The Cold War on the Periphery, by Robert J. McMahon

3. Losing Ground with India, 1950-1953

 

The outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, sent shock waves throughout official Washington and set in motion a series of far-reaching changes in American foreign and defense policy. Certain that the North Korean invasion could not have occurred without Soviet and Chinese direction and collusion, Truman administration strategists believed that the attack heralded a new, more aggressively opportunistic stage in communist strategy. One of the chief lessons of the invasion for most American officials was that the Soviet Union had become a more dangerous and aggressive adversary, one likely to exploit any weaknesses in the West's defense perimeter.

The impact of the war on America's East Asian policy was as immediate as it was far-reaching. Not only did the United States move quickly to check the North Korean advance with American troops, but within three days of the attack the Truman administration also dispatched the U.S. Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait, thus intervening directly in the Chinese civil war. At the same time, Washington announced that it would increase aid to French forces battling the Communist-led Vietminh insurgency in Indochina and to the Philippine government, engaged in a struggle with the Hukbalahap rebels. American officials were not blind to the complex local roots of these conflicts, as is sometimes asserted by critics of U.S. policy. Rather, top policymakers calculated that victories for the North Koreans, Chinese Communists, Vietminh, or Huks would, in fact, represent setbacks for the United States--and would be broadly viewed as such by America's enemies as well as it allies. Hence, a more active involvement in Asian affairs, including a greatly expanded commitment of American troops and materiel, could no longer be avoided.

The Korean War exerted an even more profound influence on the Truman administration's overall foreign and defense priorities, especially in Europe. The policy shifts initiated in the wake of the Korean War are now quite familiar to students of American foreign policy. National Security Council Paper 68 (NSC 68), the most comprehensive statement of American national security policy of the postwar era, was approved by Truman in September 1950. The president began implementing its call for "a rapid and sustained build-up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world" with his request to Congress for a vast increase in defense appropriations. NSC 68 recommended that the U.S. defense budget be tripled; the Korean War allowed Truman to accomplish that objective much sooner than any of the document's authors could have imagined possible. The Truman administration also made a massive increase in its commitment to Western Europe. It moved to rearm West Germany and integrate it into NATO while agreeing to station U.S. troops on European soil on a long-term basis.

The fighting on the Korean peninsula exerted a less direct, less immediate, and more subtle impact on U.S. relations with India and Pakistan. In many respects, however, the war ultimately proved as great a watershed for U.S. policy toward South Asia as it did for U.S. policy toward either East Asia or Western Europe. It set in motion forces that further aggravated Indo-American tensions and diminished India's relative significance to the United States. At the same time, as chapter 4 will show, those forces encouraged greater U.S.-Pakistani cooperation and enhanced Pakistan's strategic appeal to America's Cold War planners.

In the days immediately following the North Korean invasion, the United States looked to India and Pakistan for support. In the American view, an act of blatant aggression warranted strong and broad international condemnation. Consequently, American officials pressed Nehru and Liaquat, as they pressed the leaders of all nations not directly aligned with the Soviet Union, to join with the United States in demanding the immediate cessation of hostilities and the prompt withdrawal of all North Korean troops from South Korea. Both India and Pakistan supported a UN resolution to that effect that was drafted by the United States and approved by the Security Council on June 25. ₁

The Truman administration, which had come to count on Liaquat's support, was particularly pleased that, for once, even Nehru did not waffle. Not only did he instruct the Indian representative at the UN to vote for the resolution, but the prime minister personally condemned the attack in a forceful speech to the Indian parliament. "North Korea engaged in a full-scale and well laid-out invasion," he stated. "Aggression has taken place by North Korea over South Korea. That is a wrong act that has to be condemned, that has to be resisted." ₂ India's status as one of the most prominent of the Security Council's nonpermanent members, and the most visible and vocal of the nonaligned states, made its support for the UN initiative particularly valuable to the United States. ₃

On June 27 the United States introduced another resolution to the Security Council, this one directing member states to furnish as much assistance to South Korea as was required to repel the armed attack. Much to Washington's disappointment, India abstained. The resolution passed easily, nonetheless; the absence of the Soviet representative, who was boycotting the Security Council in protest over the UN's refusal to seat Communist China, removed the only likely vote of opposition to the two resolutions. Nehru quickly tried to ease American concerns about the meaning of India's abstention. On June 29 an "exceptionally friendly and understanding" Nehru told Henderson that the invasion was a clear act of aggression and that he supported both the June 25 and June 27 resolutions. He regretted that the second resolution had been passed in such haste that the Indian government could not transmit instructions to its representative in time for him to record a vote, but implied that India's formal support would be offered imminently. ₄

In fact, the Indian position was more complex. Later that day, New Delhi did issue a statement in support of the June 27 resolution. The statement emphasized, however, that India's support for the resolution did not involve any modification in its nonaligned foreign policy. India would continue to pursue an independent foreign policy and to seek friendly relations with all nations. Of equal significance, the statement remained silent on Taiwan and Indochina. The reassertion of the nonaligned philosophy at this time signified India's reluctance to support the Truman administration's effort to link the Korean struggle with the more complex issues of Taiwan and Indochina. India's support for the June 27 directive, moreover, did not carry with it a commitment to provide troops or materiel to the UN counteroffensive. "Our moral help is a big enough thing, which out-balances the petty military help of some other countries," Nehru wrote to one of his diplomats. ₅ Defensive needs and fiscal limitations at home may have precluded the dispatch of Indian troops to Korea, but even without those concerns Nehru would have resisted putting even a token Indian force under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, a person he despised. ₆

Henderson appreciated the limited nature of the Indian commitment. Although support for the June 25 and June 27 resolutions marked a "distinct step forward," he warned Washington not to "assume that Nehru is ready as yet to go along with us all the way. He does not like our Formosa and Indo-China policies and it is not impossible [that] he will give vent at some appropriate or inappropriate time to his feelings by [a] critical outburst." ₇

The fundamental differences between Indian and American perceptions of world affairs, masked somewhat by India's early and firm condemnation of North Korean aggression, soon burst into the open. Fearing that American actions toward Taiwan and Indochina might widen the conflict, and concerned that India's support for the Security Council resolutions might tarnish its nonaligned credentials as well as its credibility with the Soviet Union and China, Nehru plunged headfirst into the diplomatic maelstrom. On July 12 the prime minister sent personal messages to Acheson and Stalin, proposing that the People's Republic of China be admitted to the UN and that the Soviet Union cease its boycott of the Security Council. Those steps, he maintained, would facilitate peace talks while ensuring that the conflict remained a local one. "My honest belief," Nehru told Acheson in a subsequent message, "is that Moscow is seeking a way out of the present entanglement without loss of prestige and that there is a real chance of solving the Korean problem peacefully by enabling the Peiping Government to enter and Soviet Union to resume its place in the Security Council without insistence on conditions." ₈

American officials privately castigated Nehru's diplomatic initiative as foolishly naive; not a few drew unflattering parallels with the appeasement policies of the 1930s. The thrust of the Indian's proposal, in the American view, would have been to reward Communist China for North Korea's aggression. "The ousting of the Nationalists from the council--for that was the essence of the matter--was to be the price for the privilege of opening discussion about North Korean troop withdrawal," Acheson recalled sarcastically in his memoirs. ₉ The secretary of state's diplomatically worded reply to Nehru was gentler if just as direct: "We do not believe that the termination of the aggression from northern Korea can be contingent in any way upon the determination of other questions which are currently before the United Nations." ₁₀

The American rebuff stung Nehru, but it did not deter the Indian prime minister from assuming the comfortable Gandhian role of peacemaker. He continued to explore possible avenues for compromise in the Korean conflict, proposed the formation of a committee of the Security Council's nonpermanent members to review various peace proposals, pressed the Truman administration to reconsider its opposition to Communist China's participation in the UN debates, and simultaneously honored the American request that India serve as a conduit for U.S. messages to Beijing. Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and London all seemed to be competing avidly for Nehru's support. ₁₁

No statesman received more attention from the international press during the early months of the Korean War than the Indian leader, much of it adulatory. The struggle for Asia, proclaimed the New York Times, "conceivably could be won or lost in the mind of one man--Jawaharlal Nehru. . . . To have Pandit Nehru as an ally in the struggle for Asiatic support is to have many divisions; to have him as an opponent or even a critic could jeopardize the position of Western democracy throughout Asia." ₁₂ In equally rhapsodic tones, the New Republic declared: "Nehru and his government occupy a unique and invaluable place in the worldwide scheme of things, and it is essential that the West should understand his position, work with and through him, [and] use him as a bridge of understanding to the millions in Asia." ₁₃

A man of no small ego, as even his closest compatriots attest, Nehru clearly basked in the international limelight. His personal reputation, along with India's apparent influence in international councils, soared during these heady days. "The world looks upon us as representing the centre of Asian feelings," the prime minister proudly told a Congress party session. ₁₄ Nonalignment was yielding significant practical and symbolic dividends.

American officials considered Nehru's diplomatic activity more mischievous than helpful; they looked askance at the growing international stature bestowed on a diplomat whose moralistic pronouncements and half-baked peace proposals reeked with self-righteous naivete. The Truman administration especially resented the virulent strains of anti-Americanism revealed during India's freewheeling parliamentary debates. On August 3 Ambassador Henderson complained to Bajpai that Indian government spokesmen devoted more time to criticizing the United States than they did to criticizing the parties that precipitated the conflict. Bajpai countered that Nehru would soon make a "more spirited defense" of the United States while acknowledging that the prime minister harbored resentments toward Washington for failing to recognize and negotiate with China, matters Nehru deemed vital to India's interests and to world peace. Speaking with remarkable candor, Bajpai expressed fear that Nehru's bitterness toward the United States might increase if the China impasse were not soon resolved. The Indian diplomat added, on a personal note, that he was deeply disturbed to see Washington and New Delhi drifting apart so rapidly. ₁₅

Still, for all their suspicions and resentments American officials recognized that India occupied a pivotal middle ground in the complex diplomacy of the Korean War. India's moral authority and political leadership among both Asian and nonaligned states, along with its institutional position as one of the most prominent of the Security Council's nonpermanent members, made it a nation well worth cultivating. As British Foreign Minister Bevin observed: "In general the rest of Asia looks to India for a lead, and what we for our part want to avoid is the situation where the Western nations take one attitude on a primarily Asian question, while Asian countries take another." ₁₆ U.S. diplomats valued India for another reason as well: it could pass American messages to China. The latter function gained added significance after the successful Inchon landing allowed UN forces to launch a counteroffensive against North Korea in mid-September. On September 18, following State Department instructions, Henderson told Bajpai that it was of the "utmost importance" that China avoid intervention in the Korean conflict. He requested that India's ambassador to Beijing so inform China's leaders, telling them that the United States would view Chinese intervention as a matter of "grave concern." ₁₇

Early portents, received through the Beijing-New Delhi channel, seemed to preclude the possibility of Chinese participation in the Korean fighting. The military situation altered radically, however, when on September 27 Washington authorized General MacArthur to move his troops beyond the 38th parallel if necessary to destroy North Korean forces, provided that such a move not provoke either Chinese or Soviet intervention. With a wider conflict now sanctioned and American war aims broadened to include the unification of all of Korea, the likely reaction of China assumed increased importance to the United States--as did the role of the Indian intermediaries. ₁₈

Chinese leaders, too, took advantage of the New Delhi channel. They sent a series of warnings to the United States through their Indian interlocutors, emphasizing that any movement toward the Chinese border would trigger an immediate military response. Indian officials took the Chinese threats at face value; most American analysts foolishly dismissed them as bluffs. ₁₉

Those differing intelligence assessments contributed to the mounting tensions in Indo-American relations, but not as powerfully as Nehru's dogged efforts to prevent UN military operations extending into North Korea. Fearful that the crossing of the 38th parallel by UN troops might cause a "world conflagration," the Indian prime minister believed he could not remain idle. ₂₀ Consequently, he tried to utilize his contacts with the Americans and the Chinese in a desperate effort to avert a wider war. When it became clear that the Americans were not heeding his advice, the Indian representative at the UN cast a negative vote against a General Assembly resolution calling for the unification of Korea. The resolution passed, nonetheless, on October 7. ₂₁

India's vote against the eight-power resolution, together with the high profile that Nehru had assumed in his efforts to staunch the UN offensive, drew strong and sharp rebukes throughout the United States. The New York Times, which had waxed so eloquent about the statesmanlike Nehru only weeks earlier, now pilloried him as the "voice of abnegation." ₂₂ Other editorialists were equally scathing, characterizing him variously as the "woolly Pandit," the "academic word splitter," and "the Hamlet of Asia." Sir Archibald Nye, the British High Commissioner in New Delhi, worried that "Indo-American public relations have reached a 'new low.' " ₂₃

