Minutes of the Opening Session of the Historical Advisory Committee

Released

This document was released in conjunction with "The Formation of the Historical Advisory Committee." A scan of the original text is available for download (PDF, 2.9 MB, 81 pp.).

ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON "FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES"

PARTICIPANTS:

Dr. G. Bernard Noble, Chief Historical Division, Department of State, presiding

GUEST SPEAKERS:

The Honorable John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State
Mr. Andrew H. Berding, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs

MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE:

Dr. Thomas A. Bailey, Department of History, Stanford University
Dr. Clarence Arthur Berdahl, Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois
Dr. Leiand M. Goodrich, School of International Affairs, Columbia University
Dr. Richard W. Leopold, Department of History, Northwestern University
Dr. Dexter Perkins, Department of History, Cornell
Dr. Philip W. Thayer, School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University
Mr. Edgar Turlington, American Society of International Law

STATE DEPARTMENT REPRESENTATIVES:

Mr. Lampton Beery, NEA
Mr. William T. Briggs, OSA
Mr. Ralph N. Clough, CA
Mr. G. M. Richardson Dougall, HD
Mr. William M. Franklin, HD
Mr. Frederick W. Jandrey, EUR
Mr. Edwin M. Kretzmann, Jr., NEA
Mr. Gustave A. Nuermberger, HD
Mr. Ernest R. Perkins, HD
Mr. William P. Snow, ARA
Mr. J. Burke Wilkinson, Deputy Assistant Secretary

Reported by: V.R. Voce

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introductory Remarks: The Advisory Committee and the "Foreign Relations" Program

The Process of Compiling and Editing "Foreign Relations". Explanatory Statements and Discussion.

Scope and Coverage of "Foreign Relations"

Remarks by Andrew Berding, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs

Discussion of Down-Grad1ng of Documents Selected for Publication in "Foreign Relations" Volumes

Statistics on Distribution of Recent "Foreign Relations" Volumes

Discussion of Use of "Foreign Relations" by Authoritative Writers

Remarks by The Honorable John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State

PROCEEDINGS

[The meeting was convened at 10:00 a.m., Dr. Bernard Noble presiding.]

THE CHAIRMAN: I have a few introductory remarks to make.

ITEM 1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: THE ADVISORY COMMITTEE AND THE "FOREIGN RELATIONS" PROGRAM.

THE CHAIRMAN: We regard the appointment of this Committee as an important event in our foreign relations history, it was not set up on the basis of a snap judgment by any means. We had thought about this for some time. As a matter of fact, some eight or ten years ago we actually made some proposals along this line. But the Department at that time had not made up its mind about it. But the developments in the past few years have been fairly conclusive in our minds, in our judgment, as to the desirability of it, particularly since the world situation is so directly reflected in the "Foreign Relations" volumes.

In the 19th Century, "Foreign Relations" were published generally in one volume after they were inaugurated in 1861. In the 1940's we were putting out seven volumes, much larger volumes than the average, per year, and, so far as the 1950's and 1960's are concerned, I'm talking about the "Foreign Relations" covering those years, it's difficult to forecast precisely what their proportions will be if we carry on the present basis of selection. In the 19th Century, I might say also, publication was done on a fairly current basis. The first volume was sent, along with the President's Message in December 1861.

By 1914 there had developed a lag of about seven years, and in the 1930's that lag in publication became 15 years. And for the years in the 1940's and 1950's it is difficult to forecast just what it may be. I think you'll understand that more clearly, if you do not already, from what we have already written to you and from your other understanding of the problem. The reasons for this, of course, are fairly obvious, I think. That lag grew basically out of the growing volume of papers, the greater complexity and out of an increasing sensitivity of the papers which is due to the change of situation in the world politics.

Our problem has been made somewhat more difficult in the past few years by reason of the request of several Senators, supported by the Senate Appropriations Committee, for the publication of two special series of documents and the acceleration of the publication of the regular series. And the point is to narrow the gap which was then about 18 years.

You may recall the heated discussions in 1952 especially with regard to the Yalta conference and the demands that were made for the records to be disclosed. You may also recall the publication of the so-called "White Book on China" in 1949, and the criticism caused by that. And demands were later made that the full record of our relations with China during the 1940's be made public. And these two requests were incorporated in letters from leading Senators, and later supported by the Foreign Appropriations Committee. The Department responded to these requests by setting up a four-year program, a program to meet their requests as nearly as possible, but with the caution that the completion of the job would be contingent on getting clearance of papers as well as the availability of adequate staffing, etc.

When we came to grips with these programs and in compiling the relevant documents, we ran into clearance difficulties at home and abroad. We had many difficulties in getting papers, and of course it's difficult from a staffing side also. This applied not only to the war time conferences but also to the China volumes. The compilation of these raised serious questions of clearance, which ultimately made it impossible to meet the schedule which we made up in 1954. And that, naturally, caused further adverse criticisms.

In this over-all situation, it was felt by the Department that the counsel of a highly qualified group of scholars and citizens would be a good thing, and one of the best ways to secure a meeting of minds and an understanding between the Department and the public, at least the scholarly leaders of the public, those who teach and write books and influence thinking of public opinion. We looked at it as sort of a two-way operation. The Department could get a lot of help and advice, both in reflecting responsible opinion upon our problem and important editorial problems, and also such a group would be a kind of link with the public, especially with the scholarly professional public, in helping to understand the Department's problem in this area. So we approached the three leading national associations interested in this particular area, the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, and the American Society of International Law, all of whom I happen to be a member, as do a number of you others. So we approached these associations and asked them to make nominations. There was a great problem of how to set up this committee. Ultimately, of course, the Department had to take technical responsibility for appointing individuals, but we wanted to do it in complete understanding and agreement with the professional associations. So we asked the associations to make nominations on the basis of which the Department would make appointments. And we secured the very enthusiastic and sincere cooperation of the American Historical Association, the American Society of International Law, and the American Political Science Association, for which we are very grateful. And these appointments of individuals here are the result of it.

I want to express my own personal and official gratification over the fact that all of you have accepted; and in fact it was very, I think, notable that you all were able to accept without any difficulty.

There is just one more problem, which is more of a housekeeping detail, which I might mention. That is the question of the term. As you know, the appointment is for a three-year period. The question is when that term should begin and when it should end. Our suggestion is that it should begin, say, with September 1. I believe your appointments were made or confirmed sometime around July and August, so I suggest that the term shall begin on September 1. One advantage of that is that if we should want to change the time of meeting, it makes for a little bit more flexibility in the fall. I want to discuss that time of meeting with you before we adjourn—I hope we shan't forget it—so we can find time to your mutual convenience. I think we are very fortunate in being able to get you here at this time.

My suggestion that the term should begin on September 1 doesn't mean that your service will necessarily be discontinued at the end of three years. We haven't any such presumptions in mind, but we will consult with the American Historical Association, the American Society of International Law, and the American Political Science Association before the expiration of that year.

Now, as to the way this program shall be carried out, the conduct is suggested in the agenda of the meeting, which is the first document in your dossier. The way we carry this out is not prescribed and my own feeling is we have to play it somewhat by ear. But I will say in advance that I think we might bear in mind that it might be desirable to concentrate our discussion on problems of clearance this afternoon, by and large. I realize that things of that sort will come up all along the line, and there is no hard and fast rule.

We have provided you here with a batch of materials relevant to this subject and if it's agreeable to you, we might just look through this somewhat casually at this point.

First is the agenda, which you have all seen.

The second item is the Regulations and Procedures bearing on the publication of "Foreign Relations" volumes. And you notice there the statement that it constitutes an official record; includes, subject to necessary security considerations, all documents needed to give a comprehensive record of the major foreign policy decisions within the range of the Department of State's responsibilities, etc.

Then it provides for certain exceptions, certain omissions of obvious lines of documents which might, if published, interfere with current negotiations and give needless offense to other nationalities or individuals.

The third item in your dossier is a statement of purposes of publication of "Foreign Relations", which Mr. Perkins drew up. It points out the dual purposes of the "Foreign Relations". It's useful, of course, to officials of the Department and in the Foreign Service particularly, where at all the major posts at least these are on file and constitute an indispensable record. And the second purpose is for public education, scholars, and so forth. I won't dwell on that unless there is some question.

Then under item four there is the subject we will refer to from time to time, the status of the "Foreign Relations" volumes as of December 1. And you notice volumes on the left; the year of publication indicates that Volume "American Republics" is the only one left in 1939 that is not out. In 1940 there are still three that have not been published; four others in 1939 have been published and three in 1940. Is that correct?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: Yes.

THE CHAIRMAN: In 1941, one has been published. You see, "X" marks the stage of advance of each one, whether galley proofed or clearance for foreign and domestic and indexing stage or waiting release.

On the next page is the further status of volumes that are more or less in compilation. Some are in compilation, or compilation is completed. Six volumes are how in the process of compilation.

The next one is the status of the "Foreign Relations" volumes of the special China series, 1942-43. We thought when we made our program schedule we didn't know course how many volumes there would be for a year and we suggested there might be one and there would be eight possibly from 1942 through '49 inclusive. It turns out, as you see, there were three for 1946 and 1949. You notice there the various stages of the pipeline leading to publication they are in.

Page four covers the various conferences, the war time conferences, showing the Yalta-Malta volume published and the other important ones, Cairo, Tehran which will be one volume, are in the stage of clearance; and the second Cairo, also the Potsdam volume.

MR. BERDAHL: That is the first Cairo-Tehran?

THE CHAIRMAN: And the second also.

