238. Memorandum of Telephone Conversation Between the Under Secretary of State (Ball) and Secretary of State Rusk0
Ball summarized Sukarno’s reply to the letter sent to him by the President via the Attorney General.1 The thought here is there should be an agreement on the form of the agenda confining at least the part of the discussion on the transfer of the administration to some solution which would envisage an independent New Guinea or something of that sort. In other words, let’s be cool to all other possibilities except an ultimate transfer to the Indonesians. We are thinking along the lines of trying to inject the Canadians into this. We might, in effect, advise the Attorney General to say to the Dutch we don’t want to be the intermediary because we don’t want to be in a position where it would turn out to make the Dutch unhappy. If the Dutch still want us to do it, we would consider having someone sit in on the Ambassadorial talks on the assumption the Dutch would be prepared to tell us that they think they could probably work out an agenda item which would meet the Indonesian conditions, assuming the Indonesians would be prepared to tell us that they would be willing to have an agenda item that would pay some attention to the self-determination item. This would be a shift in our position since it might well inject us into this thing, but there is the general feeling here that we are probably in it anyway. Ball wanted the Secretary’s reaction to [Page 538] the above before talking to the President.2 Instructions should go out today.3
The Secretary said he thought, unfortunately, we have to do it.
- Source: Kennedy Library, Ball Papers, Telephone Conversations, Indonesia. No classification marking. Transcribed in Ball’s office. Rusk was at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina; Ball was in Washington. Rusk and Ball had an earlier brief conversation, part of which dealt with Indonesia. The transcription reads as follows: “Ball said this related to a message we had in from Sukarno answering the President’s letter. Very briefly he comes out in favor of some kind of secret informal negotiations along the pattern of the Algerian and French in the presence of a third party. It is not explicit that he would like to get us in the middle of some sort of negotiation. On the question of Pope, he says Pope won’t be executed, but that he will be released soon and the timing has to be left to him.” (Ibid., Atomic Testing)↩
- The text of the reply from Sukarno was transmitted in telegram 1519 from Djakarta, February 22. (Department of State, Central Files, 656.9813/2–2262) Regarding Kennedy’s letter to Sukarno, see footnote 2, Document 232.↩
- Ball and Kennedy had a brief conversation earlier that day at
11:15 a.m. The transcript of the conversation reads as follows:
“Ball summarized Sukarno’s reply to the letter which the President had sent with the Attorney General. (Ball was quite inaudible.)
“The President asked why the Indonesians wanted to talk to a third party. Ball said they think they would get nowhere otherwise. There has to be a third party in order to bring pressure.
“President asked what do we tell Bobby. (Ball inaudible.) President asked would we be the third party. Ball said this was what Sukarno was trying to do—to push us into that position. Ball thinks we should resist this. It puts us in an impossible position.
“President said when the instructions were ready, he would like to read them.” (Kennedy Library, Ball Papers, Telephone Conversations, Indonesia)
↩ - Document 239.↩