Arcadia

Every spring the elephantine body of the Mutual Security Program trundles exhaustedly to a stop, and trembling waits for a reluctant Congress to feed it intravenously. The meagre nutrient is introduced, the bulky apparatus of foreign assistance climbs back on its weary legs to waddle inefficiently through another year.

The Congress, evidently, has grown used to considering this pathetic beast the lean and speedy little greyhound that was the Marshall Plan. Those Appropriations Committee members who have the hallucination are likely to find the President's brilliant new five-year-old appropriation plan an annoying and unnecessary demand. Before their more sensible colleagues will want to approve of long-range development assistance, they will have to get familiar with a concept decades old in theory: precise and careful economic planning.

The proposal Kennedy outlined yesterday asks for no more money than the Eisenhower January message did. It pleads for an administrative overhaul--including the consolidation of small agencies--that will make possible what the old grants and loans could never do, "setting realistic targets and sound standards." It establishes controls to ensure that the politicians and economists of poor nations take development seriously. If the controls work at all, planners will not wish to waste their funds on television sets for the more gracious living rooms in Pnom Penh. And American administrators can, with a little tact, free the program's strictness from the infuriating paternalism, of previous years.

The archaie aid program will play a poor part in getting the new Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to meet American demands for more multilateral aid. The U.S. plans to ask Japan and Western European nations to contribute an annual one per cent of their gross national products to overseas assistance. The OECD, which will employ the world's best planning minds, will react very rudely to the prospect of handling America's funds through the old and clumsy beast.

Not quite all is pleasant in Kennedy's projected foreign aid Arcadia. A few familiar gnomes will still spoil the revels of economist-nymphs: tied ("Buy American") funds and too pronounced a preference for hard loans repayable only in dollars. Nor has the President entirely exorcised the most offensive ghoul of Eisenhower days, the irritating insistance that foreign nations ought to grow more the way American did.

But the planners can't be restrained; if the program is adopted they will dance anyway. Of course of the Congress will continue to fight though a five-year plan seems the least that the Executive Branch can reasonably demand. Hopefully the majority of House and Senate will take their first chance to acknowledge the incredible importance of intelligent planning.

But the planners can't be restrained; if the program is adopted they will dance anyway. Of course of the Congress will continue to fight though a five-year plan seems the least that the Executive Branch can reasonably demand. Hopefully the majority of House and Senate will take their first chance to acknowledge the incredible importance of intelligent planning.