169. Letter From the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Labor Affairs, Department of Labor (Werts), to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Rubottom)1
Dear Dick: I thought it would be interesting and profitable to get the reaction of Serafino Romualdi of the AFL–CIO to the recent Buenos Aires Economic Conference and to the opportunity given him to serve on our delegation. Accordingly, I arranged to have lunch with him in order to talk about these matters. Juan de Zengotita, who as you know is an FSO serving as OILA’s Area Specialist for Latin America, joined us. The results of the meeting with Mr. Romualdi I enclose in a Memorandum of Conversation.2
Let me say, to begin with, that there is no exaggeration in this Memorandum of Mr. Romualdi’s admiration for the job that Mr. Waugh and yourself did at Buenos Aires and for the efforts and achievement of your technical staff.
One aspect of Mr. Romualdi’s observations I should like to comment on quite frankly, both because it is in itself important and because it involves a consideration with which those of us in the [Page 572] Department of Labor who deal with U.S. foreign economic relations have been impressed for some time. I refer to what Mr. Romualdi has to say with respect to the apparent prevalence among our delegation during the first two weeks of the Conference of the view that the efforts of the United States at Buenos Aires should be directed mainly at proclaiming the advantages of having private capital finance the trade and development of Latin America. Mr. Romualdi was of the opinion that while this view was of course sound, the almost exclusive emphasis given it in our delegation’s earlier activity at Buenos Aires was definitely harmful to the United States position at the Conference. He felt, also, that the successful conclusion of the Conference was not assured until that emphasis had been modified.
In the meetings to draw up and consider the position papers for the Conference held here in Washington among representatives of the interested agencies, this Department expressed its complete agreement with the fundamental positions taken but its definite disagreement with the language in which some of the more important papers were couched and with the attitudes that that language seemed to reflect. Thus, for example, this Department felt that the position paper on “Financing Economic Development—Public Capital” could not but have an unfortunate effect among Latin Americans. The paper demonstrated very eloquently how much the U.S. was actually doing through public finance to help Latin American economic development; at the same time virtually the opening statement of that paper (numbered paragraph one) bluntly stating our faith in private capital and placed before the eloquent demonstration I have alluded to, must, in our opinion, act like a dash of cold water on the Latin Americans and serve to nullify the very favorable impression that would undoubtedly have been made by the balance of the paper, if numbered paragraph one had been modified just in its language. I appreciate, of course, that a position paper is merely a brief and that a skillful negotiator draws on other resources in setting the tenor of his remarks; but I notice that Mr. Romualdi seemed to feel that the change in the U.S. attitude, and concomitantly U.S. fortunes, at Buenos Aires was linked to a change in the position papers.
On a number of other occasions over the last few years representatives of the Department of Labor have been similarly struck, in participating in the preparation of position papers for international economic meetings or conferences, by the tendency of those papers to emphasize the negative aspects of our position vis-à-vis other states. This tendency, in our opinion, is generally evidenced in such a manner as to nullify, at least psychologically, the more considerable positive aspects of the papers. If Mr. Romualdi’s interpretation [Page 573] of the way things went at Buenos Aires is correct, the progress of that Conference would seem to have afforded what we in the Department regard as a very apt commentary on this weakness in our Government’s usual position.
In transmitting the Memorandum of our conversation with Mr. Romualdi I felt duty-bound to tell you of how his impressions bear out our feelings that political considerations of the kind that, in his view, you so ably put in play in Buenos Aires, should be given greater weight in our handling of international economic matters than they seem generally to be accorded.
Because of the importance in respect of all our international economic activities that I attach to Mr. Serafino Romualdi’s observations on the Buenos Aires Conference, I am taking the liberty of sending a copy of the Memorandum of Conversation and of this letter to Assistant Secretary of State Wilcox. Similarly, I enclose with this letter a copy of my letter to him of the same date, which contains further comments that may be of interest to you.
Sincerely,