032/3–2751
Memorandum by George F. Kennan to the Secretary of State 1
About March 7 I received a telephone message from New York inviting me to lunch on Tuesday, March 13, with Mr. Abrams, head [Page 1558] of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and Mr. Chester Barnard, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, the purpose of the luncheon being to discuss a matter which could not be discussed over the phone.
I accepted, and came to Mr. Abrams’ office at the time specified. He spoke with me alone first, and said substantially the following:
Last fall Mr. Malik had voiced the wish (as I understood, in a talk with Mr. Rusk) that he might meet with some leaders of American industry. Mr. Lancaster, a member of the law firm which serves the National City Bank, and Mr. Pickett, of the Friends Service Committee, had arranged a meeting at Mr. Lancaster’s house on Long Island (I believe in December), at which Mr. Abrams, Mr. Chester Barnard, and Mr. Henry Ford, Jr., and Mr. Charles Wilson had been present; and they had talked with Mr. Malik for three hours. In the course of this meeting, Mr. Wilson had referred to a speech he had recently made, in which he had suggested that it might be a good thing if a group of American leaders in various private fields could visit Russia and a similar group of Soviet figures could visit the United States.2 Just recently, Mr. Malik had taken Mr. Pickett aside, on some occasion at the U.N., and had said that if the American group would now like to visit the Soviet Union, visas would be available for them. Mr. Picket had asked—was he sure? in the past, there had been so much trouble about visas, even when people had been assured that they would be forthcoming. Mr. Malik had said that this time there would be no trouble. Mr. Wilson, who by this time had taken up his position in Washington, had then spoken with the President and with Mr. Acheson about this matter. But the Department of State had not been willing to give them an opinion as to whether they should or should not go. In any case, Mr. Wilson himself did not feel that he would now be able to go, on account of his governmental position. He, Mr. Abrams, was troubled about this; Mr. Wilson’s dropping out left the matter largely up to him, and he did not know what to do or where to turn for advice. He was not sure that Mr. Pickett had looked at the matter from all angles. He had recently been to Venezuela and had laid his troubles before Norman Armour, who had suggested that he might talk to Phil Mosely and myself. Phil was not available that day, and the choice therefore fell upon me.
[Page 1559]We then went upstairs and joined Mr. Barnard and Mr. Pickett for lunch, and the latter gave more details about the matter. It was evident that he and Mr. Lancaster had been the moving spirits in the matter, and that he set much store by it.
My reaction being requested, I then spoke along the following lines:
I could not speak for the Government, and whatever I said would have to be taken as an initial and off-hand reaction to something I just heard of for the first time and had had no chance to think about. I personally regretted the extreme severance of contact between this country and the Soviet Union, and wished that it had been possible to keep enough contact in progress at all times so that it would not be “news” when a group of private American citizens wished to visit the Soviet Union. In principle, therefore, I favored the resumption as soon as feasible of that small measure of contact by private Americans with the Soviet Union which had been customary in other periods of Soviet rule, even though I did not expect that it could ever develop into anything very important as long as the Soviet regime remained what it is. On the other hand, we had to recognize the situation that prevailed today, and to face the fact that the visit of a group of prominent Americans to the Soviet Union in the face of this situation would be a sensational event, into which the press would read all sorts of meanings. There were great dangers of misinterpretation here. If reaction were negative, it could make matters even worse than they are today, and prejudice the chance of any later improvement. If the reaction were favorable, the press would probably go all the way overboard, and portray the mission as an indication that the cold war was at an end, that we could now relax, that re-armament was exaggerated, etc. I thought, for these reasons, that it would be unwise to undertake such an enterprise unless one could be reasonably sure that one was guarded against these pitfalls. I thought it would be better and safer all around if they could wait until circumstances were such that there seemed to be some real prospect of improvement in our political relations with the Soviet Union, and then undertake the visit only as part of a general revival of something like normal travel between the United States and the Soviet Union, so that they would be not the only group of people doing this sort of thing at the given time, and their visit would not be so conspicuous. In no circumstances, in my opinion, should they undertake such a visit while the Korean war was in progress; for as long as Americans were being shot at by communist forces anyway the chances of misinterpretation and resentment of such a visit, in this country, would be considerable. Furthermore, I wanted to make plain my opinion that there should be no question of their discussing with Soviet leaders, during such a visit, any political matters under negotiation between our Government or other western governments and the Soviet Union.
Did this, they asked, mean that if they were to go to Russia, they should not see Stalin at all, even if he were willing to see them?
[Page 1560]I said no, it did not mean this; but that if they had an opportunity to see Stalin they should do so only in the presence of our Ambassador and should be careful not to give the impression that they were authorized to speak in any way for our Government.
Afterward, when we had left the others, Mr. Abrams spoke favorably of the advice I had given them, and I got the impression from both his reaction and Mr. Barnard’s that there would be little likelihood of the project’s being undertaken for some time to come.3
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The source text is a copy attached to the memorandum of conversation by Reinhardt of March 27 identified in footnote 3 below. A marginal handwritten notation on the source text indicates that this memorandum was seen by Secretary Acheson.
Kennan, who was on leave from the Foreign Service, was diplomat-in-residence at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, New Jersey.
↩ - Regarding the background to the proposed trip of American industrialists to the Soviet Union, see Reinhardt’s memorandum of conversation, Document 772.↩
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Clarence Pickett called on Reinhardt on March 27 to arrange an interview with Secretary of State Acheson to discuss the proposed trip of American industrialists to the Soviet Union. Reinhardt’s memorandum of that conversation reads in part as follows:
“Mr. Pickett summarized the latest developments as follows: There had been a meeting with Mr. George Kennan, who had been ‘very helpful’. Mr. Wilson, because of his official position in the Government, no longer considered it appropriate that he be a member of such a group but continued to support it most enthusiastically. He had spoken with the President about it, who had told him that he should discuss the matter with Mr. Acheson. Messrs. Abrams and Ford had become less interested, the former because he was the servant of the board of directors, and the latter because he was always somewhat disturbed by the spectre of his grandfather’s “Peace Ship”. Mr. Pickett felt that Mr. Abrams and Mr. Barnard might not be inclined to go through with the project in the absence of affirmative encouragement from official quarters. Mr. Lancaster, despite his age, continued to pursue the project with such concentration that he had recently had to take a couple of weeks’ vacation. Mr. Pickett said that despite all the problems that such an undertaking posed, some of which they had discussed with Mr. Kennan, he and Mr. Lancaster were both deeply convinced of the importance and potentialities of such an American effort to breach the Iron Curtain.
“I did not encourage him. I reiterated the considerations which had been advanced by Mr. Kennan in his recent discussion with the group on March 13 (memorandum attached) and added others.” (032/3–2751)
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