MR. BERDAHL: Those will be one volume, those three?

THE CHAIRMAN: Yes, sir. Item 5 in your dossier is the status of the "Foreign Relations" projects requested by the Senate Committee on Appropriations beginning with the fiscal year 1954. I thought that would be very useful to you. We have said that the Malta-Yalta volumes are published; the Berlin (Potsdam) volume is in process and likewise the Cairo and Tehran volumes. Those are the most important ones. So we have given a little space there to ex plain the historic development of that, and I want a little later on to have Mr. Franklin say something about the compilation of the Yalta volume and Mr. Dougall to say something about Potsdam. But this simply gives the major stage in the development of the editing of them up to date. You might read that at your leisure. There is nothing urgent about it at this point.

No. II, the special series on United States relations with China, that simply is a summary of the status of those volumes.

And, finally, III, on the request from the Senate Appropriations Committee, refers to reducing the backlog of the regular volumes, and this section deals with that. I might just say that when that program was asked for, 26 volumes had been compiled and were in various stages of pipeline leading to publication. Since that time, 25 volumes have been published, and at the present time there are 37 volumes which are compiled in the various stages of pipeline leading to publication.

The next item is a presentation of the volumes published from 1954 to 1959 and with some reference to the next two years and what could be done in the next two years if various problems could be settled. Actually, the first year we put out nine volumes. We had hoped to put out ten. The second year we put out eight volumes. We had hoped to put out ten. And we fell down three, and this year we haven't actually put out any. But we hope that before the end of the year we shall be able to do so.

ITEM 7. THE PROCESS OF COMPILING AND EDITING "FOREIGN RELATIONS". Explanatory Statements and Discussion.

THE CHAIRMAN: Item seven in the dossier is a statement on the process of preparing "Foreign Relations" volumes. Mr. Perkins has made a statement there. Would you like to say something on that and have a little discussion on that also? In the process of compiling I think you have read something about it in the files we sent to you. Ralph, just the high points on that.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: I think the details are giver in this statement, so I will not take time to repeat that.

I just want to say that the compilation is a professional job. All the people come in under Civil Service status. They are professional historians or political scientists. And we have had a remarkable continuity down through the years in our staff. The turnover hasn't been large, so the same people have been compiling in some cases for a good many years. In fact, I have been here for 27 years myself and we have other people who have been here over ten years. It is strictly a professional job not linked up with policy considerations on the compilation end.

The GPO annual volumes and the China series are done in the Foreign Relations Branch of the Historical Division because of the pressure of work, and for certain other reasons, the war time conferences were taken over by other men in the division and not in the regular Foreign Relations Branch. We had all we could handle with the regular Foreign Relations program and the China program. They had been working for us in the Department on the war time conferences, so it was quite natural that they should continue to edit the war time conferences.

The compilations made by our professional staff all come to me for review and then after we agree on final compilations it is sent over to our Publications Services Division where they have a "Foreign Relations" editing branch that does the technical work of putting it in shape and they send it to the Government Printing Office. I think the written material we have given you really covers all that needs to be said.

THE CHAIRMAN: Are there any questions about this aspect of it? [None]

The next item in your dossier is the "Yalta" volume I thought you might be interested in a few indications as to the way in which the "Yalta" volume was compiled, since that has been the subject of some discussion. Mr. Franklin prepared this and I will ask him to make any incidental comments he might bring out by way of illumination without trying to give all the content of this.

MR. FRANKLIN: Well, there may be more questions after this is read. I suspect there may be. I don't know how far this goes in answering any questions that you do have in mind, but this points out a few of the characteristics of this particular volume. It explains why we brought it out first in the series, although it is neither first nor last chronologically. One reason was obvious public interest. The other reason was, as indicated by Mr. Perkins, that we already had a great deal of material in the files in the division on the important war time conferences from which, during the years, we had answered repeated questions coming from within the Department as to what took place at various war time conferences. And we were therefore actually in a better position to push the "Yalta" volume ahead since there had of course been more questions about that and we had been more active in collecting materials.

However, we did find that our record on the military side of the conference was scrappy in the files of this Department and so we were confronted at the outset with making a rather large decision as to whether we would or would not include the entire military record. We decided that we would, and thereby entailed a great deal of work and difficulty because we had to obtain documents of the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff and these are not lightly released.

We also found that since the "Yalta" volume is coming out in the middle of something of a desert of documents, we had to put in a large amount of background documents. This made for very difficult decisions as to what should be included. We had to identify subjects and go far back into the fields that would be covered and will be covered by five years of Foreign Relations in order to pick out those particular salient documents that would lead the reader to an understanding of the references made in the minutes at Yalta and the allusions to previous materials made in the minutes. This, of course, is open-ended and is necessarily not complete, but 455 pages of the volume are designed to take the reader up to Yalta so he will know about the major subjects that were under discussion.

Similarly, we put in some post conference documents, which had been the subject of a little misunderstanding. We did not endeavor to cover the aftermath of Yalta, naturally, but simply to put in those documents, or portions of documents in which participants at the conference subsequently said exactly what had happened at the conference.

Then, on the conference records themselves, as I have indicated here, we tried very hard to lean over backwards putting in every scrap of paper that anyone wrote at I or about Yalta at the spot. So in many cases you will find not one set of minutes on a meeting but two or even three sets of minutes, notes, jottings, memos, however cryptic or informal. A few passages of side remarks were deleted, as I have indicated here; a few were also taken out for security reasons. None of these, however, interfered with the main burden of the story whatever.

We did not include materials already published by participants, such as later messages of the President, other statements which came up subsequent to the conference but as a bonus to the reader we did put in a full list of all such references. We felt that it would be contrary to the general practice of "Foreign Relations" to include all that type of already published material, most of it officially published, and it would have, as you see, run us over into an extremely unwieldy volume, if not two volumes, to have included all that.

THE CHAIRMAN: Bill, you're really referring to post conference documents now, aren't you?

MR. FRANKLIN: Yes, post conference documents already published. But we also added, as you have probably noticed, some other innovations, maps, photographs, and stuck rather closer to literal printing of the documents than we ordinarily do just because of the extreme touchiness of the subject. Do you have any other questions?

MR. GOODRICH: I have two questions. They both relate to different things. First of all, were there special considerations which led to your including in this volume scraps and scribblings and bits that you would normally, I take it, not include in a conference record?

And, secondly, did you obtain clearance from all the Governments participating in the conference?

MR. FRANKLIN: With regard to the inclusion of scraps and bits, we did go further down the line than is normal "Foreign Relations" practice. That is true. I think, however, we shall have to go far down the line for all the war time conferences because, except for the consistent minutes kept by the Combined Chiefs of Staff and by Mr. Bohlen, for those meetings for which he was interpreter, or other interpreters, the rest of the record is extremely fragmentary and therefore every little scrap and bit and jotting becomes of great significance, perhaps not intrinsically but we don't dare leave them out when we have no consistent approved record of conversation. And with regard to many of the memos discussed, we will probably find in many conferences only an occasional carbon copy. Therefore, if there are any variants on any copies we will put them in.

MR. GOODRICH: On that point, I just wonder what value these scribblings and scraps have. I know in the case of the San Francisco Conference. It was decided not to make the verbatim record of the technical committees public for the reason that they were incomplete. In one or two cases the stenographer was so situated that she couldn't hear what was going on, for example. I just wonder whether a scholar using this volume, is going to be any better informed as a result of having these Hiss scribblings? I just raise the question.

MR. FRANKLIN: Well, Yalta had a secret agreement notoriously held for a year or so before it was released, and it had Mr. Stalin and it had Alger Hiss and we just—-

MR. GOODRICH: In other words, Alger Hiss was a reason for including them?

MR. FRANKLIN: Obviously. But we did not restrict our jottings to Alger Hiss. So we simply decided, in view of this situation, we would go all the way down for anything that had any bearing pertinent to the subject. Some of the Hiss jottings, by the way, are extremely interesting. They are by no means junk. In a few places he picked up and heard some things which were not fully spelled out in the minutes.

MR. GOODRICH: But do we know this Hiss record is reliable?

MR. FRANKLIN: There were no agreed minutes for any of these meetings except the agreed minutes for the Combined Chiefs of Staff.

MR. GOODRICH: I think it is all very interesting I just raise the question if, in order to keep these volume within limits, something has to be eliminated if this doesn't suggest where the action can be used a little.

MR. FRANKLIN: I believe Yalta is probably the chief example of that type of material. I believe with the other conferences there will not be as much of that.

MR. LEOPOLD: I was struck with what you said about the amount of background material you had to include in this volume. If you publish the other war time conference volumes out of order and it is not altogether clear, but I think some will be out of chronological order, you're going to run into the same problem, aren't you?

MR. FRANKLIN: Yes, we shall.

MR. LEOPOLD: I know it's beyond your control.

MR. BERDAHL: I have another question. It was noticed when the volume came out there was a departure from the normal kind of editing, which I notice is mentioned in your statement here on page 3 next to the last paragraph the attribution to those who drafted or approved various Department of State papers. I don't raise this question for the purpose of discussing it here now, but it seems to me this might be an important matter that ought to be discussed perhaps.

THE CHAIRMAN: Yes, indeed. I hope we shall discuss it, the principle of editing.

MR. TURLINGTON: One other point. I see an expression here that is in other connotations also, "giving needless offense to other nationalities or individuals". I wonder when offense is considered to be needful.

