By the beginning of January we had Colonel Davis and a small staff installed in the State Department to provide liaison with the Pentagon in communicating with the General. I had also arranged to have W. Walton Butter-worth, then Counselor of Embassy in Madrid and my old friend from the days of economic warfare in the Iberian Peninsula, ordered to China to run the embassy there. Minister Walter Robertson assisted General Marshall at Executive Headquarters (the joint Nationalist-Communist-American organization

supervising the armistice). Butterworth's Far Eastern experience had been only as a vice consul in Singapore in 1929-31, but he was one of our most able and resourceful officers and I counted on him to supply what the General would also need on his staff: energy and imagination to deal with wholly novel situations. Thus began five years of intensive experience in Chinese affairs, entailing painful, even near disastrous, consequences for this friend and colleague. That they did not impair our friendship is a measure of his generosity.

In the first few weeks after his arrival in China, General Marshall achieved a personal dominance of the situation and produced an apparent movement toward compromise, which raised our hopes. In part this came from cautious maneuvering by both Chinese sides while appraising the extent and significance of the new American intervention through our most imposing citizen. Neither side wished to cast the first stone. Each found in the truncated statement of policy that the White House made public on December 15, 1945 (as the General later reported) "justification for its attitude."

We have already described the strength of the three military forces in north China when General Marshall arrived—the Nationalists, the Communists, and the Japanese. The Communists were demanding a cease-fire and end of the reinforcement of Nationalist strength in north China. The Nationalists' precondition was that the Communists cease cutting Nationalist communications. On the political side, also, the General found another fundamental cleavage between the viewpoints of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. The former contended that the integration of the Communist forces into a national army should precede the establishment of a coalition government, while the Communists were equally insistent that a coalition government in which they had a substantial voice should precede the integration of the forces. Again, while the two parties had agreed that constitutional questions not already settled between them should go to a Political Consultative Conference (PCC), each side wanted to hold the conference when it was ahead militarily.

General Marshall's strategy was to concentrate first on a cease-fire as essential to the solution of other problems and a psychological prelude to opening the Political Consultative Conference, and then to tie solutions of other problems together in a comprehensive package that both parties would prefer to returning to war. This rested on the premise that a compromise could be devised which both would trade for their chances of total victory. This proved to be an illusion, but not at first. In January it seemed full of promise. A Committee of Three, with General Marshall presiding and Generals Chang Shun and Chou En-lai (whose ability much impressed the General) representing the Nationalists and Communists respectively, recommended the terms of a cease-fire and permissible movements of troops, which Chiang and Mao proclaimed on January 10. An elaborate organization policed it, headed by three commissioners, with Walter Robertson presiding and an operations section headed by Colonel Henry A. Byroade, USA, with a hundred and twenty-five American members and a hundred and seventy from each of the two Chinese sides. In a short time the fighting stopped in north China. Problems proved less malleable in Manchuria.

On the political side progress was equally promising. The Political Consultative Conference met from January 10 to 31 and reached agreement on directives in five areas: government organization, a program for peaceful national reconstruction, military problems, the National Assembly, and revision of the 1936 draft constitution. The last held the seeds of future trouble. The Kuomintang believed that PCC principles, which represented the views of the Chinese liberals as well as the Communists, were too liberal and opened the way for capture of the government by the Communists; it wished to retain a maximum of power in a minimum number of hands. General Marshall reported. He was encouraged, reporting at the beginning of February:

Affairs are progressing rather favorably. The Political Consultative Conference did their job well and included enough of the details of the interim constitution I had most confidentially given the Generalissimo to provide a fairly definite basis for a democratic coalition government. . . .

As to the nationalization of the armies . . . prospects are favorable for a solution to this most difficult of all the problems.

I am getting lined up to expedite the formation of the coalition government. ... If agreement [is reached on these two matters] then I will be ready to propose . . . discussions in the U.S. regarding financial loans.

The "Basis for Military Reorganization and for the Integration of the Communist Forces into the National Army" was signed by the two Chinese sides on February 25, 1946. General Marshall had played a major role in the negotiation of this important agreement. The new army was to consist of sixty divisions, of which fifty were to be Nationalist Government divisions and ten Communist, mixed together in several armies. All other units on both sides should be demobilized. The armies would be stationed in certain numerical strengths in various parts of China. Manchuria should have fifteen divisions, of which fourteen should be Nationalist; in northwest China, all should be Nationalist. When the Communists dragged their feet in executing the agreement because—so the General thought—of the shabby comparison of their troops beside the American-equipped-and-trained Nationalists, he offered similar equipment and training for the elements of their ten divisions when selected and assigned. But the trouble lay deeper. Agreement to execute the Basic Plan under the Executive Headquarters was reached on February 27 and signed March 16, but the Communists refused to designate the ten divisions until full and public agreement was reached on the implementation of the PCC resolutions. The Central Committee of the Kuomintang, meeting March 1 to 17, was intended to do so; and General Marshall left for Washington March 11 to arrange the financial credits, hopeful that both interim government and army integration were well on their way to acceptance.

But, alas, neither was to occur. Indications soon appeared that that "approval had been hedged by reservations and that irreconcilable elements within the Kuomintang were endeavoring to sabotage the PCC program," whereupon the Communist Party and the Democratic League refused to nominate members to the State Council (of the interim government), and the Communists also refused to approve the PCC resolutions. General Marshall later concluded

that "no real settlement of governmental and constitutional questions in China could be reached so long as the Manchuria problem remained unsolved."^ Perhaps we might add today, or vice versa. We shall return to that problem after a brief look at the Washington scene.

While General Marshall was having successes in China, we of the rear echelon were getting together tools and information for him. At the time both he and we thought that the command of economic resources would be invaluable in his bargaining. The President, in his December 15, 1945, letter to General Marshall, had written: "In your conversations with Chiang Kai-shek and other Chinese leaders you are authorized to speak with the utmost frankness. Particularly, you may state, in connection with the Chinese desire for credits . . . that a China disunited and torn by civil strife could not be considered realistically as a proper place for American assistance along the lines enumerated."- But, as we were soon to learn in Europe, it was easier to offer credits than to find the funds, with lend-lease ending, demobilization in full swing. Congress cutting appropriations, and the domestic economy calling for goods of every sort. Even with the President's full support, the obstacles in the way of a seeker-for-funds-and-goods for China were formidable. First, the National Advisory Council established by the Bretton Woods legislation had to give its approval to foreign credits, with Secretary of the Treasury Vinson, its chairman, and the Treasury bureaucracy, its staff, both bent on achieving a balanced budget. The Export-Import Bank took a skeptical view of the Nationalist Government's probity and competence in managing borrowed funds. The Nationalists' existing resources available for stabilization and expenditure were not crystal clear, nor were the activities of their host of missions, agents, and lobbyists working for a five-hundred-sixty-million-dollar credit toward a three-year program of reconstruction amounting to about two billion dollars. UNRRA reportedly had under consideration five hundred million dollars in materials for delivery by March 1947. Those in charge of property disposal in the Pacific as yet hardly knew what they had available. Lastly, to discover what and how much China in its existing state of disorganization could absorb was perhaps the most difficult problem of all.

Skeptics could, and did, ask who, in a contest for supreme control in China, where the winner took all, would be influenced to do what by this carrot of economic and financial aid. Hardly the Communists, who could well doubt that, if they won, the United States would finance them. More and more the Kuomintang evinced the conviction that pursuit of a united and democratic China meant that they would lose all. That their own policy of seeking a military decision would lead to the same result did not weaken this conviction. By the time General Marshall returned to Washington in March 1946 he was able to assemble an imposing—or, at least, respectable—bundle of carrots consisting of the revival of lend-lease to cover equipment and supplies, if agreed before June 30, 1946; cotton credits of thirty million dollars; credits for transportation and telecommunications; Export-Import Bank credit of five hundred million dollars (though hedged about by the need for approval of specific projects, and progress toward internal stability); and arrangements for ac-

quiring surplus property such as river boats and for settling wartime accounts. Finally, the United States share of UNRRA goods delivered to China through 1947 would amount to approximately four hundred seventy-five million dollars. All of this had been preceded by orders under presidential authority to stop all civilian agencies and the Army and Navy departments from negotiating with the Chinese and centering all authority to do so in General Marshall. During this period the Chinese authorities in Washington were about as difficult to deal with as the Russians had been during the war. They examined all of every gift horse's teeth, and gave it a thorough checkup as well.

17. THE ACHESON-LILIENTHAL REPORT

Hardly had Secretary Byrnes caught his breath after the Moscow conference when he was off again on January 7, 1946, to London for the first meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Again the command passed to me and with it a collection of tasks and troubles great and small. They revealed that my relations with the President and the Secretary of State were to be more complicated than even the first three months had suggested. My first trouble was a small one, a social faux pas, which came close to worsening our already deteriorating relations with the Russians.

A SOCIAL FAUX PAS f

In January the President decided that the annual diplomatic dinner at the White House, discontinued during the war, should be reinstated. Stanley Woodward, Chief of Protocol, brought me the word and a problem caused by the population explosion of nation-states. If following past practice all the chiefs of mission, their deputies, and the wives of both were invited together with the essential official Americans and wives, the dinner would swamp the White House. How could the number be divided and yet avoid the impression of first- and second-class affairs? Like a good staff officer, Woodward was ready with a suggested solution of his own problem: to number the missions in their alphabetical order and invite the odd numbers for one date and the even numbers for another. It seemed a brilliant idea and immediately found favor at the White House. Alas, we overlooked an elemental precaution—careful scrutiny of the resulting lists.

On the afternoon before the first dinner Woodward was informed by a female voice with fragmentary command of English that the Soviet Ambassador and his Counselor had unfortunately been taken ill and regretted that they would be unable to dine with the President. To be sure that we were not the victims of a practical joke, we put through a call to Ambassador Nicolai V. Novikov, which found him apparently gay and cheerful in New York. However, inquiries about his health and plans for the evening brought confirmation of poor health in the Soviet Embassy. Woodward went off to rearrange the seating.

No cloud darkened the dinner. It was the Trumans' first state affair, conducted with a dignity that I found agreeable after the bonhommie of FDR. The

President made no comment on the absence of the Russians. Our colleagues in the Eastern European Office, however, soon found the cause of the trouble. Our odd-and-even selection had invited to the same dinner the envoys of the USSR and Lithuania, whose country, along with Latvia and Estonia, had been swallowed by the Soviet Union though they are still recognized by us as independent states. Doubtless poor Novikov had only received instructions at the last moment. So when we were sent for next morning by the President, Woodward and I were prepared for a good wigging for sloppy work.

We were not, however, prepared to be directed to tell the Soviet Ambassador that he was no longer welcome here, since he had been inexcusably rude to Mrs. Truman. We threw ourselves into the breach, explaining Novikov's dilemma, proclaiming our own ineptitude, warning of the serious consequences of such a step and the dismay of even our best friends abroad. The President remained adamant. Matt Connelly came in and handed him the telephone, saying, "Mrs. Truman." He listened for a while, and then said, "I'm talking with him now. He agrees with you." After listening again, he handed the receiver to me. I must not, Mrs. Truman said, let the President go through with his plan. I agreed in the objective, but asked for operating instructions. Mrs. Truman thought delay while the President's temper cooled the best procedure. She added that if he went ahead his critics would have a field day. This gave me an idea. While she talked I murmured in horror pretending to repeat phrases that she never uttered, such as ". . . above himself. . . delusions of grandeur . . . too big for his britches . . ."

The President took the receiver away from me. "All right, all right," he said. "When you gang up on me I know I'm licked. Let's forget all about it." He hung up the receiver, already smiling, and picked up an old-fashioned gold-filigree photograph frame, opened it, and handed me a photograph of a young woman in the costume of my youth.

"I guess you think I'm an old fool," he said, "and I probably am. Look on the back," he added. There was written, "Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France—Bess." It was dated 1917.

As we went out he called after us, "Tell Old Novocaine we didn't miss him!"

STALIN'S SPEECH AND KENNAN'S REPORT

Evidence had been accumulating that Stalin was steering foreign policy of the Soviet Union on an ominous course. On February 9, 1946, before a vast "election" audience in Moscow, he stated with brutal clarity the Soviet Union's postwar policy.' Finding the causes of the late war in the necessities of capitalist-imperialist monopoly and the same forces still in control abroad, he concluded that no peaceful international order was possible. The Soviet Union must, therefore, be capable of guarding against any eventuality. The basic materials of national defense—iron and steel—must be trebled, and coal and oil, the sources of energy, doubled. Consumer goods, so desperately needed in

Russia, must wait on rearmament. This grim news depressed even the ebulHent spirits of the Secretary of State. They were soon to be depressed even further.

In response to a request for elucidation of this startling speech, George F. Kennan, then Charge d'Affaires in Moscow, cabled a long and truly remarkable dispatch. It had a deep effect on thinking within the Government, although Government response with action still needed a year's proof of Soviet intentions as seen by Kennan. He found "at the bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs" centuries of a Russian fear of physical, and a tyranny's fear of political, insecurity. To the Government, whether czarist or bolshevik, penetration by the Western world was its greatest danger. Marxism "with its basic altruism of purpose" furnished them with justification for their "fear of [the] outside world. ... In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is [the] fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability."

Kennan predicted that Soviet policy would be to use every means to infiltrate, divide, and weaken the West. Means would include the foreign communist parties, diplomacy, international organizations—blocking what they did not like, starting false trails to divert—probing weak spots by every means. To seek a modus vivendi with Moscow would prove chimerical, a process leading not to an end but only to political warfare. His recommendations—to be of good heart, to look to our own social and economic health, to present a good face to the world, all of which the Government was trying to do—were of no help; his historical analysis might or might not have been sound, but his predictions and warnings could not have been better.- We responded to them slowly.

INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF ATOMIC ENERGY

My principal task and concern during my chiefs absence was an assignment that he had given me a few minutes before boarding his plane for London. Typically, we had had no prior discussion of it or of the policy decision upon which it was based and which was contrary to that which I had recommended to the President in September. In my schizophrenic official life what had seemed policy in the autumn was a hallucination in the winter. Instead of beginning our exploration of international control of atomic energy by consultation with the British and Russians before going into a larger body, we had been committed in November to starting off in a United Nations commission. However, my present assignment was not when or how to start, but what to start with.

The Secretary reached me in my bed at home, where I had been laid low by influenza, to tell me of my appointment as chairman of a committee to draft a plan for the international control of atomic energy. Protests that I knew nothing about the subject were waved aside with the cheering answer that other members of the committee knew a lot. They were to be Dr. Vannevar Bush, President of the Carnegie Institution and former Director of the Office of

Scientific Research and Development; Dr. James B. Conant, President of Harvard; General Leslie R. Groves, Commandant of the Manhattan Project, which built the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs; and John J. McCloy, former Assistant Secretary of War under Colonel Stimson—a strong group.

The committee obviously could not remain in continuous session to do the necessary preparatory work, nor did its members have sufficient technical and engineering knowledge of all phases of nuclear development. Here my brilliant and imaginative assistant, Herbert Marks, came to the rescue, suggesting that we supplement the committee with a Board of Consultants. His first nominee, David E. Lilienthal, Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, helped us with the selection of the others—Chester I. Barnard, President of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company; Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, formerly Director of the Los Alamos Atomic Laboratory but at that time back at the University of California at Berkeley; Dr. Charles A. Thomas, Vice President of Monsanto Chemical Company; and Harry A. Winne, Vice President of General Electric Company. Their function, as I reported it, was to ascertain and report the facts concerning atomic energy that were relevant to the problem of safeguards and controls, including inspection, and to give an appraisal of that problem and of the potential of other nations in the field of atomic energy as compared with the United States. The committee approved the idea of the Board of Consultants and its membership.

The two groups worked closely and harmoniously together. My own contribution was principally in bringing this about and maintaining it. The strength of our report would lie not only in its substance but its unanimity. In a field so esoteric, the united recommendation of a group so qualified would carry great authority. We had among us some whose individuality of thought and opinion was not easily blended, but blending was of the essence; it fell largely to David Lilienthal, Herbert Marks, and me. The consultants led by Lilienthal and Oppenheimer met and worked almost continuously with Herbert Marks and with Dr. Bush's assistant, Carroll L. Wilson—and intermittently with me—until they had a paper to submit to the full group. It held four plenary, all-day meetings on March 7, 8, 16, and 17 at Dumbarton Oaks, the beautiful mansion that Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss restored to house their Byzantine collection and later gave to Harvard University. We began by reading the paper aloud and ended by either approving, amending, or directing a reworking of each section. The main idea to come out of the committee was that there should be a proposal, even if in very general terms, as to how one got through a transitional stage into international control. Why not add a section at the end of the report, I suggested, that would provide one? To this we turned our main attention. Reviewing the minutes of these meetings, two points I made seem worth recalling. We should not, as one member suggested, use the effort for international control of atomic energy to attempt to open up Russian society, or expect an agreement to do away with Soviet-American tensions or the posssibility of war. We should insist that in exchange for submitting to control, vivid danger signals would be provided to show whether and when that control was being evaded.

All the participants would, I think, agree that the most stimulating and creative mind among us was Robert Oppenheimer's. On this task he was also at his most constructive and accommodating. Robert could be argumentative, sharp, and, on occasion, pedantic, but no such problem intruded here.

When later I achieved a wholly undeserved reputation for expertise in nuclear matters, no one knew better than Robert Oppenheimer how fraudulent this was. At the beginning of our work he came to stay with us and after dinner each evening would lecture McCloy and me with the aid of a borrowed blackboard on which he drew little figures representing electrons, neutrons, and protons, bombarding one another, chasing one another about, dividing and generally carrying on in unpredictable ways. Our bewildered questions seemed to distress him. At last he put down the chalk in gentle despair, saying, "It's hopeless! I really think you two believe neutrons and electrons are little men!" We admitted nothing.

In such a group of strong-minded men with very fixed views in this field, unanimous agreement at times seemed impossible; yet at our last meeting we were about to reach it when a dispute arose over the drafting of a critical paragraph. At first I thought the problem a mere choice of words, but soon to my dismay a series of compromises appeared to be coming unstuck. At this point Herbert Marks's invaluable secretary. Miss Anne Wilson (now Mrs. Herbert Marks), made a brilliant contribution. She whispered in my ear, "Recess the meeting for coflfee." I did so. She brought coffee, doughnuts, and cheerful conversation. I collected Conant, Oppenheimer, Lilienthal, and Groves and gave them a new form of words, suggested that they change them as they wished, and, when the committee came to order, introduce their joint solution. Anne circulated, keeping the rest happy until our quartet had solved the problem. This they did to our satisfaction.

A letter from the committee to the Secretary of State transmitting and joining in the consultants' report I drafted myself while my colleagues went out for lunch. Into it went peripheral and cautionary views of the committee members, thus making them heard without breaking the continuity and thought of the report. This compromise satisfied all my colleagues.

The report became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal report after the chairmen of the committee and the board, but, as I have said, it was the work of the whole group, to which each made valuable contributions. Although a series of closely connected proposals, which revealed the broad-minded internationalism of American policy, its basic conception was stated simply by Dr. Bush and me over the radio after its publication:

In plain words, the Report sets up a plan under which no nation would make atomic bombs or the materials for them. All dangerous activities would be carried on—not merely inspected—by a live, functioning international Authority with a real purpose in the world and capable of attracting competent personnel. This monopoly of the dangerous activities by an international Authority would still leave a large and tremendously productive field of safe activities open to individual nations, their industries and universities.. . .

. . . the extremely favored position with regard to atomic devices, which the United States enjoys at present, is only temporary. It will not last. We must use that advantage now to promote international security and to carry out our policy of building a lasting peace through international agreement.^

Presenting the report to Mr. Byrnes on the Sunday evening on which it was finished, I urged him to release it as soon as the President approved. The public at home and abroad should be allowed to read the document itself and not a distorted version made out of rumors and leaks. In agreeing, he told me that he would recommend to the President that Bernard M. Baruch be appointed, as he has somewhat unflatteringly put it, "for the task of translating the various proposals stimulated by the Acheson-Lilienthal report into a workable plan.""*

I protested, distrusting Mr. Baruch's translation and dissenting from Mr. Byrnes's—and the generally held—view that this so-called "adviser of Presidents" was a wise man. My own experience led me to believe that his reputation was without foundation in fact and entirely self-propagated. Mr. Baruch was undoubtedly a money maker through shrewd stock market speculations, as he himself has claimed.^ He made equally shrewd political use of his fortune, rarely squandering it on large party contributions, but dispensing it judiciously—and often nonpartisanly—in small individual contributions to senatorial and congressional primary or election campaigns. This practice multiplied his admirers in the Congress while his gifted friend, Herbert Bayard Swope, polished his public "image." My plea was useless. Mr. Byrnes, like his successor, General Marshah, had fallen victim to Mr. Baruch's spell.

After submission of the report to the Secretary, I performed my duty to the Senate-House Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, chaired by Senator McMahon, by explaining and giving it to them also. This occurred at an executive hearing on March 25. To no one's surprise, an account of the report appeared in the afternoon newspapers. When the Department released the full text three days later, the press gave it extensive publicity intensified by the discussion it received in public and private groups. This was neither surprising nor undesired, since one purpose of the exercise was governmental and public education in the actual problems involved in the international control of this radical new force so glibly talked about and so little understood. To Mr. Baruch this was a source of annoyance, he said to me a little later, as the report rapidly began to be regarded as ofhcial policy without any approval by the Secretary or the President.

However it soon ceased to be. On April 10 Mr. Byrnes wrote to me that while he had agreed to a suggestion originating with the committee that with the filing of the report it be discharged, "Mr. Baruch, who has been appointed by the President to the [United Nations] Atomic Energy Commission, is very earnest in his request that I urge you and the gentlemen associated with you to continue to act in an advisory capacity on this subject." The committee was divided in its response to this proposal, but the consultants believed that to be of any use they would have to work full time, which they could not do. Moreover, they insisted on remaining free to express their own ideas, which they

held so strongly. They all, however, agreed to meet with Mr. Baruch and his group—Herbert Swope, John Hancock, Ferdinand Eberstadt, Fred Searls, General Thomas F. Farrell, and Richard C. Tolman—at the Blair-Lee House on May 17 and 18.

These meetings made clear that others would not be profitable, but unhappily the release did not extend to me. Mr. Baruch enlarged upon some points of disagreement with the report, his principal one being the report's failure to recommend sanctions to be provided in the scheme of international control as punishments for violations of it. Mr. Byrnes has explained the Baruch view: "He [Mr. Baruch] insisted the plan should provide that, once the treaty was ratified, any government violating its treaty obligation and developing or using atomic energy for destructive purposes should be subjected to swift and sure punishment; and in case of violation no one of the permanent members of the Security Council should be permitted to veto punitive action by the council."^

This matter had been discussed at length by the committee. After careful analysis we had concluded that provisions for either "swift and sure," or "condign," punishment for violation of the treaty were very dangerous words that added nothing to a treaty and were almost certain to wreck any possibility of Russian acceptance of one. The Soviet Union was undoubtedly doing all in its power to develop nuclear weapons at the moment. (Just under four years later the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device.) If so, the "swift and sure punishment" provision could be interpreted in Moscow only as an attempt to turn the United Nations into an alliance to support a United States threat of war against the USSR unless it ceased its efforts, for only the United States could conceivably administer "swift and sure" punishment to the Soviet Union. This meant the certain defeat of the treaty by Soviet veto. On the other hand, if some other nation was charged with a violation (including possibly ourselves) what, if anything, could be done would depend upon what nation it was, its relation to either the Soviet Union or the United States, the circumstances, and whether these two nations were agreed or at odds (the latter seemed more likely) about what should be done.

Into these complexities intruded the problem of the veto. "Swift and sure punishment" for violation of the treaty, if realistically considered, seemed uncomfortably close to war, or certainly to sanctions that under the United Nations treaty were subject to the veto of permanent members of the Security Council. Did it seem likely that they would forgo it here? The only practicable safeguard in case of violations would be clear notice and warning that they were occurring. This would give other parties to the treaty knowledge that it was being breached and an opportunity to take such action, separately or collectively, for their own protection as might be possible. Provisions for paper police sanctions to be imposed by the same parties were only an illusion. These views were explained fully to Mr. Baruch.

Other proposals by the Baruch group seemed to the consultants to weaken their plan by moving away from the concept of the international authority as the sole performer of dangerous activities toward that of a regulation of their per-

formance by others. At the end of the two days no meeting of minds had occurred. Mr. Baruch asked the consultants to summarize their recommendations in writing, which they did. Both they and the committee then dissolved as organized units and the members went their various ways. I, however, remained.

At the end of May Messrs. Baruch and Hancock had two meetings with Mr. Byrnes and me about their operating instructions, at which they stated their ideas for modifying the report and I explained it. The Secretary overruled two of their proposals—one for a preliminary raw-material survey, the other for expanding the UN Atomic Energy Commission's field of study and recommendation to include other weapons. Mr. Byrnes discussed the matter of "automatic sanctions" with the President, who approved Mr. Baruch's position. Instructed to prepare a draft instruction for Mr. Baruch on the basis of our recommendations as modified by decisions of the President and the Secretary, Herbert Marks and I did so. After several further versions back and forth, the President approved the policy.

Throughout this episode, as throughout the one related in the next chapter, relations between my chief and myself remained cordial and easy. But both experiences, occurring almost coincidentally, led me to review my position carefully and to attempt a precautionary measure, which—perhaps fortunately —did not come off, as the next chapter also relates. Relations with Mr. Baruch went on smoothly when in Mr. Byrnes's absence I had to obtain advice and assistance for him in his arduous negotiation, but I had no doubt that, as he himself made clear later, he deeply distrusted me. During the summer amusing evidence of this cropped up.

After a telephone conversation in August Mr. Baruch wrote to me as follows: ". . . before you came on the phone, a voice in your office said, 'Put on recorder one or four.'f I do not know whether there was any significance in this remark. What I should like to know is whether the conversations that pass between myself and your office are recorded, and if so, whether you would be good enough to send me a copy of the recordings."

I replied at once that I had no recording device in the office and had had no stenographic record taken. He could put his mind at ease about the privacy of our conversations.

Mr. Baruch proposed the U.S. plan with considerable fanfare. The UN Atomic Energy Commission discussed it for the rest of the year and in late December, with the USSR and Poland abstaining, voted 10 to o to recommend adoption of a comprehensive international system. Its report substantially adopted the American plan. There the matter died. Mr. Molotov rather neatly escaped a propaganda defeat by introducing in the General Assembly, and strongly urging, a plan for a general regulation and reduction of armaments.

18. THE DEPARTMENT AiUFFS ITS INTELLIGENCE ROLE

THE NATURE OF INTELLIGENCE

The battle within the Department over disposition of the research and intelligence units transferred from the Office of Strategic Services in October 1945 is worth recalling to catch the first warning of McCarthyism to come, and to understand the self-inflicted wounds which impaired the standing of the State Department within the Government. It brought out, too, the issue between the bureaucracy and myself over where decisions should be made and where command should lie. The attitude that presidents and secretaries may come and go but the Department goes on forever has led many presidents to distrust and dislike the Department of State.

