Eisenhower Library, Dulles papers, “Bricker Amendment”
Memorandum by the Secretary of State to the President
confidential
personal and private
personal and private
Washington
, June 27, 1953.
- Subject:
- Bricker Amendment
Senator Lyndon Johnson was in to see me today. In the course of the conversation, he mentioned the Bricker Amendment. He said he expected that you would stand firm against it. He was confident it would be defeated unless you gave in. He added that Senator Taft had told him that he did not think it would be brought up at this session unless you did give in on the matter.
I think you should now consider sending to Wiley the letter which you drafted earlier.
John Foster
Dulles
- On June 8 Senator Wiley had telephoned Secretary Dulles and inquired what was “going on” with respect to the Bricker Amendment, since he and others in the Senate had gone all out in their opposition to the proposal and “they didn’t want to be left out in the cold if the President changed his mind.” Senator Wiley further noted that, because of his stand on this matter, he was “the greatest s.o.b. living in Wisconsin”. Senator Sparkman had suggested that Wiley ask the President to write a letter stating his opposition to the proposal, but Wiley was reluctant to do this. Instead he asked Secretary Dulles to see if the President could say something on the matter at his next press conference. Later that day, in two separate telephone conversations, Secretary Dulles and President Eisenhower discussed the wording of a draft letter to Senator Wiley which the President had agreed to prepare. Memoranda of all three conversations are in the Eisenhower Library, Dulles papers, “Telephone Conversations”.↩
- This is presumably a reference to the revised version of S.J. Res. 1 as reported by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on June 15, the text of which is printed in the editorial note, p. 1817.↩
- No letter of this nature as actually sent by President Eisenhower to Senator Wiley has been found at the Eisenhower Library or in the Alexander Wiley papers at the Wisconsin State Historical Society.↩