Assistant Secretary McGhee was sufficiently concerned about the war of words between Indians and Americans that he arranged a private meeting with the Indian ambassador on October 26 to clear the air. "Americans like to be liked and are not used to open criticism from friendly countries," he told Pandit. In an extraordinarily candid exchange McGhee pinpointed Nehru's repeated public attacks on the United States as the root of the problem. According to the assistant secretary's own record of the conversation:

I then went on to say that it is difficult for both our people and our officials to understand why Nehru himself should, as it appears he does, go out of his way to be critical of the United States. Neither our President, Secretary of State or any United States official makes statements critical of Nehru or India, even in the light of disagreement between United States and Indian policies and Indian criticisms. It is regretted if Nehru has such feelings toward the United States. We do not insist that he say nice things about us, although naturally we would as human beings like that. However, it would be expected that he, as chief of state, would not criticize us publicly, but would tell us privately in a constructive way. It would not appear that he is forced by public opinion or by his officials to make such statements, since they are in many cases more extreme than those held by either. ₂₄

Returning to an issue that American officials found equally mystifying in their dealings with Nehru, McGhee complained that the U.S. desire to aid India economically was hampered by the prime minister's seeming "indifference" on the matter. That attitude had doomed the negotiations opened tentatively during the latter's 1949 state visit regarding a possible U.S. wheat loan. Not only were Nehru's present criticisms of the United States undermining the public and congressional support necessary for any economic assistance, but he recently refused even to discuss the issue with two friendly visitors, journalist Mark Childs and Senator Claude Pepper. Yet both of them, McGhee noted, were in good positions to influence public and congressional sentiment about India. Pleading bafflement at the prime minister's behavior, the assistant secretary stressed that "other nations, who are just as proud and independent as India, have requested our assistance, without any thought that it might make them subservient to us." Ambassador Pandit conceded that she did not fully understand her brother's negative reaction to friendly offers of aid. She noted, however, that the present Indian political climate induced great sensitivity to questions of independence and made pro-United States comments difficult for any national leader. ₂₅

The political climate to which Pandit so delicately referred was indeed permeated by anti-American sentiments. Increasingly, Indian intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and government officials excoriated the United States as a militaristic and imperialistic nation that represented a greater threat to international peace than the Soviet Union. Those views, already common before the Korean War, became more pervasive with the U.S. rejection of India's various peace initiatives, the crossing of the 38th parallel, and the vehement American public attacks on Nehru's diplomatic activities. In a personal message to UN Ambassador Rau, Nehru expressed concern at the "rapidly deteriorating" relationship between Washington and New Delhi. ₂₆ The economic aid issue contributed to Indian resentments. Many Indians saw sinister motives at work in the earlier collapse of the U.S.-Indian wheat talks; they were convinced that the United States sought to use economic aid as a lever to induce India's alignment with the West. Stories to that effect circulated widely among Indian journalists and diplomats throughout 1950, and, much to the dismay of U.S. officials, Nehru did nothing to disavow them. ₂₇

Analysts in the Truman administration to a remarkable degree personalized the problem, attributing the misunderstandings that plagued U.S.-Indian relations to the baleful influence of India's leader. In a particularly revealing memorandum for Secretary of State Acheson, dated November 3, 1950, McGhee stated the problem bluntly: "Our relations with India are to an unusual degree dependent upon one man--Nehru. We must understand this man." To that end, he enclosed a report prepared by his bureau that explored the reasons for Nehru's negative attitudes toward the United States. It has become "increasingly evident," the report noted, that the prime minister's anti-American prejudices formed a "major obstacle to the improvement of Indo-United States relations. . . . Nehru obviously distrusts us and there are many indications that he dislikes us as well." Finding reasons for the prime minister's attitudes in the complex mixture of his socialist idealism, his patrician upbringing, and his distrust of democracy, the report offered the following bleak evaluation:

As a socialist, he has deep-rooted suspicions of our capitalist economy and its intentions in Asia. As an Asian nationalist, he resents our support of European metropolitan powers which retain colonies in Asia. As the leader of an impoverished people, he is aggrieved by our failure to offer large-scale economic aid to his country. As a patrician Asian of some color, he is repelled by the existence of racial and color discrimination in the United States and fancies that this discrimination is reflected in our foreign policy. As a hypersensitive egoist, he is quick to take offense at our slights, real or imagined, and reluctant to appear subject to our influence. ₂₈

In forwarding the assessment, McGhee emphasized that "Nehru's present attitude toward the United States presents a challenge, not an excuse for defeatism. India is too important to us and Nehru too important to India for us to take the easy road of concluding that we cannot work with Nehru. We must work with him." Accordingly, the assistant secretary recommended that the Truman administration redouble its efforts "to find ways and means of strengthening the ties of mutual interest between the United States and India to the point that even Nehru will see the fallacy of his prejudices." ₂₉

Most India specialists in the Truman administration, with McGhee in Washington and Henderson in New Delhi playing the chief advocacy roles, continued to believe that the most effective measure for improving Indo-American relations would be the immediate expression of Washington's readiness to provide substantial economic assistance. They hoped, as is the wont of experienced diplomats, to turn crisis into opportunity. Perhaps the fighting in Korea, having alerted senior policymakers to India's capacity for both aiding and frustrating important global policy objectives, might persuade those same officials that India was now worth a significant financial investment. McGhee, Henderson, and other supporters of aid to India had made what they thought was a compelling case the previous year only to have Nehru's diffidence and independence abort the initiative. At the end of 1950, the stakes appeared much higher--for both nations. Indo-American relations had been stretched to the breaking point by the Korean War; at the same time, India faced an increasingly serious food shortage. The conjunction of those two factors provided the proponents of closer U.S.-Indian ties in both countries with a rare opportunity for changing both attitudes and policies. ₃₀

An Indian official made the initial overture. On the evening of November 6, Minister of Agriculture Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi called on Ambassador Henderson to relate what he called some deeply distressing news. Just returned from Bihar, Munshi said that floods from the previous summer combined with a subsequent drought had already destroyed an estimated 2.6 million tons of grain in that food-producing region. Droughts and floods in other areas, moreover, had upset all governmental food plans. The minister said that if the public knew how limited present reserves were there would surely be panic. If the United States had any intention of extending economic assistance to India, he exclaimed, now was the ideal "psychological moment." The immediate extension of aid, Munshi suggested, could be a decisive factor in determining India's future orientation. Specifically, he asked Henderson if there might be some way to revive India's dormant request for one million tons of grain, either as an outright gift or at least at highly favorable terms. ₃₁

Munshi's demarche, though strictly unofficial, had far-reaching diplomatic ramifications. Henderson found particularly intriguing the minister's argument that India was at a critical turning point in its foreign relations and that timely economic assistance might help shore up the position of those--like Munshi--who favored the establishment of closer ties with Washington. Such soundings could not be dismissed as purely self-serving. On the contrary, Henderson and the senior British representative in New Delhi, High Commissioner Sir Archibald Nye, had already discussed in some depth the likelihood that India's staggering economic problems might necessitate a major foreign policy shift. ₃₂

The American ambassador, moreover, found considerable evidence, in addition to Munshi's overture, to support that proposition. On November 1 Finance Minister C. D. Deshmukh had informed him in utmost confidence that Nehru had finally accepted the necessity for outside financial aid and acknowledged that the United States was the only country in a position to provide that support. Several days later in Washington, Ambassador Pandit told McGhee that her brother was prepared to accept U.S. economic aid, provided only that no political strings were attached. Even more importantly, the powerful deputy prime minister, Sardar V. Patel, wrote Henderson a confidential letter in early November, calling the ambassador's attention to the significance of a recent speech that he had delivered welcoming U.S. aid. Henderson subsequently learned that several Indian cabinet members, including Patel, had sharply criticized Nehru at a recent cabinet meeting for his unremitting attacks on the United States. Emphasizing the depth of India's financial plight, they argued that the United States alone was in a position to alleviate the deepening food crisis. ₃₃

After a series of additional exploratory discussions in New Delhi between Indian and U.S. embassy officials, on December 16 Madame Pandit formally presented to the State Department her government's request for two million tons of food grains. Citing an extraordinary string of natural disasters, she emphasized the urgency of India's food requirements. Only the United States, the ambassador remarked, had reserves adequate to meet India's needs. Secretary of State Acheson, while expressing the sympathy of the United States for India's problem and its desire to help, remained noncommittal. Instead, he pointed to the magnitude of India's needs and explained that acceding to them would require congressional approval. ₃₄

That same day in New Delhi, Finance Minister Deshmukh told Henderson that the Indian request represented a "formal turning point" in India's relations with the United States; it meant that India, after careful cabinet consideration, had come to the conclusion that U.S. support was vital to its national stability. Henderson echoed Deshmukh's analysis in a message to the State Department. Calling the cabinet decision "of utmost significance," he predicted that "such opposition as has existed hitherto to closer economic relations between India and [the] U.S. has crumbled." Accordingly, he urged the department to consider carefully the Indian request. "I am concerned," he cautioned, "lest downright rejection [of] this overture or evasive treatment of it might have [an] extremely adverse effect on our position in India and South Asia." ₃₅

McGhee and his associates in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs needed no convincing. Almost immediately, NEA's officers produced a series of memoranda urging a favorable American response on broad foreign policy grounds. "Failure to respond to India's emergency request for food grains would seriously endanger the Nehru Government," noted one NEA paper, "and any other government which might follow would be decidedly worse from our point of view." McGhee stressed the "Indian request involved our making a critical decision. . . . If we do not take full advantage of this opportunity, our position in the whole of Asia will be adversely affected." ₃₆

The Indian request generated strong public support. On January 4, 1951, journalist and author Dorothy Norman announced the formation of an American Emergency Food Committee for India. A number of prominent individuals joined the committee, including former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, novelist Pearl Buck, Walter White, executive director for the NAACP, and leaders of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the National Council of Churches. Within the next several weeks, the National Council of Churches, the YMCA, the National Lutheran Council, and the Friends Service Committee publicly announced their support for Indian famine relief. Many leading newspapers also vigorously supported the Indian food request. Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, wrote that millions in India would surely starve if they did not receive grain from the United States, and decried any thought of taking "petty revenge against Nehru at the expense of these millions of persons." ₃₇ Even the Washington Post, a sharp critic of Nehru, called for prompt American action. "If a catastrophe is to be prevented," it commented, "aid will have to be forthcoming from the United States. . . . The food ought to be granted, and quickly. . . . Hunger and politics do not mix and any attempt to associate them would do this country incalculable harm in Asia." ₃₈

Important congressional spokesmen from both parties added their voices to the growing chorus calling for immediate aid to India. On January 8 New York Representative Jacob K. Javits introduced before Congress a concurrent resolution "favoring assistance to the Republic of India and its people to help them meet the crisis of a drastic food shortage and threat of famine in 1951." ₃₉ The resolution, which quickly picked up substantial support, was forwarded to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for action. Senators Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, who was developing a special interest in Indian affairs, and H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey took the lead in pressing the administration for swift action on the Indian request. On January 30 they joined a bipartisan group of twenty-five members of Congress who signed a letter to President Truman urging his support for an emergency food loan to India. "Unless we act promptly," the letter implored, "many hundreds of thousands of people in India face starvation." After noting their opposition to certain of India's foreign policies, the signees insisted that "the need to prevent starvation is entirely separate from all political considerations." ₄₀

Political considerations could not be so easily separated, however. William C. Foster, administrator of the Economic Cooperation Administration, acknowledged that "the interests of humanity" compelled the United States to "do what we reasonably can," but added an important caveat: "With our resources strained to the utmost, aid should be given in fullest measure to those who are demonstrably on our side and willing to fight for it." ₄₁

More troubling for supporters of the Indian aid proposal than Foster's halfhearted assent were the critical comments voiced on Capitol Hill. Annoyed by India's uncooperative policies in Asia and its persistent criticisms of the United States, a number of key congressmen expressed skepticism about the food aid project. Already piqued by India's smug, "I told you so" response to the full-scale entry of Chinese forces into the Korean fighting in mid-November 1950, many legislators were infuriated by the Indian veto of a February 1, 1951, General Assembly resolution branding China as the aggressor in the conflict. Senator Tom Connally, the powerful Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a man whose support would be critical to the administration's case, expressed strong reservations about aid to India. "Nehru," complained the blunt Texan, "is out giving us hell at the time, working against us and voting against us." He decried Nehru's purported hatred for "every white man" and told McGhee that "you are going to have one hell of a time getting this thing through the Congress or through this committee or through the full committee." ₄₂