Intelligence is information, a key to decision: "It deals with all the things which should be known in advance of initiating a course of action."^ It is both a process and a product—the process of information collection, and the product "from the collection, evaluation, analysis, integration and interpretation of all available information."- Intelligence is of different types: counterintelligence attempts to frustrate hostile foreign intelligence operations; operational intelligence, to aid the conduct of a specific mission; strategic intelligence, to gather information regarding the capabilities, vulnerabilities, and intentions of foreign nations to aid foreign policy decision of the most vital importance and at the highest level. As Sherman Kent has written: "If foreign policy is the shield of the republic . . . then strategic intelligence is the thing that gets the shield to the right place at the right time."^

Prior to the Second World War the United States had the most rudimentary foreign intelligence service. The Department's technique of gathering information, I told the House Appropriations Committee, "differed only by reason of the typewriter and the telegraph from the techniques which John Quincy Adams was using in St. Petersburg and Benjamin Franklin was using in Paris." Referring to the Army's intelligence service up to the same time. General Eisenhower has recorded that there was "a shocking deficiency that impeded all constructive planning," and General Marshall that our foreign intelligence was "little more than what a military attache could learn at a dinner, more or less, over the coffee cups."'*

By the time of Pearl Harbor, techniques had improved but not that of picking out the "significant sounds" from the "background noises," as Roberta

Wohlstetter has brilliantly pointed out.^ At that time all the information to anticipate the attack was available but not the organization and techniques to evaluate and disseminate it to the right places at the right time with the right orders.

In 1942 the Army and Navy combined their efforts into a Joint Intelligence Committee as a defensive ahiance against Colonel William (Wild Bill) Donovan's OSS—also under their jurisdiction.! By the end of the war, he had twelve thousand people in all branches of his intelligence operation. A year before the State Department had eighteen persons specifically assigned to this work.^ In 1943 Donovan's plea to the Chiefs of Staff for a centralized service was blocked in the Pentagon. The next year he carried an appeal to the White House, which invited the views of the Joint Chiefs. Their views leaked to the press, whereupon, amid charges of a Gestapo and so on, a general Donnybrook ensued. The State Department inherited with Research and Intelligence from OSS a major role in a civil war.

When President Truman turned his attention to this problem, one thing was clear to him—the hour for improvement had struck. He had before him a recommendation from Secretary Byrnes, shared by the Budget Bureau, that an intelligence agency should be responsible to the Secretary of State; Donovan's plea for a permanent centralized intelligence agency; and the armed services' view that "complete merger of the intelligence services of the State, War, and Navy departments is not considered feasible since each of these departments requires operating intelligence peculiar to itself" and their recommendation of a Central Intelligence Agency "to coordinate [that slippery word again] and, as far as practicable, unify all foreign intelligence activities and to synthesize . . ." etc., etc.^ The President turned over both Colonel Donovan's intelligence facilities and the solution of the intelligence problem to the Secretary of State.t

PRIMACY IS OFFERED TO THE DEPARTMENT

"I particularly desire," the President wrote Mr. Byrnes, "that you take the lead in developing a comprehensive and coordinated foreign intelligence program for all Federal agencies concerned with that type of activity. This should be done through the creation of an Inter-departmental Group, heading up under the State Department, which should formulate plans for my approval." This order seemed plain enough. So did the plan of the Budget Bureau upon which the President was acting. This had been shown to Mr. Byrnes, by him to me, and agreed between us as our procedure when he had offered and I had accepted the Under Secretaryship. The plan provided that the Secretary of State should be the focal point for leadership in intelligence activities, which should be supervised by a civilian director—a State Department man—enabled to speak with authority by reason of heading a strong, unified intelligence organization within the State Department. To form this organization, the bureau recommended, and the President on September 20 ordered, the transfer of the Research and Intelligence personnel to State.

Colonel Alfred McCormack of Army Intelligence had already been designated by Secretary Byrnes, at my suggestion, as his Special Assistant for Research and Intelligence. On October i, as Acting Secretary, I gave him the necessary instructions to carry out the President's order. These, as they stated, had already been cleared with the Secretary. Colonel McCormack had earned a high reputation during the war for his intelligence work in the Army. Before that, as a partner in one of New York's largest and best-known law firms, he stood at the forefront of the rising younger men at the bar. So far as organization within the Department was concerned, his orders directed him to survey the various parts of the OSS to determine what units and personnel the State Department should retain beyond the terminal date of January i, to survey organizations within the Department engaged in intelligence work to decide what should be transferred to the intelligence group. The final step should be to "consolidate the units within OSS which we wish to retain and the units of the Department of State now participating in intelligence activities so that, by January i, all intelligence activities within the Department will be under your [i.e.. Colonel McCormack's] own control."

WE MEET OPPOSITION

At this point Colonel McCormack and I encountered heavy flak. It came from three sources: congressional opposition to professional intelligence work, civil disobedience in the State Department, and indecision in high places brought on by military opposition to both unification of the services and civilian control of intelligence.

The Congress struck the first blow. Clamoring to reduce appropriations made for the war, the House cut eight and a half billion dollars beyond the President's recommendation. This reduced the amount transferred to us for intelligence work by eleven and a half million dollars. What was left was not enough to finish the current fiscal year. Appearing before the Senate committee to ask for restoration of a small part of these funds, McCormack met, especially from the chairman. Senator Kenneth McKellar, a hostile and suspicious attitude toward the basic idea of a professional intelligence service. Colonel McCormack was heckled and sniped at, and the cut was sustained.^ A supplemental budget estimate was prepared.

Meanwhile, in the State Department the geographic divisions were moving into solid opposition to intelligence work not in their organizations and under their control. "Among the conservative element of the department," writes an historian of this period, "which was also the regnant element, there was litde or no comprehension of what intelligence was and no disposition to support an intelligence staff."^ The Assistant Secretary for Administration, Donald Russell, was of the same opinion. He met McCormack's supplemental budget request to hold his organization together with the question "of whether the intelligence research of the Department should not be done on a decentralized basis (in the various functional and geographic offices) instead of on a centralized basis as contemplated in the budget estimate."^'^

On October 27 I called to my office the persons principally involved in this growing controversy in an effort to head it off. McCormack and I attempted to explain the nature of the work his organization proposed to do and its importance both within the Department and to the Department within the Government.

It soon became apparent that the opposition sprang from Spruille Braden and Loy Henderson, Chiefs of the Latin American and Near Eastern divisions, and Russell and his assistant, Joseph Panuch, from the administrative side. Braden was a bull of a man physically and with the temperament and tactics of one, dealing with the objects of his prejudices by blind charges, preceded by pawing up a good deal of dust. He did both here. Later, in 1954, stating his views to a Senate Subcommittee on "Interlocking Subversion," he described McCormack's staff as "alphabet men," inexperienced, who did their work badly and were not needed. "We . . . resisted this invasion of all these swarms of people . . . mostly collectivists and 'do-gooders' and what-nots." It was, he said, "a knockdown, dragout fight." At the meeting I called, he told the committee, he had thumbed through the directive to the intelligence group and come to an instantaneous decision: "I protest on this proposition because I have glanced through here and there is not one single item or function I can find in these pages which is not being fully and competently performed by the Office of American Republics Affairs. .. . This is a complete duplication. There is no need for it. It is an extravagance, an inefficiency, and I protest."

According to Braden, it was Russell's persuasiveness with his former law partner, Mr. Byrnes, that won the fight for the geographic divisions, but that was some weeks off. At this time the Secretary approved the request for a supplemental appropriation to complete the fiscal year ending June 30, 1946. I went to work on the House Appropriations Committee to get this money for the intelligence group and finally succeeded. Russell, meanwhile, set up a group within the Department to consider the proposal to break it up. This group voted nine to eight for a unified intelligence group. On January 5, 1946, before going off to Europe, Secretary Byrnes stated that he would decide the issue in February after his return. Meanwhile, each side prepared its briefs; and persons unknown then or now introduced a new "persuader" into the debate, one destined to be all too familiar, the "loyalty" theme.

THE HIGH COMMAND WAVERS

Before this broke, both the President and the Secretary retreated, leaving the position of the intelligence group in the State Department exposed. In September they had both favored a "leading" position for the Secretary and the Department. Colonel McCormack tried to persuade the services to accept this point of view.'' Although they agreed with him in opposition to uniting all intelligence directly under the President, they objected also to a looser grouping of agencies under the supervision of the Secretary and his Director. Their persuasion led Mr. Byrnes to join them in an odd plan for a National Intelli-

gence Authority and a Central Intelligence Group. The President accepted it in a directive of January 22, 1946, in which he changed his position by moving primacy in intelligence from the State Department to the Executive Office of the President. He further weakened his earlier stand by not giving the Director a strong staff under his own control.

The National Intelligence Authority, which was to formulate high policy, would consist of the Secretaries of State, War, Navy, and a presidential appointee. Admiral Leahy, the Director of the Central Intelligence Group, would sit with the others but not vote. The Group, which would get its staff and money from the State, War, and Navy departments, would do the planning, development, and coordination of all foreign intelligence work. How often these same dismal words and futile charts of organization had issued from the White House during the war to "clarify" various powers, functions, and responsibilities granted in the field of foreign economic activities. A good many of us had cut our teeth and throats with this sort of nonsense. From that experience we learned that no committee can govern and no man can administer without his own people, money, and authority.

On February 12 Secretary Byrnes heard argument and received memoranda from me, Colonel McCormack, and the geographic assistant secretaries, taking the issue under advisement. Two weeks later Russell gave him a memorandum proposing the "Russell Plan," whether by request or not I do not know. The plan called for transfer of the units doing work on specific areas— the bulk of the staff—to the geographic divisions; the rump of the organization would be renamed the Office of Intelligence Coordination and Liaison and deal with other intelligence agencies throughout the government. While the Secretary cogitated for a month, the "loyalty" issue broke from insinuation within the Department to attack from the Congress.

A PRE-MC CARTHY ATTACK

Representative Andrew Jackson May, Democrat, chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs, was the chosen instrument for the attack. On March 14, May charged that persons with "strong Soviet leanings," who had been forced out of the War Department, were now to be found in State, and that he had complained strongly to Mr. Byrnes and had named names. The latter denied the basic charge and said his screening committee had found and removed only one person as suspect. Colonel McCormack, at the time engaged with testimony in support of his appropriation for the ensuing fiscal year before a House subcommittee, soon made public a letter denying May's charge and demanding to be heard.'- May refused for lack of committee jurisdiction. McCormack demanded retraction, defending the persons—some twenty in all —brought over from military intelligence. The Appropriations Committee cut out his entire appropriation, although later restoring a part.

Panuch had been peddling the same charges, among others, against the people brought over from OSS, saying:

The underlying purposes of this merger, in my opinion, were:

1. To shift control over the formulation of foreign policy from the career Foreign Service officers of the Department to personnel of reliable [sic] ideological orientation. . . .

4. To shift the center of gravity in the process of United States foreign policy formulation from a national to an international orientation via the supranational United Nations Organization. . . .

Thus, in September and October of 1Q45 the State Department—theretofore a relatively small, but compact policy agency—became a huge, bloated organization with a confused mission, swamped with inexperienced, untrained—and what is worse, unscreened—personnel. . . .

. . . Their ideology was far to the left of the views held by the President and his Secretary of State.

The end of this ideology may fairly [sic] be described as a socialized America in a world commonwealth of Communist and Socialist states dedicated to peace through collective security, political, economic, and social reform; and the redistribution of national wealth on a global basis.

Sucli were the views of Mr. Russell's chief assistant. The on]y one of them which requires mention is that the people transferred were "unscreened." Somewhat over sixteen hundred persons were transferred. They were all carefully reviewed by Colonel IVIcCormack and fifty per cent were retained.

SECRETARY BYRNES DECIDES AGAINST ME

On April 22 Secretary Byrnes issued orders putting the Russell recommendations into eflfect.^^ The next day he left Washington for a month. On the same day Colonel McCormack submitted his resignation to me, as Acting Secretary. My letter accepting it concluded:

May I add my own word. I know with what reluctance you gave up last fall your intention to return to private life in order to do this work in the Department. I know the untiring energy which you devoted to it. I know the effort which you have put into surmounting the difficulties which were inherent in the task. All of us who have worked with you are deeply grateful. When you joined us, you and I had only a slight acquaintance; I knew you chiefly through your work. As you leave, you take with you my increased admiration for that and a deep personal regard. I hope that the future holds opportunities for us to work together again and to happier outcomes.

I was under no illusion about the position in which Secretary Byrnes's decision had left me as well as my departing colleague, nor of the character and disposition of some of the remaining ones over whom I had theoretical command. Perhaps as revealing as any aspect of this sorry episode is a phrase used by Panuch in his 1953 testimony in which he stated that one of the purposes of the merger was "to shift control over the formulation of foreign policy from the career Foreign Service officers." This was, indeed, where too many of them believed that it rested. For five years the conviction had been growing upon me that what the Department needed most was a disciplinary innovation which would convince its members that in fact as well as in theory "control"

and all that that implied and required resided in the Secretary of State as the President's chief secretary. However, that would have to await the arrival of General Marshall.

I DECIDE TO RESIGN

Mr. Byrnes returned from London at the end of January to spend three months with us. After that, except for two visits, he was gone again until after the middle of October. He was an individual operator using half a dozen close associates upon those problems that engaged his attention. For him the four or five thousand other people in the Department and any problems upon which he was not working personally hardly existed. It was not strange, then, that ideas of organization were not congenial to him and that "the reorganization to end all reorganizations," which he had promised in August, never materialized except for a welcome pay raise. What did materialize, as I mentioned earlier, was Assistant Secretary Russell's split up of the research and intelligence work, the consequent resignation of Alfred McCormack, and the weakening of the Department's capacity to maintain a global view of the offensive being mounted from Moscow.

