840.20/3–3149
Memorandum by the Counselor of the Department of State (Bohlen) to the Secretary of State
We had a very useful discussion at the Pentagon this afternoon concerning the question of the organization of the Pact. Mr. Hickerson and Mr. Achilles accompanied me and from the military side there were General Gruenther, General Norstad, General Maddox1 and Admiral Struble2 who had been working on the problem.
[Page 256]Although there was some divergence of views between the military representatives as to the problem presented by the organization of the Pact, there seemed to be a general consensus that the chief difficulty lay in the fact that under the present setup from a purely military point of view there was no form of organization that would really make full military sense since, of the participants, only Great Britain had any real force at the present time. They were inclined, particularly General Norstad, to regard the organization under the Pact as a political problem rather than a military one. There was, however, general agreement that while an ideal setup from a military point of view could not be achieved without destroying the political advantages of the Pact, there were a considerable number of possibilities towards bridging the gap between the political purposes and the military reality. They were in general agreement that at some point in the organizational scale it would be wise to have the form of the organization correspond to the military reality insofar as possible.
It was agreed by all, and particularly forcibly presented by General Norstad, that the nub of the matter was, in effect, the role of France; that no matter what form of organization was set up under the Pact, the central problem would remain as to whether or not France could be informed and have an equal voice in the determination of major strategy. General Norstad, in particular, felt that there was a constant danger that the political purposes of this Pact would be destroyed if France felt that she was excluded from the top military planning group; against this, there were strong feelings of the joint British and American staffs that for security reasons alone France could not be cut in on overall strategic planning.
I pointed out that under the Pact there was a possible alternative and that was to give France full membership in whatever was the real controlling body from the military point of view of the Pact, but at the same time confine the functions of any of the organizations under the Pact to the immediate question of the implementation of the Treaty. Under such an arrangement France would be on a full equal footing within the framework of the Pact with any other member, but on matters lying outside of the immediate purposes of the Pact which might involve global strategy—Far East, Middle East, etc.—no mechanism of the Pact would be called upon to deal with such subjects.
After some discussion the following were generally agreed, subject to confirmation tomorrow by General Gruenther; that for the present phase it would be wise to restrict our thinking to:
- 1.
- The Council on which all would be represented under the terms of the Treaty;
- 2.
- The Defense Committee which would be civilian and would probably have to include representatives of all the countries if only because it is specifically mentioned in the text of the treaty; and
- 3.
- The idea of a Steering Committee composed of U.K. and France representing the Western Union countries, and the U.S. and Canada.
It was also agreed that we should not permit the mechanism of the Atlantic Pact to supersede or undo the Brussels mechanism but should tend to deal with the countries involved in that Union as a unit and that we should use our influence to get the Brussels Pact membership expanded in due course to include the other European members of the North Atlantic Pact.
For the purposes of the Saturday3 meeting, as you will have seen from the revised briefing paper, it would be sufficient to put forth the foregoing without, however, attempting to name the countries which might be on the Steering Committee but merely stating that the Steering Committee of the Defense Committee should be set up with a more limited membership.