How to Go out of Business by Succeeding

IN the village square of Anthili, 140 miles north of Athens, on the vast plain where the Persian King Xerxes camped in 480 B.C. before he charged Thermopylae, there stands a marble statue. It is not a monument to the defenders of Thermopylae, but to the recent rebirth of Anthili and the man who made it possible: Walter Eugene Packard, a Point Four soil reclamation expert from California.

Thirteen years ago, Packard persuaded the villagers to let him irrigate 100 acres of their arid, salty plain to grow rice. Within five years. Packard's project in Anthili and other towns had converted Greece from a country that annually imported $5,000,000 worth of rice to a nation that exported $5,000,000 worth--on an initial U.S. investment of $43,000. Other Point Four schemes trained a Greek agricultural staff to teach 8.000 villages such basic matters as tractor maintenance and cheese making, instructed technicians to operate a new electrical power system, reorganized an archaic police force along modern lines.

So successful were these and other projects that this week, after giving Athens $14 million under the Point Four plan, the U.S. ended its technical assistance program. At the same time, Point Four aid to Spain, Yugoslavia, Lebanon and Israel also wound up. These countries will still be eligible for financial support, but Washington believes that yesterday's underdeveloped nations have learned the skills they need while the new nations of Africa and Asia now require Point Four help far more urgently.

On the basis of a relatively small U.S. investment--$65 million in Point Four aid, out of a total of $5.2 billion in overall economic aid&3151;the benefits to the five recipients have been huge. In some ways, the Point Four program in Israel was the most successful (although the country had the unusual advantages of large private help from the U.S. and skilled immigrants from Europe). Best-remembered achievement: a pistol-packing cowpuncher from Texas, Bart McMenomey, was one of several U.S. experts who helped raise cattle production from 4,500 head in 1954 to 70,000 today. McMenomey so impressed Israeli cowboys that they learned to play the banjo, labeled the huts on their kibbutzim (collective farms) in Galilee "Saloon," "Sheriff" and "Jail."

Said Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir at a farewell party in Jerusalem for departing U.S. technicians last week: "This is the age of the cold war. It is also the age of the warm heart. No other country has taken upon itself greater responsibility for so many people in real and sincere brotherhood as has the U.S."

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