With devastating indifference, President Donald Trump and his special assistant Elon Musk have crippled Food for Peace, a program few Americans have heard of, but one that did tremendous good for over six decades. President John F. Kennedy effectively launched the program in 1961 with the help of a special assistant of his own, George McGovern. Within a year, it was feeding tens of millions of children around the world. The press generally regarded it as one of the Kennedy administration’s more impressive achievements.
Though some Republicans have critiqued foreign aid as wasteful, the Food for Peace initiative vividly illustrated how foreign aid can do incalculable humanitarian good, while helping the American economy and advancing U.S. foreign policy goals.
In the late 1950s, as a young congressman, McGovern had been a critic of foreign aid, albeit for reasons much different than those espoused today. For every dollar the U.S. spent on economic assistance in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, he pointed out, it spent $10 on military aid. The spending disparity ignored the circumstances of many of the countries receiving this aid: people did not have enough to eat, and rates of illiteracy were as high as 90%. For McGovern, the test for any program of foreign aid should be "how effectively it enables the people of the underdeveloped areas to build up the kind of society where better standards of life are possible."
This philosophy made McGovern a champion of Public Law 480, enacted under Dwight Eisenhower, in 1954, to reduce America's ruinous postwar agricultural surpluses by distributing them overseas. Critics branded PL 480 a clumsy Republican “dumping program,” one without any overt humanitarian mission, intended only to pacify electorally important farm states. McGovern saw things much differently. Instead of spending $1 billion annually to store surplus grain, he wanted to use PL-480 to feed more of the world's hungry. Doing so would raise “living standards” and promote “peace and stability in the free world" he argued before Congress. McGovern and Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey turned his proposal into the “Food for Peace” Act, which Congress passed in 1959.
Like many Republicans in the 1950s, Kennedy initially saw Food for Peace through a political lens, as a partial solution to the “farm problem” which he could not ignore it during the close 1960 campaign. McGovern, who was running for Senate in South Dakota, helped him find his voice, explaining the dynamic connection between the domestic issue and foreign policy. Under McGovern’s tutelage, the candidate played on the theme whenever he traveled to farm states.