Remarks to Members of the General Advisory Committee on Foreign Assistance Programs.

I AM delighted to see you here this afternoon. First, I want you to know how much I appreciate your willingness to serve on this important new committee. The Government is very large and is staffed by many capable and intelligent people, but it is in constant need of new ideas and mature judgment from private citizens.

You are going to make a contribution to the work of our Government that will benefit not only the managers of the foreign assistance programs and the taxpayers, but the millions of people throughout the world who need our help if they are to emerge from poverty and hopelessness. Your industry, your insights, your vision will affect all we do in helping others find their way.

Of course you know that no Government program has been more controversial or more misunderstood than this one. Extreme charges have been made against it. Extreme claims have been made for what it can do. Yet the fact remains: over the past two decades the use of a portion of our national resources to help free countries build their strength and safeguard their independence has been one of the most important elements of our foreign policy.

There have been sharp changes in the aid program in recent years.

Some of the countries we were aiding a few years ago--such as Japan, Greece, and Taiwan--are today on their feet, or very close to it. Foreign aid used to be primarily on a grant basis. Today it is primarily a loan program.

We changed our procurement policies, in the light of our balance of payments problem.

We increased the efficiency of the program and reduced the number of people required to run it.

But there is much to be done if this program is to serve American policy and those who need our help in the coming decade. For the world has changed since the days of the Marshall plan, and our responsibilities have changed with it.

When we began in the late forties, we were dealing with highly developed societies--economically, politically, and socially. European recovery was a spectacular success-but it did little to prepare us for the job of helping less developed peoples. We have been working at that job for a decade or more, and we have learned a good deal; but we need your help in making our assistance more effective, more sure, more imaginative.

We must find the key to the wise development of resources--human and material. We must learn how to help these people conquer the scourges that beset them all-disease, poverty, illiteracy. We have conquered some of these problems in our own country; we are struggling to conquer those that remain. Our experience can be of great value to the less developed world. And the sense that all mankind shares the same destiny, and is working to cast off the same burdens, can bind us to the peoples of the world as nothing else can.

So we need your counsel in making that sense of common destiny, of common hope, a reality.

There is much to be done. I think we need to do more to insure that countries wanting our help undertake all the self-help measures they possibly can. We need to encourage the institutions like the Inter-American Committee for the Alliance for Progress, in which the developing countries themselves participate and help establish the proper standards for self-help. We need to do more to help strengthen international agencies such as the World Bank and the Special Fund of the United Nations headed by Paul Hoffman. I think we need to do more to engage the joint energies and resources of other advanced countries with us in the task of overcoming poverty and disease in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

I hope this committee will consider all these problems. I hope your goal will be the most effective and most efficient assistance programs the United States can possibly devise.

I urge you to be a lively and imaginative committee. I have instructed Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, and Administrator Bell, to make available to you every bit of information they have, without exception, that may be of benefit to you. I urge you to go and look at our programs on the ground in the countries of Asia, and Africa, and Latin America, where our people are working. I want you to satisfy yourselves, and to satisfy me, that every potentially useful idea is examined, and that we are making the best use of every potential resource for assisting the development process.

I look forward to meeting with you and to having the benefit of your advice and recommendations.