HUMAN RESOURCES FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01676R004200150013-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 17, 2002
• Sequence Number: 13
• Publication Date: November 20, 1957
• Content Type: MF

-'Approved For Release 20 1 CIA-RDP80BO1676R004200150013-8
I
20 November 1957
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
SUBJECT : Human Resources for Economic Development
1. I believe Mr. comment on the underlying papers
that were submitted to you is as good a one as we could draft in this
Agency without doing much more work than would be worthwhile. Accord-
ingly, I recommend that it be signed and dispatched.
2. Having said this much, I have to add that I regard both the
18 October memorandum and the 31 October report to the President based
thereon, as dreary, bureaucratic documents which leave unsaid most of
what needs to be said on the subject and which express their few good ideas
in a stilted and ineffective fashion. They recommend "efforts to intensify
present programs ...... and coordinate existing programs to achieve the
ntegration and concentration necessary". This is the standard language
of bureaucracy. What is totally missing is any fresh insight into the
nature of the problem or any imaginative suggestions about the kind of
"training" that might help: to alleviate it.
'A. To illustrate, the whole underlying paper seems from a very
hasty glance to be based on the premise that what the key personnel in the
underdeveloped nations need is literally "training" in how to plan and
manage, or else, technical training in science and engineering. I happen
to feel that this is a most unperceptive and superficial appraisal. In most
of the underdeveloped countries the really serious lack is not that of men
sufficiently trained to be proficient, it is the lack of men who are sufficiently
energetic, courageous, honest, hardheaded and realistic to provide effective
leadership in political, economic and military affairs. This really serious
lack requires something more than conventional "training" to overcome.
It is not at all certain, of course, that it can be overcome in any way. If
the articulate young men who are the prospective political leaders of a
country are sufficiently unrealistic, dishonest and cowardly, there is no
school that can make them into good human beings. But, at least if the
problem is recognized in these terms, one is led to make efforts of a very
different sort than those apparently contemplated in these papers.
Approved For Release 20021'1014'CIA-RDP80B01676R004200150013-8
 'Approved For Release 2002/10/25: CIA-RDP80B0l676R004200150013-8
4. To my mind it is at least arguable that Diem's years of
residence in the United States, his extensive and intimate exposure to
American friends and ideas, had a good deal to do with his development
into an effective human being. One way that I would attack the whole
problem of developing leadership is to try to find out what influences
had conditioned men like Diem, Magsaysay, and perhaps Suhrawardy,
in order to determine whether these influences could be brought to bear
on the next generation of promising leadership material. I have no idea
what sort of program would evolve out of this approach but I am certain
that it would have little to do with what is ordinarily called "training"*
It is not proficiency that needs to be inculcated; it is a set of attitudes
toward society and the individual's relation to it together with a certain
sophistication about what is happening in the world and about the nature
of world communism. I see no hint in these papers that the problem is
understood in these terms and I am certain that all the integration and
coordination in the world will contribute little.
5. I will not ride this particular hobby any further and freely
confess that the above views are a result of the most superficial thought
on the matter. Possibly they will serve, however, to illustrate my
irritation with the well-intended documents that u,..,.Ax es