product curve. If it went up just a little bit, this was success, regardless of anything else. And what's his name began to talk, "But, but Jim, you can't do this." Smith said, "God damn it, John, I'm running this. It looks to me like here's a reservoir of people that do what we ought to do." He said to our group and a fellow in the sociology department, "You fellows go out and draft a cable to every mission in the world in under-developed countries saying what this program is, saying I am interested in seeing these young people have a chance to work and that we would approve anything they did on that."
We did it. It went out and we got stuff, of course, pouring in, but it stopped at the bureaucracy. Those fellows would just sit on the requests. I talked to Smith just before he quit. He says, "This is the God damndest place I've ever seen. You put things out, but nothing ever comes up. It just churns around here. I'm burned up and to hell with it." He was seeking a job with the Navy. They didn't give him the Assistant Secretary of Navy job so he got in his station wagon one afternoon and went back to Denver. That was the end of Jim Smith in ICA. Then Riddleberger came in as administrator. Riddleberger was a professional diplomat and wouldn't move on anything. Dennis Fitzgerald then really took over and ran the outfit. But we hung on, just getting a little bit here and a little bit there. We had a good mission in Vietnam, good mission in Laos and Nepal. Lodge, Ambassador in Vietnam, discovered these kids. They were right out to the village, they were never in Saigon. Lodge said, "These hundred kids here are
the most effective Americans in South Vietnam; we want more of them." Well, Lodge wasn't there long until he was fired. General Maxwell Taylor took over. When Maxwell Taylor came in a fellow by the name of Killian became country director. Killian had been in Korea with Taylor. He decided to take over control of the IVS group. The Army had made a big map of the white and the black areas. They said, "No Americans are going to be in the black areas, and aid will go only to the white areas." These were only theoretical. For instance, in the big flood out there, our IVS boys rode those planes and made parachute drops into villages with food. They were not allowed to drop food in a black map village. They stuck it out and finally this fellow got fired. Another fellow came out and he discovered IVS. He wanted more IVS. It is a long story, but finally Bunker came in as Ambassador and Bunker said, "These are the most effective people in South Vietnam and
I want just as many as you can get there." He was a strong supporter but our IVS kids blew up their own program. These young people got fired up over the folly of the Vietnamese war, and they were getting into local politics. So, we're having a lot of trouble. They did marvelous work. All over South Vietnam and Southeast Asia, they talked about it. There's a good program in Laos. So, that's where it is now and I'm going to a board of directors meeting next week at which we're going to make some decisions on the future. (Note it was finally decided to withdraw IVS from South Vietnam due to Saigon policies on the war.) MCKINZIE: Of the IVS? ANDREWS: Under the Eisenhower administration IVS barely survived. After the people in a country had put up part of the money, after you'd agreed in the country on the plan, and sent it into Washington, it took from 18 months to two years to
get it through the bureaucracy. It just discarded, the whole doggone thing. So much for that little episode with these young people. When Kennedy started for the Presidency (and this is personal), I was on a committee that was set up by Chester Bowles with all this Eastern liberalist crowd, to blueprint a foreign aid program for Kennedy. Rostow was there and I went down to New York and they began to discuss something for Kennedy to talk about. Humphrey had made a little noise about a Peace Corps made up of young people. It was suggested that Kennedy might propose such a thing. Rostow said, "Oh, my God, we can't touch that one with a ten foot pole, because we get these damned kids out there and no telling what'll happen." And I said, "Well, gentlemen, you're just wrong as hell because it is happening and here's what it is," and I gave the IVS idea a selling. And they said, "All right, Andrews, you and Jack Bingham (who used to be my deputy), draft a memorandum and send it up to the speechwriters."'
So we did theoretically a policy paper. Kennedy was searching for something to appeal to the young people about. So, he goes out to Michigan and his entire speech was on this Peace Corps idea. And he got more letters and telegrams as a result of that than any single speech he made in the campaign. So Peace Corps was in. IVS then considered liquidating because we felt we'd demonstrated what you could do with young people. Shriver, the Peace Corps administrator, made a tour of all of our IVS missions and talked to the kids. He set the Peace Corps up on the basis of this IVS demonstration. But since Shriver could not forbid Jews to become members of the Peace Corps, and since we were operating big in the Middle East, they said, "You folks had better stay in and take care of these places where we can't go." There are places in Africa and in the Middle East that you couldn't get the Peace Corps in at all. We went ahead and limped along and were moving very, very good until we got all wound up in the
Vietnamese war. After Kennedy's death we still had Presidential support. Johnson praised this thing from one end to the other, but we got all mixed up in the Rostow theory. Remember the Rostow take-off concept of foreign aid. That progress came through industrialization. That industry came in first. The Point IV theory was that we could pay for training, and that training had to precede industry. You couldn't run a railroad without people who knew something about welding and carpentry and all that sort of thing. You see the railroads and what industry there was prior to this time had been primarily run by colonial powers -- the British and the French and Dutch. I'll tell you how one technical training thing started and the results, and I can repeat it in 40 countries of the world not quite as miniscule, or as primitive as this one. When the Palestinian war was over the little mud city of Amman, Jordan found itself with 350,000 refugees in that old city. Not a single sanitary facility was there,
not a single thing that could give you any clues on what was happening and what was the danger of various diseases breaking out. The first Point IV man out there was a man from Public Health, not Agriculture. He was appalled at what had happened. Pig's garbage was all over the streets, people everywhere. It was the damndest mess you ever saw. He went to the mayor and said, "Thousands of people will die in this city unless we do something about cleaning it up. "Well," the mayor says, "what shall we do?" This fellow went out to an old British Army base and borrowed first, and later bought, a bunch of Dodge Army trucks. Point IV equipped them to haul garbage and started a garbage collection system, the first garbage collection of any city in Jordan. Before, garbage was just thrown in the street and picked up on people's backs and carried away or left to rot. Those trucks would break down; you had to do something. The British turned over this old Army post to the Jordanians and we put a fellow out there that knew how to repair motor trucks. He trained a whole flock of
Jordanians. That was the beginning of the technical school now there. Now in Jordan you have a fifteen acre complex with 1,500 night and day students studying fourteen different skills and trades. They're supplying their garage mechanics, their electronic engineers, their refrigerator and radio repair men, and the whole shebang. The same thing happened in Iran; it's a long, long story and I'll not bore you with it. The same thing happened in Taiwan, and in Thailand on a different scale. Even in the case of Thailand it's a twenty acre complex, in Bangkok, and they have training centers over all of the northern area for people in the hills. They can come in and get some kind of training. Trained people preceded the industrialization. MCKINZIE: Most of these training programs were in repair of machinery, is that right? ANDREWS: Yes, that's right. In Iran though we turned this into a full-fledged technical institute. And the first year it opened we had 50 students. The
culture says, "You mustn't work with your hands." Students all want to get into Tehran University, but those 50 technical students got jobs immediately repairing refrigerators, radios and automobiles, and made as much money as a minister. With this the school began to grow. When I was there in 1960 they were graduating 700 technicians in 33 different skills. And everyone of those people got jobs, because here was Goodyear, Philco and outside firms were coming in and these fellows would be hired as supervisors for these assembly lines. Iran had lots of oil money and they were wise enough to use it on development. Those technical schools were a marvelous thing to support local industry. They're not closed up. We had a hell of a time of ever getting down off of theory to the practical know-how. We had to recruit our people -- the American side -- from technical institutes in Cleveland and Detroit. It worked a miracle. That is pretty well the end of the story except in the case of Jordan. Another thing
this doctor did, which shows how these things grow and are forgotten. He tried to find a testing laboratory so he could test for water impurities, and he couldn't find a single place between New Jerusalem where the Jews were and a commercial laboratory in Lebanon, that could look through a microscope at water and determine whether there were bugs in it or not. He said, "We must have a testing laboratory here for sanitary reasons." And he again went to the Mayor. The Mayor said, "I'll supply the stone, and the labor to build a laboratory. The King owns the land, and the King will allocate enough land to establish a laboratory. And we'll build a two-story laboratory." "And what will you do?" "Well," this fellow said, "we'll put in testing laboratory equipment and we'll bring over six American technicians who will train your highly educated young Jordanians how to run the laboratory equipment." I wired Washington for the laboratory
equipment, and we had that damned stuff moving right now. The cost was $150,000. We allocated another $150,000 for the training. The building went up, and a brass plaque in Arabic says the building and laboratory is the gift of the Jordanian people by point IV. I went back ten years later and I wanted to find out what happened to the laboratory. I met with the AID staff. They'd never heard of it. And one fellow said, "Seems to me like I did see the Arabic that sounded like Point IV down here in the middle of the city, but," he said, "I didn't know we ever had anything to do with that." I said, "We built it and created it." This set into motion the damndest scramble you ever saw. And so they went back and looked over the records and there'd been a bunch of files run into Washington and never a thing told to the new mission on that. In the meantime, this laboratory had trained, had expanded, and had become a national testing laboratory like our National Institute of
Standards. They tested asphalt, minerals and all materials for the roads, tested petroleum and other industrial products. They put on a third story and they'd showed the validity of manufacturing serums for the inoculation of livestock. And a couple of these young Jordanians went up to 0ld Jerusalem and established a serum plant. I was out there some five years later, and that serum plant, it's entire output had been sequestered by the U.N. and was furnishing then the animal serums for cholera and animal diseases all over the Middle East. It was a very lucrative business for these two young men. That's just the way these things go. You see it took 10, 15 years to work that thing out and in Jordan today there's not a single village or area that doesn't have access to laboratory technicians -- and to have an operation right in the hospital where the technical work is done. Jordan has the cleanest cities in the Middle East. It isn't necessarily because of Point IV. Tourism has increased, and they don't want these people to see dirty cities. They just keep them
clean so the tourists won't be offended. MCKINZIE: Nice long range. ANDREWS: Well, that's the end. Now start asking questions. MCKINZIE: Well, if I could ask you some questions about the handling of dependent overseas territories, as they used to be called. Vietnam was a dependent overseas territory of France, at that time, and as you mentioned earlier, much of Africa was an overseas territory. Those people had their problems in those territories, the same as the independent countries had their problems, but there was the idea to help people who were in underdeveloped areas. ANDREWS: That's right. MCKINZIE: How was this reconciled? How was it treated? ANDREWS: Well, we had that in the Caribbean down in the Virgin Islands and all through there. I'll tell you about Vietnam. Here again I stuck my neck out as far as the telephone pole, and Acheson and
Mr. Truman backed me up. These people, the would-be government which was the French Vietnamese business in Saigon, came to Washington and wanted Point IV to come in there. MCKINZIE: This was before '53? ANDREWS: Oh yes, oh yes, before '53; it was in early '52. I said, "Okay, we are a people to people program and we must insist that if we come into your country our people can contact the Vietnamese. Just how will this machinery work?" "Well," they said, "you'll have to go through the Colonial office in Paris, and then you'll have to go through our administrative machinery out of Saigon down through the provinces to the people." "But," I said, "does that mean we have to go through the French machinery?" They said, "Yes." I said, "Gentlemen, we haven't got any time for that sort of business; it can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned." Just that rough.
