With devastating indifference, President Donald Trump and his special assistant Elon Musk have crippled Food for Peace, a program few Americans have heard of, but one that did tremendous good for over six decades. President John F. Kennedy effectively launched the program in 1961 with the help of a special assistant of his own, George McGovern. Within a year, it was feeding tens of millions of children around the world. The press generally regarded it as one of the Kennedy administration’s more impressive achievements.
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Though some Republicans have critiqued foreign aid as wasteful, the Food for Peace initiative vividly illustrated how foreign aid can do incalculable humanitarian good, while helping the American economy and advancing U.S. foreign policy goals.
In the late 1950s, as a young congressman, McGovern had been a critic of foreign aid, albeit for reasons much different than those espoused today. For every dollar the U.S. spent on economic assistance in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, he pointed out, it spent $10 on military aid. The spending disparity ignored the circumstances of many of the countries receiving this aid: people did not have enough to eat, and rates of illiteracy were as high as 90%. For McGovern, the test for any program of foreign aid should be “how effectively it enables the people of the underdeveloped areas to build up the kind of society where better standards of life are possible.”
This philosophy made McGovern a champion of Public Law 480, enacted under Dwight Eisenhower, in 1954, to reduce America’s ruinous postwar agricultural surpluses by distributing them overseas. Critics branded PL 480 a clumsy Republican “dumping program,” one without any overt humanitarian mission, intended only to pacify electorally important farm states. McGovern saw things much differently. Instead of spending $1 billion annually to store surplus grain, he wanted to use PL-480 to feed more of the world’s hungry. Doing so would raise “living standards” and promote “peace and stability in the free world” he argued before Congress. McGovern and Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey turned his proposal into the “Food for Peace” Act, which Congress passed in 1959.
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Like many Republicans in the 1950s, Kennedy initially saw Food for Peace through a political lens, as a partial solution to the “farm problem” which he could not ignore it during the close 1960 campaign. McGovern, who was running for Senate in South Dakota, helped him find his voice, explaining the dynamic connection between the domestic issue and foreign policy. Under McGovern’s tutelage, the candidate played on the theme whenever he traveled to farm states.
For example, to thousands of cheering South Dakotans in McGovern’s hometown of Mitchell, Kennedy declared the agricultural surplus “an opportunity.” No group could do more for the country than farmers if Americans “recognize that food is strength” that gave the U.S. the power to win “good will and friendship” from people around the world Kennedy told the crowd.
Kennedy won a narrow victory, but McGovern lost his race for the Senate. The President-elect admired the South Dakotan’s agricultural expertise and his distinguished record as a B-24 bomber pilot in World War II and appointed him the first Director of Food for Peace.
McGovern set out to turn the program into a bona fide progressive instrument of foreign policy by burying the old “surplus disposal” concept and dramatically increasing the volume of food distributed through a variety of initiatives. For example, he marshaled allotments of millions of tons of surplus American food and fiber to fuel labor-intensive economic development projects in a “food for wages” program. In 22 underdeveloped countries, Food for Peace provided partial wage payments for over 700,000 workers engaged in land clearance, irrigation, reforestation, and the construction of roads, schools, hospitals, and agricultural cooperatives. (Workers received food not only for themselves but for their families as well.) For McGovern, this was the way to fight the Cold War—by improving the nutritional health of many millions of people while launching essential public works projects that otherwise might have gone undone.
Dearest to his heart, however, was the overseas school lunch program, which he worked tirelessly to expand in 17 countries, including Cold War hotspots like South Korea and South Vietnam. Feeding hungry school children did enormous good; it resulted in striking improvements in school attendance (often by 40 and 50%) and in the health of tens of millions of malnourished children. Pre-schoolers and nursing mothers often came at lunchtime, too. In 1962, McGovern arrived in Bombay to deliver the 14 millionth ton of wheat to India. One out of five Indian school children then received a Food for Peace lunch every day. The children, Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith remarked at the event, “are better fed and better read as a result of this progressive vision.”
McGovern had masterminded the greatest humanitarian achievement of the Kennedy-Johnson era; but it was one that also came with substantial economic and political benefits for the U.S. In recounting to farm audiences the successes of Food for Peace, McGovern highlighted the practical advantages: it absorbed surpluses, saved millions of dollars in storage costs, and, because American ships carried half of all the exported commodities, it benefitted the merchant marine as well. Further, the program served a Cold War purpose: the abundance produced by American farmers alleviated the worst kinds of human suffering that had spawned tyranny abroad. It was “our most constructive instrument of foreign policy,” McGovern would tell audiences. “American food has done more to prevent communism than all the military hardware we’ve shipped around the world.”
This meant that America’s rural heartland was now a force in foreign policy. Indeed, “America could make its greatest contribution to world peace by fully utilizing our agricultural abundance,” said McGovern. He often reminded farmers that they composed just 8% of the U.S. population, yet they produced a volume of commodities five times greater than did their counterparts in Russia who made up nearly half of its labor force. “Marx,” he liked to say, “was a city boy.”
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This experience would have a lasting impact on McGovern’s thinking about the ways powerful nations might figure in the life of weaker nations. He went on to help establish the World Food Program in 1961. Though he won a Senate race in 1962, he never forgot the lessons of Food for Peace. What today we call “food security” became his top domestic priority. In 1968 he launched the first serious investigation of the scope of hunger and malnutrition in America, which resulted in a major expansion of the school lunch program; in 1971, he worked with Kansas Republican Senator Robert Dole to quadruple the number of families who could qualify for Food Stamps, thus (for the while) nearly eradicating hunger in America.
McGovern is best remembered today for his prescient opposition to the Vietnam War and his landslide loss in the 1972 presidential election. But he was also the statesman who, according to Robert F. Kennedy, “almost single-handedly” transformed a mere surplus distribution venture and made it “mean something around the rest of the world.” President Kennedy did not exaggerate when he stated proudly in 1962, “Food for Peace has become a vital force in the world.”
In the decades since, Congress has continued to reauthorize the program with an emphasis on international food security in the underdeveloped world. Legislators also recognized that it advanced the economic standing of American farmers and the country’s foreign policy goals. It remained, in Kennedy’s words, “a vital force” and the enlightened instrument of practical idealism that McGovern had crafted. As of February 2025, Food for Peace had fed upwards of some four billion people around the world.
In light of the Trump administration’s approach to foreign aid, Americans today would do well to recall McGovern’s legacy. For it demonstrates how foreign aid can have political and economic benefits while also accomplishing undeniable good. The history of Food for Peace exemplifies the value of internationalism and humanitarian endeavors in the making of American foreign policy.
Thomas J. Knock is professor of history in the Clements department of history at Southern Methodist University and distinguished fellow at its Center for Presidential History. He is the author of The Rise of a Prairie Statesman, The Life and Times of George McGovern; and To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.