THE CHAIRMAN: That is a very good point. You know the definition of a gentleman is one who never insult an individual except intentionally. Are there any further questions on Yalta? [None] I want Mr. Dougall, who is Chief and immediate editor of the Potsdam (Berlin) volumes—and we say volumes because there will be three of them—to say something about the status and problems of the Potsdam volumes.

MR. DOUGALL: One of the problems of Potsdam is that, unlike most of the other war time conferences that we are concerned with, it was a long conference. It lasted a lot longer and it was in a comparatively accessible place, so that people turned up who were not, so to speak, members of the central core of the conference and these discussions all got closely interwoven.

The Polish delegation, for instance, was summoned and came and appeared. This did not happen at most of the other conferences, although at a few like Casablanca we had French representatives appearing. The length of the thing, plus the number of various committees and subcommittees, that were at work mean that there are a lot more minutes in that type of thing and the actual bulk of material is longer. The size of the delegations were enormous and the number of subjects which they discussed was pretty great. We have broken them down into 64 individual subjects, for instance, which we are dealing with and printing papers on, aside from the minutes.

As Dr. Leopold pointed out, there is going to be a lot of pre conference material on this as well, more than on Yalta, because there are more subjects to cover. A whole volume, probably, and if we get the Potsdam volumes out in the reasonable future they will certainly be ahead in chronological order of the annual volumes of "Foreign Relations". So an entire volume will be devoted to what was going on immediately before the conference so that the general reader may have an idea of what the situation on each individual problem was when the conference opened.

There will then be the minutes and perhaps in a volume by itself the physical breakdown which has not been arranged entirely. And then some 700 documents broken down by subject, which were either passed around at the conference, proposals of the individual delegations, or conference related papers of some sort, correspondence between our delegation at Potsdam and the State Department, this type of thing, or reports as to what was going on elsewhere which had an effect on the conference discussions. This is something again for which I think Potsdam will probably be unique, because it lasted so long the delegation could get reports of what was going on, say, in Iran or with respect to the Venezia Giula question or the Yugoslav demarche against Greece which they then dealt with at the conference. And if you don't have any documents of what was going on outside the conference, you really don't understand what they are talking about at the conference table. Potsdam was much less hermetically sealed, say, than Yalta. Even there there was some correspondence back and fro, but the communications were difficult. The conference was much shorter, so that there is this difference in the problem.

We also had a much greater difficulty in some ways in getting the documentation together. As your summary on Yalta points out, they got scores, if not in the hundreds, of documents from the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park. For Potsdam the Truman Library was not yet set up. It did not have control of the papers. They were in the personal control of Mr. Truman who, from the general setup of the speeding up of this publication, thought there were some politics involved and was in no awful hurry to cooperate on the matter. I must say that when he finally decided to, he did it very wholeheartedly, but there were a couple of years of delay in merely getting into his papers to fill out what we needed from them. And when we did get into them, we discovered that some subjects were discussed at Potsdam which we had had no evidence of before that they had actually been discussed. We knew that a paper was prepared, say, for the President and Mr., Byrnes on Palestine, but had no indication whatever that it had been discussed internationally at the conference. The evidence of this was in Mr. Truman's papers, which he had discussed with the British. So we then had to have another look at the State Department files to see what should be put into the volumes to enlighten people on this.

Well, we had some other difficulties with finding files. Admiral Leahy's files, for instance, are in the Pentagon. But the Pentagon was blissfully unaware of this fact. They told us two or three times that they didn't have them, until we finally found one of the Admiral's Aides who could be quite specific as to where they were, and then we found them and we got quite a lot of material about that.

The research on Potsdam is now all done and has been for some time. The problem is one of clearance now, which we will put off until this afternoon in the general clearance discussion. There aren't more than a few dozen-odd queries to clean up on footnotes to keep the volumes from going right along in the printing process, except for the clearance business. This means that the Department still has to make up its mind as to whether it's going to print the full story or whether it cannot print the full story, and if it can't, our opinion is that we had better hold off more or less indefinitely until it can all be told. That is it, Mr. Chairman.

THE CHAIRMAN: Are there any questions right now?

MR. TURLINGTON: I have a small one. In regard to papers held by the President and other high officials, would the Department like to see some legislation to limit the practice of taking papers away?

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, as it actually works out, it isn't quite so bad as it might seem. You see, the Roosevelt papers had been set up at Hyde Park and the Truman papers had been set up out in Independence and they both have been turned over to the Archives, so that they are under official control. I don't think that the publication of those papers would be any different, if their presence were restricted in that matter, than they are now. We have had quite full access to the Roosevelt papers at Hyde Park, and when the Truman papers are organized properly at Independence—I understand that will be within a year—they would be accessible too.

[At this point Mr. Andrew Berding, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, joined the meeting.]

THE CHAIRMAN: I'd like to introduce Andrew Berding, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, who has been extremely helpful in promoting our program and has interested himself in helping us to get this committee established, which I think is certainly a landmark in our development. I want Mr. Berding to say a few words to you.

MR. BERDING: It is certainly good to see you here; and with the same degree of emphasis, we need your help. It's simply stating the obvious to you when I tell you how the foreign affairs of the Government has grown even within the last few years. Obviously the statement of history connected with the growth of these foreign relations is of ever-widening importance and complexity. I am thinking, for instance, of the many conferences now that someday are going to appear in "Foreign Relations" volumes.

Take in relation to myself. A year ago I was with the Secretary at a NATO conference in Paris. I just take this span of one year. The NATO conference in Paris was first. In March we were at Canberra, Australia, for the South East Asia Treaty conference. Two days after we got back we went to Bermuda for the Bermuda conference with the British. In May we were in Bonn for the next NATO conference. In July we were in London for the Disarmament Conference. Then, of course, we were up for a week at the General Assembly. Now we leave a week from today, probably the night before so we can get over there ahead, for this Heads of Government meeting in Paris. That is just a span of one year. That didn't used to be the case in the past, before the blessed, and not so blessed, advent of the airplane, but it certainly is the case now.

We, likewise, have what we did not have before—the United Nations, and all our relationships with the United Nations. I was at the Secretary's staff meeting this morning and a good portion of the discussion concerned the present state of discussions in the United Nations. All that at some time will have to be taken into consideration in our "Foreign Relations" volumes. We weren't a member of the League of Nations in the old days. Now we are a member of this world organization.

Then we have the fact that since the end of the war we have diplomatic relations now with a score of new nations, newly independent nations. They never appeared before, except occasionally as a reference to a dependency or colony. And now we have full-scale diplomatic relations with those countries. And we find that those new names will be now be appearing too. Who thought and who thinks now, in connection with our "Foreign Relations" volumes, of Ghana? But some day, sure as anything, our historians will be dealing with Ghana in our "Foreign Relations" volumes. It's simply one of many more, and there are other nations still going along that are newly independent that we will add to this number.

The complexity of our foreign relations is further increased by such things as our mutual security program. We operate now to an infinitely greater degree in the economic field than was ever the case before the last war. In the last war we operated with the Government and before that, and since the last war, a great deal of American public investment which of course calls for treaty work, agreements and the like, all of which again have to be handled, to some degree at least, by the historians and have a record of these things.

Our staff, of course, has grown a great deal to cover this complex work. I had the great pleasure, in writing the memoirs of Cordell Hull, of working with Secretary Hull. And I remember several years after he retired, he came back to the Department one day just to pay a courtesy call on Secretary Acheson. After they talked for a while, Secretary Acheson said, "Wouldn't you like to have me call in the Assistant Secretaries to meet you?" And he looked around this great big office and he said, "Do you think this room is large enough?" [Laughter]

It's just a small illustration of how things have grown and, as I say, they certainly give us many, many problems and we therefore are most grateful to you gentlemen for agreeing to come here and be part of this, to us, very important Advisory Committee, and we will certainly work with you to the utmost. The Secretary is very interested. He will be in to talk with you at noon and we hope to have the very great benefit of your sage, wise advice and counsel.

THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Are there any further questions about the Potsdam volume? [None]

The next item on clearance of "Foreign Relations" I think we will leave over to this afternoon, since we are going to specialize on that problem now.

The next small item is on down-grading of documents.

DISCUSSION OF DOWN-GRADING OF DOCUMENTS SELECTED FOR PUBLICATION IN "FOREIGN RELATIONS" VOLUMES

THE CHAIRMAN: I will ask Mr. Nuermberger to stand up and say something about that.

MR. NUERMBERGER: We have a brief statement on the down-grading. We primarily instituted that particularly to facilitate the handling of the material primarily with Mr. Clough's office. Mr. Osborn in your office has been very helpful on that, Mr. Clough.

If we handle this as Top Secret, we would have any number of safes, and so forth, and extra charge to the GPO when it did get down there, if it is permissible to do so. We receive these documents and we instituted the practice that wherever possible we down-grade as far as we can go, primarily if we can go to Unclassified. We have been able to get Unclassified for a number of documents because a number have been found to be printed or the substance printed in various publications. Also on Top Secret telegrams—that is, where they were Top Secret in code—telegrams more than ten years old could be down-graded, and we have been able to do that.

The procedure is for us to take the initiative and then take it up with the office that is primarily interested in the document. I believe, as I have listed there, we have been able to down-grade approximately 1,000 Top Secret documents, and from the overall picture that is just a drop in the bucket as far as Top Secret documents go, because during the war most documents were Top Secret. It has been a problem, but it has also been very helpful to us and we appreciate the cooperation that we have received both from within the Department and also the Defense Department in down-grading their documents. We have had no difficulty with them in down-grading.