They were pretty much upset and then they put pressure on Marshall plan, people through France to get money to build up a lot of military structure there and build those big buildings, new schools, roads, etc, but too late. France funneled 840 million dollars of Marshall plan money out of France into South Vietnam. They completely ignored land reform and the basic issues that were concerning the people. And so that was it, and then when the Eisenhower administration came in we had, I think in our entire embassy, a little bit of an education grassroots program on the basic Point IV. We had $78,000; that was 411 we were spending. So then Stassen said, "Well, we're going to make South Vietnam a showplace." In the appropriation in the following year which I did not have anything to do with in '53, they put in 300 million dollars to carry on an education, public health and agricultural program in South Vietnam, right down the Point IV road. It looked awfully good. They sent a big mission
out there and I had hopes for awhile that we were going to lick it. I got back into it again through Michigan State. CIA picked up Diem in Paris and flew him to Saigon and put him up as provisional President. Diem had gone to school with Professor Fisher of Michigan State, public administration, in Sorbonne. So when Diem sat down in his chair as President he wired Michigan State and Fisher and said, "We want you to come out here and help me build a proper administrative structure to run a modern state." Fisher went out and looked the situation over. President Hannah also went out and invited Diem and his close associates to come to Michigan State. We had a big meeting. I sat just as close to Diem as you are, right here, and we talked all kinds of things. And Michigan State took a contract, partially financed by South Vietnam, partially by AID and partially by State Department to do three things. One was to establish a modern police academy in Saigon. Saigon got its running money and paid its police force out of the brothel and opium
fee at that time. Secondly, Diem wanted a rural police, which would be in battalion strength in the countryside to keep peace in the villages. Finally, he wanted a national institute of public administration. Michigan State took a contract for all three, running into several million dollars. I was at Michigan State on a Kellogg Foundation project, but they asked me if I would assist in briefing these people before they went out. I was a little disappointed; found most of them more concerned about whether they'd have a refrigerator or could buy French perfume than they were on what there was to do. But that's neither here nor there; that's typical. Michigan State started and they made real progress. It was unfortunate that the AID, the ICA mission there, didn't have any technicians so they called on Michigan State to fill the gap with a result that Michigan State got involved in everything except what they were supposed to do. But they went ahead, and so help me, they did set up and actually equipped a cracker jack of a police force for Saigon.
In the meantime, somebody had come to the President and said, "Mr. Eisenhower, you're building up a fine jewel here in the Orient, which the Chinese are going to come in and take over. And the only way in the world you can protect that is to have a modern Vietnamese Army which can repel an invasion from the north." And Ike understood military terms and he said, "So be it." There were 300 million dollars that had been programmed for credit. We had some marvelous credit things going in agriculture, rice, cleaning up, resettlement, and all kinds of things. But they were shoved aside. It was, I think, too much an American image, but it looked good anyhow. The money was drained out of these programs and put to building roads, such as Highway 19 from Saigon up to the central highlands and Highway 1 up to the border, along with airfields and harbors. The idea was that you could run tanks over those roads. Those roads cost an average of 50 million dollars apiece. In the meantime, they were building harbors that would take ships three times as big as what
was needed there. And they were building airfields up in the interior there that would take a B-52 bomber. This was a time when we were supposed to be helping the people, but all the money was drained off into those things which were really preparing for a war. About the only program they had was IVS which worked with the people down at the village level. Well, it's a long, long story, but I rode over Highway 19 clear down around to Hue and down the coast to Saigon on a paved highway, black-topped, in a jeep. I didn't see a single Vietnamese vehicle on that road and the only people I saw were some native people in native dress walking along the highway going down to a village celebration. The Army got more and more impatient and finally convinced Ike that he had to set up a modern military machine and as you recall, he sent 700 generals in there in civilian clothes to advise the Vietnamese on how to build a modern army.
Other programs were phased out and the whole thing went on from bad to worse. We had a marvelous health program going up there. At one time it looked like we'd completely eliminated the malaria mosquito from South Vietnam. But the whole thing collapsed. When you put 700 generals with three to five hundred million dollars in a little country, you know who's going to run it. And that's what happened. We've been running it ever since. MCKINZIE: Sure. ANDREWS: And this is one of those sad things. The only military man who has really attempted to logically make the step by step involvement in South Vietnam was [General James M.] Gavin. He wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post in which he laid out his concept of how we got involved. How each little step took us more towards disaster. I was right in the middle of the thing and I was one of the few people that fought to keep us out of there.
And during Mr. Truman's administration I could do it because I was the guy that said, "To hell with it, we're not going to get mixed up with this thing." Then in came the Eisenhower administration and as a holdover you had the big conferences on what you're going to do; I was out-voted 9 to 1. That was the end of the story. MCKINZIE: Right. As you recall, was there any colonial area where Point IV was able to take in a program? In Africa or in any other part of the world? The reason I'm asking this is that Franklin Roosevelt, you know, had been very much opposed to anybody having a colonial empire; at least he gave that impression. And you can't say that the people in dependent overseas territories don't count, because they happen to live in dependent overseas territories. ANDREWS: That's right.
MCKINZIE: But I understand the political problems of the thing. Do you have any colonial areas where the Point IV idea was able to be applied? In Africa? ANDREWS: No, no. MCKINZIE: No. ANDREWS: No, not in the colonial areas. Well down in the Caribbean, Jamaica, we had a housing program that worked very good. MCKINZIE: Right. ANDREWS: And we set up the Caribbean Commission, you know, and we demonstrated cheap housing and quite a bunch of programs in that area. That was under British possession and the British were very cooperative. We did a little work in Surinam in the Dutch possession, but nothing in any major sense because the colonial powers were afraid to let the United States in the door. They wanted to control it. They were fighting to keep hold of those areas and it was only after these various
countries had become sovereign that we were able to walk in. I think our first bunch of countries was 38 in number and by the time I left in the Eisenhower administration it was something over 44 or 45. Then, as the African countries, like Nigeria, opened up, why I think it increased to about 70 or more. At the same time, you had the policy of vital interest and peripheral interests. You put the bulk of your money in countries that were involved in our defense and in the creation of a buffer between us and Russia. That became the policy beginning with the Eisenhower administration. MCKINZIE: Right. ANDREWS: You starved lots of good programs in Latin America, and in Africa and other places. Again that's the way it was. I think on the whole that it was all beneficial, but it could have been done with half the money and half the effort if we'd just stayed with the original course and not shifted all over the place. We should have stayed with the
original concept that the country program is made up by the country and not by you. You see, after Eisenhower and after Stassen, you developed the country book idea in effect, an American program in that country. The country had its program, and anything you did as an American out here, outside of this book, you didn't get anywhere with it. If it wasn't written down in this book, there would be no American assistance. I went into how they made up a book, and I talked to a fellow in the Philippines and I said, "How do you make up these books?" "Well," he said, "I get a quart of scotch and go over to the Manila Hotel and start writing." I said, "Do you call in the Philippines experts?" And he said, "Hell, no, why should I?" MCKINZIE: Let me ask you about the International Development Advisory Board. Nelson Rockefeller was head of that at one time, I believe that was... ANDREWS: Yes, and later Eric Johnston.
