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3. Mutual Defense Assistance Program, July 1949–January 1950
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32 nato before the korean war 3 Mutual Defense Assistance Program July 1949–January 1950 Anticipating the Bill The contentious congressional debate over the ratification of the treaty derailed the concerted effort on the part of the European allies to win an immediate U.S. response to their urgent requests for military aid. In fact, once the treaty had been signed, Article 3 superseded Article 5 as the priority for members of the Brussels Pact. Although the meeting of the UN General Assembly dominated headlines on April 5, the Western Union submitted its package of requests of that day. The administration shunted it aside until more detailed information was available. At least this was its rationalization. For many friends of the treaty, the mingling of aid to the allies’ military establishments with the guarantees of the treaty would be a gratuitous obstacle to its ratification. Yet it was understood by advocates and adversaries alike that the military assistance program, formulated before the treaty was signed, would be the administration ’s first order of business after ratification. As early as March 1948, in reaction to the Communist coup in Prague, State and Defense officials produced a Title VI to the proposed economic assistance bill. If it failed to be included in the future Marshall Plan, it was not because of the absence of Western Europe’s need for military aid; rather, the House Foreign Affairs Committee worried about the implications of an open-ended program for the health of the U.S. economy.1 The machinery for implementing such a program, after all, was in place by the winter of 1949. Two weeks before the treaty was signed the JCS had even come up with a recommended figure of $995,647,000 for Western Union nations , a figure that the Foreign Assistance Correlation Committee (FACC) lowered to $830,850,000 on April 5, and the Bureau of Budget furthered lowered to $817,630,000 on April 15. On April 20, 1949, the president approved $830,600,000 for the Brussels Pact members.2 While the administration was responsive to the requests presented by the Brussels Pact allies immediately after the signing of the treaty, it was even more responsive, as noted in Chapter 2, to the delays demanded by Congress. The con32 mutual defense assistance program 33 tents of the hearings and debates over ratification of the treaty gave the administration ample warning of the trials ahead. Opponents of military aid had forced the administration to accept the treaty as a bar to aggression completely apart from any military aid. Supplies sent abroad would be only those not needed by the U.S. military, and none of the aid would interfere in any way with the economic recovery program. Despite these concessions, the enemies of the treaty were convinced that a secret understanding had been made between the administration and the European allies. The inability or the unwillingness of the defenders of the treaty to give details of a military aid program nurtured these suspicions. As the ratification process came to an end, the administration found itself in a dilemma. It recognized that a failure to follow up the implications of the treaty with an aid bill could seriously affect Europe’s ability—and will—to resist Soviet aggression and, at the same time, understood that a major assistance program could harm the allies’ economic recovery efforts. Not least of its concerns was the political damage that exposure of the inextricable connections between the treaty and a military assistance program would do to the administration’s relations with a restive Congress. Such was the situation in Washington when the MAP bill was introduced in the House and referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs on the same day—July 25—that the president signed the instrument of ratification.3 To calm the storm of criticism that the administration knew would follow the formal request for military aid, bipartisan advocates of the Atlantic alliance joined State Department spokesmen to mount a campaign on behalf of military aid in advance of its introduction in the Congress. Demonstration of widespread support for military aid was all the more important given division within the administration itself. Edwin G. Nourse, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, exacerbated those divisions when he suggested that the costs of arming Western Europe be squeezed from the military budget.4 ECA officials, for their part, were understandably concerned that any military aid program would impact the effectiveness...