SENATE VOTES TO CUT AID TO NASSER

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29192, 30 April 1960, Page 13

SENATE VOTES TO CUT AID TO NASSER

Bid To Halt Blockade Of Israeli Ships (AZ ’ Presa -Assoctotion-CopuriphO - P-m.) WASHINGTON, April 28. President in Senate voted tonight to empower the President in effect to cut off aid to the United Arab Republic the SuracS! nta,ned ' tS blockade of Israe,i commerce in but uc C , d °sqW as on h tentative and is subject to reversal; invite thVpredden f ,„S,'l?k S M? Ort - of a . n amendment which would • A/v/vnnm* t ° withhold foreign aid from any country engaged ’ C Warfare against an Y other country receiving United States

The amendment did not mention the United Arab Republic by name; but its sponsors, Senator Kennedy Keating (Republican, New York) and Senator Paul Douglas (Democrat, Illinois) told the Senate that the amendment was the least Congress should co to express opposition to the Egyptian actions in restricting use of the Suez Canal by ships serving Israel.

The Douglas-Keating amendment expresses the sense of Congress that the purposes of the foreign aid programme are defeated when a country benefiting under its acts to “wage economic warfare against other nations assisted under this act” But it lays down that this principle should be applied “as the President may determine.” The amendment is broadly similar to one already introduced into the House of Representatives version of the Foreign Aid Bill for the coming fiscal year. The Eisenhower Administration resisted both amendments. The Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator William Fulbright, led the fight against the Senate amendment. He said there was no hope that it would accomplish anything and that to pass it would be just “a sham and a travesty.” He said it could lead to “no good, only to trouble.” Senator Fulbright said that trade unions who had boycotted an Egyptian ship, the Cleopatra, in New York, had brought reprisals from Egypt by, as he put it, “taking our foreign relations into their hands.”