Office of the Historian

501.BB Palestine/5–2148

The Secretary of State to the Secretary-General of the United Nations (Lie)

[Washington,] May 21, 1948.

Dear Mr. Secretary General: I have your personal letter of May 16 on the need for effective Security Council action on Palestine, delivered to the State Department on Monday, May 17. As you were informed orally by Ambassador Austin, the resolution proposed by the United States on May 17 was intended to establish a basis for Security Council action to pacify that situation.

As for consultations between your office and the Department of State, please be assured that the Department will always be ready to discuss with you or your representatives issues which are pending before the various organs and bodies of the United Nations. We necessarily rely very heavily upon Ambassador Austin as our permanent Representative to the United Nations and would suggest, therefore, that you take up with him the question of whether direct discussions between the Department of State and the Secretariat would be desirable under any given set of circumstances.

I now plan to be in New York on Tuesday, May 25, and hope that we can have lunch together, with Ambassador Austin, at the Waldorf-Astoria. If so, we can discuss the questions raised in your letter which need further attention.1

Faithfully yours,

G. C. Marshall
  1. The editors have found no official record of a conversation between Marshall and Lie on or about May 25, but see Henderson’s memorandum of May 25 to the Secretary, p. 1044.↩