State Dept. Reported Seeking to Avert Congress Debate on Arab Boycott

The United States Department of State is striving to avert an open discussion in Congress on the issue of the Arab blockade in the debate on the pending Mutual Aid bill, according to the chief diplomatic correspondent of the Baltimore Sun.

Writing from Washington, the correspondent asserted that this effort is motivated by concern on the part of the United States about Arab votes in the forthcoming session of the United Nations General Assembly. He declared that State Department officials hoping for Arab League support on crucial issues before the Assembly were wearing “long faces” chiefly because of the fight in Congress against foreign aid to Arab countries practicing boycott and blockade tactics against Israel and against American enterprises doing business with Israel.

“Chief among the local developments complicating Washington’s relations with the Arab world is a by-product of the current debate on Capitol Hill about the Kennedy Administrations foreign aid program and, more particularly, of insistence on the part of some members of Congress that the United States Treasury should not be tapped for aid to countries that discriminate against American citizens on racial or religious grounds,” the correspondent, Paul Ward, wrote.

Reporting that during recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, Sen. J. W. Fulbright, Arkansas Democrat, “assailed” the anti-bias clause propose by the White House as “offensive to the Arab world,” the Sun correspondent emphasized that Sen. Fulbright did more than to assail the aforementioned policy declaration as irrelevant to the Foreign Aid bill. “He belabored the point to such an extent that he finally got Phillips Talbot, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and Henry R. Labouisse, International Cooperation Administration director, to agree to deletion of the passage,” the correspondent stressed.

However, Mr. Ward noted, the “opposite kind of reaction” developed in the House Foreign Affairs Committee membership and “a majority of them Judged the Administration’s phraseology was too vague.”