MCKINZIE: Before Eric Johnston, ANDREWS: Yes, Eric Johnston was made head of it when Rockefeller resigned an appointment of Dr. Bennett. The Point IV setup and the Point IV legislation provided for a kind of a double-barrel approach. You had the International Advisory Development Board which was independent of Point IV. In other words, I could call on it for advice, but I couldn't tell them what to do. I allocated money to them. And this was made up of people from all over America. John Hannah was the educational man. Clarence Poe was the agricultural man. We had two agricultural people, two education people, and the whole category around. And this board traveled widely and looked at these programs. They'd come back and tell us with gloves off, what they saw and what they thought ought to be done. Admittedly some of the work was very effective and some was very ineffective. Hannah's committee did a marvelous job of mapping an educational philosophy for the
Point 1V program. Dr. Hyde of the Public Health Service, International Public Health Service, who was on it did a marvelous job of mapping out a world health program and where we fit into it. Dr. Poe did not do so well; he was too much of a good old Southern orator and didn't get down to business. Well, out of that committee came the suggestion that we ought to have three international gatherings; one in Geneva on health, one in Rome on education and one in Bangkok on agriculture at the ECE in Thailand. The first two of them were held and this took all of our key people in health and many of the local key people that we could get to come to Geneva. Then we called in the experts in all kinds of diseases -- malaria, water-borne diseases, glaucoma and the whole category of health problems. We kept their feet to the fire there five days. This was U.N., our people, and the country people. And we pulled in some of the most renowned and distinguished scientists in the world on these various diseases. I said, "Now, you people put
down first things first, and how are we going to do it, and how are we going to use our resources to accomplish our goal." They came up with a remarkable bunch of ideas. They said, "The first thing we've got to attack is insect and airborne diseases like malaria. This is comparatively easy to control if you go to it. And after the malaria program gets underway and looks like a success we want to attack waterborne diseases -- dysentery, typhoid and all that whole series carried by water. After that we begin the environmental things, little clinics, x-rays of chests, tuberculosis, and in glaucoma." These experts said that you could not sustain an industrial civilization with glaucoma. This could be whipped, but it'll take a long time. So, glaucoma was the last we were going to hit and that was staffed by the U.N. The program outlined was accepted by all the host country people that were there. That was our program and that's what we started out on. Of course, this was getting pretty late towards the end of Point IV. We had
a meeting in Rome on education and the same system was carried out -- host country people, U.N. people and so forth. They decided that we had to start on fundamental education, such as teaching the small child in the village something about his own environment. Take him to the grocery store on how you weigh food; then move on into ABC's and reading and writing. This was a long term program and it was accepted. We set up a program in Bangkok for agriculture. Skinny [Elmer] Holmgreen was the big shot in Marshall plan, and Marshall plan now, you see, and eventually Point IV, were to come under one head. I went to Holmgreen and said, "Holmgreen, I set this thing up now, but I'm going to leave here one of these days and do you want to carry it on or not?" "Well," he said, "I think it's a good idea, why don't we do it." "Well," I said, "somebody's going to have to clear this with Stassen. I don't feel like spending the money and calling in people from all over
the world when I'm going to leave." Well, Holmgreen got in touch with Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald got in touch with Stassen. Stassen said, "No." So, the agriculture program was out. MCKINZIE: But the whole idea of these conferences was suggested by International Advisory Board? ANDREWS: That's right, and that was the way that we were going to move. Beneath the Advisory Committee and surrounding me was a technical committee representing Interior, Assistant Secretary of Interior, Assistant Secretary for Labor, Assistant Secretary for Agriculture, and on down. And these Assistant Secretaries would discuss these programs and once a call from the field came for an Interior man, this Interior fellow would see that we found this man. We set up then a joint USDA land-grant college committee, which made a list of all the technicians available in the United States in the universities and in the Department of Agriculture. They were on file cards and you could just almost press a button and
find the man you're looking for at once. One dramatic thing like this was something that turned out not so good, but it did show you could move and do the job. Periodically you had desert locusts sweep over the Middle East. They start down in Ethiopia and go clean up across the Middle East and end up in Pakistan. And these swarms multiply 40 times between Ethiopia and Pakistan. They just wipe a country clean. In the summer of 1952, these desert locusts were breeding in Ethiopia and they were beginning to swarm in the Middle East. The Jews and everybody were excited about them. Even the Jews were on the committee and they worked right along with the other technicians from the Arab countries. They asked for Point IV help. We pressed a button and here were two scientists that had been working on this problem for years and there had been discovered a new insecticide called Aldren. In a matter of hours we loaded up three DC-4s; we put six tons of Aldren in one of them; we put jeeps and walkie-talkies and other equipment in
and they landed in Jordan and began to work. They stopped the locusts. What they did, these little cub planes they had would fly out of a morning over the desert and they'd see these swarms. They would use walkie-talkies and report back to headquarters. You'd take a spray plane and brother you killed them by the millions, hit the swarm. But the kickback was, the people out in that part of the world, of course, eat the desert locusts. We had been told that Aldren was not damaging to human beings. We went blithely ahead on the basis of the scientific opinion on it. But when the people began to eat these locusts they became sick with nervous disorders and every other ailment. A program that had fantastic, dramatic appeal turned sour -- not completely sour -- we stopped the locusts. It was so popular that when we got to Iran, that was the last stop before Pakistan, the Russians wanted to get in on this. And so I said, "Why not. Hell, if they're interested in killing locusts, so are we; bring them in."
They came in. They came in and they sprayed thousands of acres in Iran. Of course they may have taken lot of pictures but the Russians were very clannish and would not let any of the Iranians around their camp. In our camps the Arabs and the Bedouin would come in, sit down and drink coffee and have a big time and when one of our pilots got in trouble and landed out there, the whole province would come in to take care of him and get him back to headquarters. But the Russians would knock the socks off anybody that stuck his nose around. And so they did more damage to themselves. Mr. Acheson again backed me up, much to the consternation of some of the McCarthy people and other bureaucrats. But anyhow, that was highly successful; we stopped the locusts for 17 years. MCKINZIE: President Truman liked the idea of that particular project. In fact, he had some pictures of the locusts. ANDREWS: Oh, I've got slide pictures of the whole business. I've got stories by the hundreds on
4,000 slides out of 60 countries of various kinds of programs that I've been involved in. Anyhow that was a psychological bust so far as Arab people were concerned in that we didn't know that Aldren was toxic. Those people have eaten those locusts for centuries. MCKINZIE: You had mentioned cooperation with the Soviet Union in one little instance here. You've said in some letters and some speeches that you would have been willing all along to have made this a cooperative program. ANDREWS: Oh yes. MCKINZIE: If it could have been a real cooperative program... ANDREWS: Oh yes, that's right. MCKINZIE: and turned it over to the United Nations. In fact, there had been some criticism of the United Nations. ANDREWS: That's right. Matter of fact, I tried my
darndest to amalgamate it with the United Nations. In Iran we had a United Nations and U.S. coordinator who saw to it that we did not duplicate efforts. We had a very fine working relationship. And if the United Nations' man could do a job that we couldn't he did it, and vice versa. But you were under trouble all the time. In Burma the U.N. had sent about 20 tons of DDT out there and a medical team of six to put on a health program. I was there 18 months later and they hadn't moved out of the hotel in Rangoon and there hadn't been a pound of the DDT moved out of the warehouse. They didn't even have instruments that could test anything or even listen to a heart beat. The U.N. had a pretty good bunch of people in there, but no money or materials. I said, "All right, we've got this DDT; you've got instruments; you've got people. I'll turn this DDT over to you and let's go." And we did.
But Senator Margaret Chase Smith got hold of it, and she just gave me hell from one end to the other that I was bypassing and spending U.S. money on projects that were not approved by the Budget Bureau. We finally had to quit it. Also, Senator [Homer] Ferguson, a Republican former prosecutor from Michigan, was chairman of the subcommittee on Senate appropriations and he really gave me hell. Finally he just wore me out one whole afternoon, and like a prosecutor, he'd shoot a question at you. After one session I said, "Senator, you were damn rough this afternoon." I said, "I can't see where that's gaining anybody anything." "Why," he said, "Stanley, damn it, I'm up for reelection; I've got to have a record." And that's what you had to go up against. MCKINZIE: You mentioned the Bureau of the Budget a little bit ago; these were all long-range programs and if they're going
to be cooperative programs you kind of have to wait around till the other guy gets ready to cooperate. Does the accounting system, the bureaucracy of the United States, stand for that? ANDREWS: It was awful bad. What we did, we got in all kinds of trouble. We just ignored it and said, "Hell, go ahead." And of course, when the General Accounting Office came along they really gave us trouble. But we did move, and... MCKINZIE: What I mean is you had some of your money at the end of the year didn't you? If they didn't, if they saw a country didn't come along with its matching part and you're waiting on it, what happened? ANDREWS: We turned the money back to Congress. We made some awful mistakes. But I found the best way to handle that was to walk up to Congress and tell them before they found out, because somebody in the organization is going to leak it. We had a well program in Iran and we bought 1,500
tons of tube well casing through General Services and the guy that made out the specifications in General Services ordered three inch pipe, but 2-1/2 inch knuckles, and joints. So when it got out there you couldn't do a damn thing with them. When the appropriation hearing came up, I knew somebody would bring that out. I just walked up to the Senate Finance Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee and said, "We just played hell, and here's what it is." They were really surprised. People don't do that, you see, in Congress. You try to cover it up, but I wouldn't cover up a damn thing. I didnt care; I was willing to have to leave the outfit any hour. I had an understanding with Brannan in our Department of Agriculture and the understanding with Dean Acheson that any hour he thought I was embarrassing the administration, anything else, give me five minutes notice and I'm out and not a damn word said. You can operate that way when, particularly with the backing that Truman gave you, you could really hit with a broad sweep.
