Letter from Harry S. Truman to Eleanor Roosevelt

TRUMAN HARRY s. TRUMAN FEDERAL HESEIVE BANK BUILDINO KANSAS CITY 6, MISSOURI January 18, 1956 Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: I was very pleased to receive your letter of the thirteenth enclosing the suggested statement on the Near East, and I am in complete accord with your view that something must be donc. While I was President of the United States, I had a aurvey made of the whole Near East. Gordon Clapp went to the Valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates and came back with the report that it is perfectly feasible to restore those old canals constructed and used by the ancient Babylonians and the people of Ninevah under Sen- nacherib. with that irrigation the land could support from twenty to thirty million people. He said that there are 160 billion barrels of oil in sight in the Arabian desert and also that it is quite possible to run a syphon from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea Valley which would create enough power to make Israel a com- pletely industrial nation. Dr. Bennett of Oklahoma A. & M., who worked with me on the Point IV program, spent the provious year in Ethiopia where he found a plateau of about 62,000 aquare miles at from six to eight thousand feet above sea level where the soil is as rich and black as it is in the Iowa corn belt. His estimate was that it could raise enough food for a hundred million people. As you know, we succeeded in getting Turkey to raise a surplus of food stuffs. The last year I was in the white House that country raised a surplus of four million tons of wheat. Before that, it had had to im- port wheat from Hussia.