Conversation 752-014

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John, how are you?

Good.

How are you?

How are you doing?

I was sitting over here, so you can relax a little bit.

I'm having a hard time.

Are you going to Congress?

Are you going to Congress or yours?

I will not claim eternity of that much.

Let's get a picture.

Direction.

We'll look happy that we just got the bill back.

If we want.

We don't want to look away from it.

Let me start by explaining what is obvious, which I hope is most of you are not going to say what other people are going to bring on questions.

See if you would like a cold drink or a hot drink.

We're all 15, close.

Kind of icy.

Icy.

Okay, bye.

You have a lot of A.I.D.

directors who have more tenacity and more skill than anybody that's ever had a job.

And you have a superior.

You have lessons.

The way you've done that, the way you've gotten the profile down, the way you've gotten better people in, not very widely allowed, getting a lot of screening, the way, too, that you've got an emphasis, you know, over where it really belongs in the area,

you know, like to tell people in the population, we ever thought that could come around.

You've done all these things, and I want you to be more aware than you would think, because I had a long time interest in foreign aid, you know, and I've supported it quite strongly over the years, for reasons that most of the so-called do-gooders would never understand.

I support it because it's in our interest.

I think the humanitarian is very nice,

the only way to justify taxing the American people in order to feed somebody else on a permanent basis is the interest of the American people.

And the interest of the American people, of course, are certainly, that's where the green comes down to.

So these are some of the things we've been thinking about.

What do you see for its future?

Is that the future?

Well, I...

And I appreciate that you're giving this time today.

At some point, though, I asked you an opportunity to visit me sometime before the convention.

And I think that after that story, I'd like to do something else.

I thought we needed some advice and some guidance.

Of course, there's a motion over there.

Last evening, sir, we got to get another hurdle over the cliff over that motion.

I'm not, I'm not, I don't like it, but I'm not discouraged to do it.

You have to work through the household.

Yeah, well, that's where we're working heavily.

And I started to say, we're talking about one of our basic problems is we have so many crooks in this business.

We have so many people out of state.

And they don't get coordinated very well.

And you can predict this to me, but the problem is that

and the executive and the government, there are so many people that understand that you don't gain much taking the Congress on, face-on conversation.

You've got something.

They have a committee system.

There are some PowerPoints.

You don't get everything you want, but what you're going to get is you get better.

You don't get everything you want, but what you're going to get, you get better without confrontations.

And the fact of this business was really my program.

They showed me the program last time.

Of course, at that point, people, they didn't say anything, but they just backed away from it.

And that's, it was clear to me that for the first time since I did this job three and a half years ago,

It was in my hands up until then.

We had the Peterson Task Force and all sorts of people here and there that were in government that were reorganizing.

I have to tell you, this was investigated about 18 times.

And we were in just a whole operation.

And we said, salvage what you can.

And from the very beginning, since the position we had in this room, you know,

I still think it was.

It is.

And after the decision was made, they were going to go and do some tasks to take care of this congressional mandate.

They came up with a report, and there was a long delay, and so on, and a lot of things went on.

And finally, we got to get in front of our door situation.

Since that time, instead of

referring to everybody in the State Department or elsewhere, and now honoring you.

I just, you know, hail the best in the cabinet.

My original intention after Peterson was to try to sell it to Congress and then the whole thing to get somebody else to run it.

Such bad drug wouldn't do that.

So that's true.

And it's always a good thing.

Now, what I will ask this out to people is asking what it is you'd like me to do.

Now, one of the basic problems we're able to get into is, you know, we have so many losses.

Yeah, we're part of the State Department, which is good in a way.

Which gives us real problems because it isn't Bill Rogers or the Undersecretary.

You have bureaucracy.

It's about the third or fourth level now.

I mean, all the decisions that get in every act, it tries to tell you what you can't do.

So the Secretary and the Undersecretary are busy with all sorts of formalities.