MCKINZIE: You've compared a time or two in a letter, maybe in a speech, the techniques of the ECA in early years with those of TCA and you used the words "compliance control," emphasis on compliance control in the ECA and you talked about the field orientation of the TCA... ANDREWS: Yes, that's right. MCKINZIE: That doesn't mean, of course, does it, that the man was completely on his own... ANDREWS: Oh no. MCKINZIE: ...because you talked to me about the idea of the buck stopping. ANDREWS: There were four fundamentals laid down by Dr. Bennett. I don't claim credit for it. Three things were paramount. Congress has got to understand this program. Unless Congress understands it you're dead. Number two, you've got to have a program people can see. And number three, you've got to have full accountability for every dollar
spent. That was it. That's fundamental and it was hard, but hell, we'd make them make receipt for lead pencils. Generally you have got to have people who know the score. You've got all kinds of investigations, but we came out very clean. MCKINZZE: But now in ECA nobody did anything without checking with Washington. ANDREWS: Yes. Well, I didn't want the field to check with Washington at all, unless it was a question of policy. If they did not know what to do out there that man is not competent, and he ought to be fired. MCKINZIE: The thing was selecting the right man in the first place. ANDREWS: You see our country directors were selected from technicians with administrative ability. When Eisenhower and Stassen came in they put in professional administrators, IBM boys in IBM training school with all these controls and compliance
and everything else. In Point IV we had some exceedingly able people who could look at an agricultural program out here that spent 50 thousand dollars or something and he could tell at a glance whether anything was going wrong or right or not. But this administrator, this technically trained IBM administrator would have to call in five technicians to tell him. You just built up bureaucracy in the offices and did not put people out where they belonged. I'm not saying that was the only way to do it. It worked for 18 months. Now I don't know whether it would have worked another six months or not. MCKINZIE: Mr. Stassen built on this university contract system, really big. Had you talked to Dr. Bennett about that or had you done much with the university contract idea? There were a few, three or four small university contracts, Arkansas... ANDREWS: Oh yes. MCKINZIE: Had you anticipated expanding it?
ANDREWS: Only slowly. And only where a country was clearly willing to put real money behind the effort. Ethiopia, I expect, paid 60 percent of the cost of that agricultural college, the research station, extension stuff. Point IV put up the money for the Oklahoma State staff. And Oklahoma State was very low cost operators. They went heavy on training -- on training young Ethiopians to take over teaching spots and responsible jobs. When that contract was over they were graduating from the agriculture college about 200 BA agriculture students, about 50 Ph.D's, and they had an extension service with the home demonstration in every province of Ethiopia. And you had research stations out there that make Beltsville look a little sick. Not the big buildings, but the stuff that was going on in a primitive way was really good research on various crops. MCKINZIE: Oh, okay. ANDREWS: And you can find the whole thing in a report I made to TCA in 1960.
MCKINZIE: When you left you must have had some ideas about what needed to be done next and in a couple of letters you seem to indicate that sooner or later Point IV was going to have to get into things like farm credit; sooner or later they're going to have to get into distribution of goods. ANDREWS: Yes, we went into farm credit in a small and mostly demonstrational way. Actually Point IV was not in operation under our original concept of getting as close to people with all agriculture services as possible to really demonstrate conclusively that we were on the right track. I felt in the beginning that the only way we could ever boost agriculture production through the small landholder or tiller of the soil in each of the developing countries in which we worked was by some form of credit or the investment of capital in inputs. Nearly all of the countries under colonial management, and that meant practically every country in the world in which we worked on Point IV except Thailand had some sort of an
agricultural credit bank or system largely dominated by the Colonial power and providing credit largely for the large landholders and plantations. Credit was provided the landlord and he in turn passed it on in the form of food and goods to the direct tillers -- taking a portion of their crop in pay. Usually land rents, water, seeds and supplies took about 80 percent of the total direct tiller's income. Our first major demonstration of the kind of credit system which we at that time thought would be needed was in Iran. Land in Iran was owned and controlled by about 6,000 landlords including the Shah of Iran who actually owned about one-third of all the villages in the country. The landlords counted their holdings in terms of villages owned rather than acres. The Shah had decided, after taking over from his father, that he was going to initiate a nationwide land reform and was going to begin by disposing of his own lands or villages. He asked Point IV for help. We were not experts on land reform but in studying the successes and failures of land reform in several
countries, including Italy, Japan and Eastern Germany we were convinced that merely dividing up the land and letting things go at that was the road to failure. Under the landlord tenant system -- obnoxious as it often is -- the system did provide supervision and management, inputs, seeds and supplies, transportation, and indeed a market system because the landlord gathered the rents in kind from the direct tillers and sold and transported the total volume of all the smaller producers at one time. Land reform in most cases destroyed this system and the small tiller was left on his own with only his small piece of land -- no supervision, no credit, no inputs and indeed no guaranteed market. Point IV suggested to the Shah that some system had to be set up to take the place of the landlord in the system. Iran had the traditional Agricultural Bank, functioning for the landlords and there were only about a dozen places in Iran where even the landlord could walk in and arrange for his financing without going up to Teheran. Point IV argued that
credit facilities must be close to the villages and the people and as much as possible controlled by the village people. Bank Oman was the great bank through which transactions in the name of the Shah took place. Our administrator in Iran allocated 10 million U.S. dollars to the Bank Oman, which was to be the back-up money for the issuance of Iranian money to small cooperative societies which would loan the money direct to the small producer and hopefully in time be able to develop supply cooperatives and marketing coops. The Varman Plain, about 50 miles south of Tehran, was selected as the place where this effort would start. A number of U.S. technicians mainly from the old Farm Security organization of USDA in the United States were sent out to work with the best Iranian talent we could find. There were many doubters in our own ranks as well as in Iran that "the little fellows" would not pay their loans and the whole thing would fail. However, the effort was launched in the spring of 1952. A major effort was made by teams going from
village to village explaining the meaning of credit and how it might be used. Loans were to be made by a committee of farmers in the villages and those same farmers were held responsible for seeing that the borrower looked after his crop and paid the loan when the crop was harvested. The amount of the loans ran from about $12 U.S. to a as high as $500 for the larger producers who grew several crops a year on their land. Obviously administrative costs for loans of this size were very high, especially if it had to go through the usual bureaucratic system of final action on the loan and payment of the money out of the central bank. By making the local committee fully responsible for making and collecting the loan, cost of handling this paper was cut to the minimum. During the late fall of 1952 and summer of 1953 I personally received almost weekly reports on the progress of the lending of the money. I began to feel a little worried that we were going too far too fast but once a thing like this started it was hard to stop or slow down. I left the Government
service in the fall of 1953 without really knowing what did happen on the Varman Plain. In early spring 1954 I was asked to make a talk to the students of the Agricultural College of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and in the course of the talk I mentioned our experiment in farm credit ending with the remark that I did not know how well we had collected but I did know we loaned a lot of money. In the middle of this comment a student from Iran at the university arose and said, "You can rest easy. Records show that the loans were repaid 98 percent, a figure much higher than the lending in the landlord system." These figures were officially confirmed in a special report three years later when the Bank Oman, for reasons we need not go into here, closed out its farm lending business. There was a change of policy in Iran and also a major change in U.S. policy with the Eisenhower administration. Point IV came under the general direction and supervision of the Economic Cooperation Administration, or
Marshall plan. The ECA credit work tended more toward the U.S. farm credit administration system, which features "sound credit loans" with emphasis on larger sums rather than the very small amounts necessary in a land reform or land redistribution system. With the closing out of the activities of the Bank Oman, which was essentially an operation to assist the Shah in implementing his land reform, emphasis was once more placed on the original agricultural bank of Iran serving the landlords. By now the Shah had succeeded in getting many of the landlords to break up their holdings or provide a better break for the small holder and the traditional agricultural bank was converted into something resembling the U.S. Production Credit system and the facilities for making loans greatly expanded. We do not know the exact number of locations where a producer now can receive credit but the system now pretty well covers the entire country and the offices in the country have grown from about 60 originally to several hundred.