In its final recommendations, sent to Secretary of State Acheson on January 30, NEA urged that those political objections be countered by presenting the proposed wheat deal in the context of larger U.S. national security interests. "If we do not assist India in its present crisis," McGhee stressed, "elements inimical to the United States and the Western world generally will be strengthened." U.S. assistance, moreover, would help solidify the position of "our friends" in India, thus offsetting "much of the anti-Western bitterness which enables Nehru to maintain his present posture in foreign affairs." While conceding that no "overnight change" could be expected in U.S.-Indian relations, McGhee predicted that the wheat loan would lay the basis for a rapprochement between Washington and New Delhi. ₄₃

An even more explicit Cold War rationale justified the transaction. "The present threat of famine in India," NEA noted, "promises to create conditions ideally suited to the subversive activities of the Communist Party of India." Conversely, a prompt U.S. response to the food grains request would be the most effective means available to the American government for countering that communist appeal. Nehru's statements and policies had frequently irritated officials in Washington, but if he were toppled from power "India will either be thrown into a state of chaos or come under control of a government far less sympathetic to our ideals and objectives than the present government." A new communist-influenced government might even emerge that would swing India into the Soviet orbit. "By comparison Nehru's current effusions would probably seem quite innocuous." ₄₄

Acheson endorsed McGhee's recommendation, accepting wholeheartedly the Cold War rationale developed by NEA. He urged Truman to deliver a formal message to Congress urging prompt action on the Indian request. While acknowledging that the United States could never gain any political concessions from India, he suggested that "by playing the thing right it would be possible to make a definite asset of the whole transaction." The president, Acheson emphasized, "should make a big play of it." ₄₅

On February 12 Truman did exactly that. He sent a special message to the newly convened eighty-second Congress, strongly urging that it provide India with two million tons of grain in emergency food relief. After cataloging the series of unfortunate developments that had brought India to the brink of crisis, the president emphasized the traditional American concern for human suffering. Significantly, he did not gloss over the problem of Indo-American relations. Tackling the issue directly, Truman insisted that those political differences "must not deflect us from our tradition of friendly aid to alleviate human suffering." At the same time, he underscored the Cold War context for the loan. "We must counter the false promises of Communist imperialism," he exclaimed, "with constructive action for human betterment. In this way, and in this way only, can we make human liberty secure against the forces which threaten it throughout the world today." In printing copies of the president's message, the State Department highlighted this angle, entitling the address, "Indian Food Crisis--Opportunity to Combat Communist Imperialism." ₄₆

Initially, all went according to the administration's plan. Taking their cue from Truman's proposal, on February 15 twenty-nine senators and eleven representatives offered identical bills for Indian food relief. Strong Republican support particularly pleased administration planners, especially since the opposition party had gained seats in both the House and the Senate during the 1950 elections. The leading Republican spokesman on foreign affairs, Senator Robert Taft, joined the bill's sponsors at the last minute. Senator William F. Knowland and Representative Walter H. Judd, two of the most vocal critics of Truman's Asian policy, also cosponsored the legislation. Even Joseph McCarthy, who had accused Truman just the previous week of harboring communists in the State Department, announced his support, declaring that he did "not favor any political conditions in meeting a humanitarian need." Acting with surprising speed, on March 1 the House Committee on Foreign Affairs approved legislation to authorize emergency assistance to India by a grant of funds to purchase two million tons of food grains. ₄₇

To be sure, some opposition did surface during the hearings. Several committee members sharply questioned Acheson, objecting in principle to aid for a government that opposed the U.S. effort in Korea. Republican Congressman John M. Vorys, with the blessing of former President Herbert Hoover, insisted that a wheat deal should only be concluded on a quid pro quo basis. The Ohio lawmaker's views were incorporated in a minority report, signed by Vorys and three of his Republican colleagues. "India needs grain immediately," it argued; "we have the grain. We need strategic materials from India over a period of years; India has those materials. We should make India a loan which can be repaid in strategic materials." ₄₈ Despite the sensitive issue raised in the minority report, administration planners thought that the path had been smoothed for early passage of the bill. After all, twenty-three of the committee's twenty-seven members had voted for it.

Such optimism, however, soon proved unfounded. Within weeks legislative action had stalled, leading one official to wonder whether it could pass in its present form. Several factors help explain this unanticipated reversal in fortunes. First, the administration had overestimated the depth of congressional support. The quick action of the House Foreign Affairs Committee may have bred a sense of false confidence. A deadlock soon developed in the powerful House Rules Committee; a coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats, arguing in favor of Vorys' minority report, prevented the bill from reaching the House floor. Second, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was preoccupied with hearings on the controversial question of assigning U.S. ground troops to Europe. Moreover, Senator Connally, who had already expressed his reservations about aid for India, showed no inclination to schedule early hearings. Finally, an Indian diplomat assigned to the United Nations, Bharatan Kumarappa, unwittingly helped fuel this congressional opposition during a lecture tour in early March. In one speech that gained wide publicity he claimed that India's "chief enemy in the Far East is not communism but Western imperialism." The Indian government quickly apologized for its diplomat's untimely remarks, but serious damage had already been done. Such "pro-Communist" statements, as they were quickly dubbed, gave further ammunition to the bill's congressional opponents. ₄₉

Leading Indian officials expressed keen disappointment over the congressional delay. On March 12 Bajpai informed Henderson of his deep concern at reports reaching New Delhi regarding the aid bill's status. Later that day Chakravarti Rajagopalachari told the U.S. envoy that the graciousness of the gesture had already been lost. The Indian home minister said that he was deeply depressed about the course of events as he had been hoping that the wheat loan would be a turning point for U.S.-Indian relations; now his hopes were "exceedingly dim." Henderson later reported to the State Department that America's friends in India, many of whom had staked their political fortunes on a favorable U.S. response, were "extremely anxious"; conversely, "elements fundamentally hostile or suspicious" to the United States were "becoming more triumphantly cynical." On March 21 Nehru informed his chief ministers he found it "a little humiliating to wait in this way for favours to be bestowed on us." In a private conversation with American writer Edgar Mowrer the next day, the prime minister vented his growing frustration with the congressional holdup. "We too have our pride," he snapped. "The way in which you are handling our request for grain is insulting and outrageous. If we go through centuries of poverty and millions of people die of hunger, we shall never submit to outside pressure." ₅₀

The Truman administration worried about the diplomatic ramifications of further delay. Henderson cautioned that a continued congressional impasse might well eliminate much of the goodwill that still persisted in India "and damage our good name for years to come." He was particularly concerned lest serious famine strike various parts of India with Washington being held responsible because of its dalliance. ₅₁ A State Department memorandum for Acheson, dated March 19, underscored the seriousness of the problem. Unless grain could begin moving to India by April 1, the dangers of massive famine would increase. "Each week's delay, therefore, means that the benefit which will accrue to us from the grant will be further minimized and malnutrition in India will grow more acute." ₅₂ Offers by the Soviet Union and China to provide India with emergency food aid, announced on March 30, compounded the administration's difficulties. Such seeming generosity, officials admitted privately, won important propaganda points. ₅₃

Renewed administration pressure helped break the logjam in Congress. On April 16 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee finally opened hearings on the India food-grain bill. Following the forceful testimony of Acheson and other administration spokesmen, the committee favorably reported a bill on April 20. The Senate bill was a compromise version. Unlike the legislation offered on February 15, which called for a grant, or gift, of $190 million to India to purchase the requisite two million tons of grain, the new bill called for a $95 million grant and a $95 million loan. The terms for repayment of the latter were to be determined subsequently by the Economic Cooperation Administration, which was to oversee the program. ₅₄

At the same time, the House Rules Committee also reached agreement on the controversial legislation. Following a seven-week deadlock, on April 24 that committee approved a bill that would provide the entire $190 million amount as a loan; the loan would be partially repayable in strategic materials. Ironically, this compromise measure was virtually identical to the minority report offered earlier by Vorys and supported by only four of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's members. The chairman of that committee, John Kee, reluctantly accepted the changed bill when informed bluntly by the Rules Committee chairman that no other version would be allowed to reach the House floor. It "does not reflect my views personally nor those of the majority of the committee," Kee stated frankly, but was being offered solely "as a last resort because it will do more good than nothing." ₅₅ Finally, more than four months after India's initial request and more than two months after Truman's appeal to Congress, bills were being readied for discussion by the full Senate and House of Representatives. Even if approved, however, a conference committee between House and Senate leaders would be necessary to work out differences between the two versions of the bill.

In India, meanwhile, the food situation was steadily deteriorating and Indian resentment with the glacial pace of the American legislative process was growing quickly. Two new problems surfaced at this juncture. The first concerned the level of supervision provided for in these draft bills. In language standard for any U.S. aid program, both explicitly called for an ECA mission to supervise the distribution process. Nehru balked at the prospect of a "foreign agency" controlling India's grain distribution system or its development plans. The proposed legislation, he wrote Ambassador Pandit in Washington, amounted "practically to converting India into some kind of a semicolonial country or at least a satellite in the economic sense. . . . I realize completely the consequence of our refusal of this gift. Nevertheless I cannot bring myself to agree to this final humiliation." ₅₆

Indian officials in both New Delhi and Washington quickly conveyed the prime minister's objections to their American counterparts. In a meeting at the State Department on April 14, Pandit expressed Indian concern that an ECA mission charged with supervision of the grain distribution would infringe upon Indian sovereignty. She also said that the bill's provision for a U.S. voice in determining the use of counterpart funds--local currency generated as a result of the sale of U.S. grains--might be construed as giving the United States a voice in all of India's development plans. In New Delhi, Bajpai told Henderson that it would be "politically extremely difficult" for India to accept these provisions. The U.S. ambassador retorted that India was seeing the proposed legislation in the worst possible light and was "making mountains out of mole hills" at the very time when Washington was doing its utmost to alleviate the present food crisis. ₅₇

Although reassurances from American representatives temporarily soothed Indian sensitivities about these matters, a more complex problem soon emerged: the question of Indian repayment in strategic materials. India was already exporting substantial quantities of manganese, mica, and beryl to the United States. In 1946, however, it had embargoed the export of monazite sands. When processed, monazite sands released not only rare earth compounds but thorium, a chemical element which the Atomic Energy Act of 1947 labeled as a source material for atomic energy. India's publicly stated intention was to refine the monazite sands through its own infant processing industry, then to sell the refined rare earth compounds to the United States while retaining the thorium for its own purposes. Several congressmen and senators, in both open and closed hearings, suggested strongly that the United States use the proposed wheat loan to break the Indian embargo on the sale of its valuable monazite sands. On April 22 Bajpai informed Henderson that India was concerned with the inclination of some U.S. representatives to interject this factor into the wheat bill hearings. Indians would resist any U.S. effort to pressure them on this delicate subject, he cautioned. The provisions of the House bill of April 24, which explicitly called for repayment in strategic materials, although unspecified, brought the issue to a head. ₅₈

Increasingly angered by what he viewed as American attacks on Indian sovereignty, Nehru vented his frustrations in two widely publicized statements. On April 29 he declared that congressional conditions for the transfer of American grain were unacceptable to India. "India is not so down and out," he stormed, "as to accept any condition dictated by any foreign country in the matter of importing food that sullies our honor." ₅₉ In a speech broadcast over All-India radio on May 1 he was even more blunt:

While we welcome all the help we can get from foreign countries, we have made it clear that such help must not have any political strings attached to it, any conditions which are unbecoming for a self-respecting nation to accept, any pressure to change our domestic or international policy. We would be unworthy of the high responsibilities with which we have been charged if we bartered away in the slightest degree our country's self-respect or freedom of action, even for something which we need so badly. ₆₀

The congressional response to Nehru's outburst was as swift as it was predictable. On May 2 both chambers postponed action on the India aid bill. Representative Lawrence N. Smith explained flatly that as a result of Nehru's remarks: "The temper of the House is no-go for the India bill." ₆₁ Another congressman, who insisted that his name not be used, told a reporter for the New York Times, that the bill had been put into a "deep freeze," perhaps permanently. ₆₂

State Department officials repeatedly tried to impress upon Indian representatives the seriousness of this latest flap. They recommended strongly that Nehru clarify his position in a public statement. At a social occasion in New Delhi, Henderson told the Indian leader that his decision on the proposed wheat loan would have "far-reaching effects" not only on U.S.-Indian relations but on India's economy. Facing an increasingly bleak economic situation, Nehru relented. On May 10 he stated before Parliament that India would agree to the terms of either the House or Senate bills, but would prefer the simpler terms of the House bill, which put the program entirely on a loan basis. With regard to the troublesome issue of strategic materials, he said that India would gladly supply those materials that were available and could be spared, but emphasized that it was a fundamental principle of the Indian government not to supply material to foreign governments that might be used in the production of atomic weapons. Thus he implicitly ruled out the possibility of India removing its embargo on the sale of monazite sands. ₆₃