On April 23, 1946, Mr. Byrnes was to go to Paris for two meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers before the Paris Peace Conference to conclude treaties with Italy, Finland, Bulgaria, and Rumania, and then to the conference itself, which with two brief breaks would keep him there until October 17. In these circumstances my position seemed to have some elements of dangerous instabihty. As Acting Secretary I had, with the President's backing, ample scope and authority, except in matters of departmental organization. But as Under Secretary my position was far from clear, since many people could and did go to the Secretary for approval of action without informing me. In other words, lines of command were not clear. They had not been clear under Mr. Hull, either. This created trouble then and it could again. Furthermore, it seemed quite possible that further misunderstanding between my two superiors, similar to that which occurred at the end of December, might occur again. As the man in the middle, my position could be unenviable. Therefore, I wrote a letter of resignation to take effect at such time after the Secretary's return as might be convenient to him and to the President.!

I took the letter to the Secretary, explained that if he and the President should fall out I would like the record to show that my resignation was dated before the fracas, and asked him to put the letter on deposit in the White House. He was not only taken with the idea but the next day showed me a letter of his own emulating it. As I recall, it reported the doctor's finding of a heart murmur, nothing serious, but not to be neglected indefinitely. It asked for relief after completion of the satellite peace treaties. The upshot of the matter was that he filed his letter and did not file mine. In due course, this produced quite a different result from that which I had in mind for myself in writing my letter or from that which the Secretary had in mind for himself when he wrote his.

19. THE QUEBEC AGREEMENT

MY INTRODUCTION TO SECRET DIPLOMACY

During the winter of 1945-46 I learned about a matter that was to disturb me for some years to come, for with knowledge came the belief that our Government, having made an agreement from which it had gained immeasurably, was not keeping its word and performing its obligations. Like all great issues it was not simple. Grave consequences might follow upon keeping our word, but the idea of not keeping it was repulsive to me. The analogy of a nation to a person is not sound in all matters of moral conduct; in this case, however, it seemed to me pretty close. Even in realpolitik a reputation for probity carries its own pragmatic rewards.

When we entered the war, British scientific development was ahead of ours in some important areas, notably the electronics of naval warfare and the field of nuclear physics. To obtain the greatest security and benefit of all the material resources and scientific talent of our ally and ourselves in the development of a nuclear weapon seemed to dictate pooling them in our country and under our direction. Full agreement on doing so was not reached until the Quebec agreement of August 1943. Earlier in the war, even before we ourselves became belligerents, informal exchanges of information on weapons research and development had been carried out, including some interchange on atomic matters. General Leslie Groves was placed in charge of the "Manhattan District" in September 1942, when we were making ready our major establishments at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and in the New Mexico desert. General Groves was not a scientist, but he was a most capable administrator of this great scientific project. As Robert Oppenheimer said of him, "he had a fatal weakness for good men."

He also had reservations about full exchange of information regarding what was becoming an increasingly American effort. Secretary Stimson sought guidance from President Roosevelt, who decided that, pending a talk with Mr. Churchill, no more information should be shared than was necessary for the conduct of the project. The British protested but the President confirmed a recommendation of "interchange of information only to the extent that it can be used now by the recipient."'

This was how matters stood when the agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States governing their collaboration in the development of "tube alloys," the British code name, was written down by the two heads of government at their August 1943 meeting in Quebec. Like so much of

the writing emanating from their meetings, it was not a careful lawyers' document, but rather a memorandum of what they had agreed on so far as they had discussed the matter. It recited the decision to pool in the United States brains and resources to insure their most provident use and to speed the project, with the result that a far larger part of the expense had fallen on the United States. It was agreed that the parties would never use "this agency" against each other, nor would they use it against third parties without each other's consent, nor communicate any information about tube alloys except by mutual consent. Britain disclaimed any "post-war advantages of an industrial or commercial character" beyond what might be considered by the President of the United States to be "fair and just and in accordance with the welfare of the world."-The agreement provided for a Combined Policy Committee of three American officials, two British, and a Canadian, which should agree from time to time on the program of work to be carried on, allocate materials, plant, and apparatus in limited supply, and settle questions arising under the agreement. Complete interchange of all information and ideas on all sections of the project should take place among the Policy Committee members and their advisers and on scientific research and development between those engaged in the same sections of the field. Interchange regarding design, construction, and operations of large-scale plants should be regulated by ad hoc agreements in the interest of the earliest completion of the project and approved by the Policy Committee.

The strict construction placed by American officials on the meaning of the agreement was spelled out for President Truman at the time of his November 1945 talks with Prime Minister Attlee. But the basic ambiguity surrounding the commitments, which was to give me so much discomfort, is underlined by another agreement of Churchill and Roosevelt in September 1944 that "full collaboration" between the two governments "in developing Tube Alloys for military and commercial purposes should continue after the defeat of Japan unless and until terminated by joint agreement."'^ Three months earlier the two had established a Combined Development Trust, administered by six persons appointed and removable by the Combined Policy Committee and charged with acquiring, developing, and holding as the agent of the Policy Committee uranium and thorium supplies originating outside the jurisdiction of the two governments and the Commonwealth (i.e., at that time chiefly in the Belgian Congo). Its operations were to be financed equally by the two governments.

When the new President and Prime Minister met in November 1945 they agreed that there should be "full and effective cooperation in the field of atomic energy between the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada," that the Combined Policy Committee and the Combined Development Trust should be continued, and that the former should recommend arrangements to achieve this purpose."*

So far as I can recall, my first knowledge of these highly secret and important affairs came shortly before Mr. Byrnes took me to a meeting of the Combined Policy Committee on February 15, 1946, called principally to recast the Quebec agreement. We had before us proposals drafted by a subcommittee consisting of General Groves, Roger Makins of the British Foreign Office, and

Lester B. Pearson. One of these proposals we were later to wish most fervently that we had put into effect at the earliest opportunity, as it would have changed the second article of the Quebec agreement to provide that atomic weapons should not be used against third parties without prior consultation between the two governments rather than "without each other's consent." However, the amendments were a "package," as the phrase goes, and some of them caused considerable concern, not least to their co-author. General Groves, who until the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 remained in charge for the Army of all our Government's operations in the atomic field.

The General, therefore, threw a monkey wrench into the negotiating machinery. He pointed out to Secretary Byrnes, who raised the objection in the meeting, that although the heads of government had directed the preparation of the amendments, the United Nations Charter, which took effect October 24, 1945, required the registration of all international agreements with the United Nations. Lord Halifax strongly opposed delay but Mr. Byrnes, who saw the propaganda advantage to the Russians in bringing to light active Anglo-American-Canadian agreements on atomic energy when we three were the proponents of international control, remained hesitant. He must discuss this problem with the President.

What particularly bothered General Groves were two changes in prior practice. One would alter the allocation to the United States of all ores obtained by both countries, as had been done during the war, in favor of an even division of ore on the ground that each country paid for half and should receive half. The other matter was the British request for technical information needed to build a large-scale atomic plant in the United Kingdom. The General argued that an even division of ore would soon bring our operations to a halt. We had used our only two atomic weapons and needed to make more, while the British could not yet use any ore. He also saw an atomic plant in England as far too vulnerable to Russian attack. If built at all, it should be built in Canada. The honeymoon of Anglo-American relations existing during the war was clearly coming to an end, and some of the commitments of the marriage seemed to be causing pain to one of the spouses.

A correspondence between President Truman and Prime Minister Attlee failed to resolve the issue of technical help in building the atomic plant. The President's view was that the exchange of information contemplated in the agreements related only to basic scientific research and that to enlarge the area while both the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and international control through the United Nations were still pending would be a serious mistake. The Prime Minister argued that help on the plant had never been ruled out but retained as a possibility and that equitably it was justified by British help to us in the development of radar and jet engines.

When the raw-materials issue became deadlocked in the Combined Policy Committee, I was drawn into an attempt to work out an agreement, with Dr. Bush and General Groves as my colleagues working with Roger Makins and Sir James Chadwick on the British side. After much discussion the British representatives offered to recommend to London that the one hundred per cent

allocation to the United States of all material going through the Combined Development Trust should continue through March 31, 1946, with the United Kingdom getting fifty per cent for the rest of the year without prejudice to different allocations in subsequent years. We recommended this solution to the Combined Policy Committee as one that would permit the United States to maintain its scheduled operations for the remainder of the year. The Secretary of War and the President approved on July 10, 1946.

By the time the President's correspondence with the Prime Minister had run down and the new allocation of raw materials had been made, the UN Atomic Energy Commission was convening for discussions that would focus on the American proposal for international control of atomic energy, and the Congress in August would greatly change the situation by its domestic control act. Neither the British Government nor ours believed the hour propitious for embarking on further discussions to amend the Quebec agreement. This still remained highly classified as top secret and became increasingly a source of acute embarrassment.

Indeed, so closely was knowledge of the Quebec agreement held that Secretary of Defense Forrestal did not know of it until some time after I did.'"' What disturbed me when I did learn of it was the problem presented in our relations with Congress. The Administration had for some time been discussing with Congress, in considerable detail and apparently in complete candor, all aspects of both national and international control of nuclear energy and weapons, without mentioning the existence of so relevant and important a matter as this agreement. The somewhat incredible truth was that very few knew about it (due, in part, to so many changes in high office), and those who did thought of it as a temporary wartime agreement to be superseded by broader arrangements currently and constantly discussed.

The immediate problem seemed to be how to purge ourselves of an imputation of bad faith, a problem I was eager to have decided by my superiors and betters, the President and the Secretary of State. They, however, operating on the principle that the bearer of bad news should do something about it, sent me to the Capitol to begin by making a disclosure to Senator Vandenberg, share with him his first moments of anguish, and bear his recriminations. Since I was innocent myself, I could, at least, urge that while we at the other end of the avenue might be fools, we were not knaves. No competitors for the honor of this mission appearing, I performed it. Senator Vandenberg had with him his colleague on the Foreign Relations and Joint Atomic Energy committees, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, Republican of Iowa. Senator Vandenberg later described the agreement I disclosed as "astounding" and "unthinkable."*' It was thinkable enough, however, to permit a considerable flow of words of a highly unfavorable nature from both senators. My role was to bear them submissively and patiently until a reduction in the temperature of the conversation returned the whole subject to the realm of the thinkable. When we had jointly thought about it for a while, the agreement appeared less unusual as a wartime agreement between allies engaged in the joint development of this horrendous weapon. Nor was it immediately clear that the best interests of either or both

countries would be served by cutting off all relations between them on atomic matters. Doubtless the Quebec agreement needed modification in the light of the rapidly, and not too favorably, developing situation, but just what modification would require some thought and discussion with our British colleagues. Later negotiations, resulting in the so-called modus vivendi of 1948, were carried on by my successor, Robert Lovett. These relieved the extreme apprehension of the senators but left the British with a sense of having been ungenerously, if not unfairly, treated. When I returned to office in 1949, the problem of our relations with the British on nuclear matters was still unresolved. Tackling it again, I found my views out of sympathy with the more extreme nationalist ones prevailing in the Congress and in some parts of the executive branch. I was not proud of the resulting governmental attitude. But all this belongs to later chapters.

20. THE PUZZLE OF PALESTINE

Almost immediately upon becoming President, Mr. Truman with the best will in the world tackled that immensely difficult international puzzle—a homeland in Palestine for the Jews. Inevitably I was sucked in after him. The fate of the Jewish victims of Hitlerism was a "matter of deep personal concern" to him and as President he "undertook to do something about it." The Balfour Declaration, promising the Jews the opportunity to re-establish a homeland in Palestine, had always seemed to him "to go hand in hand with the noble policies of Woodrow Wilson, especially the principle of self-determination."^ From many years of talk with him I know that this represented a deep conviction, in large part implanted by his close friend and former partner, Eddie Jacobson, a passionate Zionist.

Both Prime Minister Attlee and Ernest Bevin, in the heat of their annoyance with Mr. Truman, charged that his support of Jewish immigration into Palestine was inspired by domestic political opportunism. This was not true despite the confirming observations of some of his associates, such as Bob Hannegan, Jim Forrestal, and James Byrnes, collected by Mr. Attlee in his memoirs.^ Mr. Truman held deep-seated convictions on many subjects, among them, for instance, a dislike of Franco and Catholic obscurantism in Spain.

I did not share the President's views on the Palestine solution to the pressing and desperate plight of great numbers of displaced Jews in Eastern Europe, for whom the British and American commanders in Germany were temporarily attempting to provide. The number that could be absorbed by Arab Palestine without creating a grave political problem would be inadequate, and to transform the country into a Jewish state capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East. From Justice Brandeis, whom I revered, and from Felix Frankfurter, my intimate friend, I had learned to understand, but not to share, the mystical emotion of the Jews to return to Palestine and end the Diaspora. In urging Zionism as an American governmental policy they had allowed, so I thought, their emotion to obscure the totality of American interests. Zionism was the only topic that Felix and I had by mutual consent excluded from our far-ranging daily talks.

By the time I took up my duties as Under Secretary in September 1945 it was clear that the President himself was directing policy on Palestine. I detected no inclination on the part of Secretary Byrnes to project himself into this issue, but rather a tendency to leave supervision of the Department's work on it more and more to me. Despite my own views, I did my best loyally to see

that the President's wishes were understood and carried out, taking at this time more of an administrative than an advisory role. The officers of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, who under the instruction of President Roosevelt and Secretary Stettinius had been following a neutral role on the Palestine issue, faithfully adapted themselves to President Truman's different approach. Later on, some ardent Zionist sympathizers attacked the head of the Near Eastern Office, Loy Henderson, for obstructing the President's policy. This was untrue and grossly unfair to this entirely loyal and competent officer.