This Iran demonstration was the main Point IV effort in the early stages though we did inaugurate a similar system with less educational effort on the Alto Plano in Bolivia. It was not as successful as the Varman Plain experiment but it formed the base for a credit system which has grown increasingly effective in the land reform movement in that area. The ECA took over authority and administration in the Philippines shortly after Point IV came into being. We had a small mission out there previous to that time. When Magsaysay ran for president he made agricultural production the main thrust of his campaign with "credit for every farmer in his barrio." The United States went all out in support of this theme. Elmer Holmgreen as head of agriculture in ECA and Dana Reynolds his credit man went all out to help Magsaysay keep his promise. It was highly political of course and the inevitable happened. The little fellows in the bureaus got their money en masse, and these fellows planted rice till it ran out your ears, and on some of the islands
they had rice they couldn't store, and couldn't get it out because there was no transportation into the consumption centers. And the credit, and the credit coops, the credit associations busted. And ten years later I went out there and sat down with the head of the credit bank -- traveled all over the islands. He was trying to get things set up on a sound basis. I imagine something did happen. He was a very able guy and knew the trouble. But you see credit was used as a political thing. It did the political job but set a real credit system back ten years. I was out through the Far East with Secretary Freeman in 1961. I conducted a trip for Freeman and nine of the technical people in the USDA. We made a survey of eleven countries. Actually it was kind of cold-blooded. Freeman wanted to find out how much PL-480 grain he could get rid of. That's the truth. It was a well-organized outfit and each fellow had a segment, and when we hit a country we each went to our own assignments. Mine was to find out what they're doing themselves
on the food business and what they were planning. We each made a detailed report on our findings and the whole thing was sent to President Kennedy. Kennedy's administration was anxious to get out from under our surplus. I could understand it, but I thought I'd better call the shots as they were. My conclusion was that our PL-480 program in most of the countries we visited had been a deterrent on agricultural production instead of a boost. And I'll just give you one instance. When I was in Pakistan and signed the Point IV agreement with Said Hassan, I went on to Japan and other places. In that year we shipped out of West Pakistan 300 thousand tons of wheat into Japan and swapped them for 50 wood-burning locomotives. There was no foreign exchange, so it was barter. West Pakistan had planted that year twelve million hectares of wheat. Twelve years later when I got out there with the Freeman mission, we were shipping into West Pakistan a million 38 thousand tons of American PL-480 wheat. Pakistan had seven million hectares in production. I
brought this up in the five-year plan that Said Hassan had drawn up; he set aside 23 million cores for agricultural development. Well I said, "Where'd you spend that?" "Oh," he said, "we didn't spend it, it just looked good in the plan." And he said, "We'd be perfectly willing to quit growing cotton if you just give us some cotton." I put that in the report and it didn't suit very many well. But that was the truth, and the truth of the matter is our PL-480 has, of course, supplied millions of human beings with food that they wouldn't otherwise have. But it's been an absolute deterrent in some areas of the country in doing anything to help themselves. MCKINZIE: There were some people who argued privately and I suppose in Congress that the only way a country could develop was through competitive, free, private enterprise and that anything you did in a form of a gift regardless of how much cooperation there was if it wasn't private enterprise
it was not going to work. ANDREWS: The country's got to want to do something and it's got to put out... MCKINZIE: Yes, but did you have much of this kind of criticism in the government... ANDREWS: No, not much of that, and this, you see, most of this stuff was after I left. I think the Freeman mission was to find out how much stuff we could dump. My part of it was to see what they were doing themselves. The damn truth of the matter is they were not putting up much effort at all. And in India, which has a very critical food problem, I know Singh, the Chairman of the Planning Board. Under the old Point IV program I used to meet with him regularly. And we knew each other and could talk frankly. I said, "What the hell is it here? You've got all this money allocated, but where's it being spent?"
"Well,'' he said, "frankly, we feel as long as we can get PL-480 wheat from the United States we can spend the rest of the money in industrialization. You see, what they did, we gave them the wheat; they sold it to the public and the rupees went back into their tax fund which is really a tax. Then they used that in the development of their industry mainly." MCKINZIE: Of all these programs before 1953 do you care to commit yourself on which one of them worked best? Of course, everybody's got different problems. I realize it makes it hard to make a judgment on that, but the lot of them. ANDREWS: Well, I wouldn't want to single out a single country because there was something good in all countries, and something bad in all of them. If you get ahold of those reports you'll find that there's pretty extensive analysis on that point. I took health, education and agriculture programs in fifteen countries and selected a program that I knew something about.
And I knew what we started out to do and tried to find it. I wouldn't say we could generalize on any one country, but I will make this generalization. In the country that was in on the planning of the program -- I went out there ten years later and they took me around to show what they had done, and they didn't say Point IV. They said, "our program," when I knew we had helped. That meant to me that the program was a success. In country after country these people took tremendous pride in what they'd done in their program. Many of our programs, you know, were run by Americans, literally run by Americans over in the AID office, not through the machinery of the ministers of the countries. A whole lot depended on to what extent the country director held their feet to the fire and made them do something before he moved. In so many places we got impatient and just went ahead and pushed them out of the way and did
it. There was talk about training all the time but -- except in the technical schools -- there was practically no training on how you deal with the social system. The technical training is very good, but that's a different thing from an involvement of people in their own welfare and raising the total level of people in the social system. You've got to raise their sights and give them confidence in themselves. One little thing in Jordan that worked quite miraculously. It has to some extent been copied in quite a number of countries; I can name five or six countries. In the Middle Eastern system of government all the taxes are collected in the country and brought to the center. And then God or the King gives it back. This device is used to keep the people in the villages in tow... Well, these villages got excited about cleaning the country up; they would sit around out there and wait for months for King Hussein or somebody to allocate some money to clean up their villages. Finally we got around and said, "All right, suppose
we give you some money; would you pay it back?" "Well, we don't know, we're not allowed to tax ourselves; but we want to try." So, we set up a 300 thousand dollar revolving fund in Amman. A village that wanted to put in a little sewer system or some other improvement could come there and get the money, and buy the pipe and materials on their own. They had to do the work themselves. In the water returns they would pay back to the revolving fund this money. The minute they would get one little project finished they'd grab on another one and it just multiplied. You'd never get one project finished till they saw another they wanted to do. They got confidence they could do it. This wasn't big, but ten years later when I was out there the revolving fund was still intact with 300 thousand dollars and interest paid into the revolving fund was a little over $250,000. So you had a revolving fund of $550,000. And these villages were all just going to town. They set up a market, they set up roads in the village, they built wells and a joint cooking
deal. What happened is that you had a room in the center of the village and you set in a gas cooking arrangement with a big griddle and oven. These Arab women normally beat out this dough and put it in a clay oven fired with straw. The kitchen became something of a community center and the women would come up there and sit around and knit and wait and take their turn and cook on this gas stove arrangement. And it became a great social thing. MCKINZIE: I'm kind of interested in the idea that there was no immediate political goal to be achieved from these programs. ANDREWS: That's right. MCKINZIE: It must have been kind of hard to make that apparent sometimes, was it not? Some of the people who were in the old IIAA said... ANDREWS: Well, that was political. MCKINZIE: They said, "You know our job is to buy
friends and influence people." ANDREWS: That's what we were trying to do, because we wanted to keep Latin America out of the world war and keep the countries neutral. MCKINZIE: Some of those same people later were involved in the Point IV program and it would be a little hard for some of them I would imagine. ANDREWS: That's right. But you see the agricultural side in the Latin America was nearly all USDA. And the little industrial stuff and health and education was IIAA. And they used the Servicio technique to handle these programs. The Servicio technique was a marvelous thing to control the money and account for the money to Congress. You, that is the U.S., had absolute control of it, but you built up a bureaucracy that was bigger than the ministry itself. When the decree went out in 1954, I believe it was, to abandon Servicios, you threw that whole Latin American program into chaos. Peru is just now beginning to get straightened
out on the thing, and Bolivia is not straightened out yet. MCKINZIE: It might have been, in short ,a little better to work within the existing Department of Agriculture to reform the farming system. ANDREWS: The point of it is we didn't even understand what we were getting into. All those countries had their own concepts of an extension service. There was a -- I've forgotten the Latin word -- there was a little office in every province manned by Ministry of Agriculture officials who could supply seed, who could sell plows, who could give limited advisory services. This was a structure already out there, but we just bypassed that. Now that we're pretty well out of there these things are coming back as a part of the overall effort. They were old bureaucrats and they were troublesome. I made a study of their credit problem down there, but what we did for quite awhile was to ruin a limping-along credit system that served that country fairly well. We tried to put in a