How do they...

Right.

Well, what I intend to do, unless you tell me what I did,

a few days you're going to get a report of where we are as we go into fiscal 73, the last redirection program.

It will be pretty well operational by the end of December, by the end of this term.

We'll have to turn around.

We still have some problems.

We have reduced our overseas staff by about 25,000 people.

37% of the university staff are actually hungry.

We have a very sizable problem because many of these people have tenure in the civil service and the foreign service.

And I thought the tenure system on the university was tough, but this is just as bad.

particularly in the foreign service.

It's in the foreign service.

I think that's worse than civil service, actually.

They have a protective society.

Civil service is just a great big mess.

Foreign service, for Jesus Christ, you've never been taken on.

Well, the difficulty is seeing these foreign service officers are interchangeable.

State, aid, USIA.

State has its own retirement system.

USIA was founded 20 years ago.

Aid being a temporary agency never has been.

So while these people have retirement rights,

We can't retire a foreign service officer until age 70 unless he wants to retire.

Well, if he's an A.O.D.

If he's an A.O.D., then what?

Yeah, we've got a certain amount of them.

And my predecessors had tried to get Wayne Hayes.

Wayne Hayes is a driver's seat on this one.

He's the chairman of the subject at A.O.D.

And he's a driver, and he's a skipper.

But we've taken him on, and we've got him on our side, and he has a room.

And in this office, there must be a market section, and maybe he finishes him in the house.

He has got a proposal that you, AIDs, Foreign Service Officers, be eligible to retire under the Foreign Service Retirement System.

I think we can keep it in because our Jenkins and friends on the other side are never sure because it's kind of too full, right?

I mean, it's not easy there.

But that will help because we're down to about 20.

We had 3,400 native employees in Washington and the U.S. We're down to about 2,900.

We ought to be down to about 2,000.

And I think we can do a little more reasonable trade time.

But that isn't the only waste of time for this group.

When the decision was made, the Peterson Task Force recommendations, he recommended that we try to sell the secure assistance package and if with the end of the shooting in Vietnam, not in China, it stops successful because we're

Much of what we're now doing with supporting the systems is helping them increase their food production and build schools and infrastructure and be concerned with population planning and the building of the beginnings of an industrial economy and all of that.

That's development.

What should we stop?

We have this commitment to go forward and get

And immediately, if we get the security assistance package, which we're not going to get, the Congress will approve it, we're going to have to split out, and the sensible thing is to split out of what's developed and have 8M do it much more effectively than some good ways in the same building.

Now, there's a part of it that's maybe political and so on.

The second big recommendation of Peterson was everything multinationally that we could do multinationally.

It never did make very much sense.

Mr. Major, it makes less sense now.

Just forget that one totally and do everything you can.

I'm against all the multinationals.

Well, we've got to pay for lip service.

Oh, damn it.

We've got to give a little lip service, but don't worry.

And help them make a...

I think we're going to flush that U.N. thing.

and that's, we've got Peter Stump there now, but that's to be said.

I'm going to cut our support of that in hand next year.

It's just terrible.

We're just screwing ourselves over the world here.

I'll serve the violent and the radical.

I've talked to a couple of heads of government, and they all want to divide.

And it gives us political strength.

And all the national things, since we get into the United States, they're putting up most of the money and the police to the end of it, because they all gang up against

Well, of course, the difficulty is that the U.N. can't be affected.

Rudy Peterson will try, but he won't succeed.

And out of the 130 out of that race, and each one of them was a vote, we're at about 25 or 30 or 35 or 40 percent of the money.

What is that for a variation?

No, nothing's up now.

It's a large choice right now.

So I just had to auto pass it.

You know, it's important to cut it by 30 percent.

I mean, this is just quiet.

He'll deal with it anyway.

He'll let me tell him.

He has a lot of surety.

I have no objections.

He always waits for me.

We have a special relationship.

