357. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to Senator J. William Fulbright0

The President has asked me to pass to you for information the substance of a message over the week end from Ambassador Badeau in Cairo. Ambassador Badeau reports that when Mayor Brandt had a long session with President Nasser on November 8, Nasser spent a large part of the meeting speaking bitterly and at length against the American tactics of using aid to put pressure on him. He is reported to have said that the UAR emerged from the Suez crisis convinced that it could not depend on the Western world, but that American policy in this Administration had made him hope that this judgment could be reversed. It now seemed clear that he would have to go back to 1957.

Other dispatches from Cairo make it clear that the Gruening Amendment1 has had a strong impact there, but unfortunately the effect is the opposite of what supporters of the Amendment must have [Page 776] intended. On the evidence so far, there seems no alternative to the conclusion that we make people more, and not less, nationalistic by actions which seem to them to be “neo-colonial pressure.”

McGeorge Bundy2
  1. Source: Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Countries Series, United Arab Republic. Secret.
  2. On November 7, by a vote of 65 to 13, the U.S. Senate approved an amendment to Section 620 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, introduced by Senator Ernest Gruening, that would withhold U.S. foreign aid, including agricultural sales, to any country that the President determined was engaging in or preparing for aggressive military action against the United States or any country receiving U.S. assistance. (Circular telegram 884, November 8; Department of State, Central Files, AID (US)) In circular telegram 889, November 9, the Department of State informed posts of an intense campaign being mounted in the U.S. Senate by opponents of aid to the United Arab Republic, particularly Senators Kenneth Keating, Jacob Javits, and Ernest Gruening. (Ibid.) The amendment was subsequently amended to exclude suspension of the Peace Corps and the Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961. The final bill was signed into law by President Johnson on December 16. (P.L. 88-205; 77 Stat. 387)
  3. Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.