Remarks to the National Committee for International Development

Secretary Rusk, Mr. Bell, Mr. Linowitz, ladies and gentlemen:

It is a pleasure to welcome you to the White House. The National Committee for International Development is an outstanding example of the constructive help which private citizens can give to their country by taking an active part in public affairs. It is good that you have come to Washington to inform yourselves at firsthand of the work of our aid program. I have just completed my own careful review of this program as a part of the annual budget-making, and I want you to know that I am proud of the story that Dean Rusk and David Bell have to tell.

The foreign aid program is an investment in man's future. Some of its returns are already in. We have strong and vigorous neighbors today in Europe and Japan. With our help, the first of the developing countries are approaching self-support-- thus economic aid to Free China ends this year because it has done its job.

Our Latin American partners are moving forward in the Alliance for Progress. But we have a long pull ahead of us, and our continued support for the progress of the developing countries is far too important to allow waste or scattering of effort.

The Agency for International Development has done a good job of tightening management, cutting costs, squeezing more aid from every tax dollar. You can expect David Bell to carry these reforms still further.

Under his leadership we have taken a harder look at the kinds of things we are asked to support, and at the performance of the countries which ask for assistance. The saving effected is a direct result of concentration on the most productive activities, and on the countries that make the best use of our help.

To make our aid still more effective, we will rely even more on private American leadership and skill in the aid program. It was the great American land-grant colleges that sparked our own agricultural revolution. They are now beginning to play an increasingly effective role in the developing countries, and we will turn to them more and more, through contracts for technical assistance.

Private enterprise made our industrial plant the world's most productive--so we must use every tool we can, from technical assistance to insurance for private ventures abroad--to get more Americans to share their know-how.

Under the AID program today, American engineering and construction firms are in the field designing and building more than $4 billion in wealth-producing capital projects in Asia, Africa, and Latin America: dams to generate power and irrigate new lands, roads to get goods to markets, factories to produce the fertilizer these countries need so badly.

So we are glad that you have come to examine this program and to review our plans with us. This whole program is more and more a partnership between Government and non-Government institutions of every kind. It is more and more an effort of the whole American community.

I hope that your committee will be able to help in the task of insuring the widest possible public understanding of this constantly changing and improving program. For it is now becoming a partnership of Government and private citizens to serve the objective I set forth last year--"strengthening the family of the free."