At the time of which I am writing, President Truman's views centered exclusively upon two points: first, immediate immigration into Palestine of one hundred thousand displaced Jews from Eastern Europe; second, the determination to assume no political or military responsibility for this decision. To accomplish the former would require Britain, the mandatory state, to change its policy, which restricted immigration into Palestine to fifteen hundred per month. The President wrote Mr. Churchill of his desire to discuss this at their prospective meeting at Potsdam. When the time came, Mr. Attlee had succeeded Mr. Churchill as Prime Minister and was not prepared. While waiting for him to get prepared, the President responded to the Egyptian and other Arab prime ministers that he wished "to renew the assurances which your Government has previously received to the effect that ... no decision should be taken regarding the basic situation in Palestine without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews." Regarding this, the President later observed, "To assure the Arabs that they would be consulted was by no means inconsistent with my generally sympathetic attitude toward Jewish aspirations."^ The Arabs may be forgiven for believing that this did not exactly state the inconsistency as they saw it.

At the end of August the President sent by Secretary Byrnes, who was going to London, another appeal to the British Prime Minister to open up Jewish immigration into Palestine. Mr. Attlee returned a dilatory reply asking for more time and no action "in the interval." At the same time Mr. Henderson gave Mr. Byrnes some observations, the wisdom of which has been amply borne out by subsequent events. He pointed out the grave complications involved in either horn of the Palestine dilemma—in moving toward Palestine either as an Arab state with a Jewish minority or as a Jewish state with an Arab minority. Therefore, he urged, while there was still time before the dilemma became too painful, we should attempt to get British, Soviet, United States, and, if possible, French agreement upon a solution and then consult the Jews and Arabs before putting the plan into effect. Otherwise one or more of the powers might lay responsibility for what might be done upon the others and encourage either Jews or Arabs or both to agitate or possibly fight against it. There is no record that this advice ever reached the President or that it would have worked if attempted, but it was surely a shrewd sighting of troubles to come and worth careful thought.

The President's thoughts, however, were quite different. He has told us that he entirely separated the long-range problem from the short-range one.

"My basic approach was that the long-range fate of Palestine was the kind of problem we had the U.N. for. For the immediate future, however, some aid was needed for the Jews in Europe.""* This idea that the United Nations was and should be something different from its members and could assume responsibility without power has been a curiously persistent one.

Such was the situation when I assumed my new duties and, in my superior's absence, found myself on the Palestine tightrope, balancing precariously. Both Jewish and Arab leaders called on me to ask what was going on. Current press gossip and speculation had made the Jewish leaders more relaxed and optimistic than the Arabs. I told the former that these important questions were receiving the President's personal attention and that I was not authorized to say more. The President's assurance about consultation should be enough. Knowing that they would be in touch with David Niles, the President's assistant for minority groups, who would be more communicative than I, what I said seemed adequate.

The Arab group were more specific. On October 3, 1945, the Egyptian Minister spoke of their disquiet over reports that the President was pressing the British for a hundred thousand Jewish immigrants into Palestine, which he found hard to believe in view of President Roosevelt's clear commitment about consultation. They would appreciate assurance from me that United States policy toward Palestine had not been changed and that our Government intended to adhere strictly to its undertaking about consultation. What conversations had taken place between Messrs. Attlee and Byrnes I did not know, nor did I wish to elaborate on the President's views on the scope and significance of consultation. I told them, therefore, that during the brief time I had been in office I had not familiarized myself with the Palestine situation, and that the Secretary would be back in a few days and would be informed at once of their request. When Secretary Byrnes returned, I told him of the request and he urged the President to release for publication President Roosevelt's letter to King Ibn Saud written just before FDR's death and to reaffirm his predecessor's statements of neutrality and friendship for the Arabs. On October 18, 1945, the President authorized the former but not the latter. When the Syrian Minister, not to be outdone, asked our agreement to publish FDR's letter to the President of Syria, I decided that we had published enough of these all-too-fulsome documents and told Henderson to reassure him in a more austere manner.

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN COMMITTEE OF INQUIRY

Prime Minister Attlee, who had been doing some cogitating about the President's letter, decided understandably to move us from our position of private exhorter to a publicly responsible partner in Palestine affairs. Accordingly, he proposed an Anglo-American committee of inquiry. During Attlee's visit in November to discuss the international control of nuclear energy, Mr. Byrnes and the President ironed out with him some differences between the

British and ourselves in our approach to the Palestine inquiry. I did not complain about my exclusion from both these discussions. The Palestine committee was to examine the needs of displaced Jews in Eastern Europe and the number that could be received in Palestine under "prevailing political, economic and social conditions." It was also to recommend provisional and permanent solutions for Palestine. Loy Henderson had warned against giving any one of the European states the enviable opportunity to incite the Arabs and Jews to hostility against a plan proposed by less than all of the major powers. We were about to give the Russians just that priceless opportunity.

I must mention the committee's membership and report because of the controversy that grew out of it with me in the storm center. Judge Joseph C. Hutcheson of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a fiery Texan and friend of the President, was American chairman, flanked by Dr. Frank Aydelotte, former President of Swarthmore College; Frank W. Buxton, editor of the Boston Herald; William Phillips, former Under Secretary of State; James G. McDonald, former League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and Bartley C. Crum, a California lawyer. The committee reported to the two governments on April 22, 1946. Being then in charge, I received a telegram from Averell Harriman, our Ambassador in London, asking on behalf of the British Government that we release the whole report at one time, so that it might be considered as a whole (which we did on May 1, 1946), rather than releasing only the conclusions or some of them apart from the whole.

The President, however, as perhaps the British feared, latched onto one of the recommendations of this report, that a hundred thousand certificates should be issued for early emigration to Palestine.^ The recommendations were interdependent. Government in Palestine was to be based on the principles that (1) Jew should not dominate Arab, nor Arab Jew; (2) the state should be neither Jewish nor Arab; (3) it should protect and preserve the interests of all in the holy places of the Christian, Moslem, and Jewish faiths. The mandate should become a trust to work for the conditions referred to. Standards should be equalized, bringing Arab up to Jewish. Immigration should continue to be facilitated after the first one hundred thousand, and land-policy restrictions eased. Economic development, education, and domestic tranquillity were to be fostered.

Unfortunately, the only significant omissions were how these goals, so unanimously desired, were to be achieved. President Truman at once approved the recommendations on immigration and easing the land-acquisition restriction. He reserved judgment on the long-range proposals. On the same day Mr. Attlee told Commons that the report must be considered as a whole and means found for carrying it out as a whole. The United Kingdom could not do this until it found out to what extent the United States "would be prepared to share the . . . additional mihtary and financial responsibilities."*^ The one hundred thousand immigrants could not be admitted until the illegal armies had been disbanded and the Jewish Agency for the Development of Palestine (an outgrowth of the Zionist Congress in Zurich in 1929) resumed cooperation in sup-

pressing terrorism. The United States and the United Kingdom were farther apart than ever.

Mr. Attlee was annoyed by Mr. Truman's taking the plum out of the pudding, and President Truman by what some of his advisers thought was Mr. Attlee's stalling on the central issue of immigration. With Mr. Byrnes away at the Paris Peace Conference, I was again called from sidelines into the thick of the fray. John Hiildring, Assistant Secretary of State in Charge of Occupied Territories, bombarded me with complaints about British stalling on the refugees while the situation in Germany and Austria deteriorated. The Near East Division answered that the British would not issue the hundred thousand certificates to relieve our problem in Europe until we took some share in their responsibility in Palestine, and it also reminded me of our promise to consult with the Arabs and Jews. The press bombarded me for a statement. I replied that it was too early.

The problem before me was clear but not simple: to bring Mr. Truman closer to Mr. Attlee's position that the report should be considered as a whole, and Mr. Attlee closer to President Truman's desire to get on with the issuance of some, at least, of the hundred thousand certificates. Since neither of these gentlemen was of a yielding disposition, the odds were against the success of the effort. The best method seemed a proposal to Mr. Attlee to hold consultations with the Arabs and Jews within two weeks on the basis of the Anglo-American report, and, in view of the urgency of the immigration matter, to complete consultations "at the earliest possible moment." On May 6, 1946, I went to the President with a telegram along these lines, which he kept for further thought after listening to me. Two days later he sent the telegram and received a prompt reply from Mr. Attlee asking for a delay in our consultation.

Although we consented, the Arabs did not. Ministers of five countries— Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—called on me in a body on May 10 to complain of the "painful impression in the Arab world" made by the report and urge us to restore tranquillity by repudiating it. I promised them consultation before action was taken. After another long talk with the President, we prepared a letter and memorandum of consultation, which with similar documents by the British were submitted to the Jewish Agency and the Arab Higher Committee, other official organizations, and the Arab governments on May 20. Toward the end of June the Jewish Agency replied equivocally, complaining that immigration of one hundred thousand Jews was to follow agreement upon the whole Palestine question. The Arabs unanimously and flatly rejected the whole report and denied the right of the United States to intervene. On June 12 Mr. Bevin made ill feeling unanimous by stating to the Bournemouth meeting of the Labour Party, "1 hope it will not be misunderstood in America if I say, with the purest of motives, that [U.S. policy toward Jewish immigration into Palestine] was because they did not want too many of them in New York."" Both Bevin and his motives were clearly understood in America. He added that His Majesty's Government was not prepared to put

another division in Palestine to help the immigration of a hundred thousand Jews from Europe.

Once again I gratefully resumed my seat on the sidelines when my chief briefly returned to Washington. Henderson had wisely advised that if the Administration wanted substantial Jewish immigration it must do more than urge; planning with the British was necessary regarding who should go, how they should be chosen, how transported, how housed on arrival, temporarily and permanendy, how this should be financed, and how public order was to be maintained. Mr. Byrnes proposed to send Treasury and War Department officials to London as aides to Harriman in discussing these pressing problems. Attlee also wanted to move the Americans from fluent advice to immersion in the tough details of this problem. He sent a list of over forty specific questions caUing for specific answers. The President decided to appoint a Cabinet committee of State, Treasury, and War, with alternates, to help him formulate and execute policy regarding Palestine, negotiate with the British, and keep in touch with private organizations.

THE CABINET COMMITTEE

In the latter part of June an outburst of violence erupted in Palestine. Explosions, pitched battles in Haifa, curfews, "roundups," and arrests became endemic. On June 28 the Prime Minister informed the President that the High Commissioner had been authorized to take stern military action to cope with the situation. This he did by arresting the Zionist leaders. President Truman announced that the United States Government was prepared to assume technical and financial responsibility for transporting a hundred thousand Jews to Palestine. The Prime Minister, left with the military responsibility and the dam about to burst, urged speedy resumption of talks. The President had the Cabinet Alternates flown to London in his own plane. This group consisted of Henry F. Grady, a former Assistant Secretary of State, a strong personality; Goldthwaite Dorr, a New York lawyer temporarily serving in the War Department; and Herbert Gaston, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. The Alternates pressed hard for immediate admission of the one hundred thousand.

Shortly after they arrived, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the Secretariat of the mandatory government and part of the British Army GHQ, was blown up on July 22 with casualties of forty-one killed and forty-three injured. The secret Jewish organization, Irgun Zvai Leumi, claimed responsibility. Three days later the plan of the British-American conferees in London was leaked to the press. The plan provided for a Jewish and an Arab province in a federal Palestine, the provinces with powers largely limited to local matters. A strong federal government under the control of the mandatory state would have direct authority in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the Negev and jurisdiction over such matters as defense, foreign affairs, taxation, courts, post office, and—very importantly—immigration. The admission of the hundred thousand immigrants was made dependent upon acceptance of the federaliza-

tion plan and American economic aid was recommended for all the Arab states, with fifty million dollars specifically for the Palestinian Arabs.

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH

It needed only a few days over the end of July and beginning of August for Jews, Arabs, and Senators Wagner and Taft (and a few days later nine more senators and representatives) to reject the plan—now known as the Morrison-Grady Plan—for Herbert Morrison, Lord President of His Majesty's Council, to announce it in Parliament, and for President Truman to order the Cabinet Committee Alternates home. Mr. Byrnes, who had been in touch from Paris with Grady, Bevin, and Attlee and had tried to launch the report with a fair wind, had had his fill of Palestine. The President summoned me once more to the stricken field.

It was, indeed, a stricken field. Attlee had deftly exchanged the United States for Britain as the most disliked power in the Middle East. Furthermore, the center of battle interest was moving from Israeli-British fighting in Palestine to civil war along the Potomac. Staff members of the Cabinet Committee were attacking the chairman; the American members of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry were attacking the Cabinet Committee; the President informed the British that he could not support its report; and Mr. Churchill advised the House of Commons to give up the mandate if the United States would not help. In this situation a meeting of the American members of both committees was called to reconcile their views, with me as chairman. The Archangel Gabriel would have declined the assignment, but he had more latitude than under secretaries of state. Like the Light Brigade, "Theirs not to reason why—theirs but to do or die!" Often both.

I pass over the meeting quickly. Judge Hutcheson demanded to know why his committee had been summoned. I replied, to hear their views on the Morrison-Grady report. This answer was a mistake, as he and his colleagues gave them with passion and at length. As they saw it, the report proposed a ghetto in attenuated form, a sellout—"very pretty, even grandiose—but a sellout, nevertheless." In Billy Phillips' more restrained diplomatic vocabulary, the plan was "entirely unacceptable"; he was not aware, he said, that the United States had become "the tail to the British kite." To prove their case to the hilt. Judge Hutcheson asked that the meeting continue through the next day, necessitating a postponement of the President's meeting with them. I notified him that my effort to reconcile the Americans had been no more successful than the earlier attempt to reconcile the Arabs and Jews. Palestine was not a subject that lent itself to adjustment of views.

