The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

28 NOVEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL But for the critics of foreign aid, of whom there has always been a seemingly inexhaustible supply, USAID’s shortcomings have at times been glaring. From the fall of Vietnam to recent events in Afghanistan, some of the agency’s largest and most expensive programs collapsed upon themselves with shifting political and military tides. Over the years, money has flowed to dictatorial regimes, first because of their Cold War bona fides, and later to sway erstwhile allies in the global war on terror. Perhaps no federal agency has been scrutinized more closely by Congress or a longer series of blue-ribbon panels eager to surface meaningful reforms. USAID’s legacy is complex, deserving of neither hagiography nor damnation as is too often the case. And the world in which the agency operates has been almost utterly transformed over those six decades. But the raison d’être for USAID and its work remains surprisingly constant. As William Gaud, one of the agency’s early leaders, argued, there are two basic reasons for the United States to provide foreign assistance: It is in our self-inter- est, and it is the right thing to do. So let us look back to the agency’s founding to better under- stand some of the debates that continue to follow the agency to this day and then explore how the agency has evolved over time. Kennedy’s Vision To better understand USAID, it is helpful to understand the worldview of the man who created it: President John F. Kennedy. As a young congressman, Kennedy was not a supporter of U.S. foreign assistance. However, his views on the developing world began to change rather drastically during a seven-week, 25,000- mile congressional trip in 1951, when he traveled to Israel, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, Japan—and what was known then as French Indochina, and later as Vietnam. He came away with a newfound affinity for those in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America fighting to establish their own nation and identity. He argued that communism could not be com- bated solely through the force of arms and pushed for expanding economic aid. His support for independence movements was frequently cited at the time as an example of his lack of maturity on foreign policy, although those views seem far sounder in retrospect. Kennedy’s views of foreign aid were also shaped to a remark- able degree by a piece of fiction: the 1958 novel The Ugly Ameri- can by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. The book detailed the bumbling exploits of Americans in a fictional Asian country, outflanked at every turn by shrewd communists, and scorched its way up the bestseller list, where it remained for a 76-week run. Kennedy, who had become a senator in 1953, was so enthusiastic about the book that he not only purchased copies for all his Sen- ate colleagues; he also took out a full-page ad in The New York Times praising its depiction of Americans working overseas. It was not just The Ugly American that raised concerns about foreign aid. No fewer than six different major studies of the U.S. aid program were conducted during the late 1950s, many of them highly critical. Responsibilities for the program were dif- fuse, scattered across multiple competing agencies that operated under overlapping and sometimes contradictory mandates. Public support for aid was waning, and the U.S. government was beginning to realize that implementing foreign assistance programs in the developing world—the new front line against communism—was much more difficult than implied by the tri- umphs of the Marshall Plan. The early optimism was exemplified by Henry Bennett, who oversaw much of the aid program during the early 1950s and boldly predicted that hunger, poverty and ignorance would end around the globe for all practical purposes within 50 years. With Cuba falling to Fidel Castro on New Year’s Day 1959, the debate about America’s relationship with the developing world reached a crescendo. There was no real practical theory on how best to help the largely subsistence agrarian societies of Asia, On June 8, 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivers remarks at the White House to a group of USAID mission directors shortly after the agency was established. “There will not be farewell parades to you as you leave or parades when you come back,” he told them. ROBERTKNUDSEN/JFKPRESIDENTIALLIBRARYANDMUSEUM