MR. FRANKLIN: Might I add something on that subject. The special difficulty in the war time conference volumes has been the large admixture of Defense documents of the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff, so that where the conferences at Malta-Yalta, Tehran and Potsdam are concerned, we have not been able to down-grade until a much later stage and we have had to operate with these large masses of manuscript add gaily proof Secret and Top Secret. It has acted like a anchor on the physical handling of safes and everything that goes with it.

THE CHAIRMAN: And, incidentally, the surcharges that go with the printing of documents on a Secret and Top Secret basis are much larger.

MR. NUERMBERGER: I believe it runs around 20 percent higher.

THE CHAIRMAN: It is more than that, isn't it?

MR. NUERMBERGER: It's 20 or 25 percent.

THE CHAIRMAN: Any questions on that? [None] The next item is on the statistics on distribution of recent "Foreign Relations" volumes, which you might be interested in looking at.

STATISTICS ON DISTRIBUTION OF RECENT "FOREIGN RELATIONS" VOLUMES

THE CHAIRMAN: There is a total of 4,000 copies printed. The House and Senate get 1,620, Department of State 460 and Depository Libraries get 464 copies; while the Superintendent of Documents has 750 copies for sale, the Library of Congress 25 copies, and other Government agencies get 535 copies and Foreign Exchange 106 copies with Press getting 40 copies.

You notice next the statistics of sales with the Soviet Union getting, from 1933 to '39, very heavy distribution. Volumes of sold copies were very heavy and the Malta-Yalta volume was extremely heavy, I suppose surpassing any previous sales for the "Foreign Relations" volumes.

But the "Foreign Relations" volumes, of course, are not printed from the point of view that they will be a profitable enterprise. They are distributed to the libraries and very few professors. I believe Professor Leopold has an enormous collection of them, but I don't know how many other have. But obviously they cannot be collected in the ordinary man's library, and so they have to be used in other libraries. Therefore, we cannot apply the test of sales to the "Foreign Relations" volumes. I think that becomes pretty obvious.

The next brief item is what one of our staff thought up, showing the number of pages required in the "Foreign Relations" volumes from 1912 to 1941. You notice in 1919 they jumped enormously because in those years some 29 volumes were printed, including the 13 covering the Paris Peace Conference; and now they are mounting up again down in the 1940-41 period, because they are not all printed yet. But they are in galley proof and the presumption is that that is an estimate on the galley proof.

We thought it would be interesting for you to see, in the complexity of "Foreign Relations" as it is becoming now, some of the things that are not printed, not included normally in "Foreign Relations". Some reference is made to that in the item we sent you. You no doubt have an idea of the types of things that are ordinarily left out but we just took a rambling sample and asked the members of our staff to sit down and make a few notes covering a brief period, say, as to the specific items, the concrete things which were not included.

Under the second heading you will see a great many things which you might offhand think should be included, but for reasons of relative importance they are left out. When you consider what we have to put out, taking the major aspects of our policies, this leaves a great deal of interesting information, particularly on the internal affairs of particular countries that a person can do valuable research on. As I say, these are random samples and do not purport to cover everything specifically. But they, I think, are suggestive and are interesting as to the sorts of things we have left out, and we covered something from each of the areas. There is one on Switzerland for the European area; and one on the Far East, not including China—not that we intended to exclude it but it just happened that these notes were so made—; one on the Near East; one on the Soviet Union; and one on the general area. And here's an illustration: the story on "The European Advisory Commission", this sort of thing. And on Argentina is one from the Latin American Republics area. You may want to ask questions about that later.

DISCUSSION OF USE OF "FOREIGN RELATIONS" BY AUTHORITATIVE WRITERS

THE CHAIRMAN: Item 14 in your books is a list of the uses of "Foreign Relations" by authoritative writers and some of the writers are present here today. They find that reading of important books in international relations covering our diplomacy has a great many references to "Foreign Relations".

MR. LEOPOLD: I am sure that sometimes your group is asked what is the value of all this work you're doing, and I think in connection with this list there is a very nice correlation between the footnotes used in the volumes here and those years in which you published the greatest number of pages for the period of the World War and the Peace Conference.

THE CHAIRMAN: That is very interesting. I hadn't thought that through. On that question you raised about the value, you people are in a position to give us helpful advice, which we appreciate. I just called up a friend at the Library of Congress and asked him about the use there in the reference library on the next item, and I was quite interested in his reply. The Library receives at least 23 copies and they are in fairly constant use.

Now we come to the last item in the dossier, the Indexing of Persons in "Foreign Relations" Volumes.

I think we might leave that for discussion later. It's a matter which we had a good deal of concern about.

[At this point Mr. Berding left the meeting room.]

THE CHAIRMAN: I suggest, gentlemen, that we might turn to the agenda, and we have covered Items 1 and 2, so we'll now come to the third item.

ITEM III. THE SCOPE AND COVERAGE OF "FOREIGN RELATIONS"

THE CHAIRMAN: Item 3.a. raises the question which is: should coverage continue on as extensive a basis as in the past, in view of the increase in the mass of records? I might say, it's very difficult to get a precise indication of the increase in the mass of records. We are going to try to get a better indication than we now have. Records, of course, as a whole include a lot of things other than just the policy papers. The best evidence we have of the problem is a tendency now for the number of volumes of papers, that are deemed necessary to "Foreign Relations", to increase.

As I say, in 1941 we had seven volumes at least that will be required in addition to the war time conferences of the time. And the presumption is, as Mr. Berding said, with the United Nations and the new countries it means that correspondence will be greatly increased. So we can assume that perhaps in the post war period the tendency to increase is even greater than during the war period, aside from the war conferences.

Now is the time, gentlemen, for our Advisory Committee members to lead some discussion here on this subject. You have a brief summary here as to the situation and we would like very much to have your views on this question as to the scale on which we should compile and, the way in which the compilations should be made. Shall we go on increasing volumes following the present basis of selection? Or shall we change our basis of selection one way or another, regardless of the number of volumes that result? Of course I don't mean to say that we assume that 10, 15 or 20 volumes would be ordinarily required, it probably won't be that. But there is a tendency to increase, so what should we look forward to in the way of compilation?

MR. D. PERKINS: What is your budgetary situation?

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, I want to say that we have had a somewhat varied experience in the budgetary side. Back in 1950 the appropriations for publishing "Foreign Relations" volumes was reduced to $28,000, which would have limited us to a little less than three volumes a year in terms of the cost of publishing a volume, which runs to about $11,200. This was in the spring of 1953 when the new program went into effect and we were requested to turn out more volumes. The appropriation the next year was increased to $112,000, making it possible to put out ten volumes. And that continued for another year, and then it was cut down to $84,000 and it has been $84,000, approximately, for the last two years. That would really make it possible to turn out eight volumes, but in the present situation that would be as many perhaps as we could actually manage to publish and clear.

Of course we are going to face Congress soon on the appropriations question and one can't anticipate what the present discussions on defense, and so forth are, and the fact that at the present time we are not actually very productive so far as volumes flowing out of the pipeline is concerned. We hope that we will be able to make a little better showing before the end of the year has arrived. But at present it is not too promising.

MR. BAILEY: Does this figure cover the next staff expansion?

THE CHAIRMAN: That I gave?

MR. BAILEY: Yes. You have to look forward to staff expansion if you would continue on this same scale.

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, our staff, I think, at present in the "Foreign Relations" side is reasonably adequate on the present scale. If the number if required to increase, then we have to have more staff. But at the present, the staff is divided into five or six sections — there is the general and five others, six sections of two professions each. And Mr. Perkins and Mr. Nuermberger do the reviewing. That is adequate at present. I think for the next few years the staff is reasonably adequate to turn out, say, eight volumes a year. Would you agree, Ralph?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: Yes. And I would make this statement, if the situation changes so that we need extra staff there would be a lag between the publications and the staff. In other words, we have already compiled so much material in advance that if we found they were catching up on publication of what we have compiled, then we would have time to increase our staff immediately to bring up that problem. As long as we have so much material, already compiled that isn't coming out, I think we would have a rather poor case to ask for an increase of staff to compile more at present. I think we will need, as we get into the expansion of the post war period, perhaps extra staff, but not at the present time. It isn't a problem now.

MR. LEOPOLD: Would you be able to find the same quality of person if you have to increase?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: If you professors turn over the product.

MR. BAILEY: Then there is a great demand for of the Ph.D. in the academic world—a prospective demand.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: We find that competition with the universities is much greater now than it was a few year ago.

MR. THAYER: In the year in which you were cut to $84,000, was that due in any respect to the fact that you were in need of fewer volumes, or did you ask for more?

THE CHAIRMAN: We asked for a continuation of $84,000 because at that time we were still quite optimistic that we might be able to turn out the ten volumes, but it was cut.

MR. THAYER: So that did result in leaving out material that otherwise might be included?

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, it didn't result in any difference in our compilation. We still put in the same. It simply meant—well, it happened or concurred that we ran into difficulties in clearance, so we couldn't put out any more.

MR. CLOUGH: There is another aspect of the cost of this. That is that it is a burden on the people who do the clearance. The more you have to put in the "Foreign Relations", the more you have to be cleared by the geographic office and this takes a substantial amount of time.

THE CHAIRMAN: That is quite correct. I don't know what the implications of that are.

MR. CLOUGH: Well, the only point is that the Departmental budget as a whole would be affected because it takes more manhours to accomplish a particular job.

THE CHAIRMAN: Yes.

MR. BAILEY: We reach the point where we can't by any means assume finality in any respect. Sacrifices will have to be made, it seems to me, to have a program at all.

