Meader declared that “the struggle between bureaucrats who wish to hide their activities and committees of Congress insisting on access to complete and accurate information concerning public business ... has not received the attention it merits.”
The Michigan congressman was a Republican, to be sure, but he was one of a handful who could not be accused of playing partisan politics with this issue. No man in Congress insisted any more aggressively than George Meader that the Eisenhower administration make records available to the public, to Congress and the General Accounting Office. When Meader quoted President Kennedy’s January 30 address on the state of the Union, he did not do so in a malicious or partisan manner.
Kennedy had said: “For my part, I shall withhold from neither the Congress nor the people, any fact or report, past, present or future, which is necessary for an informed judgment of our conduct and hazards.”
“I wish this sentence could be printed in capital letters in the Congressional Record,” Meader said. “Many of us welcomed that clear, forthright statement as heralding a new policy in the executive branch of the Government with respect to furnishing information to congressional committees on request.”
Representative Meader was not critical of President Kennedy for the delays on Peru, for President Kennedy had personally overridden his Secretary of State. But Meader was wary of the future.
“As the bureaus and agencies in the executive branch of the Government have grown in number, and in power,” he said, “there has been a parallel growth in their efforts to shroud in secrecy the manner in which they discharge their stewardship of the public authority and moneys entrusted to them.”
Meader declared that “the question remained whether that laudable generality [in President Kennedy’s address of January 30] would be actually carried out in practice” or whether there would be “procrastination and recalcitrance on the part of officials.”
Within two weeks of the March 29, 1961, showdown, the Hardy subcommittee was receiving the documents on the U.S. aid program in Peru. These were the documents, the release of which Attorney General William P. Rogers had said “would gravely impair the proper functioning and administration of the executive branch of the Government.”
What the reports did do was to document fully the sloppy, wasteful, and corrupt administration of foreign aid in Peru.
From the outset the Peru drought relief program had been riddled with irregularities. There were shipments of 106,000 tons of grain meant to be sold to help needy drought victims but which were sold, without authorization, to pay administrative costs, port charges, and inland transportation costs. Above all, the grain was not meant to be sold, as it was, for the profiteering of grain millers in Peru. It wasn’t to be sold to raise money to buy houses to be sold to influential Peruvians at less than cost.