Following Nehru's conciliatory statement, events moved rapidly on Capitol Hill. On May 14 the Senate reopened debate on the India aid bill with H. Alexander Smith and several of his colleagues eloquently arguing in favor of the measure. Two days later that body approved the proposed $190 million aid program. Consistent with the inclinations expressed by Nehru, the Senate legislation placed the whole program on a loan basis. There was one major sticking point, however. The upper chamber also adopted an amendment offered by three conservative Republicans that called for repayment in specific strategic materials, including monazite sands. As Nehru had already expressed his unalterable opposition to the sale of monazite sands, this provision could only be interpreted as a purposeful slap at the Indian leader. Action by the House of Representatives proceeded with less controversy. On May 24 it too adopted a measure that called for a $190 million loan for the purchase of food grains. While the House bill also called for repayment in strategic materials, it carefully avoided specifying those materials. A House-Senate conference committee worked out the differences between the two bills by adopting a compromise that essentially followed the more judicious House bill. On June 6 the House passed the conference bill; five days later the Senate approved the legislation. Nehru promptly expressed his pleasure with the U.S. action, calling the aid bill a "generous gesture" that would "bring the two people nearer." ₆₄

On June 15 President Truman formally signed the wheat loan legislation. "This kind of help to stricken humanity," he proclaimed, "is a tradition of the American people." Two months later the first American aid shipment reached India, with Indian leaders again effusively praising American generosity in a brief ceremony. ₆₅

The pious rhetoric and obligatory expressions of goodwill could not obscure some harsh realities. Clearly, the long delay, the intemperate statements of certain legislators, and the crude efforts to use the specter of imminent starvation to extract political and economic concessions had left deep scars. A measure conceived by Truman administration planners as a lever for moving India closer to the West had grievously backfired. Even Loy Henderson, who had viewed India's food crisis as a unique opportunity for strengthening Indo-American relations, conceded in early June that the wheat loan would lead to no appreciable change in Nehru's attitudes toward the United States. And Henderson's comment was almost surely an understatement. Probably closer to the truth was the analysis presented by British High Commissioner Nye. India's "almost pathological" mistrust of the United States, he reported to his government, "has been greatly aggravated" by Washington's "lamentable" handling of the loan request. "It will long be remembered here that the United States Congress spun out discussion of (to India) unacceptable conditions of the loan for weeks, while the need became more and more urgent and opportunity finally passed." ₆₆

The Truman administration probably should have realized that the food aid bill was an exceedingly risky gamble. For the larger goal of a U.S.-Indian rapprochement to be realized, the American response to India's food crisis had to be immediate and generous. Yet, given the growing tensions between the executive and legislative branches over a number of ticklish issues--China policy, the conduct of the war in Korea, Truman's dismissal of MacArthur, the proposal to station American troops in Europe--such an expectation was, at best, highly optimistic. In fairness to administration planners, they were trapped in a "no-win" situation, a point Acheson candidly admitted during closed Senate hearings. "We are in a situation where, if [we] don't do it," he said, "we are going to lose ground. If we do do it I think we can gain some, but it will be in the intangible field." ₆₇ Ironically, they did it--eventually--and still lost ground.

The ill-fated wheat loan reflects in microcosm the deep political and ideological differences that plagued U.S.-Indian relations ever since independence. American leaders, convinced of the righteousness of their foreign policy as well as the purity of their motives, were mystified--and stung--by Nehru's constant criticisms. They could not fathom his failure to support U.S. efforts to block communist aggression in Korea and elsewhere. For their part, the newly independent Indians jealously sought to protect their cherished freedom of action in foreign affairs and feared that the United States would use its economic strength to compromise that independence. The proud and suspicious Nehru asked for U.S. aid only with great reluctance and only because his advisers had insisted firmly that there was no alternative. His wariness of U.S. intentions had not abated; indeed, the slowness of congressional deliberations and the barbed comments hurled at India and himself during those proceedings just served to confirm his preconceptions. At the same time, Nehru's indignant outbursts helped confirm American suspicions about the ungrateful and untrustworthy nature of India and its leader--much as his independent diplomatic stance during the Korean War had earlier. The whole episode aggravated tensions between the two nations and left a substantial residue of bitterness. When Chester Bowles arrived in New Delhi late in 1951 to replace Henderson as the U.S. ambassador to India, he quickly discovered that "our insensitive handling" of the wheat loan was still a major source of tension. ₆₈

That tension remained palpable throughout 1951. At a meeting of U.S. diplomats stationed in South Asia, held in Ceylon from February 26 to March 2, concern with India's neutralism and its "virulent and widespread anti-Westernism" nearly dominated the proceedings. In their agreed conclusions and recommendations to the State Department, the conferees underscored the necessity of exposing "the fallacious basis of the present foreign policies of India" and combating "the dangers to South Asia and to world peace inherent in those policies." ₆₉ McGhee, who chaired the sessions, underscored those points during a subsequent meeting with Under Secretary of State Webb. He said the philosophy of neutralism was spreading throughout the region, a "most dangerous condition" that required an aggressive U.S. response. ₇₀

Henderson, in Washington for consultations, offered an equally discomfiting appraisal of Indian policy during a June 20 meeting with Acheson and Webb. Referring to the recent wheat loan controversy, the ambassador said that Nehru increasingly recognized that his nation's economic needs compelled him to work with the United States, but he deeply resented it. In an analysis that was becoming familiar, if not tiresome, Henderson remarked that "Nehru does not like the American way of life and would be very unhappy to have American influence spread in India." He decried Nehru's most recent outrage, the prime minister's expressed opposition to the American-sponsored Japanese peace treaty, and suggested that India's position stemmed from its desire to limit the American presence in the Far East. "Basically, India wants to eliminate Western influence from Asia," Henderson speculated. The prime goal of Indian policy was to work with China so that India and China could together control Asia. ₇₁

In a series of intelligence reports, produced in mid-1951, the Truman administration's South Asia experts sought to identify with more precision India's present and likely future position in the East-West conflict. The results of those studies were not heartening. "Unless its own immediate interests are involved," concluded the State Department's Office of Intelligence Research, "India can be expected to follow a policy of neutrality in the event of a third world war, regardless of whether the Soviet bloc or the West is considered to have precipitated the conflict." ₇₂ That conclusion was echoed by the CIA in a national intelligence estimate of September 4. Noting India's firm determination to avoid committing itself to either side, the estimate discounted the likelihood that even outright Soviet aggression in Europe, the Near East, or Southeast Asia would lead to an alteration in New Delhi's foreign policy of nonalignment. Indeed, India's determination to maintain its independence at virtually any cost, the CIA noted, "has of late resulted in a tendency to appease world Communism and in [a] failure to support the West in its program of combatting world Communist aggression." ₇₃

The intelligence assessments confronted directly an equally serious set of questions for the administration's Cold War planners: How would Soviet control of India affect American worldwide interests? And what could the United States do to prevent the Soviets from gaining such control? The answer to the first question was complex. It had been a staple of U.S. policy papers and intelligence reports for years that a communist India would be disastrous for the United States. The most recent policy paper on South Asia, NSC 98/1, which had been approved by the president on January 22, 1951, reiterated that conclusion. "The loss of India to the Communist orbit would mean that for all practical purposes all of Asia will have been lost," it declared; "this would constitute a serious threat to the security position of the United States." The intelligence community accepted that assessment but saw the potential damage as more political and psychological than military. ₇₄

The CIA's national intelligence estimate suggested that a communist India "would not add significantly to the military power of the Soviet bloc in terms of materiel." Even so, it would provide a sizable standing army of nearly 400,000 men and a vast reservoir of additional manpower; a communist India would also deny Western access to a major source of strategic products. Most significantly, if the communists gained control of India they could militarily threaten neighboring states, disrupt communications between Europe and Asia in time of war, and demoralize the noncommunist nations of Asia. "Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, would probably fall completely under Communist domination. The generally pro-Western governments of Pakistan and Ceylon would find it difficult to take a firm position against the USSR and its Asian allies even if strong Western military support were forthcoming. Neutralism would be greatly encouraged in Iran, the Arab Near East, and the Philippines." A communist triumph in India, in short, would set off a chain reaction whose consequences would be highly detrimental to the Western position throughout Asia and the Middle East.

Unlike previous reports which, after sketching similarly dire scenarios, had generally ended on a positive note, the State Department and CIA assessments of mid-1951 concluded with the somber warning that India stood a reasonable chance of falling to communism. The magnitude of India's economic problems was so great that widespread dissatisfaction with the government already existed; it threatened to grow more acute over time unless a large-scale economic development effort could be launched and executed effectively. Further economic deterioration could result in communist control over India. The United States might be able to help arrest India's economic decline through timely and sustained economic assistance, but the intelligence community now frankly acknowledged that America's ability to influence Indian developments was severely circumscribed. External economic assistance carried significant risks and could not be seen as a panacea. Nonetheless, it "appears the only possible means of checking an economic decline which would otherwise create greater difficulties for the West and which might result in a graver threat to the Western position throughout Asia." ₇₅

These analyses, which echoed those of the top State Department officials responsible for South Asian affairs, reveal that the Truman administration was growing more, rather than less, frustrated and disillusioned with India. The nasty battle with Congress over the wheat loan gave pause to even the most optimistic advocates of warmer Indo-American ties. Clearly, American grain had not brought India any closer to the United States; if anything, the whole affair just opened fresh wounds. The superheated congressional debates on the Indian food bill, moreover, demonstrated that hostility toward India on Capitol Hill was both deep and intense. The argument so consistently advanced over the previous several years by ambassadors Grady and Henderson, Assistant Secretary McGhee, and the Indian specialists in NEA that economic assistance would prove an effective tool in moving India into the Western camp had been severely, if not fatally, damaged. India's rejection of the Japanese peace treaty in September 1951, along with its continuing unwillingness to follow American, British, and UN advice regarding the Kashmir dispute--even after the latter affair once again brought New Delhi and Karachi to the brink of war in the summer of 1951--provided just the most recent evidence of India's determination to pursue an independent foreign policy. American officials increasingly acknowledged that their ability to influence India was much more limited than they had previously believed. ₇₆

They also realized that the relative autonomy that the executive branch often enjoys in the realm of foreign affairs was sharply circumscribed in the case of India by the weight of public and congressional sentiment. Furious anti-Indian invectives, many directed personally at Nehru, burst forth from across the political spectrum during the summer and fall of 1951, triggered especially by India's boycott of the Japanese peace treaty convocation at San Francisco. "Never has Mr. Nehru's neutralism shown such a bias," complained the Washington Post--"a bias in the Russian direction." ₇₇ Even the New Republic and the New York Times, normally sympathetic to Nehru, condemned without equivocation his refusal to attend the San Francisco ceremonies. ₇₈ Conservative opinion rendered an even harsher verdict. The Washington Daily News castigated Nehru for delivering "a master stroke of sabotage" to the treaty. "No elaborate analysis is needed," it sneered, "to show that in rebuffing us Nehru has lined up with the Communist camp and that the peace he seeks would be red tinted." ₇₉ The Chicago Tribune, an inveterate foe of the Truman administration, weighed in with an equally scathing commentary. In an editorial titled "Nehru, Battling for Stalin," it charged that the Indian prime minister "seems to have hitched his diplomatic kite to the Russian star." Posing the question whose answer appeared so self-evident to the political right, the Chicago daily asked: "Now that India has shown what side it is on, what is there in it for us in continuing to supply aid to that country?" ₈₀

Groping to explain the malaise afflicting Indo-American relations to the general public, both Collier's and Life commissioned independent, fact-finding trips to India by prominent ex-government officials. Upon his return from the subcontinent, former Atomic Energy Commission chief David E. Lilienthal identified Nehru's conflicted background and ideology as the core obstacle to warmer ties. In an article for Collier's, provocatively titled "Are We Losing India?," he concluded somberly that "we are witnessing today what may be the beginning of the end of friendly relations with India." ₈₁ In the pages of Life, the largest-circulation magazine of the day, William C. Bullitt concurred with that pessimistic appraisal. The acerbic Bullitt, a foreign policy adviser to Roosevelt and former ambassador to the Soviet Union and France, also blamed Nehru directly for the current state of affairs. Dismissively characterizing the Indian prime minister, with whom he had spoken at length, as "an elegant and exquisitely Anglicized aesthete," a "Marxian socialist of the Harold Laski school," and "a political Peter Pan," he speculated that Nehru's anti-Americanism provided an outlet for "his resentment of the powerful, dominant white man." Offering a pseudo-Freudian explanation for what he viewed as an unremitting hostility toward the United States, Bullitt posited that "we are the terrible father in India's national neurosis." Nehru, of course, served for him as the central figure in this sorry psychodrama. "It seems to be impossible for him to like us," Bullitt concluded. "His balance in the 'cold war' inclines almost steadily to the Communist side." ₈₂ Although the ambassador ended his biting analysis, as did Lilienthal, with a halfhearted argument for providing India with economic aid in order to curtail the appeal of communism, both men provided additional ammunition to those on Capitol Hill already inclined to dismiss India as unworthy of American help.

