795.00/12–1150
Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, by the Director of the Office of United Nations Political and Security Affairs (Bancroft)
| Participants: | Mr. Hickerson—UNA |
| Ambassador Gross—USUN |
Mr. Hickerson called Mr. Gross to give him some reactions to the revised draft resolution circulated by Rau after the meeting of the Asians this morning.1
Mr. Hickerson pointed out that we had had a meeting with the military, who were still in the room,2 and that he and Rusk had talked the question over with the Secretary in the last few minutes. The line that was agreed upon for Gross to take with Romulo was as follows:
The proposed resolution was filled with military bugs of various sorts, among which were the question of whether there was adequate provision to prevent the Chinese from building up their strength, either by bringing new units into Korea or reinforcing existing units; there was no provision for inspection to insure that the Chinese Communists complied with the cease-fire arrangements when agreed upon; there was no provision preventing movement of the Chinese Communist units in North Korea in such a way as to regroup to strengthen their position. All these things made it clear that it was difficult and disadvantageous for the Assembly to adopt a resolution for a cease-fire when there had been no agreement in principle by the Chinese Communists to a cease-fire. This was a unique situation which differed from other cases before the United Nations where it was known in advance that there would be agreement in principle to a cease-fire. Therefore, although we should not run out on the cease-fire and should not depart from our position that we would consider any cease-fire on its merits, we should tell Romulo that we thought the first thing was to seek to obtain agreement to a cease-fire.
Accordingly, the course of action which we preferred would be to have Entezam, as President of the Assembly, with the help of Rau because of his initiative, and perhaps Mike Pearson, try to negotiate a basic agreement for a cease-fire with the Chinese Communists and the Unified Command. This should be done quietly and without publicity of any sort.
Our second preference would be to have a General Assembly resolution asking Entezam to appoint a commission which would consider [Page 1518] the problem of cease-fire from every angle and determine whether or not a cease-fire would be agreeable to the Chinese Communists and under what terms.
A third alternative approach to take with Romulo would be to suggest to him that there should be included in the cease-fire proposal terms which would make it unacceptable to the Chinese Communists.
An acceptable variant of the third alternative would be to take the first two operative paragraphs of the Fawzi Bey draft and to add a third paragraph asking the President of the General Assembly to appoint a committee of, say three, to supervise the arrangements to carry out the cease-fire and demarcation of a line.
Mr. Hickerson emphasized that by suggesting these alternatives, it did not mean that we were running out on our agreement to consider a cease-fire. He said he realized that it would be a difficult task for Gross to get this across to the Asian group.
- The text of the revised draft resolution was telephoned to the Department from New York, but no text has been found in the Department of State files.↩
- Messrs. Bancroft, Hickerson, and Rusk had met with 7 representatives of the military services including Vice Admiral Arthur C. Davis, Director of the Joint Staff of the JCS. A memorandum on this meeting by Mr. Bancroft, not printed, is in file 795.00/12–1150; the gist of the meeting is given in Mr. Rusk’s memorandum, infra.↩