IV. Accelerated Progress in 1965 



The proposal by President Johnson to contribute a billion dollars 

 to regional development in Southeast Asia as an alternative to military 

 action seems to have been represented in the press as an unprecedented 

 innovation and a wholly new concept. It is evident, however, that a 

 number of persons familiar with the Mekong project had proposed 

 variants of this approach. Mention has been made of the views of 

 C. Hart Schaaf, who saw the Mekong project as contributing to the 

 "achievement of peace and well-being for all people of the Lower 

 Mekong Basin." Similarly, Gilbert F. White, principal author of the 

 report of the Ford Foundation, in an article published four months 

 before the Johns Hopkins speech, suggested that — 



A peaceful and honorable resolution of the conflict in South Vietnam and Laos 

 may be found in a bold plan for land and water development which already unites 

 factions in four nations of Southeast Asia. For seven years, Cambodia, Laos, 

 Thailand, and South Vietnam have been working with little publicity and without 

 disagreement on a huge development program. These four countries, which do 

 not cooperate in anything else, have reached accord on development of the Lower 

 Mekong Basin. 



And then, near the conclusion of his exposition he asked — 



Is it possible that the vision of a majestic river harnessed for the advance of 

 twenty million people by an unprecedented piece of international cooperation 

 would so command the imagination of the nations that the present grueling con- 

 flict could give way to a struggle for more abundant life? Could this mean to a 

 world increasingly aware of its network of mutual responsibilities what the 

 Tennessee Valley Authority meant, to proponents of national development thirty 

 years ago?* 8 



President Johnson's Contacts with Regionalism 



President Johnson himself had had extensive exposure to the subject 

 of regionalism. Shortly after he first came to the Capitol as a con- 



fressional secretary in 1932, the Congress with strong support from 

 'resident Roosevelt was deliberating on passage of the TVA Act of 

 1933. Issues involving TVA, or the question of extension of the region- 

 alism principle, periodically came before the Congress during his 

 service in the House of Representatives, 1937-1948. As Vice President, 

 Johnson was asked by President Kennedy "to undertake a special 

 fact-finding mission to Asia." 34 



Of this trip, President Johnson, two days after his Johns Hopkins 

 speech, commented as follows : 



I went to bed last night reading a transcript of a meeting I had out in Bangkok 

 in 1961 with a group of men of vision, and we were talking about the development 



^Gilbert F White, "Lower Mekong, a Proposal for a Peaceful and Honorable Resolution 

 of the Conflict in South Vietnam," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (December 1964) 

 +*. T7 ■■? President's News Conference of May 5, 1961," Public Papers of the President of 

 the United States (Washington, D.C. : U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), p 354. The 

 mission was announced by the President at his new conference of May 5, 1961 ; the Vice 

 President returned May 24. 



(395) 