He'll do the things we want.

That's what I talked about yesterday.

I just love to have him around.

He's sweet.

You see, if someone's in problem with the bank, we'll leave for that.

It's a sizable fraction.

People have

And they take our money.

And they spend it.

For instance, in this, you know, on that, I can pick something, the $200 million, which they used to get from us, and they get it from the World Bank.

What's our money?

And, of course, it would make sense in this program.

We've got to coordinate what we do multinationally and what we do

not only so we don't waste our time, so we coordinate it, and so we take some credit for what we do all the last month's journey.

Our own ambassadors have the slightest idea of what we're paying for.

The DLNDP, or the bank, or these very small names.

They don't need you to do all this stuff.

Do it.

It is an interesting example.

Not too long ago, our ambassador to Jamaica, I saw him.

He said, do you know what I'm making for Jamaica?

I said, do you know what I'm making for Jamaica?

He said, do you know what I'm making for Jamaica?

I said, do you know what I'm making for Jamaica?

How many deep people are in the, how many UN people in the UN action agencies?

I said, I'll go find out.

And just remember that about 40% of them are on our payroll.

We're paying for about 40% of the total cost.

The next time I saw him, he said, you know how many, how many UNDP and other UN agencies people we have?

He said, no, he never told me.

Well, they said we have 390 of them.

I said, you know, the U.S. wasn't doing anything.

That means somewhere between 30 and 40 of these people were out in our direction.

Well, that's the second part, right, about Peterson, which time has gone up with.

What I'm concerned about is

The possibility in this campaign that somebody would raise with you or someone else the idea that you're needs in the past, and we need another external party in terms to the one thing.

We don't need any study.

What we need to do is take what we have, build on it, and redirect it, and come up with something that will do what it should be doing.

We've got to have an industry.

and a lot of gold, and two-thirds of people over on the left in these poor countries.

But of course, they have very little in common.

You've got everything from the smallest and poorest countries to Brazil, and perhaps from Nigeria.

Some of these countries have got a lot of potential.

These countries have lots of potential in terms of markets and resources.

In Peter's business, of course, we've got our markets.

and we had a raw material.

And any notion that the program isn't going to be part of the foreign policy of the country doesn't make sense.

I mean, that's a critical question.

Do you think AID should be, if you look at it now, do you think it should be set where it has to be?

You were starting to know a lot of it.

We've got to deal with the ambassadors.

There is something to be said for being quarantined, but there is much to be said on the other side.

When we had this Peterson package, you remember there was a go-round, and he came up and he was going to report to the White House, the court, the secretary of state.

It has to, somehow or other, have the leverage of the president to make it effective.

And I think long range it would be better off somehow rather than dying here.

I said that to Peterson so as not to get caught in this thing.

I said I'm not going to get lost in this.

We get a report to the state.

We get a report to the White House.

You can do it many different ways.

What I'm concerned about is the program.

I mean, just say two or three things that I think are very important to have in mind.

One of my present meetings is a difference from what you may have heard before.

It is change as a result of race.

One, let's begin with the proposition that there must be an identity program.

There must be.

Second, the inheritance of this is something you have not mentioned, but it's something I am very strongly about.

I mean, it's related to what you said.

It's very important that they keep the economic progress and so forth.

We're not going to change where there's an argument for military programs like in Latin America and India because the military programs in those countries aren't in the dispensary.

They're maintaining the internal order and the necessary, shall we say, stability to even retain their liberal society.

The third point is that I didn't do it.

I completed him around the moment, actually.

I used to do it for him.

We have not actually done the job.

I asked for a study of this, and I never had it back.

I asked his long sheet.

I said, not very much of this is true.

Every time you ask anybody for it, they just lie to you because they don't want us to admit how much we spent on it.

My thought on the best sheet is that

It's probably very, very true.

The main point about it is not how much we're doing it, but how much we're doing it under control.