Senator William F. Knowland, the powerful California Republican, certainly spoke for many congressional skeptics when he accused India of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." A charter member of the conservative China bloc, the caustic Knowland added pointedly: "I think the time is coming when we had better start taking a realistic view of just who our friends are." ₈₃

That public debate both influenced and mirrored private deliberations being carried on simultaneously within the inner councils of the American government. With the anger of rejected suitors, a growing number of Truman administration officials also began to cast aspersions on India and its controversial ruler. Some even advanced the heretofore heretical proposition, at least among the administration's India experts, that India's importance to the United States had been greatly exaggerated. In a remarkable cable, sent to the State Department on September 6, Henderson argued with haughty disdain that Nehru's basic objective was to create an independent, neutral bloc in Asia, an "Asia for the Asians." To that end, he was seeking to wean China from Soviet influence and Japan from U.S. influence. Although the Indian leader would continue to "make minor concessions and friendly gestures" to the United States from time to time to dampen American resentment, and would make a special effort to "charm and flatter naive Amer[ican] and Brit[ish]" representatives, Henderson doubted that Nehru would alter his basic intentions. ₈₄ Other American officials asserted at this time that, regardless of Nehru's ambitions, India could largely be ignored or bypassed without harming any fundamental American interests in Asia or in the world. ₈₅

Officials in the British Foreign Office found the latter attitude particularly upsetting. They worried that the United States, out of despair, might actually write India off, thereby increasing its isolation and further weakening the Western position there. Although they too found India's uncooperative attitudes and behavior exasperating, British diplomats for the most part counseled patience and forbearance and remained impressed with India's potential value to the West. They feared that the United States might allow pique to cloud its judgment. In an astute analysis of American thinking, High Commissioner Nye told London that Americans were suffering from "the disappointment of exaggerated hopes. . . . They formed optimistic but superficial views of the prospects of working with the new India and have been angry and mortified when these views proved to be entirely wrong." ₈₆

American thinking about India during this time actually displayed sharply contradictory, even schizophrenic, tendencies that the otherwise astute British observers failed fully to appreciate. Along with the inclination of some U.S. officials to dismiss India as not worth the effort, other policymakers clung with equal conviction to the notion that India was too important to write off. Remarkably, some diplomats appear to have held both opinions at different times; some perhaps harbored those contradictory visions simultaneously. These conflicting attitudes and policy prescriptions regarding India probably stemmed less from Washington's irritation with New Delhi's rejection of its overtures--although that factor certainly played a role--than in the lack of consensus among U.S. strategists about India's importance to broad, Cold War objectives.

India defied easy categorization. It certainly did not fit the profile of those areas, such as Western Europe, Japan, and the Middle East, that Truman administration planners most prized. It possessed neither an advanced industrial base nor a highly skilled workforce. It did not contain any truly crucial raw materials, such as the Middle East's oil. And its location promised few military advantages to either the United States or the Soviet Union if the Cold War should suddenly metamorphose into a hot war. If the prime objective of American policy was to deny Soviet access to the raw materials, industrial infrastructure, skilled workforce, and base sites of Eurasia, as recent scholarship has convincingly demonstrated, it was not clear where India fit into that strategic equation. ₈₇ India's tangible economic, strategic, and military value to the United States remained limited, in time of peace or war, a fact that the Joint Chiefs of Staff stressed in their very first assessment of the subcontinent. A nation forced to choose where to invest its limited resources could be forgiven, then, for discounting the relative significance of India's claim on those funds.

The countervailing arguments, as should be familiar by now, tended to stress the political, psychological, and symbolic importance of maintaining an anticommunist India. The CIA's national intelligence estimate of September 1951 was but the latest administration assessment that emphasized the grave challenges that a communist India would pose for the United States. But the danger that India would succumb to communism, either as a result of internal collapse or external aggression, was not an imminent one in the view of American intelligence, diplomatic, and defense experts. The CIA and State Department analyses of mid-1951, to be sure, warned of precisely such an eventuality. But the grim scenarios sketched in those appraisals were essentially long-term projections flowing from a series of "ifs." They lacked the urgency required to capture the attention of Truman, Acheson, Lovett, and other senior policymakers.

With a war raging in Korea, revolutionary nationalist turmoil spreading throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and the economic resuscitation of Western Europe and Japan sputtering, Truman and his chief foreign policy advisers evinced only sporadic and episodic interest in India and its problems. The relative indifference to India among high-level officials suggests that that country had yet to attain the status of a major, no less vital, area of interest for the United States. As national security priorities during the Cold War were often defined in terms of threats, the seeming absence of an immediate communist threat to India, either internal or external, reinforced the inclination of leading administration strategists to view India as a less than pressing concern. Top Washington policymakers, in sum, agreed that India was not presently a vital interest for the United States. Precisely how important it ranked in relation to other nonvital interests remained a live subject for debate. Given the welter of conflicting elements involved in divining India's real value to the United States, the growing evidence that America lacked the financial resources to make a significant difference to India's economic development at any rate, and the concern that even if it found the funds Congress might balk at appropriating them and Nehru might refuse to accept them, the Truman administration's failure to pursue a clear-cut and consistent policy toward India at this juncture becomes somewhat more explicable.

All those issues surfaced during the controversial confirmation hearings for Chester Bowles, Truman's choice to succeed Loy Henderson as envoy to New Delhi. The president was shifting Henderson to Iran not because of any great dissatisfaction with the veteran diplomat's performance in New Delhi, but because the simmering Iranian oil crisis demanded an ambassador of his stature and experience. The two men provided the starkest of contrasts. Henderson, the career diplomat and Soviet expert who had earned from his colleagues the sobriquet, "Mr. Foreign Service," was reserved, taciturn, and coldly analytical in his approach to diplomacy. A man who prided himself on his professionalism, Henderson's bearing, habits, and attitudes all bespoke a deep conservatism. Bowles, recently defeated in his bid for reelection as governor of Connecticut, was ebullient, energetic, and intense. An unabashed liberal, Bowles was an ardent New Deal Democrat and a charter member of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). His career had been a varied one up to that point, although he had had minimal foreign policy experience and, in fact, had never even been to India or any other part of Asia. Scion of a wealthy New England publishing family, Bowles had graduated from Yale, made a small fortune as an advertising executive in New York, headed the controversial Office of Price Administration during the war, and served in some minor UN diplomatic positions before turning to politics in his home state of Connecticut. Many observers viewed his nomination for the Indian post more as a political favor from a friendly Democratic White House to one of its loyal supporters than as an effort to put forward the most qualified individual for the job. ₈₈

Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were not shy in making that accusation. Indeed, when the confirmation hearings began on September 20 they peppered Bowles with questions designed to expose his lack of experience for such a delicate diplomatic posting. Senator H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, who voted against the nomination, disparaged Bowles's qualifications for "this critical position," calling Truman's choice "a political appointment." ₈₉

Bowles's unbridled enthusiasm for India also grated on the sensibilities of some lawmakers. With near-missionary zeal, the nominee referred glowingly to India as "a miracle." Its heroic efforts to feed its people and to demonstrate to the world the advantages of the democratic and capitalist path to economic development deserved the strongest possible support from the United States. "I hope that the committees will do everything they can do in allocating the money to see that we get as much as we can out there," he remarked. "It is a big country, and whatever we have won't be enough." Several Republican legislators blanched at the thought that Bowles would serve as too vigorous a lobbyist for India's needs. Senator Owen Brewster of Maine spoke for many when he asked Bowles pointedly how far he felt "American resources can be dedicated to the solution of this particular problem, with all the others we have." Emphasizing the magnitude of India's economic difficulties, Iowa's Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper voiced his objection to an American representative inclined to spend American money in a fashion that he likened to "taking a squirt gun and trying to put out a warehouse fire." Other issues were raised during the hearings, including the concern that Bowles might be overly sympathetic to Nehru. But fear that Truman's nominee might tug too hard on Congress's purse strings raised the greatest hackles. Bowles might fail to recognize the "severe limitations on how far we can go" in making aid available, complained Brewster, and might indicate to the Indians that they should " 'just hold on a little while and Uncle Sam will arrive with a lot more in his Santa Claus bag.' " ₉₀

Presidents almost always receive congressional assent for their ambassadorial appointments, however grudgingly. The Bowles nomination proved no exception to that rule. On October 9, after an extended debate that featured the unusual appearance and grilling of several administration witnesses, including McGhee, the Senate voted 43-33 to confirm Bowles. The surprisingly close vote served notice to the administration--if more notice were needed--that jarring much additional money loose for India from this Congress might require a Herculean effort. ₉₁

Bowles arrived in India in late October and immediately plunged into his new assignment with characteristic vigor and single-mindedness. Indeed, he virtually took India by storm. Most Indians had never encountered an American quite like Bowles. The new ambassador adapted quickly to Indian culture, sent his children to Indian schools, patronized Indian arts, traveled extensively throughout the vast country, and sent the message to all who would listen that America cared about India--about its people, its history, and its culture. Bowles clearly found the sights, sounds, and smells of this ancient land intoxicating, and many Indians found their extraordinary visitor's exuberance and informality delightfully refreshing. In a nation where symbols count for much, Bowles managed almost overnight to alter the tone if not the substance of Indo-American relations. He even succeeded in developing a warm rapport with Nehru, a feat that Henderson must have found astonishing. "Looks as though we've got a smash hit on our hands out there," enthused McGhee to journalist Norman Cousins. "He's just what they needed." ₉₂

Even before his departure from Washington, Bowles had become convinced that India represented one of the greatest possible challenges for American foreign policy. That conviction hardened upon his arrival in New Delhi. Haunted by the communist triumph in China, Bowles feared that India might succumb to communism as well if the United States failed to provide it with sufficient economic support. "If India goes in the next few years," he wrote President Truman on December 11, "it is likely that all of South Asia and the Middle East will also go." His analysis of the problem was straightforward: the condition of the Indian economy over the next three to five years was likely to "be a decisive factor in determining whether or not Communism takes over this part of the world"; since such a development would have disastrous consequences for the Western position in Asia and the Middle East, the United States must do everything possible to support India; specifically, it should help India meet "the very reasonable objectives" outlined in its new five-year plan by providing the $200 to $300 million in annual aid that he believed necessary to ensure the plan's success. Bowles emphasized that U.S. efforts to induce India to join "our camp" were foolish; he pleaded instead for tolerance and patience with Nehru's neutralism, insisting that in a time of crisis India would side with the West without hesitation. Indeed, he considered India to be a natural bulwark against communist expansion in Asia. ₉₃

Bowles argued that position with force and passion in a series of personal messages to Truman, Acheson, McGhee, and other senior administration officials. The key tactical problem, he recognized from the outset, was how to gain congressional approval for an Indian aid program of such magnitude. Although chariness might have been warranted in light of his recent experience with Congress, Bowles approached the problem with typically brash self-confidence. He was certain he could sell his program to most legislators by presenting "the communist danger here in India and South Asia as potentially a second China." Bowles's political sense told him that "there were not many Congressmen with the courage to stand up in the face of a persuasive statement of the all-out danger in this part of the world and a specific practical proposal for meeting this danger." ₉₄

In a letter to McGhee, he suggested that he found the following statement extremely effective in softening the stance of even the most determined congressional opponents of aid to India:

Here in my hand is a crystal ball and in it I see, five years from now, a Communist India associated with a Communist China and a Red Russia. In this ball I also see Congressional investigating committees falling all over themselves in an effort to find out just why, having failed in China because we were unwilling to spend even a small fraction of our armament program to strengthen the Chinese economy against Communist infiltration and exploitation, we then proceed to repeat the same fatal mistake in India. Members of the investigating committees seem to be supported by a very angry and somewhat frightened public. ₉₅

In order to present his views about India directly to senior administration officials and key members of Congress, Bowles returned to Washington briefly in January 1952. In a whirlwind series of meetings, briefings, appearances, and speeches Bowles drew on his Madison Avenue background to present the strongest possible case for increased aid to India. In a report to Under Secretary Webb, Bowles described U.S.-Indian relations as "surprisingly friendly," but warned that "if we lose India, we lose the entire area, except what we can hold by military force." Webb urged Bowles to dramatize India's importance to America's broader struggle with the communist world in his presentation to Congress, especially since many legislators regarded India as a marginal problem. ₉₆

Bowles had already decided to pursue precisely that strategy. Utilizing his closest friends on Capitol Hill, Connecticut senators William Benton--his former business partner--and Brien McMahon, the ambassador had distributed in advance to all members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee an eleven-page, off-the-record memorandum containing his personal views on India's critical importance. ₉₇ On January 16 he met in executive session with members of that committee to convey those views in person. Bowles placed great emphasis in his remarks on India's five-year plan, describing it as critical to the survival of capitalism and democracy in India. If the plan succeeded, he argued, the Indian standard of living would rise, the Indian political situation would stabilize, and the American position in Asia and the Middle East would be strengthened. On the other hand, "if we fail, we have another China on our hands, only this time it could be even worse because many other countries might fall, too." Several senators expressed sympathy with Bowles's views and did not balk when he asked their support for $250 million per year in U.S. aid over the next four years to bolster India's five-year plan.

