154. Memorandum of Telephone Conversation Between Secretary of State Rusk and the British Ambassador (Dean)1
Telephone Call From British Ambassador Dean
D. has a message from George Brown asking what steps Sec. proposes to take. Sec. said at that moment there will be a strenuous effort in the Security Council—Sec. just had a message that a cease-fire had been agreed to in Jerusalem for 12:00 noon. Sec. said this seems to cancel out a lot of other things we have been working on. D. said B. thought it was a good idea to have an appeal in the name of the SYG to cease hostilities—Sec. said he thought an SC resolution on that could be passed quite quickly. Sec. said we have been in touch with Moscow telling them we were astonished—we thought we had commitments on both sides not to start anything and that we all should get behind the Security Council about a cease-fire. We have no idea who started it—this is still murky and we cannot yet make a judgment.
Sec. called D. back as soon as he hung up. Sec. said he wanted to be sure that George Brown understands we had no inkling of this from either side and that there is nothing behind the scenes that he doesn’t know about.
- Source: National Archives and Records Administration, RG 59, Rusk Files: Lot 72 D 192. No classification marking. Transcribed by Jane M. Rothe.↩