MR. D. PERKINS: But I think in conferences, for example, you still wish to turn out as many as you can. There must be further elimination of data in fields that are almost required by the situation at present.

THE CHAIRMAN: It is either that or cutting down in the marginal documents on those subjects which we cover.

MR. D. PERKINS: That is what I mean, really, cutting down on the volume of documents except when we want a full record of a thing like the Potsdam Conference—would it by any chance be obtained as full as possible. But in the normal volumes, it seems to me, there is room for further reduction.

THE CHAIRMAN: As a matter of fact, I have two volumes here which Mr. Perkins went through and indicated documents which might be regarded as marginal documents, and if we had time—perhaps we will before the conference is over—I'd like to just go through that and point out; some of them and get your comments on that. This afternoon we will have your comments on some other things, but I think that would be a useful exercise if we could spend some time on that.

MR. LEOPOLD: It strikes me that this question of clearance rears its ugly head at every point in trying to decide what your future is going to be. This would depend upon clearance and what you can do.

THE CHAIRMAN: That is correct. And on that you want to concentrate your earnest attention this afternoon.

MR. BAILEY: And the more important the subject, the greater the difficulty of clearance.

MR. FRANKLIN: On the question of personnel, it might be added that the war time conferences have had to be done by folks in the Policy Studies Branch, and in the regular compiling "Foreign Relations" branch of the division, so some inroads have been made there and they have been at the expense of our other work done for the man within the Department very largely, so there has been an increment there in such instances and it might be that some additional staff in the "Foreign Relations" branch might be necessary to keep up that slack.

MR. DOUGALL: There is also the fact that cutting down on publication does not necessarily mean that we won't eventually need more staff just to go through the papers, because there are certain categories of files you can set aside but the other categories which you have to go through to pick out the important papers mushrooming beginning about 1945 and they will have to be gone through.

THE CHAIRMAN: That is a very good point. Well, you know the old saying, that if you have to give a ten-minute speech it takes you longer to prepare it than if you had to give a 30-minute speech.

MR. BERDAHL: As I understand it, we are not qualified to discuss the entire foreign policies program of the State Department. It seems to me it's a budgetary problem for the series of "Foreign Relations"; it does become a general problem of publication, doesn't it? I mean, if we get a certain amount of money, it's the distribution of that money—whether it is distributed wisely. That is the point. I have sat in earlier previous years with some other special groups that have been called to discuss other phases of the publications program.

THE CHAIRMAN: Sometimes the Congress acts to restrict or specify what it can spend for a particular purpose and sometimes it doesn't.

MR. TURLINGTON: That brings up the question about current publications, as to the extent they are repeated in the Foreign Service Bulletin, and you have the T.I.S.

THE CHAIRMAN: Of course the T.I.S.—

MR. TURLINGTON: In some of the older volumes of "Foreign Relations" they requested us to print the texts of treaties and drafts, etc. But I think the problem is more on the bulletins, as far as I know. There are many documents of considerable historical importance that are published in the Bulletin currently.

THE CHAIRMAN: I would assume so, but Mr. Perkins can discuss that.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: The repetition of documents published in the Bulletin would not be an important fact in cutting down. Occasionally, on short key documents, we feel it's better to put in "Foreign Relations" rattier than send the person to find the Bulletin which perhaps he can't find. But the Bulletin is of a rather different nature. The great majority of our documents in "Foreign Relations" exchanges of telegrams between the Department and our missions and memoranda of conversations with officials, etc., etc., the nature of the documents is quite different. We have, in recent years, been adopting a policy of leaving out more documents that can be cited to a good official source where people can find them elsewhere.

As you know, we have left out treaties and we are leaving out executive agreements. In some cases, though, you are right, we have printed drafts to show you can't very well have the correspondence on how a treaty was arrived at without presenting the drafts which were discussed. But we do not reproduce much Bulletin material.

MR. LEOPOLD: You will be helped, won't you, as you get past '45 of the new publication of the documents on the period 1945-55, so far as treaties and those official texts will relieve you? Because I think there will be an authoritative volume of the State Department to which you can send yours.

MR. BAILEY: You wouldn't accept the New York Times text?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: No, not for a thing of that kind.

MR. BAILEY: I was thinking in terms of a cross reference.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: We are not supposed to show partiality between private publications, but in cases where we give citations, say, to the New York Times, it would be in some public speech or public statement by somebody that is not in any good official source. It may refer to a speech made by a certain person—well, that speech, is reproduced in the New York Times and we might cite the New York Times in a case of that kind.

MR. BAILEY: Has any thought been given to eliminating marginal countries completely, like Liberia?

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, thought has been given to it. It is indicated in here [Indicating dossier].

MR. D. PERKINS: Shouldn't we address ourselves to the questions raised on page 2? There are four points made here. I don't see that my views are crystallized on that, but I must say that points 1, 2 and 3 seem to me of a somewhat hierarchical order. I would think that one is the one to do first. I should dislike to see 4 done, if anything else could be done.

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, we would dislike that very much too.

MR. D. PERKINS: In between that, my reaction—and I am willing to listen to other points of view—is that one, two and three represent a kind of hierarchical order.

One is the simplest thing to do. I think two might be well considered. I am not so hot about three and I don't care at all about four. That is the way it goes with me.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: Perhaps one word of explanation is needed. In putting these items down there is no suggestion that we recommend these. These were ideas that have come to us of what might be done and we put them in as possibilities, not as things that we recommend.

MR. LEOPOLD: I would like to second Mr. Perkins' feeling, particularly about three and four—although my views are not crystallized on them either. But I feel as strongly about keeping three as I do about keeping four.

MR. D. PERKINS: It does tie up with the financial problem and the clearance problem. You can't discuss in the absolute sense without thinking about both. You agree in general with what I have been saying?

MR. LEOPOLD: I do.

MR. THAYER: I am thoroughly in sympathy with the thought that Mr. Perkins expressed. If we assume that something has to be cut, that we can't continue to amplify to the extent that has been done, it seems to me that number one is a very sensible thought, that number two is a corollary which may be equally sensible, but numbers three and four should be thrown out entirely.

MR. GOODRICH: I would agree completely with that, and it seems to me that if we are going to think in terms of the criteria that would be applied in tightening up on the selection, then that in my mind raises the question as to what the purpose or purposes of the "Foreign Relations" volumes are.

Now, I take it that one purpose is to serve the interests of the Department and the Foreign Service. But so far as scholars are concerned, it seems to me that you can distinguish between more general interests of scholars in the history of "Foreign Relations" and the interpretation and application of "Foreign Relations" and the more specialized interests and the detailed story with regard to some fairly specific issue. And on the assumption that anyone can go to the Archives for all the detail he wants, I think that you might apply the principle of excluding documents that would be of interest only to the few who might be invested in a very detailed study of that particular question. Now, I don't know how that appeals to the diplomatic historians, I'm sure.

MR. BAILEY: Has any investigation been made as to who uses this publication? Is it possible to achieve that as a corollary?

THE CHAIRMAN: We have given some consideration to that, but it's very difficult to get a satisfactory analysis of it, I think. Of course people like yourselves are among those who are best able to tell us. I had this little item from the Library of Congress which is used in the Embassies. But from the public side, we might circulate a questionnaire—it might be a project which we ought to undertake, and with your approval and upon your suggestion, but; we have figures here as to the use that has been made of them in writings. As to how full the professors in this field require the use of "Foreign Relations" by their students is something we would like to know. I believe you would have to tell us.

MR. LEOPOLD: I think there is one thing to keep in mind in connection with what Mr. Bailey said, and that is the difference between, say, the use given to a volume in your series for 1934 today and in the last few years and what might be given 20 years from now, coming back to the list of selections you made. The words of many of those volumes in that item are only now being written, but they are dealing with the period 1917-18, 1920-21.

MR. BAILEY: I go along with you, Mr. Perkins, on, that. I have a feeling we might be governed in the long run by Congress.

MR. D. PERKINS: What is the date they go to the National Archives now?

THE CHAIRMAN: Actually, for the period 1930-39, they are there now. But during those years it is not fully open. It's fully open at 1930 without question under the rules of the Archives not the State Department. From 1930 to '41, inclusive, they are open under a semi-restricted basis, shall we say. And those restrictions are imposed by the Department; that is to say, anyone can apply and can have the privilege of using the files, subject to the clearance of his notes and possibly the review of his manuscript. We prefer just to clear notes, to avoid any possibility of so-called censorship of interpretation. But those are the restrictions with regard to that period, down through 1941.

From 1941 down to the present, they are so-called closed and general access is not given except under the roost exceptional circumstances.

MR. P. PERKINS: That means more than ever, it seems to me, that we have to establish criteria of what is really of most use because most students could not go to the Archives. I think, we are right in the way in which you arranged the possible means of elimination.

MR. THAYER: On the question of the use of volumes, so far as our school is concerned, every student in the school is encouraged to use and, so far as I know, discuss these volumes in the preparation of term papers and their essays of that kind. There is a very general use, in other words.

THE CHAIRMAN: It is quite impressive to me that the Library of Congress supplies 19 volumes for general use and they are used extensively.

MR. TURLINGTON: Could I have a clarification on number three? Coverage of multilateral conferences, for example, on a year-by-year basis—how is that done? In other words, you don't wait for that month to be concluded before you report it, you just report what progress has been made for all the multilateral conferences done during the year, or what?