farm credit production credit type of system which will not work where you have a central government based on the European system of administration. it won't work. Gradually we got some advisory committees set up and one thing and another and amalgamated the two countries' credit. It wasn't necessarily bad, but we could have done so much more if we just recognized that was there and tried to build on that. The people were demanding something and if we had put our training program of extension services into this, we could have combined our training with the materials and credit supply. Our extension work training of Bolivians really paid off. I went down into eastern Bolivia. They had a whole series of farmer institutes. These little farmers would ride bicycles in, carry what little food they had and sleep in the streets and alleys while attending these schools. Some Bolivians were terrific teachers. They really knew their people, and they knew how to demonstrate. I visited one of these schools in
session. Those little fellows, 80 of them, came in and stayed three days, ate the little food that they could get and slept in the streets, or wherever they could. At the end of the three days each was given a little certificate. They were very proud of it. The school was about fruit trees. That coastal bottom area is pretty good apple country. The extension agent showed them how to spray their apples and have good apples. Very few of these people could read and write. He would make a sort of a ceremony in making up the spray mixture. He would take a half gallon olive oil can or Wesson oil can and say, "Now this is so," and he held up his fingers, "three of these, three of these goes in this can." He took great deliberation in pouring in the water. Then he took his pesticide and with a little cup he dipped out the pesticide and counted on his fingers again, one, two, three. These three cups go in there. Then he tightened this thing up and started the pump and threw the thing on his shoulder and
walked up to a tree and began to spray the tree. Then he came back and emptied out the stuff and he picked one of the fellows out of the crowd, and said, "You do it." And the guy was forced right in front of these 80 people to do it that way. And he sprayed the tree right on down. That's the technique he used. These things were terrifically effective. You see the advantage there was that the government office supplied those pesticides free, and in our side of the extension service we were buying them and shipping in there -- buying them and sending them to this big Latin American shipping company that then retailed them through their stores. These people bought them. Again we were a little too anxious to show how hot we were and not let the people show how hot they are. There's other things we helped to build. There's an animal serum library there in La Paz, Bolivia, in which we had a wise, a very wise veterinarian who knew how to work with people. He single handedly worked up the whole scheme. We
developed a serum laboratory. Bolivia put in a lot of money. I was there at the formal opening; it was run lock, stock and barrel by Bolivians under the Minister of Agriculture. It took five or six years in training and effort to achieve that important facility. MCKINZIE: Well, it must have been kind of frustrating at times to wait for them to ask... ANDREWS: Oh yes. MCKINZIE: on some things. ANDREWS: Did I mention the system the Rockefeller Foundation uses on project development? MCKINZIE: No, you did not mention that. ANDREWS: Rockefeller had a system whereby each side agreed to do certain things, and they'd say, "We put up this and here's our money right here, now you put up yours." And Rockefeller would just sweat them out. It would take three or four years sometimes till they would get up the money,
but finally they would, and it went on. MCKINZIE: Well, a lot of the criticism, if there is a criticism of the early programs these days, is that somebody should have anticipated such things as land reform and birth control. And in some Point IV programs I guess there was some discussion of these. ANDREWS: Oh yes. MCKINZIE: land reform, not in all of them, I guess, because... ANDREWS: Yes, in India I sent Walf Ladejinsky, who was MacArthur's philosopher of land reform; he implemented the land reform program in Japan. He was sent out to India. He worked out a cracker jack of a land reform law, with the Indian government. It was never implemented for various reasons. MCKINZIE: Was the Indian government interested in it when he went there? ANDREWS: Oh yes, Nehru was very much interested.
He asked him to come in, but Nehru died and the bureaucrats dragged their feet on action. We also set up a good credit system there. When you let this little fellow in the village have 8 percent money, you knock the zamandar and the money lenders out who charge 180 percent. And you had a terrific slow-down, with foot-dragging in the government even though Nehru was peerless in making appeals to the masses. But when he got into the Congress these fellows would just lick him. They'd slow him down; he couldn't move. Pakistan was the same way. MCKINZIE: You probably knew more about underdeveloped countries than anybody else in the government. Did it worry you that population seems to be outgrowing food supply? ANDREWS: Oh yes. MCKINZIE: To be increasing so fast. ANDREWS: But in those days you couldn't say anything. If you even mentioned that you've got to have some
kind of birth control, the Catholic Church would gut you. I know we used to have in the State Department Point IV conferences in which all of the volunteer agencies came in and various people in the State Department would put out their concept of what the foreign policy was. And I would always come over and talk about the Point IV thing. I made a crack at this population control idea and it got in the papers. They really gave me trouble. And even MacArthur in the last two pages of his formal report on Japan mentioned that some way had to be found in Japan to control its population. It created such a furor that he had to remake the book and tear those two pages out. Yes, it's only within the last four or five years that you dared. What I'm getting at is the Catholic pressure makes it difficult to really do anything. We tried in Taiwan; we got this from one of the Chinese, a chap by the name of Jimmy Lim I think his name was, the rhythm theory of birth control.
MCKINZIE: Right.
ANDREWS: We introduced the rhythm in India. And held clandestine meetings, and spent a lot of money on educational efforts. India took it up and spent a lot of money on it, but... MCKINZIE: You mean the man came to teach it to them from Taiwan? ANDREWS: That's right; the idea is sound and manageable but it takes a lot of doing to make a dent on population increases. And I don't know what you can do. Of course you can set up money; you can say, "You've got to control population," all that stuff, and it's accepted, but nothing seems to happen. MCKINZIE: But then it just wasn't. ANDREWS: No. Boy, you just didn't say it. You just didn't say it. MCKINZIE: Might be aware of it, but you just didn't. ANDREWS: Oh yes, I have charts like this one. I make lectures sometimes on the world population
growth, and I have charts and I'd come out here and show how this was going up and how the food supply was lagging and all that kind of stuff. I'd show it to the countries and anybody that'd listen. But it didn't take hold into action. You couldn't get action out of it. MCKINZIE: Let me ask you; I don't know whether this fight to get a single agency for all of the aid programs involved Point IV. Were you involved in any of that hassle? ANDREWS: Yes, I was against it though I knew I would be leaving the government. MCKINZIE: It just kept going on? ANDREWS: I fought it tooth and toenail. The philosophy of the Eisenhower administration was to use your total power to bring the countries around the periphery of the Soviet Union and China into our camp. They said, "We've got this tremendous leverage. We've got the military aid; we've got economic aid and we've got Point IV; and this must
be one global deal and we can't have any division." In the early Point IV the U.S. had a big military program in Iran, but I didn't pay the slightest attention to it. They didn't pay the slightest attention to me. We were just a little fellow; oh, once in awhile they'd want to know where they could get some food or want to know if we had any technicians to help them set up a textile mill that the Iranians could use to make uniforms or something like that. But we were completely disassociated from the military and CIA. The only economic stuff we could get was to go up to Mr. Harriman and have him allocate ECA or Marshall plan money or military money for a project we might want to finance for technical assistance programs. They stopped Harriman on that after the Eisenhower administration. Harriman, I think, could shift 20 percent between agencies at will. You had great flexibility, but the Eisenhower crowd and the Budget Bureau stopped it after Stassen took over.
MCKINZIE: What about the State Department? I've heard you in a speech or two talk about the hard core realists in the State Department. Now they must have been there earlier. They must have been there even during the Point IV days, wanting to use this. Was it pretty good natured or were they dead serious about using Point IV? .ANDREWS: You had people at the lower levels to put on pressure but at the top level we were never asked. Oh, I'11 take this back; we were asked in a general way sometimes, for instance in Panama. Don't ask me why, but some big Republican had made a big contribution to the campaign, and he had to be taken care of. So they made him ambassador. He was a big concrete manufacturer and he said he had to have money to do a lot of road building. This guy conceived a cock and bull business of developing a big cattle ranch along the Panama Canal. .Again he had a point. He wanted right now, I think, about ten million dollars allocated for
his schemes. I said, "Well, let me send somebody down there that knows cattle and knows what you can do." These fellows came back and said, "Hell, it's a boondoggle; if you want to use it as a labor thing it's okay. But so far as a cattle ranch, it's just out. This guy wouldn't let up, and I finally -- this was now in the Eisenhower administration -- said, "Okay, Mr. Stassen, if you've got to do it, here's the money, but I'm going to have nothing to do with it." I wrote a memorandum advising against the scheme. Well, the money was allocated anyhow and this fellow -- I don't know how come he was held over into the Republican crowd although he was a Republican appointed by Acheson -- stayed on down there. The first sum allocated was $300,000. He got the Panamanians out; he organized brigades; he got everybody with a machete on his shoulder and the motion picture people out. They marched down along the canal and they just cut the hell out of the brush. And they cleared off, I guess, three or four, five hundred acres, maybe
more. Someway or another it just began to peter out. Well, I went down five years later and the stuff where they cut off was as high as this ceiling. Not a damn thing had been accomplished. This ambassador was out there making speeches to the brigade with motion picture cameras grinding and all that sort of thing. But that's the kind of stuff you get, and are up against and what you have to fight if you're trying to run a realistic program. Everybody's got a new idea. In the early days of the Eisenhower administration some guy here in Texas, a big cattle man, gave a hundred thousand dollars in various ways to the Eisenhower campaign. He was due for an assignment, so he came in to see me and said, "State Department says and White House says that there's a good job down in Peru or Equador, one of the countries down there that I could do." And he says, "I want that job." "Well," I said, "frankly, let's talk about it and if Mr. Stassen and people say you should be appointed, that's it, because I'm going to leave here."