As far as all the national agencies are concerned, down.

I mean, cut them back as much as we can.

Of course, we've got the Asian Development Bank.

We've got the Latin American Development Bank and all these other organizations.

And to the extent that we've got to, we've got to support them.

But we have got to have them.

strong secretary of the country, he was doing exactly what I heard him do.

I mean, we were trying to cast our votes in effective ways, but Jesus, when they, when, for example, on the Indian thing, when they take the world back, that goddamn, that, that, that, that, there are all these, uh, we put it back in here.

If necessary, we'll have to, we'll have to screw them another way.

because all the national agencies get American money and then turn right around and work contrary to the efforts of American foreign policy to Canada anymore.

It can't happen.

So that's why the U.N. thing, all these, Mike Tilden is in the other direction.

Give us more by that, you know, take it faster than any smaller country.

To have a few bucks a week, come and take care of a poor little guy down here in Jamaica.

He says, well, we're going to give it to you.

Let's get it coming from the U.N.

That's the whole point.

That's what this is all about.

And if we're talking about raw materials markets, really like that, or raw materials supply areas and the rest, the thing I think that the United States is important to, and that we can be, we can turn off a spigot and turn it on.

It's kind of the same thing, of course, when you go out and make all the nice, and you just continue to do nine rolls, make an eight without strings and the rest, but if we don't have the eight with strings, we're nuts.

We should have given it all.

The other thing is that I think that in terms of the, in terms of your state, I feel that we should move it more out of the, under the control of the State Department of Bureaucracy.

I'm not referring to Bureaucracy, nor to Bureaucracy or to Irwin or any of our other people.

I am referring to that name, Bureaucracy.

It's basically, it basically is.

is always approaching things from the standpoint of the other countries, from all the national standpoint, rather than from the standpoint of the selfish, unlike the selfish foreign policy interest of the United States in the future, in order to sell this program to the Congress.

And certainly, in order for it to be effective, we have to put more emphasis on that direction.

Because it loses its constituency.

I know out there you've got active people who talk about all the nice things.

People that will be voting against the United States.

I mean, that makes the whole process fantastic.

But as far as I'm concerned, the direction is going to be changed.

And as far as your own activities are concerned, to the extent that you can quietly, and this is an issue now, we don't want any issues like this in the campaign, but to the extent that you can tilt it,

In those directions, that's what I might seem to do.

And after the election, I think that, after you having been in this this long time, I'd like to agree to come up with, on a private basis, your recommendation as to how do you really think, if we start over again, we should move at this point.

The things that ought to be done, for example, this, I didn't know about this, this personnel problem, that ought to be easy.

whether or not there should be some attempt.

Let's take a look at a budget that is possible in the directions that we want to take on.

Because we have to, assuming that we win the election, if we win the election, that will be the best and perhaps the only time that you can make any significant

If you don't make it in the first year, you'll never make it.

But we've got to be ready to submit it in the next budget, see?

So I'll leave this information.

I'd like for you to put your word on it now and have it.

But don't breathe it.

Well, you have people you can trust.

Don't breathe it.

And then they're out before we can do the budget thing.

Well, this pleases me because it seems like, in other words, I don't find you as the task force.

A lot of us have talked to Peter about those things, and we've talked to John, and basically, but I think the, I haven't really gotten Schultz in, because Schultz is an extension, but I think he understands him.

One person that I very much, I very much wanted to talk to, and I haven't even talked to him, I don't think he's always come to me,

My colleague is traveling around the world and he's fighting all the colonies against things, but that's not true.

He is really hung up, as he showed me, about this meat and raw materials.

He believes in the eight birds.

He doesn't believe in the multi-matter, I don't think.

He just wants us to use the programs in our interests, if you know what I mean, and see what he can do about how they want to be structured.

I don't think we can get him on.

Well, Chris, we've got four pieces of it.

We've got P-04-80, which is angry.

