Eisenhower Library, James C. Hagerty papers
No. 483
Hagerty
Diary, Tuesday, June 29, 1954
In at 8:15.
Throughout the morning we were flooded with press queries as to when the Declaration would be issued.1 Churchill arrived at [Page 1124] eleven and was joined by Dulles and Eden in the President’s office. He was in very good form, due I am sure to the success he had made at the Press Club lunch the day before.2 Apparently the British had cleared the Declaration with their home government overnight and there was very little work to be done on it. The President called me in shortly after the meeting started. Churchill was sitting at the President’s desk on his right and the other men were grouped around the desk. The Prime Minister asked me to talk to Mr. Eden and arrange a mutually agreeable release time for American distribution and Commonwealth distribution. Eden, D’Arcy Edmondson, and Colville, the Prime Minister’s secretary, went over to one part of the room, and after a very short discussion the British proposed the release be made at 1:30 P.M. which was 6:30 P.M. GMT. I had no objection to that and readily agreed. The British wanted to make sure that the governments of all their Commonwealth received copies of the Declaration prior to its release to the press. After about five minutes we reported back to the President and the Prime Minister that the release time had been arranged satisfactorily to both countries and the President and the Prime Minister signed the document.
Churchill insisted that the President’s name be first. One of the original copies which had been signed by Churchill was also signed by the President but he put his signature below Churchill’s. Churchill said that this was not correct, that after all Eisenhower was the President of the United States and as head of state his name should always go first. He turned to me and said, “Mr. Hagerty, I want you to promise me that in the release of this document to the press in mimeograph form you will put the President’s name first.” I agreed to do so and the meeting then broke up at about 12:10. The President escorted the Prime Minister to his car on the south grounds and had the usual photographic session with him. As the Prime Minister left, I returned alone to the President’s office with him and he told me that by and large he thought the meetings had gone off very well. As he had said on the first day, he repeated that it was very difficult to keep the Prime Minister on the beam in discussing any one subject for any length of time. The Prime Minister has moments when he does not seem to be entirely aware of everything that is going on. It is merely old age, but it is becoming increasingly more noticeable.
I asked the President if he had discussed the subject of Red China and its admission to the UN with Churchill, and he said that he had. “I just had one conversation on this subject. I told him that it was politically immoral and impossible for the United States to [Page 1125] favor the admission of Red China to the United Nations, and suprisingly enough Churchill agreed.
He pointed out that at the present time Britain was also at war with Red China and would remain so as long as Red China kept her military forces in Korea. According to the Prime Minister, that was that and we never discussed the situation again.”
[Here follows a brief report on the Oppenheimer case.]
- For the text of the Joint Declaration, see Document 488.↩
- See Document 480.↩