The Judge declared that the report violated the Cabinet Committee's instruction first by nullifying and not carrying out his own committee's earlier recommendations, and, secondly, by violating the League of Nations mandate by its recommendations for cantonization and restriction of movement in Palestine. Furthermore, he argued, the President had no power—for legal reasons—

to agree to a change in the mandate without the advice and consent of the Senate. Due to pride in its own report, I felt, the Hutcheson group had gone too far. The Morrison-Grady report had in it the makings of a compromise; indeed, later on the Jewish Agency suggested some helpful amendments, and the United Nations Special Committee report of August 31, 1947, shows its influence. For a while the President contemplated modifying the report, but the dog had been given a bad name and for the time being was of no use.

THE YOM KIPPUR STATEMENT: OCTOBER 4, 1946

At this juncture my efforts and energy were diverted to coping with a crisis more immediately menacing than Palestine—Yugoslavia's downing of American planes. The President turned his to an unsuccessful plea for congressional liberalization of our own immigration laws, "authorizing the entry into the United States of a fixed number of these [displaced] persons, including Jews." We joined forces again at Yom Kippur in a move which, as one now looks back, seems to have been of doubtful wisdom. At the time I did not think so, and agreeing with the President that the situation called for restatement of his views, helped him prepare them. The statement was attacked then and has been since as a blatant play for the Jewish vote in Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York in the congressional elections only a month away and an attempt to anticipate an expected similar play by Governor Dewey. Plainly it could be so interpreted, but I do not believe that it had any such purpose.

When President Truman engaged in a political maneuver, he never disguised his undiluted pleasure in it. His "nonpolitical" political trips and speeches, his calling the Eightieth Congress into special session in the preelection summer of 1948, his occasional political appointments, some of which I opposed and in some of which I cooperated—all of these were frankly put forward to us as political and discussed as such. He would extol to the voters such actions of his administration as he thought were right and should commend themselves to them. But he never took or refused to take a step in our foreign relations to benefit his or his party's fortunes. This he would have regarded as false to the great office that he venerated and held in sacred trust.

About the Yom Kippur statement the President was very serious. For a year he had urged immigration to relieve the Jewish refugees in Europe and satisfy their yearning to go to Palestine, yet the possibility seemed dimmer than in 1945. Dissension at home had been added to strain between Britain and America, conflict between Arab and Jew, and terrorism in the Holy Land. A conference convened by the British in London between more moderate Arabs and Jews had broken down. The Day of Atonement seemed to come on a particularly dark day in Jewish history. The President chose it as a fitting occasion to announce that he would continue his efforts for the immigration of the one hundred thousand into Palestine and the liberalization of immigration into the United States. He also said that some plan for Palestine based upon partition between Arabs and Jews "would command the support of public opinion in the United States."** .

Among those who called to tell me that the statement had been a mistake was G. E. Hopkins, Associate Secretary of the Division of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Church. When I asked whether this judgment would apply to its effect on the displaced-persons camps in Europe, he thought not. While the British prepared for their London conference and Secretary Byrnes was in New York for a foreign ministers' conference and meetings of the UN General Assembly, the Palestine issue marked time and I found myself dealing with foreign probes to locate, if possible, our exact position, which the foreign observer might be excused—not knowing the President's position as well as some of us did—for regarding as ambivalent. President Truman continued to be concerned almost exclusively with the immigration of the one hundred thousand Jews. Others saw this as depending upon the ultimate fate of Palestine, which the President, in turn, regarded as a separate question to be decided by a slightly mystical entity, the United Nations. Hence the baffling and circular nature of all the talks.

The chief inquirers about our position at this time were the British Ambassador and two princely visitors from Saudi Arabia. The two princes differed in manner and appearance, but not at all in their views about Zionism and Jewish immigration. His Royal Highness, Amir Faisal, the present King but at that time Minister of Foreign Affairs, came to Washington in mid-December, preceding his brother, Crown Prince Saud, by a month. The Amir, striking in white burnoose and golden circlet, which heightened his swarthy complexion, with black, pointed beard and mustache topped by a thin hooked nose and piercing dark eyes, gave a sinister impression, relieved from time to time by a shy smile. Hollywood would have cast him as a dark and mysterious shiek. But his manner, like his brother's, was composed and dignified, hands hidden in flowing sleeves and voice solemn and never excited. He spoke of the high regard his father. King Ibn Saud, had for the late President, whom he had met on a destroyer in the Red Sea when the President was returning from Yalta shortly before his death. The King was stifl, as he had been then, deeply concerned about Zionist plans for Palestine, which would not make for peace in the Near East.

As he talked with President Truman, it seemed to me that their minds crossed but did not meet. The Amir was concerned with conditions in the Near East, the President with the condition of the displaced Jews in Europe. Neither reafly grasped the depth of the other's concern; indeed, each rather believed the other's was exaggerated. The conversation ended in platitudes, which were seized upon as agreement. I found it a disturbing conversation. The Amir impressed me as a man who could be an implacable enemy and who should be taken very seriously.

The Crown Prince, on the other hand, was a much more enigmatic figure, larger, heavier, less finely chiseled both in body and mind, baflflingly shrouded behind dark glasses protecting weak eyes. The President's meeting with him, which both Secretary Byrnes and I attended, for the most part dealt with matters irrelevant to the Palestine issue. On that it was singularly unproductive, since the views of Crown Prince and President were diametrically opposite, the

one wishing immigration to cease altogether, the other to increase it greatly. My abiding memory of the meeting is of the Crown Prince's immobility throughout its hour-and-a-half duration. His feet remained close together on the floor, his hands motionless in his sleeves. This so impressed me that, when the boredom of presiding over public meetings would overcome me, I used to practice immobility. It requires immense self-control. The temptation to pull an ear or rub the nose can become agonizing, but less so than listening to speeches.

Lord Inverchapel, the British Ambassador, was an agreeable companion but unsatisfactory as a diplomatic colleague. Unquestionably eccentric, he liked to appear even more eccentric than he was, producing an ultimate impression odd enough to be puzzling. He also professed strong Zionist sympathies, certainly not shared by Attlee or Bevin, This deepened the conversational puzzle of knowing what he meant, whose views he was representing, and how what one said in reply appeared in his telegrams to London. Our talks began in November and went on until February, when the crisis over British withdrawal from Greece again briefly interrupted my responsibility for Palestine matters. At first the Ambassador's inquiries were at large; later on, they were directed toward learning whether the impending change of Secretary of State from Mr. Byrnes to General Marshafl might involve a change in policy.

Bevin, so the Ambassador told me in late November, had made clear to Jewish leaders in New York that if he could not get a permanent solution to the Palestine problem within a short time, Britain would give up the mandate to the United Nations, after first offering it to the United States. His hearers had been aghast, protesting that this would produce disaster, and had urged partition, though not personally favoring it, as preferable. Bevin had replied that Attlee and Churchill had already agreed to give up the mandate and that the decision would be made. In any case, he added, the mandatory state could not decide on partition without the approval of the United Nations, where it would be defeated. Rabbi Abba H. Silver was reported as believing that if both Britain and the United States would approve the proposal it could be passed. If their agreement could be assured, he thought that the assembled Jewish organizations could also be brought to approve it at the Zionist congress to be held in Basle in December. Bevin thought well of the idea. What Lord Inverchapel wanted to know was whether he would be justified in encouraging Bevin to believe that the United States would support partition.

The supposed facts from which this inquiry sprang rested so exclusively on His Lordship's hearsay evidence that prudence in reply seemed indicated. Why, I asked, did Mr. Bevin not ask this question of Mr. Byrnes, who was staying in the same hotel with him in New York? So important a matter would warrant Mr. Byrnes coming to Washington for a talk with the President or instructing me to consult him. Lord Inverchapel thought that Bevin would probably do this the following week after the Cabinet had considered a paper Bevin had laid before it. What was wanted now was my preliminary reading. I obliged with caution. In his October 4 statement, I said, the President had not advocated partition as a solution, but rather had stated that a solution based on

partition would, in his judgment, command the support of American public opinion. The version advanced by the Morrison-Grady report had not commanded it. However, the gap between its version and that suggested by the Jewish Agency did not seem unbridgeable. Therefore, if such a bridge could be found, I believed the President would be willing to recommend it to the Congress. This seemed all that Lord Inverchapel's effort deserved.

He tried me out again on January 21, 1947, the day General Marshall assumed his duties as Secretary of State. The British Government, he said, reading from a paper, was about to begin a conference with Arab and Jewish leaders in London. It did not expect agreement. It might be that one solution would be "acquiesced in," however grudgingly, with the minimum of opposition. That would be the solution the British Government would seek. It would undoubtedly have to resort to the United Nations and would want to know the United States' attitude to the solutions before shaping the outcome toward one. The alternatives were: (1) outright partition; (2) cantonization—federalization (Morrison-Grady); (3) surrender of the mandate to the United Nations. In a discussion with Bevin, Byrnes had urged the first solution (partition) but Bevin could not free himself from some doubt about our attitude. Would we support, and with what vigor, such a solution in the General Assembly? Would any other seem to us preferable?

I replied that I was not authorized to speak for the United States Government but would report his questions to General Marshall, who would reply promptly. My own impressions, for what they were worth, were not novel. A solution based on partition would be the easiest to support, both because of domestic opinion and because the opposition in Palestine was more likely to be vocal than physical. The United States Government could not participate in carrying out a solution by force. Since partition seemed the best hope, it should be explored fully both to gain acceptance and to reduce opposition. The responsibility for decision rested with the British Government. The London conference seemed to me to offer the last chance for peaceful solution. One factor seemed to me essential to any solution: immigration of the hundred thousand Jews now waiting in the European camps. Arab opposition seemed primarily based on the belief that it would produce a Jewish majority in Palestine. Since the Arabs already had a large majority and a higher birth rate, a controlled immigration would not have this result. The essential aim should be a solution with the maximum possibility of being put into effect, not the one theoretically or dialectically most advantageous.

Lord Inverchapel then asked me about his other two suggestions—the Morrison-Grady Plan and the idea of turning the mandate over to the United Nations. The difficulty with the first, I said, had already been demonstrated— the almost universal opposition to it. Perhaps a combination of the two might be explored, a modified Morrison-Grady Plan for a limited time with reserved power in the United Nations to make the ultimate decisions. A mere surrender of the mandate, I feared, would be a confession that no solution was possible and an invitation to civil war.

Since this was the first policy matter to be taken up with the new Secretary

of State, I submitted to him a memorandum of my conversation with Lord Inverchapel, with a note that the Ambassador wished an answer during the week, a suggestion that the Secretary discuss the matter with the President, and the recommendation that I be instructed to confirm the personal views already expressed. Within the week the Ambassador also received from me a memorandum along these lines.

BEVIN THROWS IN THE TOWEL

The day on which Lord Inverchapel received this memorandum saw the opening in London of the second phase of the London conference, again without Jewish participation. The United States Government played no part in it. After two weeks Mr. Bevin informed General Marshall that it was a failure and that on February 14, 1947, the British Government would refer "the whole problem to the United Nations." The Secretary assured him, 'T am . . . most anxious not to embarrass you in your delicate and difficult task." The day following this sobering announcement I talked with Sir John Balfour, British Minister (the President, the Secretary, and the Ambassador all being away), urging him that instead of maintaining, as his government proposed to do, the present immigration rate of fifteen hundred a month, it should double the rate. This was on the theory that one might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, with the additional argument that the increase would hardly excite the Arabs more than they were but might lead them to be less satisfied with the status quo of stalemate. A talk I had had with Rabbi Silver disclosed a subdued and rather frightened mood, which might be helpful.

In informing Henderson of this talk, I added that if the British were going to withdraw from leadership in the United Nations on the subject as well as from responsibility in Palestine, I did not see how we could safely avoid assuming some leadership. Whatever the United Nations might propose, we would be asked to finance it. It was to our interest, therefore, that the United Nations proposal should be as sensible as possible. Hitherto we had favored a solution based on partition. Did this policy carry too great a weight of foreign opposition from all quarters to be possible in the United Nations? We must avoid being committed to any discussion with the British, which would surely leak and cause domestic repercussions with us, before getting our own ideas as crystallized and accepted within the Government as possible. "I am aware," I concluded, "that this only poses but does not answer the sixty-four-dollar question, but I have come to the end of my ideas for the morning."

RESPONSIBILITY PASSES TO THE UN

On February 21, 1947, before General Marshall left Washington to speak at Princeton and then to go to Southern Pines, North Carolina, for the weekend, he sent a telegram to Bevin reminding him that "the transfer of the vexatious problem to the United Nations unfortunately does not render it any

less complicated or difficult." Returning to President Truman's preoccupation, he asked whether, without markedly disturbing the situation while the United Nations considered it, immigration might be increased appreciably, adding "but the British must decide." After he had left town, Bevin turned the tables of responsibility by informing us that within a month the British would withdraw from responsibility for Greece, leaving to us the task of restoring that unhappy country to security and stability. Three days later in the House of Commons Bevin attacked American policy in Palestine and was cheered. For the next month, as related in Chapters 24 and 25,1 was pretty busy on problems of Greece and Turkey and had little time for Palestinian matters. Then General Marshall's departure for Moscow turned them over to me once more.