Chairman Tom Connally was not one. The Texan bristled at Bowles's presumptuousness and made it clear in a number of testy exchanges that he would staunchly oppose any additional aid for India. When Bowles conceded in response to Connally's probing that he was "trying to get you to give a lot more [money]," the chairman exploded. "I know you are," he snarled, "and you will not get it with my vote, unless I change my views very radically. We cannot finance the whole world and we cannot finance India. You know good and well that the more money we give them the more they want." ₉₈ After the hearing, Connally told reporters that Bowles had "evaded" the crucial question of whether Nehru was hostile to the United States. "My own view," he offered, "is that Nehru is not friendly to the United States" and thus not deserving of American aid. ₉₉

State Department and White House experts generally agreed with Bowles's descriptions of the potential dangers that economic stagnation posed for India, even though most found Bowles's penchant for hyperbole a bit discomfiting. They did not share the ambassador's optimism about the prospects for prying additional money loose from Congress. Sensitive to the parsimonious sentiments about foreign aid emanating from Capitol Hill, in February the administration cut its planned fiscal year 1953 request to Congress for economic aid. The new proposal reduced the funds earmarked for India's economic development program to $70 million. Bowles, who had lobbied vigorously for a substantial increase in the economic commitment to India, was shocked. He fired off a protest to the State Department in which he characterized the decision as a "most disturbing" one that could represent "a blunder of extremely serious proportions." In a direct appeal to President Truman, the ambassador once again tried to set the India aid question within the context of the Cold War, warning that the failure of democracy in India would in all probability produce a disaster "substantially greater than [the] Communist victory in China." Bowles stressed the urgency of the situation and the minimal nature of the program that he was proposing while pleading for presidential intervention. ₁₀₀

He won a partial but limited victory with this appeal to higher authority. Truman ordered a reexamination of the administration's budget request for India in light of his ambassador's special plea and, as a result, the economic development program for India was targeted at $115 million; that figure was still $10 million less than the sum Bowles had strongly advocated for developmental assistance. Moreover, there was a second component to the Bowles program, an equally important one in his view, that the administration excluded entirely from its revised budget request. In addition to $125 million in economic development support, the ambassador had urged the administration to make another $125 million commitment in the form of dollar grants for India's purchase of cotton and wheat in the United States. According to Bowles's strategy, the first part of the program would provide technical assistance and supplies needed for the improvement of agricultural production under India's five-year plan. The second part would provide commodity grants that would support the plan indirectly by freeing dollar exchanges, expanding borrowing capacity, and generating local currency so that India could utilize its own resources more effectively. ₁₀₁

After much additional discussion and bureaucratic wrangling over the details of the Bowles program, both Secretary of State Acheson and Mutual Security Director W. Averell Harriman recommended against asking Congress for any additional aid for India. They raised some technical questions about the need for Bowles's proposed commodity grants, but their chief reservations were political. Authorizing legislation for the fiscal year 1953 foreign aid program had already been introduced before Congress and had been widely criticized by legislators in both chambers as too extravagant. Indeed, a House-Senate conference report slashed the administration's technical assistance recommendations, which included aid for India, by 32.5 percent. Under those circumstances, seeking additional money from Congress for commodity grants under that legislation was "now clearly out of the question." Nor, "in the absence of a critical emergency," could separate legislation for India be justified. Consequently, Acheson and Harriman urged Truman to inform Bowles of those unfortunate political realities while assuring him that his proposal would be fully considered in the development of the administration's program for the next fiscal year. ₁₀₂

Consummate Washington insiders, Acheson and Harriman recognized, as did Truman, that any president's influence with Congress could be expected to plummet during his closing months in office. That axiom of American political life carried particularly cruel implications for an unpopular, lame-duck president. As election year politics heated up, the problem became even more acute. Truman's foreign aid request was but one early victim of those larger forces. The decision of Republican presidential candidate Robert Taft to make an issue out of the embattled president's "give-away" program hopelessly politicized an already contentious subject, as did the decision of Harriman, Truman's point man for the mutual security program, to throw his hat in the Democratic ring. India served as a perfect foil for Taftite critics of the Democratic approach to foreign aid; not surprisingly, it inspired some of the most passionately partisan, if ill-informed, diatribes during the budget hearings. In a typical comment, one Republican representative railed against Bowles's "billion-dollar give-away program for India," which he characterized as a "boondoggle" that was both "fantastic and unworkable." The administration wanted to take dollars that represented "the sweat and toil of American labor" and spend them futilely "in grandiose, impracticable, global schemes." ₁₀₃ Asked another with contemptuous sarcasm: "In making this [proposed] contribution to India, are we not strengthening and are we not expending that money in a country where Russian influence holds them within a firm, iron grip?" ₁₀₄

In the face of this Republican-led onslaught, Bowles rushed back to Washington in early June to plead his case personally with Truman and Acheson one more time. Ever the realist, Acheson candidly told him that "it looked like a massacre to go to Congress for more money now." The secretary of state reminded Bowles that a new administration would take office in January and suggested that it would probably have a better chance of obtaining additional foreign aid dollars from Congress than one in its final months in office. Grasping at straws, Bowles implored Truman to at least ask Congress for additional funds so that the record could reflect the administration's commitment and effort. The president did direct the Budget Bureau to reexamine the ambassador's aid proposals for India one final time, but, as all concerned probably anticipated, it too sided with the Acheson-Harriman recommendation. ₁₀₅

On July 1 Truman forwarded the Budget Bureau report to Bowles in New Delhi. The president said his sympathies lay with Bowles's proposals, but Congress remained "anything but cooperative." "They have had a wave of hysteria," Truman observed sadly, "which has caused them to almost strip foreign aid and also the defense program." ₁₀₆

Much to the dismay of Bowles and Truman, in early July Congress authorized even more severe cuts in the India-aid program. The House Appropriations Committee chopped another 60 percent off Truman's foreign aid program, leaving India with only $34 million of the $115 million the administration had originally proposed. "The news hit here like [a] ton of bricks," Bowles informed White House counsel Charles Murphy. ₁₀₇ He immediately cabled Truman, expressing his shock at Congress's "reckless action" and imploring the president to send an emergency request to Congress for a restoration of the cuts. In a remarkable display of political clumsiness, Bowles asked Truman not only to request the full $115 million in development assistance originally proposed but to ask as well for $100 million in commodity assistance--even though the latter request had never made it through the State Department. ₁₀₈ In response to Bowles's emotional plea, Truman wrote his ambassador that while he too was "deeply concerned" by the big slash made in funds for India he saw no way to reopen the question before the next congressional session. ₁₀₉ On July 15 Truman publicly blasted Congress for its "exceedingly dangerous" cuts in the foreign aid program. He singled out India--"the largest democratic nation in all Asia"--as one of the most unfortunate victims of congressional stinginess. ₁₁₀

The unresponsiveness of the administration and Congress to what Bowles considered a matter of commanding importance took much of the wind out of his sails. Beginning almost from the day of his arrival in the subcontinent, the American envoy to India had undertaken what must rank among the most vigorous one-person lobbying campaigns on behalf of a foreign country ever conducted by an American diplomat. Bowles blitzed administration officials, legislators, media representatives, and numerous other influential private citizens with a veritable avalanche of information on India and personal pronouncements about India's importance to the United States. Typical of his efforts was a lengthy memorandum entitled "The Crucial Problem of India" that the ambassador sent to literally hundreds of politicians, journalists, and government officials early in 1952. Along with his other memoranda, progress reports, personal letters, speeches, and magazine articles, it formed part of an overall strategy geared toward building broad-based support for U.S. aid to India. He even tried from New Delhi to offer detailed advice and instructions to a group of private citizens who wanted to lobby for more aid to India. All those efforts proved insufficient in the face of what, in Bowles's judgment, was shortsightedness on the part of both the administration and Congress. "The trouble," he complained in a personal letter to a friend, "lies in a group of slide rule artists somewhere in the depth of the Budget Bureau and the State Department who insist on making foreign policy under the guise of economic analysis." ₁₁₁

Actually, the trouble with Bowles's program for India went much deeper. The program, and his strategy for selling it, suffered from a fundamental flaw: much of the American public, a majority within Congress, and a substantial number of senior administration officials continued to view India with a curious admixture of hostility, annoyance, and indifference. His old friend and business partner William Benton had tried to keep Bowles from losing perspective in a number of personal letters that emphasized the essential apathy toward India prevailing in much of official Washington. On April 15, 1952, the Connecticut Democrat remarked that you "may be surprised when I tell you I do not hear the word 'India' except in my correspondence with you and my avid reading of the New York Times--I do not hear the word or see the word from one month's end to another. India is so remote from the Senate, in this political year, that the country is never mentioned at all." ₁₁₂ A month later, the senator tried a more direct approach. He advised Bowles to relax and hold back for a couple of months on all the memoranda and progress reports since many of his correspondents were having difficulty absorbing them. "It's hard for you to realize how remote India is to people here in Congress," Benton wrote. "Chet, it is never mentioned; it is never talked about; it's as remote as the Antarctic. Thus it seems strange to have 'progress reports' coming in from this far off and remote and forgotten land." ₁₁₃

Bowles's urgent pleas for greater attention to and more money for India contained another fatal flaw. All his arguments hinged ultimately on a highly dubious proposition: namely, that India stood in grave danger of "falling" to communism. The officials who wielded the most clout in the administration--Truman, Acheson, Lovett, Harriman--never bought the logic of that contention. Too much evidence simply pointed in the opposite direction. The Indian Communist Party lacked national stature and appeal; it posed no significant political danger to the ruling Congress Party. Nehru, a hero of the independence movement and the designated political heir of Mahatma Gandhi, was the only Indian politician who commanded broad and deep popular support. The first nation-wide election of early 1952, which brought a landslide victory for Nehru and the Congress, demonstrated the prime minister's unassailable supremacy in Indian political life. India faced grave internal problems, to be sure; its economic difficulties were overwhelming. But India was not China; Nehru most certainly was not Chiang; and there was no Mao in sight. Bowles's tireless repetition of the China analogy may have impressed some less knowledgeable observers of international affairs, but his doomsday projections gained the ambassador little credibility with men as shrewd as Acheson and Harriman. ₁₁₄

John H. Ohly, Harriman's deputy, deftly dissected the faulty logic on which Bowles had pegged his expansive economic aid proposals. "He is probably right that every penny of this amount [$750 million over three years] is needed if the goals of the Indian 5-year plan are to be approached," the skeptical Ohly reasoned, "but it may also turn out that he has vastly overshot the mark in his estimate as to the necessity of approaching those goals in order to prevent a dangerous increase in Indian susceptibility to communism." Funds are not unlimited, he stressed, and "we cannot afford an economic development program unrelated to the communist threat." Moreover, the absence of a serious communist threat to India meant that U.S. aid, if it did succeed in bolstering the Indian economy, would just strengthen a regime whose interests had in the past frequently conflicted with those of the United States. "Is it in our best interests," Ohly asked pointedly, "to spend large sums to build strength in a neutral India which is thereby able to assume the leadership of the Asian countries?" ₁₁₅ Bowles, whose fervent embrace of India was probably based as much on sentiment and idealism as it was on Cold War geopolitics, never developed an effective response to that ticklish question.

Another problem with Bowles's aggressive advocacy for India stemmed from the Truman administration's solicitude for Pakistan. As America's envoy to India, Bowles could afford to ignore the likely impact of his proposed aid program on other nations; the State Department did not have that luxury. Acheson concisely captured the dilemma that Bowles's recommendations posed for U.S.-Pakistani relations. "Pakistan's need for assistance is correspondingly great and equally urgent," he emphasized to Harriman, "and it is essential as well that there be maintained a justifiable ratio between aid to India and Pakistan unless we are prepared to accept the possibility of Pakistan's alienation." ₁₁₆ Unwilling to offend a nation whose support they were actively cultivating, administration officials trimmed Bowles's program for India in part because of Pakistani sensibilities.

