A tragic oversight

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 310.

Every encounter with senior US policy-makers, from Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, left a sour taste in the Indians’ mouths. The CIA reported that the view of Nehru’s inner circle was that Americans were ‘elementary and material’, while from Truman downwards the Indian Prime Minister felt he had encountered only ‘mediocrities’. At a dinner with bankers intent on giving India a loan, the fastidious Nehru was so appalled by the ‘vulgarity’ of being told that ‘twenty billion dollars were around the table’ that he refused to pick it up. Exhausted by the pace of his whirlwind tour, he failed to press the fact that India urgently needed a million tons of wheat.