THE CHAIRMAN: Ralph, you might discuss that. I will say in general that the coverage is on a year-by-year basis.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: That doesn't mean current, right after the thing has been published. It means our regular annual volumes are issued, so many volumes, for each year with the exception of one volume for 1939, for example, there were five volumes, four of which have come out and then of 1941 there are seven volumes, one of which has been published. It simply means that we would cover all these important subjects on a year-by-year basis and concentrate on things of major importance, a comprehensive coverage of all areas in all departments. In other words, if conferences are of minor importance, there we would not cover it, there are various policies which we would not consider of special importance, we would leave out large sections that were not of major importance.

MR. D. PERKINS: That is true now?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: No, a comprehensive coverage of all areas in all departments of general subjects and concentrate efforts on subjects or problems of major importance. For example, there is a difference between importance and major importance. We leave out lots of minor things now. But anything we need to cover the diplomatic activities, the diplomatic activities of the Department for a year, we put in. Under this three, we would omit a large number of the minor things and concentrate on getting the record on certain major subjects. That clearance is always bobbing up, of course, as you have noticed. There is one drawback to that. If you abandon the across-the-board coverage of all important subjects and just concentrate say on major subjects, we would always be told this subject you can abandon until sometime later, the clearance is easy on it.

MR. D. PERKINS: Perspective would change then too, and it's pretty dangerous to try to make the elimination cut very deep there.

MR. TURLINGTON: What I'm trying to get at is if you publish 16 years after the event a considerable record of multilateral conferences, you may not have anything that in new at all. There is not too much sensitivity. I suppose generally in multilateral conferences and a current publication on a multilateral conference might just anticipate the need for mentioning it in detail in the volume published 16 years later.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: To some extent, of course, you're right. And of course it would be true in discussions in the Assembly and all the discussions at the United Nations, the official discussions, are done in the open and those records are published and we would not reproduce, of course, those records. What we would print would be lots of documentation of what goes on behind the scenes.

MR. GOODRICH: You mean behind the scenes so as the American Delegation to the Assembly is concerned—position papers and private conversations, and records of conversations with other delegations, that sort of thing?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: That kind of thing.

MR. GOODRICH: That would supplement the printed record that is made available currently?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: Of course we haven't really explored the post war period at all, except in the China series where we have compiled down through 1939.

MR. BERDAHL: But you would expect future volumes of "Foreign Relations" to have United Nations subjects?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: I don't know as we would have a subject "United Nations ". Of course we would have to explore that as we entered the field. But presumably we would do as we do now—we treat by subjects. And if a subject were brought up at the United Nations we would treat that phase along with other phases of the old-fashioned diplomacy going on outside.

THE CHAIRMAN: Under the so-called general heading?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: Well, it would depend on what the topic was. If it were something like disarmament, a multilateral subject, a general subject, it would be under a general heading. If it were something in Palestine or Syria, it would be under the heading, even though discussed at the United Nations.

MR. BERDAHL: Coming back to the printing of documents already printed somewhere else, would you consider the collection of documents in which Leland Goodrich has joined in editing for the past for the Peace Foundations is an appropriate source to cite for the documents without necessarily reprinting them? This is in a sense a private source, of course.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: I believe those documents mostly have been reproduced from official documents.

MR. GOODRICH: No, sometimes they are reproductions of the New York Times texts and you obviously wouldn't accept those.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: No.

MR. GOODRICH: I wouldn't think the State Department would want to accept that as a substitute, but I think, it would be desirable to avoid duplicating, so far as possible documents already published by the Department.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: We have done that more and more as we have felt the need of tightening up on selection and cite too other cases. However, often where a document is not very long and has lots of references to it, it would be very inconvenient to have readers go out and find it from another source which they might not be able to find. But we definitely do consider the space problem on that.

MR. GOODRICH: What bothers me is how you get the proper correlation between your conference documents and your year-by-year volumes on "Foreign Relations".

MR. E.R. PERKINS: Aside from this special war time series, we expect to treat the other conferences as we come to them in the regular course of "Foreign Relations". You see, in that case this problem that Mr. Dougall mentioned, of putting in lots of background documents, will not arise—I mean in the conference.

MR. GOODRICH: Suppose you have a top-level conference sometime in the near future on the unification of Germany and in connection with that there will be a lot of communication between participating governments as well as the actual discussions that take place at the conference. Now, is that documentation going to be repeated in the year by-year volumes?

MR. FRANKLIN: Perhaps I can say a word on that. We have made an effort, that you may have noticed, during the past ten years to bring out a large amount of documentation, all that could be released, currently on top-level conferences—you know, our volume on the Paris Peace Conference in '46, the volume on the conferences In Berlin, Geneva, and so on. These little booklets contain most all that can be released at the time and will help, I think, to take the pressure off "Foreign Relations" and I am sure Ralph would not contemplate reprinting those. That is what he meant when he referred before to having good official collections to which reference can be made. Then, however, he would for those conferences cover the background position papers, the formulation of United States policy, behind the scenes, and so on.

MR. GOODRICH: But then you may have what has happened in connection with China. You had a single volume on the development of the China policy and then when the Republicans took over that wasn't enough, they wanted the full story to be told. Now you have 15 volumes on China. That is not a good example, but suppose this is a conference and you put into the conference record all the documentation. What do you do when you come to the year—just refer to that? I would think that is the logical thing to do.

MR. FRANKLIN: Yes.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: I might say on the China volumes, the method of compilation is very much the same as for the annual volumes, only we jumped ahead on China. But otherwise that same material would have been picked up in normal course. I think that, due however to a great interest in China, we did put in a great deal additional back-ground material that would otherwise not be put in, and there is one very good reason for that historically. A great deal of the discussion of our China policy has centered around a charge that the United States lost China. The other people say, as the Secretary said in his preface to the White Book, that nothing we did could have changed the picture, the final result. That, you see, concentrates interest on what went on in China, and you have to dig real into the picture of the Revolution in China much more than you normally would in the internal affairs of another country. And that probably would have arisen whether we did it in the regular course of the annual volumes or in a special series.

MR. LEOPOLD: At the moment, while we are making some progress, I think, as to how you solve your problem of cutting down the size, I raise now the question—it may be irrelevant— of how you have tried to save some space in the past and to take just a quick look. I have in mind one thing. In some of the supplements—correct me if I am wrong on this—for the World War series, or I think in some of the special conferences of the past, there was a list of people participating which might take only a page or two which was of tremendous assistance to even the specialists in the field—it was all there. You have this material in your present volumes in footnotes. I think the help that is given in the China volumes and in others is superb, but you have to dig and keep going. I wonder if this is the sort of thing we can perhaps put back as the series expands. That is the sort of thing I mean, and I believe it's missing from the regular years now. I do not believe there is one for the China volume for '42.

MR. FRANKLIN: No.

MR. LEOPOLD: Just one other thing. I understand perfectly the reasons for omitting the digest, which I think goes back to the 1932-33 year, where you used to have the compilation at the start.

MR. FRANKLIN: Yes.

MR. LEOPOLD: I wonder whether you thought there was any compromise between the omission and the very lengthy, maybe a hundred pages in each volume that you used to have; that is, that digest in the first hundred pages was very useful. It was very costly and space-consuming. I wonder whether there was any thought given to that.

THE CHAIRMAN: Would that be helpful to give just a little of the documents?

MR. LEOPOLD: I don't know. It had occurred to me you are under constant pressure to reduce the size of the volume, which we appreciate, but even with the reduction in the size of the volume we are going to run apparently for each year seven volumes and this imposes on even the specialists a certain difficulty in any finding of aides or anything of that sort.

THE CHAIRMAN: Would you give some consideration to that question?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: May I just speak to one point briefly?

THE CHAIRMAN: Yes.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: On this list of persons, we indexing and on have a section here/on indexing persons. If we index all people except those just given trivial reference, then a person can turn in the index and, while we would not put in all his positions, he might hold two or three positions during the year; if he is indexed you don't know who the man is so you turn to the first reference and he would be identified. We have thought that might meet that situation.

MR. D. PERKINS: That applies to the problem of precis too. You might do that by the index too.

MR. FRANKLIN: Of course they serve two different purposes. The list of papers gives a guide into the volume and we have discussed this many times, but they do have their separate purposes.

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, the question of whether the list of persons that you suggest would be as good as or better than including persons in the index—now, that is something we are beginning now and we would like very much to have your advice on that. Do you think it's desirable to have a list of persons, say, in the beginning of the book? Do you think it's also desirable, or alternatively desirable, to have persons listed in the index as we are now beginning at least?

MR. FRANKLIN: In this volume we have both. This is indexed by name and also a list.

MR. LEOPOLD: If you have the index by person, it will be simply a page, there will be no breakdown beyond that but simply the number of the pages on which that man's name appears.

THE CHAIRMAN: No. There will be a breakdown.

MR. BAILEY: All of these things are desirable from the standpoint of the person using the volumes.

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, are they sufficiently urgent to cause you to recommend them very strongly?

MR. GOODRICH: I would think for a conference volume it would be very helpful to have at the beginning the list of participants, but for a normal volume I don't see any reason to have a list of persons at the beginning.

THE CHAIRMAN: In undertaking the names of the persons, I just learned that it raises the price per page of indexing quite a bit. I think it is $1.10 or something like that, and now it's $1.65 per page to include the names. I was surprised and somewhat shocked.

MR. BERDAHL: It costs more to index by name than subject.

MR. TURLINGTON: For example, in the Yalta volume, Mr. Acheson is not in the index though he is mentioned several times.