Lord Inverchapel wanted ideas about how the United Nations should be organized to consider the problem. Obviously the whole General Assembly, with about sixty members, could not hope to understand the problem or come to any sensible conclusions without collected and organized information. Two questions arose: Who should collect and arrange the material so as to avoid charges of prejudice and attempts to slant it toward a particular conclusion? Who should initially appraise it and make recommendations to the Assembly? He asked for our considered opinion in writing. After discussion and guidance from the President, who brought shrewd judgment to the matter, we recommended a small neutral group to work with the UN Secretariat for the first task, and, for the second, an ad hoc committee with broad terms of reference and composed of neutral nations that had taken no stand in the matter, nine or ten in number, and excluding all the larger powers. We also recommended that the agenda of a special session of the General Assembly, if called, should contain no other business than the appointment of the special committee, a view opposed to the Arabs' desire that it should also terminate the British mandate.

On April 2 the British asked the Secretary General to "summon, as soon as possible, a special session of the General Assembly for the purpose of constituting and instructing a special committee to prepare for the consideration" of the problem of Palestine and its future government at the next regular session of the General Assembly. The special session met from April 28 to May 15, setting up the committee as requested and as recommended. General Marshall recorded that this action was "very satisfactory and afforded ground for hope that a practicable solution may be presented to the General Assembly in September."

By mid-June he had changed his opinion. "An agreed settlement no longer appears possible," he wrote to Ambassador Warren Austin at the United Nations. Every solution would meet with strong opposition. "A certain degree of force may be required [for] any solution." The whole situation must be reviewed "to make certain that any solution . . . can be defended before the world both now and in the future." My own days as Under Secretary were running out, with my resignation accepted to take effect at midyear. My last recorded view, brought out by pressure from the Jewish Agency to state an American policy and press for increased immigration, was just the opposite. I thought it

unwise to apply pressure of any sort to the Special Committee and impair the complete neutrality of its approach.

In retrospect, the importance of impartiality was probably restricted to the deliberations of the General Assembly. It did not help the report of the Special Committee made on August 31 in the eyes of either Jews or Arabs in Palestine. In fact, by mid-July more than forty-five hundred illegal immigrants detained at Haifa were returned to Europe. By the year's end fighting was general throughout Palestine. By that time I no longer had any responsibility.

21. TROUBLE BREWS IN WASHINGTON

The summer of 1946 was a time of almost uninterrupted troubles both in Washington and abroad. In Washington those that involved me included both small, often amusing ones, and larger troubles in which the element of amusement was wholly lacking.

TROUBLE FROM A COMMENCEMENT SPEECH

In June our daughter-in-law was being graduated with honors from Bryn Mawr College. We were proud of her and her achievement, performed while her husband was serving most actively in the Pacific naval theater of war. I was pleased to be asked to speak at her commencement exercises. In an attempt to introduce a little spice into the annual surfeit of June banalities, I touched on one aim of education—to develop an independent critical spirit. This I now see is one of the most subversive of doctrines. Certainly to one of my hearers I chose an infuriating illustration. The Star Chamber, I said, a room in Westminster Palace with a ceiling decoration of stars, had gotten a bad name from the Puritans since there the King's counselors reinforced by judges sat by statute to try offenders too powerful for the law courts. Meetings on other subjects sometimes took place in secret and the council also undertook to license printing presses and their uses. To characterize a proceeding today as a "star chamber" one was to apply a highly pejorative epithet. Yet what came to be called the Court of Star Chamber was one of the principal instruments by which the Tudors ended the Wars of the Roses and guided England out of the Middle Ages into a modern centralized state.

This was too much for Fulton Oursler, then senior editor of the Reader's Digest. He immediately protested to me in person on the spot and by letters to the President and the Secretary of State. He reported my speech in hair-raising terms, concluding, "I suggest that such views are treasonable to the philosophy of American government and that no man holding such views deserves public office." They were signed, "Yours for the Constitution."

Alas, he was unfamiliar with the workings of bureaucracy. The letter to the President was referred to the State Department for reply. In Mr. Byrnes's absence it was referred to me. For the same reason his letter to the Secretary of State came along with it. I took particular pleasure, writing on behalf of my superiors, in being excessively patient and polite, regretting that I had disturbed him and attributing this to my failure to make myself clear rather than to the content of my thought. The same views contained in testimony before

a Senate committee, which I enclosed, had failed to produce shock. I cited learned authorities in support of my point. I was saddened that he should doubt my loyalty to the First Amendment to the Constitution, concluding:

I have sworn many times to defend that document against all enemies, foreign and domestic . . . [and] gone to some trouble and inconvenience to carry out my oath. So while I see much to be said for your view that I should not hold public office —though for different reasons than those you give—I cannot share your opinion that my views are treasonable to the philosophy of American Government.

Let's put it down to a difficulty in communication.

RESTLESSNESS IN THE CABINET

The months since April 1945 had brought me into continuous and close relations with President Truman. My regard and affection for him had grown steadily. In the summer those members of the Cabinet who had private dining rooms in their departments—principally the Secretaries of the Treasury and Defense and the Attorney General—began a friendly practice of inviting their colleagues in a body to luncheon, about once a week. Very shortly the talk turned to official matters and, with the campaign of 1946 carrying ominous overtones of popular discontent over high taxes and price controls, to politics. Jim Forrestal had been reading—or, perhaps, misreading—Walter Bagehot on the British cabinet system and talked with us about the desirability of the Cabinet's taking greater corporate responsibility. Bagehot's writing was of much earlier cabinet practices in Britain than those that currently prevailed. In 1946 the relation of the Prime Minister to his Cabinet—except for its lack of formality—was closer to that of the President to his than to Bagehot's description of mid-nineteenth-century practice.

At any rate, the idea appeared to be taking hold that at our luncheons we should discuss broad governmental policies in preparation for more orderly, serious, and effective discussions than usually took place in the somewhat haphazard weekly Cabinet meetings. This filled me with forebodings. Of all those present I was probably the only one who had been living in Washington during President Wilson's illness when Secretary Lansing, after weeks of silence from the White House, called the Cabinet together to consider some pressing matters of Government business. When President Wilson learned of it, Lansing received a note of summary dismissal. Our meetings, like his, were convened in all innocence and complete loyalty to the President, but it did not require much imagination to foresee what bad blood could be produced if news of these meetings leaked to the press, as most things do in Washington. It seemed clear to me that the meetings should end and that the ending should come from a friendly suggestion of the President before and not after any sinister purposes should be attached to them.

After the third or fourth of these luncheons I asked James E. Webb, then Director of the Budget and later my Under Secretary of State, who had been asked to join us, to drive back to the office with me, and I put my worries to him. He thoroughly agreed. We changed our destination to the White House,

where the President was able to receive us immediately and privately. He saw at once both the innocence and the indiscretion of the lunches and said that he would handle the matter in a relaxed way at the next Cabinet meeting.

This he did to perfection. Opening the meeting, he said that he wanted us to see one another socially as well as officially and to develop the warmest of friendships and loyalties. The Cabinet as a group should not meet out of his presence or take up Government business except with him and as his advisers. Other courses would lead to misconceptions, speculation, and harmful gossip. He then went on to other business. The luncheons ended without embarrassment to anyone.

TROUBLE FROM A LADY

During these months another small incident, intended to have only temporary consequences, produced an institution that has not always been beneficial. On one of his short visits to Washington during the summer Secretary Byrnes told me that our distinguished and much-beloved colleague. Will Clayton, Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs, had asked to be permitted to resign and return to private life. After some discreet inquiries I reported to Mr. Byrnes that, in my judgment, this request did not represent Will Clayton's wish in any respect. He loved the tremendous challenge of his post and the problems he faced. What was wrong was Mrs. Clayton's sense of injustice because Will bore the title of Assistant Secretary, while I, whom he had once superseded, carried a higher one. Why not, I suggested, try out the soothing effect on "Miss Sue's" ruffled feelings of a proposal that Will be made Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. This must be done carefully, for if proposed to Will Clayton by the Secretary himself, he would turn it down at once, great gentleman that he was, as an encroachment on my position. I assured the Secretary that nothing could impair the harmony with which Will Clayton and I worked together; I asked only to be allowed to handle the matter myself. He agreed.

I went to the Clayton house one late afternoon for a private chat, which I had no doubt "Miss Sue" would overhear. Will and I sat on the terrace behind the house as the sun went down. Disclosing no knowledge of his proposed departure, I said that Mr. Byrnes and I had concluded that his heavy burden would be eased in the bureaucratic in-fighting, and abroad too, by the addition of some rank to his own prestige. Another star had helped even Generals Eisenhower and Marshall. He should be made an Under Secretary of State, which would help me also. A voice from the window above us said solemnly, "That is a very sensible idea, Will Clayton. You should accept it." Neither of us acknowledged the existence of this voice offstage, but went on with our conversation. In due course, Will agreed and I took my leave.

We had no trouble with Congress, which readily gave the temporary authority for the additional position. When Will Clayton did retire in 1947, his office was allowed to lapse. When it was revived for Douglas Dillon in 1958, it performed a useful purpose in giving prestige to the economic function. But

later, when it became merely a second Under Secretaryship, often called Under Secretary for Political Affairs, as it is while I write, it is a fifth wheel, an embarrassment, and should be abolished. The offices men create live after them, the good is oft interred with their purpose.

MR. MOLOTOV PAYS US A VISIT

On November 6, 1946, Mr. Byrnes telephoned me from New York to tell me that Molotov was coming to Washington for the celebration of the Russian "October" (old-style calendar) Revolution, when the bolsheviks took over in Petrograd. He asked me to meet Molotov, ease his day in Washington, and not allow any incident, however trivial, to add to Mr. Byrnes's problems at the United Nations or the Council of Foreign Ministers.

A letter to our daughter, Mary, gives an account of the day.

I explained to Solomon Bostic [chauffeur to the Under Secretary] that the old car, which Eddie Miller always called the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, had to be shined as never before as we were going to bring Mr. Molotov up from the train in it.

We arrived at the railroad station to find more guards, both Russian and American, than I had seen for some time. The Soviet Ambassador discussed whether I should have the honor of driving him and Mr. Molotov in my car but came to no decision, because the Ambassador had no idea what Mr. Molotov might want to do and no intention of committing himself.

When the train came in we were at the bottom of the car steps to welcome the great man, and for me to extend President Truman's assurances of his pleasure in looking forward to their meeting. This was not true, but it had the desired effect. It was my first experience with the interpreter, Pavlov, an extraordinary fellow. He did not wait for one party to a conversation to finish before translating, but talked along in the opposite language from that of the speaker, two or three words behind him. The result was good because the conversation remained current, but at first gave me the feeling that I was actually speaking Russian.

When Mr. Molotov decided that he would ride with me, he and the Ambassador, the interpreter, and I got into the car. This was most fortunate, as his own car—brand-new and shiny—burst into flames as soon as the chauffeur stepped on the starter. The trouble appeared to be faulty ignition, but of course it gave all the appearances of a first-class plot. We went roaring out of the station with, to Bostic's delight, an escort of motorcycle police, all blowing whistles, sirens, and with great backfiring of motors. For once in his life, Bostic had the joy of driving as fast as he liked through Washington with all traffic stopped.

As we tore along the streets, Mr. Molotov after one or two tentative starts asked why it was that he never saw me at conferences. I told him that the only answer I could give to that was an answer which Mr. Hull had given to me when I asked him the same question several years ago. I said that Mr. Hull had told me that he would give two reasons. I could choose either the one which I thought was the truer or the one that pleased me most. He said one reason might be that I was so valuable in Washington that I could not be spared for other work. The second might be that if he ever let me out of his sight he would not have the slightest idea what I might do. Mr. Molotov was considerably entertained by this and said that he presumed unquestionably that the first explanation was the correct one but if, by any chance, the second

one was right, he would like to be there to see the result. He then said to the Ambassador, according to the interpreter, "The Secretary has the jolly spirit."

By the time we got to the Embassy we were old friends. He asked when he could call on me. I suggested at twenty minutes before we both would call on the President at 4:00.1 received him in the Secretary's office and we engaged in chitchat until it was time to go to see the President.

Being determined that this would take place in style, instead of walking the thirty or forty feet across the street, we all got in cars, Bostic again officiating, and drove out to Pennsylvania Avenue and back in to the White House offices.

After the interview with the President, Mr. Molotov got back into his car and I went to call on him at the great reception. The doorman told me that I was the one thousandth person to be recorded on his counting device. When I asked to pay my respects to Mr. Molotov, the Ambassador assigned a naval officer to take me to him. After a long walk through rooms jammed with people, the naval officer knocked on a closed door as we used to do at speakeasies on Fifty-Second Street. It was opened a crack, a whispered conversation took place, and I was ushered into a large room with a table heaped with every sort of food, wine, whisky, and vodka, with only Mr. Molotov, the interpreter, former Ambassador Joseph E. Davies and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Leon Henderson and his wife to enjoy it all. When after another chat I was let out, Averell Harriman was let in. Apparently very few indeed went through that portal.

Stanley Woodward said that it was unnecessary for me to go to the train to say goodby. But I told him of the old woman who was seen by one of her daughters putting on black underclothing to attend a funeral. When she was asked why, she said, "Child, when I moans, I moans."

So at 9:00 o'clock off we went. Mr. Molotov, sitting alone in the compartment of a car filled with thirty guards and attendants, was overwhelmed at the distinguished courtesy paid to him, as apparently were the Russian occupants of the car. As I left him, they all stood up in two long rows, bowing to me as I passed between them.

Thus Mr. Molotov departed.

