By the late 1950s, issues of global health—and attention to the WHO—were viewed within the context of the U.S.-Soviet competition and the need to have resilient, anti-communist partners in the Global South. The WHO represented a multilateral, yet seemingly nonpartisan organization that could serve as a vehicle for a U.S. victory in the Cold War, a testament to capitalist progress. To the many liberals and Democrats who backed it, the WHO exhibited unrelenting faith in technocratic solutions—teleological faith in human progress, and the assurance of better living through science.
U.S. investment in the WHO during the first twenty years of its existence thus aimed to fulfill the broader purposes of U.S. hegemony during the Cold War, to align the commitment of U.S. power to the cause of public health. Leading liberal Cold Warriors such as Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, for instance, envisioned a Pax Americana for global health issues. Humphrey traveled to Geneva in 1958 to ascertain the status of word health concerns—and highlight the advancements the WHO had made on health (including infectious diseases). The “WHO has become the hub of the world health wheel, the center of motion for innumerable constructive forces,” Humphrey said upon returning to the United States. The WHO owed its illustrious position almost exclusively to U.S. investment in public health. Humphrey felt that “as a nation, itself, no people have contributed more generously to health through private and public means, unilaterally, bilaterally, and multilaterally than have the American people.”
By the mid-1960s, President Lyndon Johnson viewed the WHO as an institution that could advance his Great Society in global terms, one that could end poverty and disease throughout the world. But as a liberal internationalist who saw international institutions as necessary for marshalling consensus behind U.S. foreign policy, Johnson knew he had to rely upon the WHO to legitimize his global Great Society. His efforts to eradicate smallpox in the 1960s, for instance, relied on the WHO as a mediating force to carry out a Smallpox Eradication Program (SEP) in the Global South, helping to negotiate the health interests of non-aligned states in Africa and Latin America with the Soviets’ and Americans’ bilateral struggle for control of global development. As historian Erez Manela has argued, the WHO served “as an institutional space in which this parallel discourse of cooperation could operate” while also being “a politically neutral receptacle for the SEP’s successes.” In 1965 Johnson predicted an end to smallpox worldwide by 1974, but only “if greater resources are made available for an intensified attack upon it,” and the United States remained committed to “international cooperation to keep people from dying.”