In his "A Time For a Choosing" speech Ronald Reagan said "We bought a thousand TV sets for a place with no electricity." Was that true? If so, where was the place?

by Aidan_Welch

Here is the exact clip: https://youtu.be/_VBtCMTPveA?t=1048

I would appreciate any info.

gerardmenfin

In 1965, a student at the Kansas State Teachers College tried to identify, statement by statement, all the sources used by Ronald Reagan in the "Time for choosing speech" (Hayes, 1965). This was not strictly a "debunking" exercise: Hayes stated whether there was a source or not for each of the 35 assertions, checked the source to see if it matched Reagan's version (sometimes it did, sometimes it did not, and he asked Reagan for confirmation), but he did not investigate the truthfulness of the sources. Statement 27 to 30, which list some "peculiar uses of US foreign aid funds", can be traced back to an article published in the National Review on 20 March 1963 and written by Congressman Otto E. Passman, a strong opponent of foreign aid. The exact Passman quote was:

One thousand 23-in TV sets were ordered for use in community education programs in underdeveloped countries at a cost of $400,000 for areas with no electric power supply

Note how the "for use in community education programs" is missing from Reagan's speech, which gives the impression that those TVs were just given to foreigners for no particular reason.

Now, where did Passman find this information? This gets tricky. In 1961, Kennedy had pledged that the US would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, [and] support any friend". This included military support as well as soft power in the form of foreign aid. In 1963, he planned to request a $4.9 billion foreign aid package and created a committee, helmed by General Lucius Clay, to "review the management, aims, and resources of America’s aid programme" (David and Holm, 2016). The Committee, whose grandiose official title was "Committee to Strengthen the Security of the Free World" published in March 1963 a report (the Clay report) that was perceived at the time as harshly critical of US foreign aid, and helped Congress to slash the proposed budget down to $3.6 billion.

Among the arguments advanced by opponents like Passman, both in articles and during debates at the House, were such lists of bizarre examples meant to prove that US money was being wasted, the "1000 TV sets" among them. However, the Clay report does not mention any of this!

A Dallas right-wing newsletter called Life Lines, in an issue published in August 1963, also includes a similar list but with a different twist:

$343 thousand for education television in Nigeria, though there are only two TV stations and very few TV sets in the country.

This is getting close. Indeed, the US at that time was big on what was called "educational TV" (ETV), seen as a smooth technological solution for educational problems. Several contemporary studies (Dizard, 1966; Gueulett, 1972) and reports (UNESCO, 1967) do indicate that the US, through USAID, the Peace Corps, and private organizations (such as the Ford Foundation) did pour money in developing countries, notably Nigeria and Colombia, to promote ETV by sending technical personel and equipment. While it is difficult to reconcile the figures given in 1963 by Passman (and Reagan) with those provided in those documents, the general conclusions for Nigeria were not really positive and did point at the inefficiency of the ETV-related aid brought to that country. The Western Region programme, started in 1959, was still struggling after 6 years, and was plagued by numerous issues, such as poor coverage, lack of staff, receiver breakdowns (maintenance was inexistent), and, indeed, power failures or fluctuating electrical current. 189 TVs sets had been obtained by the programme, with 25 paid by US AID to replace broken ones. In Northern Nigeria, US AID had started a programme in 1962 (there were actually two programmes overlapping in 1964). There were 41 TVs installed in schools with a further 27 unused or broken. The region's geographic isolation resulted in many TV sets (sometimes half of them!) being damaged in transit. The UNESCO report concluded:

While the vastness of the region's area and its low population means that a relatively small proportion of the schools are within the reception zone of the two television transmitters, lack of electrical connexions reduces the number of participating schools even in the reception zone. This imposes a serious restriction on the potential student-output for the programme.

The UNESCO report found that the programme was too costly given its poor results - few participating schools, little actual instruction time.

We cannot be sure that the preliminary reports on the Nigerian ETV aid programmes were the source used by Passman, but the UNESCO report of 1967 shows the same concern about high-tech education being useless where electricity is not reliable or does not exist. Of course, Passman and Reagan's facile quips focus on the number (1000, a round number) and the size (23 inches! but this was due to the fact that the TVs had to be large enough for classrooms) of the TVs rather than on the money spent on salaries and facilities, but they were not completely wrong.

Sources