BULL IN A GOOD-NEIGHBOR SHOP

Disillusion with my colleague Spruille Braden, well advanced by the end of the battle over intelligence, was completed by participation in his frustrating battle with Colonel Juan Peron, the President and "strong man" of Argentina. Not that I did not join the crusade willingly enough. Peron was a fascist and a dictator detested by all good men—except Argentinians. But I had still to learn the hard way what Woodrow Wilson's experience with Huerta in Mexico should have taught me—that dictators, in Latin America or elsewhere, are not overthrown by withholding recognition and dollars or even by harsh verbal disapproval. In fact, such treatment may well make them national heroes. Peron learned to run against Braden—'Teron o Braden!"—as successfully as Mayor Thompson of Chicago used to run against King George VL

For some time before Braden came along, our policy toward Argentina had alternated between a harsh and a soft line. Few of our good neighbors were any more enthusiastic than we had been about breaking with Germany or

Japan. Argentina lagged behind the rest in doing so and in checking our enemies' economic and pohtical influence. Mr. Hull, thoroughly exasperated, adopted a harsh line. After Colonel Peron's putsch in March 1944, relations grew worse. In August we froze Argentine assets, restricted exports to that country, and after October forbade American ships to enter Argentine ports. Argentina was also excluded from the Chapultepec Conference and the same policy had been proposed for the United Nations Conference at San Francisco, but Nelson Rockefeller and Stettinius switched to a soft line and let Argentina attend and become an original member. Taking advantage of Peron's brief exile, we rescinded sanctions on April 4, and on April 19 recognized the Argentine Government. Yet at the same time Stettinius chose as Ambassador to Argentina Spruille Braden, who was strongly opposed to Juan Peron and in his speeches and press conferences in Argentina was highly critical of Argentina's government, while Stettinius in Washington spoke of friendship, agreed to send arms there, and then changed his mind.

Coming into the Argentine imbroglio in September 1945, I immediately got into trouble. Braden and I met with Senators Vandenberg, Connally, Wallace White, and George to let them know that we had asked Brazil, the host government, to broach postponement of the conference to be convened in Rio de Janeiro in October, as agreed at Chapultepec. Its purpose was to negotiate an inter-American defense treaty. Our proposal was to do it through diplomatic channels instead, so as to exclude Argentina. The senators thoroughly disagreed with the postponement largely because they had not been consulted in advance,^ as did the full committee when it met two days later. In its annoyance, it refused to consider Braden's confirmation. Since, however, a meeting of the Governing Board of the Pan American Union had been called for October 5 to consider postponement, there was nothing to be done.

In the meantime, I had announced our view to the press, explaining the illogicality of negotiating a defense treaty with Argentina, which had refused to honor obligations undertaken as recently as Chapultepec.- Our position was logical but unwise. The Governing Board reluctantly approved postponement. By these clumsy maneuvers, we had gotten ourselves at cross-purposes with the Senate and our Latin American friends. Even so, more was yet to come.

Peron, returning dramatically from a week's exile forced on him by his enemies, promptly announced his candidacy for the Presidency in the coming February elections. Shortly afterward. Secretary Byrnes strongly endorsed Uruguayan Foreign Minister Eduardo Rodriguez Larreta's proposal for collective intervention when an American nation denied its citizens their essential rights or defaulted on its international obligations. Nonintervention, the Minister said, should not be a "shield behind which crime may be perpetrated, law may be violated, agents and forces of the Axis may be sheltered, and binding obligations may be circumvented."^ To most Latin Americans the proposal had an anti-Argentine purpose, and, even worse, was too reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt's gloss on the Monroe Doctrine.! Mr. Byrnes was its sole supporter.

Two weeks before the Argentine election the Department made public under the guise of consulting the other American republics the famous Blue

Book,"* prepared by Braden and his staff. This cited chapter and verse to show that Argentine governments had for years helped "the enemy," worked against hemisphere cooperation, engaged in subversion against its neighbors, and maintained a "vicious partnership" with totalitarian forces. In Latin America its reception was cool. Peron hastened to embrace the issue tendered—"Pcron o Braden!"—and won the election handily.

In the Department we licked our wounds, while each side made cautious reconciliatory gestures, ours under the guidance of George Messersmith, an old Latin American hand who had become Ambassador in Buenos Aires. But our hearts were not in it. The situation was an ironic one. When the Department refuses, as it should, to be governed in its course toward another state by popular approval or disapproval of that state's internal policies, it is bitterly criticized for immoral or amoral behavior. On those occasions when it yields to what would be the popular attitude, if the public knew and cared enough to have an attitude, it is also—and rightly—criticized. These are occupational hazards. The sound rule would seem to be that if our interests are hurt enough by the acts of another state, internal or external, we should act to stop them, or make our protest for the record.

In May the President sent to Congress, in anticipation of an inter-American defense agreement, a bill authorizing some of the acts which would be necessary to carry it out, such as assignment of training missions and transfer of weapons.^ The eminently sensible purpose of such an effort was to anticipate and prevent the proliferation in Latin America of European training missions and of innumerable types of foreign equipment common in Latin America which both created dangerous influences and greatly impeded any effort toward common plans, operations, and supply. The danger cited was, of course, that dictators might use these arms against their own people; yet no one proposed the disarming of dictators. The proposal had strong military support. Despite this, when General von der Becke, former Chief of Staff of the Argentine Army, came to Washington in June 1946 and urgently wished to see me, I received him coolly, under the watchful eye of Spruille Braden, and "set forth the position of this Government in keeping with a statement made by Secretary Byrnes on April 8, 1946."" This reference did not warm the diplomatic atmosphere, since Mr. Byrnes had said: "The policy of non-intervention in internal affairs does not mean the approval of local tyranny. Our policy is intended to protect the right of our neighbors to develop their own freedom in their own way. It is not intended to give them free rein to plot against the freedom of others."^

When Mr. Byrnes came home in October, our Argentine policy was widely criticized as futile and disruptive of hemisphere relations, and blamed on Braden. Mr. Byrnes stoutly supported him and reaffirmed his own earlier statements. After that we drifted until General Marshall took over as Secretary of State. When, toward the end of my tenure, he was able to give attention to hemisphere matters, he found our policy, as he aptly put it, was "not afl of one piece." Our mood alternated between the emphasis that Messersmith in Buenos Aires and the Defense Department in Washington gave to patching

190 Under Secretary of State 1947 / 1946

things up and Braden's determination to concede nothing to Peron. General Marshall was hearing from both Senators Vandenberg and Connally and from the Latin American embassies an increasing desire to get on with the conference at Rio de Janeiro. In this situation Messersmith moved to Mexico City, and the conflict between the two men continued in a new setting and over a new issue.

A shipment of prize bulls arrived in Mexico from some area infected with hoof-and-mouth disease. Under arrangements existing between Mexico and the United States which permitted importation of cattle from Mexico, Mexico had agreed not to receive imports from any infected area. In this case a Mexican request to quarantine the bulls on an island for a suitable period was refused by the Department of Agriculture as not safe. Messersmith combated the decision; Braden supported it. General Marshall directed that no concession be made. The bulls were landed and quarantined, with—it was charged— Messersmith's collusion, if not consent. To General Marshall this appeared to be direct disobedience. The facts immediately became clouded in dispute. I recommended to the General that, the situation and the relations between the two men, and between each of them and the Department, having become intolerable, I be permitted to deal with the problem by eliminating it—that is, by acting in his name to recall and retire Messersmith and to ask for Braden's resignation. Upon his agreement I did so, taking upon myself the onus of the decision and its communication to the two. While memory of the action remained in the Foreign Service, it had the powerful effect of transforming an instruction from the Department from an invitation to debate to an order to act. It was small recompense for all that General Marshall had done for me.

THE IMMOLATION OF MR. BYRNES

Hardly had Secretary Byrnes and his colleagues. Senators Connally and Vandenberg, weathered the crises of August 1946 precipitated by Stalin and Tito and recounted in the next chapter, than another burst on them from Washington. In this episode I had no part, being away in Canada on a much-needed vacation. As was suggested in Chapter 15, the President thought that at the Moscow conference of December 1945 Mr. Byrnes had compromised too far to reach agreement with Stalin. "I do not think," he had said, "we should play compromise any longer. . . . Tm tired of babying the Soviets."*^ Secretary Byrnes had followed his chief's policy all through the weary months of negotiating the Italian and Eastern European peace treaties at the Paris Peace Conference. On September 6, 1946, he made a speech expressing it in Stuttgart, Germany. A week later in Madison Square Garden, his Cabinet colleague, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, replied in the manner of all critics of United States policy in Europe over the next twenty years.

The issues were posed as follows: Mr. Byrnes, regretting the Soviet refusal to consider his offer at Paris in April 1946 of a twenty-five-year treaty to maintain a peaceful Europe guaranteed against rearmament in Germany,

called for the return of government and industry to a demilitarized and denazified Germany under supervision in which the United States would participate.'' Secretary Wallace said that "getting tough" would get us nowhere: "The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get. . . . The real peace treaty we now need is between the United States and Russia." He appeared to envision each country having spheres of influence within which each would scrupulously remain in peaceful coexistence, they communizing in theirs, we democratizing in ours, both in the nicest possible way. "Under . . . peaceful competition the Russian world and the American world will gradually become more alike."^°

Before delivering the address Henry Wallace had shown Mr. Truman the typescript of it, but the President had not read it then. It is possible that even by the time of his press conference, before the speech was made, he had not read it. At any rate, the following passage from the forthcoming Wallace speech was read to him at the press conference: "When President Truman read these words, he said that they represented the policy of this administration." To which the President replied, "That is correct." (The specific words in the speech to which Wallace referred, but which were not mentioned in the press conference question, were, "I am neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian.") The conference continued:'^

Q: My question is, does that apply just to that paragraph, or to the whole speech?

The President: I approved the whole speech. . . .

Q: Mr. President, do you regard Wallace's speech a departure from Byrnes's

policy—

The President: I do not.

Q: —toward Russia?

The President: They are exacdy in line.

The following day James Reston wrote in The New York Times:

Mr. Truman seems to be the only person in the capital who thinks that Mr. Wallace's proposals are "in line" with Mr. Truman's or Mr. Byrnes'. . . .

The truth seems to be less dramatic [than a change in policy]. The President has been preoccupied with domestic issues. Mr. Wallace sent him the speech, and under our usual casual Cabinet system Mr. Truman glanced at it hastily and evidently let it go without taking time to study the implications or how it would read here and abroad.12

To the men in Paris no such relaxed view was possible. The speech was bad enough in all conscience, but the President's approval—despite his belated lame explanation that he did not approve its content but only Wallace's making it—made it a land mine exploded under them. Nor did the President's additional sentence—"There has been no change in the established foreign policy of our Government"—help much, for Wallace responded by stating that he would speak again and released a letter of July 23, 1946, to the President even more critical of administration policy toward Russia than the speech had been. On September 18 Mr. Byrnes informed the President that his resignation,

tendered in April, would have to take effect immediately unless the President could control Wallace. There could not be two secretaries of state.^^

On September 19 the President and Wallace were closeted together for two and a half hours. When the Secretary of Commerce emerged, wreathed in smiles, he read from a penciled statement: "The President and the Secretary of Commerce had a most detailed and friendly discussion, after which the Secretary reached the conclusion he would make no public statements or speeches until the Foreign Ministers' conference in Paris is concluded." When a newspaperman asked whether he had everything "patched up," Mr. Wallace replied, "Everything's lovely."^^

Mr. Byrnes, understandably concluding that the President's response to his earlier message had been somewhat less than adequate, sent a long, restrained, and admirable message, asking to be relieved of his responsibilities at once.^^ The next day the President asked for and received Henry Wallace's resignation.

Throughout this episode President Truman was naive. This is not a serious indictment. In the first place he was still learning the awesome responsibilities of the President of the United States. It did not occur to him that Henry Wallace, a responsible and experienced high officer of government, should not make a speech he had carefully prepared. Pleased that his permission was asked, he readily gave it, without, as Reston wrote, worrying about the content of the speech. Years later he would order General MacArthur to withdraw a message that he had released but not yet delivered. Even after Mr. Byrnes's first message, he did not understand the deep damage that Wallace had done to foreign confidence in the United States. It seemed a personal quarrel that could be patched up. Secondly, he was not good in the fast back-and-forth of a press conference. President Truman's mind is not so quick as his tongue. As the transcript quoted above indicates, he could not wait for the end of a question before answering it. Not seeing where he was being led, he fell into traps. He thought FDR's apparent free-and-easy dialogue with the press was as easy and candid as it seemed, a profound illusion. This tendency was a constant danger to him and bugbear to his advisers. His press conferences and, even more, his early-morning walks followed by inquisitive reporters were a constant menace.

When I came out of the peace and quiet of the Canadian Rockies, where with Ambassador and Mrs. Atherton we had ridden north through Jasper Park to the Arctic Circle and back, and learned what had happened, my worst forebodings about trouble between my chiefs seemed justified. My journey back to Washington, knowing what I did about the President's action already taken on Mr. Byrnes's April resignation, was a worried one.

I had learned about that action through the correspondence between the President and General Marshall of which I was the intermediary. One day during the summer a passage in one of the General's cables from China was too obscure for me. I asked the President whether he wanted it clarified. He then told me of Mr. Byrnes's resignation of April—about which I already knew

—and added that during the summer he had explained the situation to General Eisenhower, who was about to leave for a tour of inspection in the Far East, and asked him to inquire of General Marshall whether he would be wilHng to take Mr. Byrnes's place when the time came for him to leave office. The reply had again been that General Marshall would serve in whatever capacity the President wished.f Never have I so regretted sharing a secret. When I asked whether the President had told Mr. Byrnes of this development, he said that he had not had a secure opportunity to do so, and that meanwhile unless the knowledge of it were restricted to the four who now knew of it, the usefulness of both Secretary Byrnes and General Marshall would be destroyed.