MR. FRANKLIN: Yes, we weren't too happy about that. The index was done hurriedly and it was our first departure from our regular practice so we said to go ahead and pick up all proper names and to use the list we gave him for the identification purposes. But it was not done meticulously.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: It is more complicated than one might think at first glance because the index is a specialized job and he was not completely familiar with the whole subject and, instead of referring to a person by name, he often said, "The Foreign Minister"—well, now in indexing the reference to the Foreign Minister is just as important as though he were mentioned by name. And in the index you have to be able to pick up those references: "The Ambassador", "The Foreign Minister", this, that and the other, have got to be picked up by office as well as by name.

MR. FRANKLIN: This is where the indexer needs a list of persons to begin with. Otherwise he is lost.

MR. TURLINGTON: Mr. Chairman, I'd like to suggest a point for consideration rattier than a point to be insisted upon. There may be a divergence between the interests of the two groups for which "Foreign Relations" is prepared. The Departmental and Foreign Service people may have a very different interest from that of the historical scholars. That might be pertinent in our consideration.

THE CHAIRMAN: Yes.

MR. TURLINGTON: Shall we try to serve both, or could there perhaps be a different print made available much earlier. Five to ten years earlier for the Departmental people? And to scholars whose brains might be considered to be adequate and secure. [Laughter]

THE CHAIRMAN: Our feeling, of course, is that even if we can't publish, say, for 15 or 20 years that we can still go on compiling and we should go on compiling for the Department officers, you see, and others. Perhaps you would want to consider these questions: the list of persons, the including of names in the index along with the subjects, and then the matter of the list of papers. I wonder, have we done as much as we should in the way of considering this question of cutting down, if we have to cut down, the subjects? It is your preference, I gather, that it should be on the basis of including the same subjects, including countries, I take it.

MR. BAILEY: Well, I come back to the point that I have raised but I don't seem to receive much support, namely, that we could give serious thought to dropping out certain countries for certain years, for example, Liberia, for instance, in a certain year might not contribute, too much.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: A good illustration of that was a protest we had from Professor Bemis once because we didn't have Argentina in "Foreign Relations" for a certain year. Actually, we did have Argentina in as a participant in the Pan-American Conference, but it just happened that for that year in bilateral relations between the United States and Argentina there was nothing of sufficient importance to cover. We do not make a practice of trying to get every country in. If there is nothing in any one year of sufficient importance in relation to that country, we omit it and you notice in there you go down the list of minor countries often and you will find countries are not listed for a certain year.

MR. D. PERKINS: Isn't that covered by one and two really?

MR. TURLINGTON: All areas doesn't mean all countries.

THE CHAIRMAN: Do you feel that we have adequately covered this question? If so, may we go on to "c" and we might have time to approach that before the Secretary comes in, as to the policy with regard to including documents from other agencies. You have a little note here which indicates the problem. Mr. Franklin and Mr. Dougall have pointed out the importance, as far as the war time conferences are concerned, to get the military. We all know how much more important the military has become since 1940; with the setting up of the National Security Council we know how much its importance is written into the process of reaching decisions of a high character and quality.

The question is, how much of an effort we should make in normal circumstances to get the papers of, say, Defense and Treasury, for example, particularly Defense. It's obvious that it is not an easy matter to get them. We have a great deal of difficulty in getting clearance and getting access. Our people can't go in and go through their files and we couldn't do it for administrative reasons even if we were permitted on other grounds.

Ralph, would you like to speak to that, as to the military papers which we normally get in ordinary diplomatic correspondence and in order to fill out a particular subject it might be necessary to go to Defense for additional papers.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: We do not try to cover strictly military subjects in "Foreign Relations", but obviously military subjects become diplomatic in nature at times. For example, you may have the question of withdrawing the Marines from China. Now, that is a military question, also a diplomatic question which the Department of State has a definite responsibility for. And naturally in our own files we have a great deal of correspondence presenting the side of the Department of the Navy on that subject. However, you may run into references to other important documents on the subject which we do not have in our files and in this case we may go to the Navy, say, for it.

I remember a case, to go back and not take any current things, years ago during World War I where we set up a radio station in France. That was handled by the Navy. Then the question came up about terminating American control of that radio station, turn it back to France. We didn't have it in our files. They were talking about the agreement with France for that station, but we didn't have it in our files, yet we had discussions on the subject. We went to the Navy Department to get that agreement they had made with France for that naval radio station. That would be the kind of thing we would handle, you see.

We do definitely try to, in our regular volumes, keep to the subjects in which the State Department has a very definite responsibility, not go wandering off into subjects even though they are international In scope that are primarily the responsibility of the military or of the Treasure Department, for example. Those are the two we run into most, Defense and Treasury.

THE CHAIRMAN: Any comments on this?

MR. LEOPOLD: Maybe I am out of line here, but I was struck by I think it was your statement, Mr. Chairman, about the difficulties of getting access to materials, I assume in the Department of Defense or either the Army or Navy, the difficulty of getting access and that there is an administrative difficulty even if you get them.

THE CHAIRMAN: As far as we are concerned, the limitation of our staff and going to do researchings in their files.

MR. LEOPOLD: That is, you wouldn't have the personnel?

THE CHAIRMAN: That's right.

MR. GOODRICH: What about the Executive Offices and the President?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: Of course the period we have worked on so far has been the period up through the Roosevelt Administration where we have had access to the papers at the Franklin Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park and we have had members of our staff and I myself have gone up several times to Hyde Park and made searches up there for supplementary records. Often those, however, are definite! State Department records which, have gotten mixed in with the Presidential papers.

MR. TURLINGTON: You would include in the subjects of which the State Department has responsibility the subjects handled by Heads of Government?

MR. E.R. PERKINS: Well, the Heads of Government often take action, sometimes even without consulting the State Department. That may be true. But generally the subjects dealt with are within the scope of the State Department's responsibility and we definitely do need to supplement the State Department record with the action that is being taken up above.

MR. DOUGALL: This is where the war time conference volumes had to go a slightly separate way from the annual volumes. At Potsdam, for instance, the problem of Soviet participation in the war against Japan was an import-ant subject. Mr. Truman, in writing about it afterwards, said that it was the reason why he went to Potsdam. The State Department was not in on those discussions at all. It was entirely at the Presidential level or when below it it was at the military level. Now, here we scrounged around for military papers, the Yalta papers, of which we didn't find very much, but on some we did. Mr. Stimson was in on this and we got some enlightening information from his papers on it. Nothing in the State Department papers.

THE CHAIRMAN: Are you suggesting that those should not have been included in the "Foreign Relations" volumes?

MR. DOUGALL: Oh, I think definitely they have got to go in when you're dealing with the Heads of Government conferences. And it's such a centrally important subject.

MR. FRANKLIN: This all came up to us when we first dug into Malta-Yalta. We have it in an even more acute form with regard to the conferences at Cairo and Tehran which you haven't heard about yet but which are also in galley stage and which I have been working on with the assistance of several others. This is the payoff on this particular problem because, of course, at Yalta-Malta we had Mr. Stettinius at least there. The Department was utterly unrepresented at the two Cairo and Tehran conferences, absolutely unrepresented, and only one paper was actually prepared in the Department of State, and the people who prepared it did not know what it was for, except they did learn that it was taken to Tehran. That is all.

So, in doing a series on the war time conferences, there is no problem at all. We say on the back-strips of "Foreign Relations of the United States", we will go after documents wherever they might be, whether pertinent to United States Treasury, Hyde Park, Defense in all its categories, the whole works. But these are all the documents that fit the President. It just so happens he so chose not to use the Department of State but he used other agencies, private and official.

MR. LEOPOLD: But you are thinking really of what we would call loosely "official" documents that come before the President. The point that Mr. Dougall made about which side of the fence he is on comes up, it seems to me, very acutely as to how far you're going to pursue this policy of material that was never in the State Department files and how far into private collections, it seems to me, some of the criticisms of the Yalta-Malta volumes were, that you didn't go far enough.

MR. FRANKLIN: Yes. You can see on what basis we started from. And we went about 500 percent farther than we had ever gone before or than Ralph could ordinarily conceive of doing for every annual volume.

MR. DOUGALL: It is terribly time-consuming.

MR. D. PERKINS: I don't think we should take those conferences as a precedent for our regular program.

There are two reasons. For one reason, because of expansion; and, second, on theoretical consideration that after all the Department of State is not responsible for publishing the records of other agencies on things for which it does not assume responsibility.

MR. FRANKLIN: There will be a real problem, however, with regard to papers of the National Security Council. That will be our chief upcoming problem in the approachable years.

MR. D. PERKINS: That won't arise for some time though.

MR. FRANKLIN: Not until '47. We have two to choose from, whether to stay in the Department or go afield.

MR. GOODRICH: I think you have to go afield.

MR. E.R. PERKINS: That is a different case because the State Department, of course, is represented on the Security Council.

THE CHAIRMAN: We have already dipped into it briefly because of the China volumes of '48 and '49 and we have already learned the extreme sensitivity of the National Security Council to make any reference which would indicate that it was an NSC document. In a number of cases, in other words, we can publish papers maybe, but with restrictions on identifying that it strictly wouldn't be very serious.

MR. FRANKLIN: If the problem arises, we can publish papers submitted to the NSC by the Department of State. The question then arises on how far afield should we go to print other papers to give a broader knowledge of the papers submitted by the other departments, individuals, and agencies.

THE CHAIRMAN: The question is whether we can say the statement is a paper submitted by the Department to the NSC. Do we have a consensus, gentlemen, on this question? I have a feeling there is consensus here that there is a limit in which we should not go in trying to dig out the papers from other agencies, that the State Department has responsibilities to follow through on that but not beyond things which the State Department has important responsibility. Is that a fair statement?

