Dear Harry:
Many thanks for your good letter expressing as it does your sincere interest in a most vital problem confronting our country.
As you know, I fully share your view as to the splendid accomplishments of the Congress in translating so much of my legislative program into reality during the session recently concluded. Several of these enactments required of the Congress the setting of new directions and a fresh pace. That is always a time-consuming and often exacting process.
With respect to the foreign economic policy aspects of the program, it was unavoidable that they reached the Congress well along in the session. Time was not available to consider them adequately. I want to emphasize, however, that my Message of March 30, 1954 to the Congress on this subject remains firmly the Administration position. It is my present intention to give high priority to progress in this whole field in planning for next year's legislative program.
The events of every day bear in heavily upon us the imperative necessity of building stronger economic relations between ourselves and the free world. This is true, first because the growth of our own economy and the attainment of rising standards of living for our people can materialize only in step with economic growth and improvement in the economies of the free world linked to ours. It is more emphatically true because it is in our enlightened self-interest to have economically strong friends throughout the world. The prudent widening and deepening of the channels of trade and investment by us will not only produce good results in themselves but will encourage similar action by our friends abroad. That is the route to better markets and better feeling.
I note what you say on the watch tariff decision. That case, as with the more recent one on lead and zinc, was decided solely on its merits under the law in the light of the United States Tariff Commission's report and with the advice of interested Departments and Agencies of the Executive Branch.
I welcome your support and the support of the many who like you believe that the proposals of my Message of last March are still in the best interest of our people.
Sincerely,
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Note: Mr. Bullis' letter and the President's reply were released at Lowry Air Force Base, Denver, Colo. With respect to the watch tariff decision Mr. Bullis wrote that some of the President's friends were fearful of its consequences, and were anxious to be reassured that the Message of March 30 still constituted the administration's foreign economic policy.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letter to Harry A. Bullis of Minneapolis on Foreign Economic Policy. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/232652