That's yours.

Well, we, we, we, it's worked out fine.

It's financed in their budget.

But for the bulk of it, it's supposed to go on.

It's not what's being on your people.

Sure.

That's the, we have pleasant relations with them with this amount.

It's just a million dollars a year, a million dollars a year.

Who runs that?

Oh, it's, we really run it.

It's in their budget.

you name it, through both House and Congress, that's where you're on.

But you can hear people out in the media that tell me, because I am clear on it.

Part of it, you know, is with the other governments and part of it is with the voluntary agencies.

We pretend that on the long list.

You're not on that list.

I'm not on that list.

Yes, yes, yes.

The L4 is not what the Congress would use to go by.

Well, even if it is, that's bad.

To me, it's that.

Well, it's very concessional.

But the local, I do pay.

Well, let me mention four points.

One is we need to coordinate all these programs.

As a matter of fact, Proxmox, I'm telling you this year, we gave the yellow sheets.

The next point is that, you know, that guy...

to the sticker that the proxies were saying, the bastard, you can't rely on any dog to eat him.

He's a finaker, and you know, we got our appropriations last time around, but our trees go out of the past, and we took his community away from him.

He now has an appropriation that he marked up for me, which he counts as about 50 or 60%.

He couldn't get, he couldn't get the head Republicans to go along with him.

He's got that little subcommittee of seven with a rule that three is a four.

So he got a little elder in the club himself and marked it up.

We started to open this AT&T company, this AT&T business.

Now there are 16 other countries.

We provide a little over 30% of our total.

The rest of the world, about 70%.

For the most part, it's sort of a consortium of each country.

We have a DAG organization, an all-assisted company set up in Paris.

Eventually, what we do multinationally, we need to do either through DAG or something with the same purpose.

so that the countries that are giving aid, besides us, though we spent difficulties, now 130 countries, decide how we're going to spend, how they're going to spend our money.

But I appreciate what you've said.

This is what I hope for.

And I believe it's the best we can do.

It seems to me that that is the most useful thing I can do, and I can get this one done.

and you get some bright, competent guy to run, and he will sit up for a treat.

But then, the number of times he'll see the meat, because of the meat, he won't shoot it, so he'll run.

It's a very good thing to do, but I just have to say, yeah, it's a nice, nice job.

I really appreciate it.

We can let you just share.

If we could go over this congressional thing.

One of the problems is the state department, the home of the foreign service officers, the home of the congressional experts, and they want to go over and over and over and get every little thing that's changed.

They want to make a presidential production.

And the difficulty is,

that you can only go so often to your friends.

That's the reason I drive this damn box.

It's too clever.

Now, where we are, Morgan had agreed that he would have his authorization bill on the floor tomorrow.

They're having a market session this afternoon.

That's a one-hour movie.

It's going all right.

Hamilton has done the work.

He has an offer from, you know, what do we think it is?

I'm going to get an offer.

And he's going to be on the list.

You know, he's a real scholar.

He's going to be a very good guy, a basketball player, a very decent guy.

That's right.

But we can't let this pass.

The authorization bill comes out of the Board of Affairs Committee.

He's going to mark that.

We've already had our head-to-head session as to what we have to add.

He's going to put some more money into the deal with the proxy matter.

The present plan is, I guess you could say, we're going to have to show that people don't have to do it.

We're going to have to show

You work, tell me this, let me ask you on the congressional side, how long, how long are people, how long, do they work all right?

Of course, they've got the whole periphery to work these things, but this is a very important thing to understand.

We don't want to.

We want to try to get the house.

Well, I think we can do this at the end of the work.

That's what we should do.

We'll get there the day before.

I hope we can get this done before the 18th, because we're going to be the target for all of this group of people, all of their headboard, everything else.

But let's just move here.

Second, third time.

We've got to get this done before the 18th.

Good to see you John, good to see you.

We'll have something that's worth your time.