MR. BERBAHL: It seems to me that what you're doing is really discussing the exact application of the points the four points involved there. And it's very easy to agree, I think, on those four points on the disposition, but the application of those points is obviously a very difficult thing. You still have the problem of interpretation of these documents. So point one I suppose ought to read not only tighten up but loosen up occasionally. Such as approaching the other departments for significant documents that must by all means be included if we possibly can.

MR. THAYER: Under Part 2 of the compilation, the Regulations and Procedures, it starts out by saying "The publication of Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, constitutes the official record of the Foreign policy of the United States." It would seem to me to follow from that that you have got to chase down significant documents wherever you have to go to get them.

THE CHAIRMAN: Particularly if they are NSC.

MR. THAYER: Particularly if they are NSC.

THE CHAIRMAN: So far as that is the crux, so far as vital decisions are concerned.

MR. BERDAHL: Yes, Treasury, Defense, Labor certainly concern themselves with "Foreign Relations". In dealing with ILO, certainly you have to get a hold of Department of Labor documents.

THE CHAIRMAN: Don't you think that in most cases the matter of vital foreign policy interest there would be some State Department papers en the matter which would give us a lead into the other agency and on occasion Mr. Perkin has said we follow through where that seems to be called for. But not to approach the Labor Department or any other agency and to search his files separately.

MR. TURLINGTON: The China problem was 1949, only eight years ago, different from the ordinary l6-year problem

THE CHAIRMAN: That is correct, and we haven't published the papers yet.

MR. LEOPOLD: I think this brings us back to the point to avoid criticism, not only at the Congressional level but even at the scholarly level, that it's imperative to make clear, as I know you have been trying to make clear, in the introductions of the individual volumes, just what is your policy of searching out material beyond what is actually in the State Department files. I feel that many of the critics of the Malta-Yalta volume expected you to do something that could not possibly be done.

THE CHAIRMAN: It's amazing too, there was a very honest conviction on the part of many people, of course, including the members of both Houses of Congress, that you could really put out these volumes in three or four or five years after the event. And anything under ten years of a classified document would require paraphrasing.

You couldn't give the document in the clear under ten years because of the code, cryptographic material.

MR. BERDAHL: There is a rule to this effect.

THE CHAIRMAN: Yes. There is a gradual change in the code from year to year, but they don't feel entirely safe for ten years.

MR. BERDAHL: There is not much danger of us catching up to ten years for a long period of time.

[At 12:10 p.m., The Honorable John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, Joined the Committee meeting.]

SECRETARY DULLES: I wanted, actually, first of all, to express my very great appreciation for your coming down and helping us in what is a quite difficult problem.

The publication of these "Foreign Affairs" volumes raises each year increased problems. As United States responsibilities become greater in the world, the volume of our diplomatic activity increases, and its sensitivity increases with our playing a more central part in world affairs than we did formerly.

I was given, just before I came here, a first volume that was published in 1861—almost a hundredth anniversary—and if you're interested in a small volume, you may be familiar with it. The first two documents are circulars to all Ministers of the United States. Of course in those days we didn't have any Ambassadors. The first one is by Mr. Black and the second is by Mr. Seward, dealing with the Civil War or the war between the States — whichever you choose to call it—and appealing to our Ministers to try to prevent any foreign interference in the struggle. There is fine language in it: [Reading]

"We feel free to assume that it is the general conviction of men, not only here but in all other countries, that this federal union affords a better system than any other that could be contrived to assure the safety, the peace, the prosperity, the welfare, and the happiness of all the States of which it is composed. . . .

"Nor do we think we exaggerate our national importance when we claim that any political disaster that should befall us, and introduce discord or anarchy among the States that have so "long constituted one great pacific, prosperous nation, under a form of government which has approved itself to the respect and confidence of mankind, might tend by its influence to disturb and unsettle the existing systems of government in other parts of the world, and arrest that progress of improvement and civilization which marks the era in which we live. "

It's a little more high-flown than I write nowadays, but I approve the sentiment.

Of course the volume has grown immensely. I think in '41, which is the last one, is it not, there were seven volumes of about a thousand pages each. As we get on to the war years, the Second World War years, and the post-war problems, we get into great difficulty as to what can be appropriately published without serious damage to existing relations. A lot of these problems remained unresolved for quite a while. Take the problem of the reunification of Germany, which goes back to the war conferences, the Potsdam Conference perhaps most particularly, and where today the complete revelation of what took place there might have very bad consequences upon our problems of today and afford the Communists ammunition which they would use against us in Germany.

We have a special mandate, I think, from the Congress. We got together quite a lot of work on the Potsdam papers. It is designed to be a special publication, along with the Malta-Yalta volume, I think, but we haven't yet been able to bring ourselves to publish the papers on Potsdam because of adverse political consequences that might result from that. Those, I suppose, will be the types of problems that you gentlemen will deal with.

I hope that in dealing with that problem you will take account of some other things that we are doing which, while they do not technically meet the conventional requirements of our "Foreign Affairs" volumes, do go quite a ways toward meeting the needs of scholars. One of these is to get up these volumes which Dr. Noble is working on. This is the first of two volumes on American Foreign Policy from 1950 to '55, from pages 1 to 1700. There will be a second volume from pages 1700 to approximately 3500 or thereabouts; which will include a great deal of the significant diplomatic history of those years. And you are, I think, planning to try to get that on more or less of an annual basis. You are trying to get out one for the next two years and then pick it up from then on on an annual basis for the documents so that the documents will be coming out fairly promptly after the close of each year. Is that your program, Dr. Noble?

MR. NOBLE: Yes, sir, that's right.

SECRETARY DULLES: Nowadays, while this reflects only non-classified documentation, the pressure for knowledge about documents which comes from the press and the Congress, and so forth, is so great that there is included actually now in a volume like this a great deal of material which normally or in the past would have been kept classified and only appear in the "Foreign Relations" volumes.

Then we also have adopted the practice, in the interest of information for the scholars, of publishing special pamphlets or booklets dealing with international conferences or periods of special concern. We have got out a series of books on the Berlin Conference with the Russians in '54, the conferences which led up to the bringing of Germany into NATO and the conference of the London-Paris Accords of '54, the "Summit" Conference, the Conference of Foreign Ministers that followed the "Summit" Conference, the documentation with reference to the Suez Conferences that were held in London, and then the documents with reference to the subsequent evolution of that into the crises that began with the Israeli and the British and French attack of a year ago in October or November, along through that period.

Those publications do include a considerable amount of information which, in that particular form at least, was classified at the time but which was subsequently released with the consent of the governments concerned, and constitutes another important addition to the information available to scholars and is pretty much current. We have been able to get those volumes out within a few weeks after the closing events which they dealt with. So that we are making a very considerable effort to make available to students and scholars, and those interested in public affairs, a very large amount of material which partially at least covers what normally would be covered by the "Foreign Affairs" volumes.

That doesn't mean that there is not a very considerable additional amount which at some time or other should come out in "Foreign Affairs" volumes. It does indicate that we are attempting to compensate in terms of making available in convenient form quickly such material as can be made available in that form, and that is a great deal, to compensate for the embarrassments we are under in not being able to bring out a complete record of all our correspondence because of the extremely sensitive character of much of what we are now doing.

In the past days, particularly up to the end of the Second World War or the middle of the Second World War, the United States relationship with these events was rather peripheral. The leading part was played by what were then called the Great Powers. We were not among them, although we began to become that in the First World War, until we achieved a dominant position in the world at the end of the Second World War. So that prior to that time, you gentlemen know far better than I do, the really important decisions, the highly secret decisions, highly sensitive decisions were taken by other governments than ours. And we, as I say, were somewhat peripheral in our attitude toward those matters.

Now the center has shifted here and it is our action which becomes central and in a way most sensitive and, furthermore, we are engaged in a so-called "cold war" which has gotten pretty hot at times, where there is an extremely well-organized propaganda machine which is ready to seize any events whatsoever and use them against us. And when you get into problems like the Arab-Israel problem, well, I suppose it would be catastrophic to our position in the whole free world in the Middle East if there should be a complete revelation of what took place, going back into and preceding the creation of the State of Israel. We sent some of that material up to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when they were going to have a hearing on the subject and they dropped it like a hot cake. And you [indicating Mr. Noble] worked and did a terrific job on that. We got this material up there and when they began to see what was in it they decided they would discontinue that particular inquiry.

The problem that you have undertaken to help us with is one of very, very great difficulty and where we need the best guidance that we can get. You have offered to give it to us, and I think you would be rendering a real service to your country in its various aspects of responsibility as you study the problem and tell us how you think it can be resolved.

I guess that is all I have to say. Do any of you gentlemen have any questions you would like to put to me?

MR. NOBLE: I am sure they must be teeming with questions.

SECRETARY DULLES: Well, we think that we have a very extremely conscientious and able person in you, Dr. Noble, in charge of this work here. I find whenever I have called on you I get very quickly very comprehensive and totally impartial reports.

THE CHAIRMAN: I have a very good staff. Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary.

[At 12:29 p.m. the Secretary left the meeting room.]

THE CHAIRMAN: Any remarks or comments? [None]

Would it be agreeable to you to meet back here at 2:30 for approximately two hours? And then meet tomorrow morning at 10? [Agreed]

[Whereupon the meeting was recessed at 12:30 p.m. to reconvene at 2:30 p.m.]