The United States was the principal architect and builder of the United Nations, and the great mass of the American people welcomed the new edifice with enthusiasm and high—perhaps too high—hopes for a new world. Now, two decades and many crises later, United States opinion is wiser and more ambivalent. A large majority of the public still gives general support to the United Nations, but its enthusiasm is tempered by experience, and a vociferous minority holds views ranging from biting criticism to total rejection.

These reflections on the centrifugal tendencies of interstate associations and the need for a stronger central union were penned 175 years ago by Alexander Hamilton, but they could easily have been taken, save for the quaint language, from the current debate on the Atlantic Community. As Hamilton pondered the problem of strengthening the integrating sinews of the new nation, so modern Hamiltons voice similar thoughts concerning the possibility of creating a stronger Atlantic political community.

For students of government the annually recurring debates over foreign aid are a stethoscope held to the heart of the United States foreign policy process. They reveal in classic form the political strains and stresses that have come to afflict this country's postwar external relations. Foreign aid has required new concepts, skills, personnel, institutions, legislation, and funds. This modern brand of “dollar diplomacy” has not only jostled traditional structures and processes within the executive branch but has called upon the legislator and the man in the street to adjust to a new vision of the American mission and to what it involves in material terms as well. Herewith is a case study of that reappraisal.

The foreign aid debate of 1957, centering around the preparation and approval of the authorization and appropriation acts for fiscal 1958, was especially instructive because it was the occasion for a resounding collision between a greatly intensified crusade to redirect and reinvigorate the program, particularly in support of long-range economic development, and an equally determined campaign to bear down on the brakes. The present commentary focuses primarily on the roles of the official executive and legislative participants, as well as of influential non-governmental interests, during the course of this debate. The story sheds some light on both the foreign policy process in general and on some of the major substantive and administrative issues at stake in this particular case.