Bowles became aware of the critical interconnection between U.S. policy toward the two nations in November 1952. At that time, rumors swept New Delhi about Washington's plans for including Pakistan in the proposed Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO), igniting a fussilade of denunciations from the Indian government. Bowles, who had been kept in the dark about those secret negotiations, complained to Washington with as much vehemence as the Indians. Like them, he feared that Pakistan's inclusion in a regional defense organization would increase Pakistani military power, jeopardize Indian security, and lead inevitably to another sharp downturn in Indo-American relations. He flooded Washington with a series of near-apocalyptic warnings about the regional consequences of such a commitment. Senior officials in the lame-duck Truman administration assured the aroused ambassador that no final decision had been reached on the matter. ₁₁₇ The election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president in November 1952 ensured that a definitive decision regarding America's military and economic commitments in South Asia would rest with Republicans rather than Democrats. It also virtually guaranteed that Bowles, one of the most politically partisan of American ambassadors, would have nothing to do with that decision.

On balance, the tenure of Chester Bowles in India led to a mild improvement in the tone and substance of Indo-American relations. At the close of the Truman administration, a State Department assessment noted soberly that "US-Indian relations showed steady though not spectacular progress" through the end of 1952, "thereby continuing a trend which has been observed for more than a year." ₁₁₈

Although Bowles's ambassadorship helped bring a friendlier tone and a deeper level of understanding to Indo-American relations, the bilateral relationship still rested on a weak foundation. The administration's lukewarm response to Bowles's economic aid proposals highlighted the core problem. That response was shaped, to be sure, by political realities. The persistent hostility of a significant segment of Congress to the very notion of aiding a country whose support for American foreign policy initiatives was less than 100 percent severely circumscribed the administration's freedom of action. But even if India had been a less controversial issue in the marble halls of the Capitol, and Congress had proven more pliable, top Washington decision makers would have resisted a major economic commitment to India for several basic reasons. The country promised few tangible economic and strategic rewards to American Cold War planners. Nor did it face an imminent communist threat. Since American resources were limited, why invest substantial dollars in the economic development efforts of a country on the Cold War periphery, a country whose nonaligned approach to world affairs, moreover, posed a constant nuisance to the United States?

Out of either ignorance or the lack of perspective from which envoys accredited to foreign governments often succumb, Bowles never managed to grasp fully the broader forces that pushed India to the margins of American global interests. Instead, he charged Washington with a grievous conceptual failure. A week before the November 1952 presidential election, Bowles confided his frustrations to Acheson in a pleaful letter. "If the [State] Department feels that I am wrong," he reasoned, "I should be told that I am wrong, and my proposals for economic assistance should be modified on the basis of that decision. But if it is agreed that my analysis is reasonably correct we should proceed to build a program that will fit the requirements of the situation. In other words, I believe that the time has come either to reject my views or to act upon them." ₁₁₉

Diplomacy, like life, rarely offers such simple either-or choices. Washington planners had not rejected Bowles's analysis of India's problems entirely, but neither had they accepted his proposition that the solution of those problems was vital to American interests. Bowles's frenetic efforts undoubtedly raised public consciousness about India; they did not result, however, in a significant alteration in official assessments of India's relative importance to the United States. As the Truman administration came to an end, India remained for the United States as it had been ever since independence: an area of secondary, not primary, interest.

---

Note 1: Alan G. Kirk, U.S. Ambassador in the Soviet Union, to DOS, June 27, 1950, FRUS, 1950, 7:195-97; Henderson to DOS, June 27, 1950, ibid., pp. 204-6; Acheson to the Embassy in India, June 27, 1950, ibid. Back.

Note 2: India, Parliamentary Debates: Official Record, 1950, 5, pt. 2: cols. 223, 236. Back.

Note 3: Mathews to David A. Robertson, Politico-Military Adviser, NEA, July 3, 1950, MAP Miscellaneous 1950 folder, NEA Lot 484, DSR; Mathews to McGhee, September 12, 1950, Briefings for McGhee folder, SOA Lot 54 D 341, DSR. Back.

Note 4: Henderson to DOS, June 29, 1950, FRUS, 1950, 7:230-31; Henderson to DOS, July 26, 1950, 611.91/7-2650, DSR.. Back.

Note 5: Quoted in Gopal, Nehru, 2:101. Back.

Note 6: Ibid., pp. 101-2. Back.

Note 7: Henderson to DOS, June 30, 1950, FRUS, 1950, 7:266-67. Back.

Note 8: Nehru to Acheson, July 17, 1950, ibid., pp. 407-8. Back.

Note 9: Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 544; Henderson to DOS, July 17, 1950, FRUS, 1950, 7:409-10. Back.

Note 10: Acheson to the Embassy in India, July 17, 1950, FRUS, 1950, 7:412-13. On the Indian peace initiative, see also William Whitney Stueck, Jr., The Road to Confrontation: American Policy toward China and Korea, 1947-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 198-200; Burton I. Kaufman, The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command (New York: Knopf, 1986), pp. 53-55; H. W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 44-45; Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India's Economic Development, 1947-1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), pp. 55-56. Back.

Note 11: FRUS, 1950, 7:466-68, 499-501, 585-87, 609-11; Gopal, Nehru, 2:102-4. Back.

Note 12: NYT, August 30, 1950, p. 14. Back.

Note 13: New Republic, "India and Peace in Asia," 123 (August 28, 1950):6. See also Christian Science Monitor, August 22, 1950. Back.

Note 14: Quoted in Gopal, Nehru, 2:104. Back.

Note 15: Henderson to DOS, August 7, 1950, 611.91/8-750, DSR; memcon between Mathews and Pandit, August 4, 1950, 611.91/8-450, DSR. Back.

Note 16: Bevin to Franks, July 18, 1950, FO 371/84088, PRO. Back.

Note 17: Henderson to DOS, September 18, 1950, FRUS, 1950, 7:733-34; Brands, Specter of Neutralism, pp. 45-47. Back.

Note 18: Henderson to DOS, September 20, 1950, FRUS, 1950, 7:742-43; memcon between Hubert Graves, Counselor of the British Embassy, and Merchant, September 27, 1950, ibid., pp. 793-94. Back.

Note 19: Ibid., pp. 797-98, 808-10, 869-73. Back.

Note 20: Nehru to Chief Ministers, October 8, 1950, JN: LCM, 2:222; Gopal, Nehru, 2:103-4. Back.

Note 21: FRUS, 1950, 7:903-6; Stueck, Road to Confrontation, pp. 233-34. Back.

Note 22: NYT, October 12, 1950, p. 30; New York Herald Tribune, October 5, 1950. Back.

Note 23: Nye to CRO, October 27, 1950, DO 35/2976, PRO. See also Gopal, Nehru, 2:105. Back.

Note 24: Memcon between McGhee and Pandit, October 26, 1950, 611.91/10-2650, DSR. Back.

Note 25: Ibid. Back.

Note 26: U.S. Delegation at the UN to DOS, October 17, 1950, India-U.S. Relations folder, SOA Lot 54 D 341, DSR. Back.

Note 27: Mathews to McGhee, September 11, 1950, with enclosure, Briefings for Mr. McGhee folder, ibid.; memcon between McGhee and Pandit, October 26, 1950, 611.91/10-2650, DSR; Henderson to DOS, October 22, 1950, 891.2311/10-2250, DSR; Frank K. Roberts, Deputy High Commissioner in India, to Liesching, August 5, 1950, FO 371/84094, PRO; Deshmukh, The Course of My Life, pp. 161-62. Back.

Note 28: McGhee to Acheson, November 3, 1950, with enclosure, 611.91/11-350, DSR. Back.

Note 29: Ibid. See also Kennedy to McGhee, December 27, 1950, India-U.S. Relations folder, SOA Lot 54 D 341, DSR. Back.

Note 30: FRUS, 1950, 5:1469-80; Kennedy to McGhee, December 27, 1950. Back.

Note 31: Henderson to DOS, November 6, 1950, 891.231/11-650, DSR. Back.

Note 32: Roberts to CRO, November 7 and 10, 1950, DO 35/2976, PRO; Nye to Liesching, November 24, 1950, ibid. Back.

Note 33: Henderson to DOS, November 2, 1950, 791.13/11-250, DSR; Acheson to the Embassy in India, November 13, 1950, 791.13/11-1350, DSR; Henderson to DOS, November 5, 1950, 791.13/11-550, DSR; Roberts to CRO, November 10, 1950, DO 35/2976, PRO. Back.

Note 34: McGhee to Acheson, December 15, 1950, 891.03/12-1550, DSR; memcon between McGhee and Pandit, November 6, 1950, 611.91/11-650, DSR. Back.

Note 35: Henderson to DOS, December 17, 1950, 891.2311/12-1450, DSR. Back.

Note 36: Papers prepared by NEA, December 21, 1950, 891.231/12-1950, DSR; McGhee to Webb, December 19, 1950, 891.231/12-1950, DSR. Back.

Note 37: Atlanta Constitution, January 27, 1951, p. 1. Back.

Note 38: Washington Post, January 30, 1951, p. 10; Eleanor Roosevelt to Acheson, January 15, 1951, 891.49/1-551, DSR; Dorothy Norman to Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, February 28, 1951, Senatorial Research Files, Foreign Policy-India 1951 folder, Hubert H. Humphrey Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minn. The following newspapers also strongly supported immediate aid for India: NYT, Christian Science Monitor, Cincinnati Enquirer, Salt Lake City Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Louisville Courier-Journal, and Philadelphia Inquirer. Their editorials are reprinted in Congressional Record, 82d Cong., 1st sess. (1951), 1283-85. In a public opinion poll conducted throughout the country between March 26 and 31, 1951, 59% of those Americans polled favored giving grain to India, 31% opposed, and 10% had no opinion. See The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-1971, edited by George H. Gallup, 4 vols. (New York: Random House, 1972), 2:978-79. Back.

Note 39: Congressional Record, 82d Cong., 1st sess. (1951), 112; draft letter from Javits to the editor, NYT, February 1, 1951, Food for India 1951 folder, series 8, box 10, Jacob Javits Papers, State University of New York, Stony Brook. Back.

Note 40: Letter to Truman, January 30, 1951, DOS Correspondence, 1951-52, folder 26, CF, HSTP, HSTL; McGhee, Envoy to the Middle World, pp. 52, 298; statement by Humphrey, April 24, 1951, Press Release Files, Foreign Policy, 1951 folder, Humphrey Papers. Back.

Note 41: Summary of secretary of state's daily meeting, January 16, 1951, 891.03/1-1751, DSR. Back.

Note 42: U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Executive Sessions, Historical Series (1951), 82d Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977), 3, pt. 1:27-51 (hereafter volumes in this series are cited as Executive Sessions); Henderson to DOS, January 27, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2090-91; NYT, January 26, 1951, p. 1; memo by Senator H. Alexander Smith's staff, January 30, 1951, box 108, H. Alexander Smith Papers, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. Back.

Note 43: McGhee to Acheson, January 30, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2095-97. Back.

Note 44: Ibid., pp. 2103-6. Back.

Note 45: Summary of Secretary of State's daily meeting, January 30, 1951, DSR. Back.

Note 46: DSB, 24 (February 26, 1951), 349-51. For various preliminary drafts of Truman's message, see Indian Grain Message folder, David D. Lloyd Files, HSTP, HSTL. Back.

Note 47: House Committee on Foreign Affairs, India Emergency Assistance Act of 1951: Hearings, February 20-23, 1951; NYT, February 16, 1951, p. 4; House Committee on Foreign Affairs, India Emergency Assistance Act of 1951, 82d Cong., 1st sess., March 5, 1951, House Report No. 185. Back.

Note 48: Vorys to Hoover, February 20, 1951, box 33, John M. Vorys Papers, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, OH; Hoover to Vorys, February 28, 1951, ibid. The minority report is included in House Report no. 185, pp. 33-34. For similar statements, see Congressional Record, 82d Cong., 1st sess. (1951), 1403-4, 1951-55. Back.

Note 49: Memcon between Mathews and B. K. Nehru, Financial Counselor of the Indian Embassy, March 9, 1951, 891.03/3-951, DSR; Henderson to DOS, March 13, 1951, 891.03/3-1351, DSR; NYT, March 10, 1951, p. 2 and April 26, 1951, p. 8; Washington Post, March 10, 1951, p. 4; Burton Y. Berry, Acting Assistant Secretary of State, NEA, to McGhee, March 28, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2132-33. The full text of Kumarappa's speech, "India and the Power Struggle," can be found in box 82, Vorys Papers. Back.

Note 50: Henderson to DOS, March 13, 1951, 891.03/3-1351, DSR; Nehru to Chief Ministers, March 21, 1951, JN: LCM, 2:371; Henderson to DOS, March 24, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2130-32. Back.

Note 51: Henderson to DOS, March 24, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2131. Back.

Note 52: William J. McWilliams, Director of the Executive Secretariat, to Acheson, March 19, 1951, 891.03/3-1951, DSR. Back.

