694.001/8–350
Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, by the Consultant to the Secretary of State (Dulles)
Subject: Japanese Peace Treaty
| Participants: | Secretary of Defense Johnson |
| Mr. Dulles |
I said to the Secretary that I would like, at his convenience, to talk with him about the Japanese treaty situation. Secretary Johnson said that they had a war on and didn’t have time to talk about that now. I said that even though there was a war on in Korea we should continue to pursue political objectives, that in the past our failure to do so had meant that we had won wars but lost the peace and this time I felt it essential that we should deal politically with such problems as Japan and Germany while the war was on or otherwise we would find at the end that we had lost both of these vital areas. Secretary Johnson said that he agreed with that, and merely meant that they were not able to discuss the memorandum at the moment. I said I had not asked for, or expected, immediate discussion.
Secretary Johnson then said that the draft received1 from the Secretary did not carry out the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or General MacArthur. He said that MacArthur had reversed his original position as a result of the talks that he and Bradley had had with him [Page 1265] and that Mac Arthur’s present position was embodied in a second, highly secret, memorandum which MacArthur had given Johnson but which we had not seen. He said it seemed that the State Department had proceeded on the basis of MacArthur’s first memorandum, but not the second one.
I said that I was entirely familiar with the second memorandum, that it was dated June 23rd and it followed a talk which I had had earlier with General MacArthur and that the draft of treaty articles which Secretary Acheson had sent to Secretary Johnson was intended to, and I thought did, carry out the position expressed by General MacArthur in the second memorandum. I said that that draft gave the United States the right to maintain in Japan as much force as we wanted, anywhere we wanted, for as long as we wanted, and I did not see very well how the Defense Establishment could want more than that.
Secretary Johnson said that their first reading of the draft had not given them the impression that it was as broad as I described, but they had the impression that the Department was still working on the abandoned theory of “bases.”
I said that that was not so, that the word “bases” was not even mentioned in the draft.
Secretary Johnson then said that the draft had been sent for study by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and that if, in fact, it was the intention of the State Department to give as broad rights as I had mentioned and as were referred to in MacArthur’s second memorandum, then he thought we could “get together and go places.”
I affirmed that that was our intention and Johnson said that the Defense Department would be prepared to discuss the situation with us in about a week; that the only concern of the Defense Establishment was with the matter dealt with in our draft and as regards the other features of the treaty they were political so that we could go ahead on those without being held up in any way by the Defense Establishment.
I said we were doing that, and would expect word when they were ready to discuss the draft transmitted.