So he and his wife came in and you could see she was looking at the big embassy parties. IIAA or the Institute of American Affairs had not gotten into this diplomatic thing much yet. The head of the mission had a little diplomatic status. I told him that and said, "This is a technical job." "Oh," he said, "hell, I'm a cattleman; I made five million dollars in cattle and I'll do it. " The paper went through and he was appointed. He came by and I briefed him on going down there. He was down there about two months and the old embassy crowd shoved him around. He couldn't get very much status with the Ecuadorians. He just blew his top and wrote the damndest letter up there you ever saw in your life. And his wife got in the newspapers and raised hell. He came home. In the last days of Point IV you had those things to deal with all the time. Another thing, out in Egypt we had a marvelous man there who had the confidence of the Egyptians and we were going strong out there. Stassen said, "Well, he's
a good technician, but I want my man out there." He appointed a naval buddy, a commander in the Navy. He came around to see me and I presented him the picture and tried to tell him about the Egyptian program. He was going to set it afire. He went out and lasted about three months. In the meantime you disorganized the whole damn business. We had a little house building program that MIT had contracted to show how to build houses with pressed brick. He fired them and we went around and around on everything under way. He wanted to put his friends in the main spots. For 18 months after Stassen took over there wasn't a wheel turned in most of the Point IV countries. He began to get a feel of things and, with Fitzgerald who had a big influence on him, began to move. But just about the time that he was moving Stassen was fired. Herbert Hoover, Jr., Under Secretary of State, put in Hollister, his friend, and his uncle. How that was done -- Herbert Hoover, Jr. was in his office one Sunday morning and called President Eisenhower over at the White House and said,
"I think I've got the man for the ICA director." Ike says, "Fine, bring him over." "Well," he said, "Uncle John's interested in this job; he's a big Ohio politician and a millionaire." And so they went over to the White House and Ike said, "Well, okay, Herbert, Jr. if you say that's it, that's it." State Department didn't even know the guy lived. MCKINZIE: Wasn't Hollister a law partner of Robert Taft or something like that? ANDREWS: That's right. And that's the way a lot of things were done. MCKINZIE: But on the whole, what was it you told me at lunch today, that you were proud to have been ANDREWS: Oh sure, I'm glad we tried and things did happen and the only disappointment to me (and maybe this is hindsight, I'11 admit to a lot of hindsight), we could have done so much better. We could have
revolutionized things. I saw places where these technical assistance programs moved into processing and expanding industries and created miracles. Take the agricultural college in the Philippines. When I first went to Los Banos the only building that was standing on the campus was the poultry building. The only professor at that once great university was the poultry professor. We toured the grounds; it was completely blasted down by the Japanese and burned. And he said, "Well, what do you think?" I said, "We're going to rebuild this university for you." At that time I was out looking for pilot projects, and I said, "The United States will help you put this thing back." I didn't get a chance to do it. ICA did make a contract with Cornell to rebuild that university and to train a research teaching and extension staff, and to establish the Rice Institute, which later became the Rockefeller-Rice Institute out there. Bill Meyers was at that time dean of Cornell
and he's a tough cookie. And he wouldn't let ICA get away with a lot of the stuff that they were fostering on other universities. He was just like Oklahoma State. He said, "To hell with you; if Cornell has not got the competence to rebuild this university you don't need us." They gave him a free hand and, hell, they recreated out there a marvelous institution. If you're ever out that way go see it; it'll compare favorably with any land grant college in the United States. They got good scientists; they brought in some Germans and they brought in some Americans. They didn't stop with just one thing. They're doing some marvelous work. They fostered what finally became a real, realistic credit program in which the money got down to the little man. MCKINZIE: The one that came after this. ANDREWS: Yes, after the disaster, that's right. MCKINZIE: Let me ask; we're going to run out of time
here, but I'd like to ask you one other facet of the thing. You said Henry Bennett said one of the things you've got to be able to do is explain this program to Congress. That must have been a pretty difficult thing to do particularly when you're dealing with such men as John Taber who was a real tough cookie. ANDREWS: Well, yes, Taber was tough, but he had a fellow on his committee from Ohio who was smart as hell. I wish I could recall his name right now, but I can't, who really saw what it was all about and could control John. John would harass you to death. MCKINZIE: Was this man his assistant? ANDREWS: No. He was a Republican Congressman on the House Appropriations Committee and he was from Ohio. And the other thing is -- you might not believe it -- but I could get along with Taber. It went back to quite an experience which I shouldn't put into this thing, but I'll tell it to you anyway. In the military, I had left the
Government and went to Arkansas and became the executive editor of a newspaper and was going to buy into a partnership, and settle down as a pillar of the community. My daughter was going to be a debutante and my wife was going in society and everything else. And I was there 72 days when a call came from General Clay. He said, "Andrews, we've got to have you over here." This was from Berlin. I said, "To hell with that, General Clay, I've done my share, three years and nine months, and I'm through." "Well," he said, "I'll tell you, we've just got to have you," and he said, "We've taken over responsibility for feeding 50 million Germans. It's going to cost the American taxpayers 900 million a year, and," he said, "I want you to help me spend it." So I said, "Well, General, I just can't see it, but let me think about it." On the day before Christmas Eve, my daughter had a debut in Little Rock and I got a telegram from the Secretary of War. He said, "You will report
to the Secretary of the Army at 10 a.m. on December 24." And he said, "This telegram will authorize you to incur any expenses necessary in connection with your transportation." So, I went to the debutante ball and went out at midnight and caught an all night plane in a tuxedo and landed in Washington just at dawn. I went to a washroom and cleaned up and changed clothes and at 10 I walked into the Secretary of Army's office. I said, "You asked me to come up here; here I am." "Well," he said, "Clay says he's got to have you over there on this food program. Now what are you going to do? Are you going to volunteer like a good citizen and go over there as a civilian and do that job or am I going to have to put you back in the Army?" I was a colonel then. I said, "You haven't got the guts to put me back in the Army." "Well," he said, "you don't know. This thing's getting pretty hot," and he said, "I just might have to do that."
Well, we argued quite a little while and finally I said, "All right, I'm going to go back home. I've abused my family." I said, "I've been away from them for years and they've been wonderful people and I just cannot take an assignment without their approval." So, I went back and of course Mrs. Andrews and our daughter were wonderful. They said go. In three days I was back in Washington. But I might say -- as a little by-play -- [Secretary of Army, Kenneth C.J.] Royall said, "How did you get up here?" I said, "I flew American Airlines, but," I said, "I don't know how in hell I'm going to get home, because Christmas Eve these airlines are just loaded." He pressed a button and asked a gal to come in -- a major; he said, "Major, get a VIP plane for Colonel Andrews and have it on the Boeing Field at 5." And he said, "You go out there and get on it." So when I got out, at 5, and went to Boeing Field, here was a DC-3 all plushed up that Marshall used to use. There's a couch in
there; there was coffee and all that sort of stuff, and these pilots didn't know who in the hell I was. In those days it took about six hours to get to Little Rock and we got into Little Rock, pretty dark and a little foggy. The plane wired the tower, and said, "We've got a VIP aboard; we want clearance at once." So, bingo, I went right in, ahead of all the other planes that were stacked up all over the place. As I got out of the plane and walked through the airport, one of the guys said, "God damn, when did you become a VIP?" Well, anyhow in eleven days I was in Germany and we had less than eight days of food reserves to 50 million people. We didn't have any money to buy it. There were 300,000 people, women with babies in their arms, in the streets of Dusseldorf chanting, "We're starving, we want food." Well, I reported in to General Clay. I said, "General Clay this is critical, and," I said, "you've got to give me a free hand." He said, "What the hell's the idea?"