Note 53: McGhee to DOS, March 26, 1951, 891.03/3-2651, DSR; McGhee, Envoy to the Middle World, p. 298; McFall to Tom Connally, April 3, 1951, S. 872, 82-1 folder, Records of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Records of the U.S. Senate, RG 46, NA; note by Connelly on Cabinet meeting, April 9, 1951, Post-Presidential File, HSTP, HSTL. Back.

Note 54: Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Executive Sessions, (1951), 3, pt. 1:359ff. Back.

Note 55: NYT, April 22, 1951, IV, p. 4 and April 26, 1951, p. 8; Washington Post, April 7, 1951, p. 11 and April 10, 1951, p. 10. Back.

Note 56: Quoted in Gopal, Nehru, 2:137. Back.

Note 57: Henderson to DOS, April 12, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2142-43; memcon between Pandit and McGhee, April 14, 1951, ibid., 2144-46; Henderson to DOS, April 13, 1951, 891.03/4-1351, DSR. Back.

Note 58: Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Executive Sessions, (1951), 3, pt. 1:364ff.; Henderson to DOS, April 22, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2150-51. Back.

Note 59: Quoted in Henderson to DOS, April 30, 1951, 891.03/4-3051, DSR. Back.

Note 60: Quoted in Congressional Record, 82d Cong., 1st sess. (1951), 5739. Back.

Note 61: NYT, May 3, 1951, p. 2. Back.

Note 62: NYT, May 6, 1951, p. 23; memcon between B. K. Nehru and Mathews, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2153-55. Back.

Note 63: Acheson to the Embassy in India, May 2, 1951, 891.03/5-251, DSR; Henderson to DOS, May 6, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2157-58; India, Parliamentary Debates, 1951, 11: col. 359. Back.

Note 64: Quoted in Congressional Record, 82d Cong., 1st sess. (1951), 5256ff.; memo prepared for James P. Richards, "Differences between House and Senate Versions of S. 872," May 28, 1951, box 82, Vorys Papers. Back.

Note 65: DSB, 25 (July 2, 1951), 37; NYT, August 7, 1951, p. 4, and August 8, 1951, p. 6. Back.

Note 66: Nye to CRO, May 17, 1951, FO 371/92870, PRO; Henderson to DOS, June 7, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2167-68. Back.

Note 67: Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Sessions (1951), 3, pt. 1:369. Back.

Note 68: Chester Bowles, Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life, 1941-1969 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 572; K. L. Shridharani, "Nehru's Neutrality," New Republic 124 (May 21, 1951):8-9. Back.

Note 69: Berry to Acheson, with enclosure, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:1664-88. Back.

Note 70: Notes of under secretary of state's meeting, April 6, 1951, DSR; Henderson to DOS, March 10, 1951, 611.91/3-1051, DSR. Back.

Note 71: Notes of under secretary of state's meeting, June 20, 1951, DSR. Back.

Note 72: OIR, "India's Political and Economic Position in the East-West Conflict," report no. 5526, May 15, 1951, DSR. Back.

Note 73: NIE-23, "India's Position in the East-West Conflict," September 4, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2174-79. Back.

Note 74: NSC 98/1, January 22, 1951, ibid., pp. 1650-52. Back.

Note 75: NIE-23, ibid., p. 2179. See also NEA Paper, "Means to Combat India's Policy of Neutralism," August 30, 1951, ibid., pp. 2172-74. Back.

Note 76: Henderson to DOS, September 6, 1951, ibid., pp. 2179-81; McGhee to Henderson, September 14, 1951, ibid., p. 2182; Henderson to DOS, September 17, 1951, ibid., pp. 2182-85; Henderson to DOS, September 6, 1951, 611.91/9-1351, DSR. Back.

Note 77: Washington Post, August 28, 1951, p. 8. Back.

Note 78: NYT, August 28, 1951, p. 22; New Republic 125 (September 10, 1951):6-7. See also Washington Evening Star, August 27, 1951; Time 58 (August 6, 1951):19. Back.

Note 79: Washington Daily News, August 28, 1951. Back.

Note 80: Chicago Tribune, September 1, 1951, p. 6. Back.

Note 81: David E. Lilienthal, "Are We Losing India?" Collier's 127 (June 23, 1951):13-15, 42-46. Back.

Note 82: William C. Bullitt, "The Old Ills of Modern India," Life 31 (October 1, 1951):111-26. For more sympathetic, although still critical, assessments of Nehru's foreign policy, see Robert Trumbull, "Nehru's Dilemma--West or East?," NYT Magazine (June 10, 1951):14ff.; and Robert Trumbull, "Nehru Answers Some Basic Questions," ibid., November 11, 1951, pp. 9ff. Back.

Note 83: Congressional Record, 82d Cong., 1st sess., August 28, 1951, 10743. For similarly critical comments by Republican Senators Styles Bridges, George Malone, and Pat McCarran, see ibid., 10743, 10766, and 10999. Back.

Note 84: Henderson to DOS, September 6, 1951, FRUS, 1951, 6, pt. 2:2179-81. Back.

Note 85: F. S. Tomlinson of the British Embassy in the United States to FO, August 25, 1951, FO 371/92884, PRO; minute by Phillips, September 4, 1951, ibid. Back.

Note 86: Nye to P. C. Gordon Walker, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, November 27, 1951, FO 371/92870, PRO; minute by Patrick Johnson, June 25, 1951, ibid.; Tomlinson to FO, August 25, 1951, FO 371/92884, PRO; Nye to the British Embassy in the United States, September 3, 1951, ibid. Back.

Note 87: For the broader perspective of American national security policy during the Truman administration, see especially Leffler, A Preponderance of Power. For a wide-ranging discussion of the national-security framework, see Howard Jones and Randall B. Woods, "Origins of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East: Recent Historiography and the National Security Imperative," with comments by Emily S. Rosenberg, Anders Stephanson, and Barton J. Bernstein, Diplomatic History 17 (Spring 1993):251-310. Back.

Note 88: Bowles, Promises to Keep; Merrill, Bread and the Ballot, pp. 79-80. On Henderson's career, see especially Brands, Inside the Cold War. On Bowles, see especially Howard B. Schaffer, New Dealer in the Cold War: The Role of Chester Bowles in U.S. Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). Back.

Note 89: Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Sessions (1951), 2, pt. 2:417, 441; memoranda in Bowles Nomination folder, Box 102, H. Alexander Smith Papers. Back.

Note 90: Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Sessions (1951), 2, pt. 2:389-91, 405-6, 433, 497. Back.

Note 91: Congressional Record, 82d Cong., 1st sess., October 9, 1951, 12841-52. Back.

Note 92: Norman Cousins to Bowles, November 26, 1951, folder 49, box 84, Chester Bowles Papers, Yale University, New Haven Conn.; Chester Bowles, Ambassador's Report (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954); Pandit, The Scope of Happiness, p. 261. Back.

Note 93: Bowles to Jessup, November 19 and December 6, 1951, folder 262, box 95, Bowles Papers; Bowles to Truman, December 11, 1951, folder 287, box 96, ibid.; Bowles memo, "The Crucial Problem of India," February 1952, folder 224, box 93, ibid.; Bowles to Murphy, December 11, 1951, Murphy Files, HSTP, HSTL. For an excellent examination of Bowles's approach to Indian economic development, see Merrill, Bread and the Ballot, pp. 80-95. Back.

Note 94: Bowles to Jessup, November 19, 1951, folder 262, box 95, Bowles Papers. Back.

Note 95: Bowles to McGhee, November 8, 1951, folder 275, box 96, ibid. Back.

Note 96: Notes of undersecretary of state's meeting, January 16, 1952, DSR; Chester Bowles speech, "The Partnership Which Must Not Fail," Hartford, January 18, 1952, in Vital Speeches 18 (March 1, 1952):304-8; Chester Bowles, "Asia Challenges Us Through India," NYT Magazine (March 23, 1952):7ff. Back.

Note 97: Bowles to Benton, January 3, 1952, folder 16, box 81, Bowles Papers; Bowles to Brien McMahon, January 3, 1952, ibid. On January 4, 1952 the United States and India concluded a Technical Cooperation Agreement under the Point 4 program; it was that program, specifically, that Bowles sought to utilize in funneling substantially greater developmental aid to India. Excellent analyses of the aid strategy developed by Bowles can be found in Merrill, Bread and the Ballot, especially pp. 80-95; and Schaffer, New Dealer in the Cold War, esp. chap. 4. Back.

Note 98: Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Executive Sessions (1952), 4:76, 87. Back.

Note 99: NYT, January 17, 1952, p. 12. Back.

Note 100: Berry to Acheson, January 16, 1952, 611.91/1-1652, DSR; Lincoln Gordon of the White House Staff to Harriman, January 14, 1952, India 1952 folder, box 341, W. Averell Harriman Papers, LC; Philip Coombs, Executive Director, President's Commission on Material Resources, to Bowles, March 4, 1952, folder 46, box 84, Bowles Papers; Acheson to the Embassy in India, February 11, 1952, 891.00-TA/2-552, DSR; FRUS, 1952-1954, 11, pt. 2:1634-37. Back.

Note 101: Acheson to the Embassy in India, March 3, 1952, FRUS, 1952-1954, 11, pt. 2:1637-38; Berry to Acheson, February 8, 1952, folder 228, box 93, Bowles Papers; Bowles to Benton, February 25, 1952, folder 124, box 88, ibid.; Richard E. Neustadt of the White House Staff to Murphy, February 25, 1952, Murphy Files, HSTP, HSTL. Back.

Note 102: T. Eliot Weil, Deputy Director, SOA, to Berry, May 19, 1952, FRUS, 1952-1954, 11, pt. 2:1641-43; Acheson and Harriman to Truman, June 5, 1952, ibid., pp. 1646-48; Neustadt to Murphy, May 7, 1952, Murphy Files, HSTP, HSTL; Bowles to Truman, May 22, 1952, India folder, Subject File, PSF, ibid. Back.

Note 103: Remarks of Representative William G. Bray, March 27, 1952, Congressional Record, 82d Cong., 2d sess., 3081-82. On Harriman's candidacy and the Harriman-Taft political feud, see Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986 (New York: Morrow, 1992), pp. 486-92. Back.

Note 104: Remarks of Representative Edward E. Cox, May 21, 1952, Congressional Record, 82d Cong., 2d sess., 5653. See also NYT, March 21, 1952, p. 6; Arthur Krock column, ibid., May 27, 1952, p. 26. Back.

Note 105: Memcon between Acheson and Bowles, June 9, 1952, FRUS, 1952-1954, 11, pt. 2:1648-52. Back.

Note 106: Memcon between Acheson and Truman, June 12, 1952, ibid., p. 1652; Truman to Bowles, with enclosure, July 1, 1952, ibid., pp. 1653-54. Back.

Note 107: Bowles to Murphy, July 7, 1952, Murphy Files, HSTP, HSTL; Congressional Record, June 28, 1952, 82d Cong., 2d sess., 8488-93. Back.

Note 108: Bowles to Truman, July 5, 1952, FRUS, 1952-1954, 11, pt. 2:1655-57. Back.

Note 109: Ibid., p. 1657; Kennedy to Bowles, July 10, 1952, folder 266, box 95, Bowles Papers. Back.

Note 110: Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1952-1953 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), pp. 478-80; "Current Economic Developments," July 21, 1952, FRUS, 1952-1954, 1, pt. 1:514-16. Back.

Note 111: Bowles to Abram Chayes, October 10, 1952, folder 39, box 83, Bowles Papers; Bowles to Cousins, March 24, 1952, folder 49, box 84, ibid.; Bowles memo, "The Crucial Problem of India," February 1952. Back.

Note 112: Benton to Bowles, April 15, 1952, folder 17, box 81, Bowles Papers. Back.

Note 113: Benton to Bowles, May 13, 1952, ibid. Back.

Note 114: Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 36-38; Judith M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 357-58; Gopal, Nehru, 2:159-65; DOS Intelligence Brief No. 1181, "India's First General Elections and Their Results," June 17, 1952, India folder, Subject File, PSF, HSTP, HSTL; OIR, "India's First General Elections and Their Results," June 19, 1952, report no. 5852, DSR. Back.

Note 115: Ohly to George Elsey of the White House Staff, October 1, 1952, India 1952 folder, box 341, Harriman Papers. Back.

Note 116: Acheson to Harriman, February 8, 1952, India--Bowles folder, Subject File, PSF, HSTP, HSTL. Back.

Note 117: Bowles to Kennedy, January 29, 1953, folder 268, box 95, Bowles Papers; Bowles to G. L. Mehta, February 1, 1954, folder 434, box 146, ibid. Back.

Note 118: Acheson to the Embassy in India, January 12, 1953, 611.91/1-1253, DSR. Back.

Note 119: Bowles to Acheson, October 28, 1952, FRUS, 1952-1954, 11, pt. 2:1669. Back.

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The Cold War on the Periphery