Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, General; the United Nations, Volume I

501/3–2046

Memorandum Prepared in the Office of Special Political Affairs

March 20, 1946

Note on the Arrangements for the U.S. Delegation ²⁶ to the United Nations as of March 20th

(Provisional—For General Informational Purposes in SPA Only)

Schedule of Secretariat Operations

The Office of the Delegation at 250 West 57th Street (corner Broadway) fifth floor, was opened by Easton Rothwell, Executive Secretary on March 19, 1946. The office will be in full operation on Friday, March 22. Delegation staff problems and liaison with New York will be maintained in Room 165–S (Ext 2532) through Mr. Power²⁷ until 5:30 p.m. Friday, March 22. Thereafter, the Delegation offices may be reached via the telephone tie lines from the Department. Tie line connections may be made through the Chief Operator, Ext. 811.

Most of the Delegation advisers and staff will be quartered in the Pennsylvania Hotel and Henry Hudson Hotel.

Delegation Reporting

The following plans and arrangements for the exchange of information between the U.S. Delegation to UNO in New York and the Department have been agreed upon:

1. The New York group will have the status of a Mission. It will, therefore, as in the case of any of our Missions abroad, be kept informed through infotels of relevant information reaching the Department in cables. Security considerations do not permit the transmission to the New York staff of copies, or the actual text, of cables received in the Department.

2. The Daily Top Secret Summary will be made available to Mr. Stettinius; the Daily Secret Summary to such members of the New York staff as have a status comparable to that of a Director in the Department; and the Weekly Review to the appropriate senior officers in New York. Arrangements have also been made for the New York staff to receive all the various press summaries, opinion analyses, etc., prepared in the Department.

3. Two series of information telegrams from New York are planned: (1) an unclassified series which will receive general distribution, including distribution to other interested Government agencies and will be transmitted to our Missions abroad via the Radio Bulletin; and (2) a classified series which will be distributed to the interested officers within the Department and to the War and Navy Departments and which will provide the material for the Secret Summaries and for the infotels to the field. There will be no direct communication between New York Mission and U.S. Missions abroad.²⁸

4. There will be daily courier service by air between Washington and New York, leaving Washington at 3 p.m. and New York at 9 p.m.²⁹ There will also be two direct telephone wires, equipped at both ends with automatic recorders and two teletype lines, one of which will have security safeguards.

5. Mr. John M. Patterson will be responsible for the information and reporting work in New York. Mr. Patterson was previously with PL and was a member of the United States Delegation Secretariat at the recent London meetings. He will have three assistants: Charles J. Merritt, Eugene Rosenfeld and Mrs. Sarah Hodgkinson.

The Information Officer of SPA ³⁰ will be responsible for keeping both the New York staff and our Missions abroad informed of such developments as come within the jurisdiction of SPA. The whole question of the division of reporting work between SPA and the other Offices of the Department is to be discussed at the Information Service³¹ Committee meeting on Thursday.

6. An annotated agenda of UNO meetings scheduled,³² together with topics to be discussed and personnel requirements will be kept current by the Delegation and transmitted regularly to the Department.

Documentation Exchange

International Secretariat documents as well as Delegation documents will be transmitted regularly to the documents section of SPA by the Delegation. Such documents and Delegation documents will be circulated to the interested officers of the Department and other government agencies by the documents section of SPA.

The documents symbols used for Delegation documents and SPA documents intended for transmittal to the Delegation will be similar.³³ Both will be similar to the numbering system used by the International Secretariat.

The Delegation and Department will refer private individuals and organizations to the International Secretariat for copies of UN documents.

26. Note may be taken of the ambiguity in the official styles at this time, the same name, “Delegation”, being used to describe both the periodic United States representation to the General Assembly of the United Nations and the permanent United States representation at the seat of the United Nations. It may be noted further that neither usage had any statutory basis but represented an ad hoc development. There was in effect only one “Delegation” at London, the delegation present for the meeting of the General Assembly, but after the establishment on March 19, 1946 of the Office of the United States Delegation to the United Nations there is a certain confusion at times, particularly during the period from June onwards, as to which “Delegation” is being referred to in United States documentation. This situation continued until April 1947 when the offices at New York were officially designated a “Mission”.
27. Thomas F. Power, Jr., Chief of the Reporting and Documents Division of the Delegation Secretariat.
28. On April 3, however, arrangements were established for teletype conferences (on a 12-hour notice) between the offices of the Delegation and the United States Embassies in London, Paris, and Moscow, and the Mission in Berlin (IO files, document US/ADM/2 (Rev. a)).
29. It was within the framework of this procedure that the practice evolved of sending daily summary telegrams (in two series, classified and unclassified) to Washington “via Courier”. It is not unusual to find imbedded within these summaries, general only in scope, the most detailed reporting on the tortuous course of the new “parliamentary” diplomacy on any issue of the day. Thus the 501.BB Summaries series in the Department’s central indexed files (General Assembly affairs) and the 501.BC Summaries series (Security Council affairs), to mention the two most important, become prime sources of information.
30. At this time the Acting Information Officer was Mrs. Virginia F. Hartley.
31. For the Department’s program at this time regarding “policy information services”, see Department of State Bulletin, June 2, 1946, pp. 970 and 971.
32. The status of United Nations activities in New York at this time is interestingly described in a memorandum of “informal comments” drafted by Louis K. Hyde, Jr., of the Delegation. Pointing out that there were four main centers of United Nations activities in New York, one at the United States Delegation, Fisk Building, 250 West 57th Street, “near Columbus Circle”, and the other three focused in United Nations Organization centers at Hunter College, at 610 Fifth Avenue at 49th Street, and at the RKO Building on the Avenue of the Americas, he wrote (for the information of Departmental officers) that “development of organization in the social and economic fields is almost nonexistent. … By contrast, the political and security setup is much further advanced and promises to be so for some time to come. This is natural because of the imminent initiation of the Security Council session … members of the Secretariat seem to be arriving almost daily from London. … At Hunter College the general atmosphere was a blend of a windup of Naval training (Hunter College was a WAVE Center), civilian students coming and going, and carpenters, painters and telephone men miscellaneously circulating among confused-looking newly-arrived delegates and staff members of the United Nations.” (IO files, document SD/INF/4) For documentation regarding the establishment of the temporary headquarters and permanent seat of the United Nations in the United States, see pp. 60 ff.
33. Both the Delegation Secretariat and the Department (SPA) began early to issue what the Delegation named a “Key to Document Symbols” series (series US/ADM/ for the Delegation and series SD/ADM/ for the Department; these two series contained other administrative data also). In general, documents prepared in the Department or the Delegation (relating to United Nations affairs) were set up with symbols parallel to those established by the United Nations Secretariat, the United Nations Secretariat symbol being prefixed by “SD” (Departmental documents) or “US” (Delegation documents) as the case might be. Thus, with regard to a United Nations Secretariat paper concerned with the First Committee of the General Assembly, where the Secretariat symbol was “A/C.1”, the symbols for comparable documentation in the Department and the Delegation would be respectively “SD/A/C.1” and “US/A/C.1”.