Flailing & Cutting

Republican Congressmen, some with axes and some with feather dusters, flailed away last week at the Administration's $597 million program for interim aid to Europe. Their flailing was more vigorous than most of the program's proponents had expected.

The House got in the first and most serious licks. Its Foreign Affairs Committee, in a turbulent closed meeting, tentatively agreed to recommend a bill authorizing an expenditure of only $489 million. Italy's budget would bear the brunt of this slash. All told, Italy would be cut $87 million (from $227 to $140 million), on the grounds that 1) her farmers were hoarding around a million tons of wheat, and 2) her outlook for olive oil production was much improved.

But the House committee also decided on beneficence in another direction. Under the prodding of Minnesota's Walter H. Judd, who was once a missionary in China, it voted to give Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government $20 million a month, starting in January (instead of in April, as Secretary of State Marshall had proposed). At this rate, China would get $60 million in interim aid.

Patient Van. Next day, on the Senate floor, wild and woolly debate broke forth. In it, the leadership of Arthur Vandenberg, whose Foreign Relations Committee had reported out a bill giving the Administration the full sum it asked for, was sorely tested by his fellow Republicans. Patiently, Vandenberg accepted one carping amendment after another--e.g., Idaho's Glen Taylor insisted on having it down in black & white that aid funds should not be used to buy arms.

But the cruncher came when a group of eight Senators offered an amendment to lop a cool $197 million off the bill. The amendment's chief promoter was Nevada's George W. Malone, a former prize fighter who had made a one-man survey of Europe in an airplane. He had found, he said, that in some cities U.S. relief supplies were being sold on the open market.

Arthur Vandenberg was furious. "I know of no advantage," he snapped, "in throwing a 15-foot rope to a man who is drowning 20 feet from the shore."

Explosive Bob. After hours of boiling argument, the showdown came. Vandenberg prevailed; the amendment was defeated by a vote of 56 to 30. But the Republican high command was split wide open. Only the majority leader, Maine's feeble old Wallace H. White Jr., was on Vandenberg's side. Arrayed against him were the G.O.P. whip, Nebraska's Kenneth Wherry; Minnesota's Joe Ball, once a red-hot internationalist who now decried efforts to rush the aid bill through as "a combination of blitzkrieg and the old mousetrap play"; and, most important of all, Bob Taft.

What was Bob Taft up to, anyway? The week before, he had said he would probably vote for the full $597 million. Now he voted for a cut. To top things off, he changed his mind once more after the Senate's Thanksgiving Day recess. In a long and bitter speech, he again said he would approve the bill, even though it represented a "wrong and fallacious" approach to solving Europe's problems. The Truman administration, he said, was responsible for having allowed most of these problems to arise in the first place.

One senatorial colleague shrugged off Taft's almost daily shots from the hip by remarking: "Oh, well, he's running for President." Other Republican Senators were not so complacent; their complaints that Taft was misrepresenting his party grew louder & louder.

In Washington's European embassies, concern ran still deeper. Actually, despite Bob Taft and his fellow insurgents, Europe would probably get most of the emergency help it needed. This week, the Senate finally passed the interim aid bill by an overwhelming 83-to-6 vote.

But long-range rehabilitation under ERP (the Marshall Plan) was an entirely different matter. Illinois' Leslie C. Arends, Republican whip in the House, proposed that a national referendum be held on the question: "Are you willing to pay your share of the Marshall Plan if it means a minimum of 10% increase in your cost of living, a withholding tax of at least 30% of your pay instead of the present 20%?" This was only the beginning. If Bob Taft had his way--and kept heading the way he seemed to be going--ERP was in for serious trouble.

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