"Well," I said, "I've got to communicate with Washington and the United States Department of Agriculture and I can't get through your damn bureaucracy." Well he said, "What you're doing, you're taking my entire responsibility." "Well," I said, "that's the way it's got to be. I can't handle this without it." "Well," he said, "damn you, Andrews, if you embarrass me I'm going to shoot you." He's rough. And so I said, "Okay, if I embarrass you, you fire me in a minute." I said, "I'm nothing but a damn civilian anyhow and it doesn't make any difference; you won't hurt my record." I got in touch with Tracy Voorhees, the Under Secretary of the Army, and we went over to the Department of Agriculture and bought a hundred million dollars worth of food which we would pay for later. Commodity Credit shipped it and we had a hundred ships on the high seas in 21 days to Germany. Well, we didn't have any money to pay for it. And so we had to go to Congress to get an appropriation. Both Voorhees and I could be put
under a jail for the next thousand years for that, but we had to take the chance. If Congress refused us the money we were in jail, there's no way around that. I flew into Washington in General Clay's plane. I flew across the Atlantic and got in there at 9 and went before the Taber Committee at 11 o'clock. I had the German situation right at my fingertips. Taber was from a potato country; he began to ask me about potatoes. I knew as much about potatoes as he did and the German farmers were producing more potatoes to the acre than ever they dreamed of in Maine. We got on a good talking basis. Before I went before the committee I asked the Pentagon people and the budget people, "Is this actually true that we've got to have a hundred million dollars to pay for this food? Haven't you got something around here?" "Oh, no, we've got to have the hundred million dollars." Well, we went through quite a harassment in
the morning trying to justify the need for the money. I came back to the Pentagon at noon and was sitting in the office outside some of the bureaucrats and hear them talking. One of them said, "We didn't tell Andrews that we've got 17 million dollars salted away here for emergency." I went straight through the ceiling; I wanted to cuss the whole crowd out. When I went back before the committee I said, "Mr. Taber, I owe an apology to this committee." I said, "I swore in testimony here this morning that we didn't have any money; we had to have all of the hundred million dollars, but now I find there's 17 million dollars laying over at the Pentagon. I only want the difference between a hundred million and 17 million." And brother did he pick up. That gave him confidence, and from that day on whenever I told Taber something, he believed it. I established credibility with him and what the committee did; they gave me the hundred million anyhow. MCKINZIE: I'll be darned. When you went there for
Point IV though, he did object to the whole idea of foreign aid didn't he? ANDREWS: Oh yes. But it was a matter of principle -- and he did not harass me personally about it. He was exacting in his questions about how the money was spent. MCKINZIE: He'd hardly believe what you told him. ANDREWS: No, I think he felt I was trying to present the case as my position required me to do. The two people who were the most demanding were Taber and McKellar. MCKINZIE: Kenneth McKellar. ANDREWS: McKellar of the subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations. He was really rough and got very personal in his questioning. He badgered me one whole afternoon. This was during the Truman administration and when Point IV was new. He said, "Are you an American citizen?" I said, "Right, I am."
He said, "If you're an American citizen how in God's name can you sit here and put forward this plea for this completely unconstitutional diabolical God damned give-away deal?" And he put it to me all afternoon. It was rough. I finally got around to him. He always wanted to act like he's a farmer boy. He said, "What's your background?" I said, "I'm just an apple knocker from Arkansas." He said, "You ever pick cotton?" I said, "Hell yes, I picked cotton, and I picked 500 pounds a day." "Well," he said, "I picked cotton." And we got on that and this gave me a little more credibility with him. This went on all afternoon and after it was over I said, "Senator, you were awful hard on me today." "Well," he said, "that's all right." He said, "Hell, Stanley, you'll get your money." He had just riddled Harriman. Harriman had been in to make the opening statement and Harriman
was absolutely speechless. He couldn't talk. He made him so damn mad he just didn't dare say a thing. He just got out of the way and turned it over to me. MCKINZIE: What kind of relationships do you have with Harriman? ANDREWS: Oh, we've been friends for years. We still correspond regularly. I visit him in Washington frequently and he thinks I'm the real guy. He's got a far bigger opinion of me than I've got of myself. He was one of the finest people in the Marshall plan setup. He headed the Marshall plan mission in Europe. When we transferred Military Government into Marshall plan we had these big meetings in Frankfurt. A bunch from Paris and a bunch from General Clay's office would all sit around the table. Harriman was chairman of the bunch from Paris. We went around the table discussing how to make the transfer. I'm a pretty frank guy. I just let him have it right between the eyes, more or less in line with the speech that's here in the
file, and nothing happened in particular. He went back to Paris and he said to the people in Paris, "Who's this guy Andrews?" "Why," they said, "he's the fellow that's been in Military Government over there in charge of food." He said, "He makes more sense than the whole outfit put together." And from that day on, Harriman hardly ever made a move in anything that involved the rural development or food but what he conferred with me. I've spent hours with him. And right today I respect him more than any man in government because he's got integrity. They call him a liberal and all that stuff, but I've never seen Averell Harriman cut corners on an issue. MCKINZIE: All that competition between ECA and TCA was all pretty much up above the board. ANDREWS: That's right and he described me once to the media. CBS wanted somebody to talk about Point IV on
"Face the Nation" and Charles Collingwood did a little publicity work for Harriman. Collingwood said to Harriman, "What kind of a guy is this fellow Andrews?" He said, "He's scheduled to 'Face the Nation' and we want to know what kind of a guy he is." "Well," Harriman said, "he's one of these outspoken country boys that wear his socks with about eight inches difference between the cuff and the sock, and," he said, "he crosses his legs." And that was the picture he gave CBS. I went down to CBS all dressed up and the guy that interviewed me said, "My God, Harriman told me you were a yokel." Well, anyhow he's a real person, not just a multi-millionaire. I had Acheson and Harriman, under Mr. Truman, and Bedell Smith under Eisenhower. They were wonderful people. Bedell Smith stood square like a rock. I know Bedell Smith in Germany in the food program and we differed on issues but these people have great integrity.
General Clay was a man of the highest integrity that I ever dealt with. He was hard and he had great respect for authority. If Mr. Truman told General Clay to jump through a hoop in Berlin, he jumped through a hoop. He said when the Commander in Chief speaks we move. But with that integrity he was not afraid to speak out. MCKINZIE: Oh, I've got a thousand questions, but I think you've hit a lot of them. I had some things here about the limited scope at the beginning. How President Truman considered that this program wasn't to be a money program. Brian MacMahon one time told him he ought to put ten billion dollars into Point IV and make it available. ANDREWS: Well, you see that was the idea that you could build a structure where there wasn't any. And it cost you more to build the structure than to let structures grow with problems. In other
words, you increase the competence in the bureaucracy of a Department of Agriculture by doing things. MCKINZIE: Well, what I was going to say, President Truman didn't see the Point IV as something he could do cheap; in short, it was in the long pull to cost a lot. ANDREWS: I'11 explain the two theories. One was that you had to enter with technical assistance and education and health, because sick people don't work, and uneducated people can't run an industrial society. MCKINZIE: Right. ANDREWS: Before you went into expansion of the industry, education in technology went ahead of industrialization. A lot of people in AID and Rostow took the other view that you put the money into industrial complexes and it would drag the technology in. However, you don't build an industrial complex simply by setting up an oil refinery alone. It refines oil; it has paraffin; it has insecticides; and the whole business. And this grows. Somebody has to run the thing and if the oil people are not trained a little it means that outsiders have to run the show. I had Stanford University contracted to make a 50 thousand dollar study on how industry developed in a country. And it was very clear that you had to start in with the small complex and this thing fed on itself. But you couldn't push it too fast. You couldn't set up a complete refinery complex with fertilizer, with petroleum, with oil, with pesticides and the whole thing. And actually what happened in the oil companies we were running out there, they were not beginning to do that. They were just extracting that oil, period. And the same way with elevators and flour mills and the whole business. MCKINZIE: But you believe that President Truman understood this too? ANDREWS: Oh yes, definitely. MCKINZIE: That it wasn't something he was trying to achieve?
ANDREWS: I talked to him about it and this was one of Dr. Bennett's big pitches in the famous conference. You've got to start these basic things first. People got to eat. We had just come out of a world food shortage and you had malaria, and diptheria, typhoid, and everything else raging all over the world. Illiteracy in these new countries was 80 percent. Eighty percent of the people in countries we were working couldn't read or write their own language, so you had to get a system of communication. Mr. Truman never did say that this would not need money, but he wanted to get that money from the International Bank and he wanted to get it from the countries and he wanted the U.S. to sweeten the thing, put in what was necessary to make the thing go. Like for instance, on the Litani project, we figured we'd have to have to put in five million dollars to make that thing go after the International Bank and the Lebanese had put in their money.
The same way with the Aswan Dam. We figured we might have to put in 25 million dollars. That would have come right now. But we never went in with big money until there was justification and an understanding of what the country had to do and we had used all other avenues. That took you out of the political side of it. MCKINZIE: Right. ANDREWS: There was awful pressure in the Marshall plan for us to shove the other fellow aside and put the money in. We didn't want the Russians to outdo the U.S. Point IV welcomed money from anybody, anybody that put it in; France, Great Britain, or anybody. And we worked together with FAO people in Agriculture. We worked side by side. They were out there with transportation. We hauled them around in our jeeps, and right on down. This may have been wrong; I'm not arguing that. That was the way it was, and that's the way we tried. It was all changed with the beginning of the Eisenhower administration and the idea of
big money. That first appropriation was four billion dollars for the ICA and I'd been spending a hundred and sixteen million. In conclusion I'd have to say that we made many mistakes, did many crazy things and stimulated the doing of a lot of good and enduring things. Most of the good things are not what one would see by driving along the road looking at a building or a factory, but all over the world, here and there are institutions, developments, roads, increased food production, better distribution and a better life for many human beings because of some of the very little things that Point IV started. It is with some significance I think that nearly 25 years after Point IV the appropriation and authorization bills, passed by Congress, direct our foreign efforts back toward the original concepts of the Point IV program. They have allocated more money than in any years since Point IV to a people's type of an effort, with the direction to try once more to narrow the gap between that lower 40 percent of the people of this earth who are merely on the
survival line. For my part I feel that the brief time I spent with Point IV was one of the most satisfying of the many challenging jobs I've had the opportunity to try in a rather varied 50 years of activity. [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
List of Subjects Discussed
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