751.00/6–2254: Telegram
No. 640
The Ambassador in France (Dillon) to the
Department of State
priority
4981. Last night after Mendes finished talking about Indochina,1 he remarked that he was finding the job of Foreign Minister more difficult than he had expected and that after he finished with Indochina he might give up the Foreign Ministry to concentrate on the next important problem which would be North Africa. I asked him what he intended to do about EDC and he said, of course, that was important also but that it would be settled promptly before Parliament went on vacation. He said that he was going to appoint a committee today to try and work out the compromise solution which he hopes to achieve. This committee will be jointly headed by Koenig, representing the anti-EDC elements, and Bourges-Maunoury, representing the pro-EDC elements.
I then took the occasion to tell Mendes that I hoped that in the press of negotiations over Indochina France would not lose the opportunity which she now had, and which would not long remain hers, to obtain a satisfactory settlement on the Saar. Mendes remarked that he was not informed about this subject, I then told him that I personally and the experts in my Embassy felt that the agreement worked out at Strasbourg was most favorable to France. I told him that he should know that the US had worked very hard with Adenauer to get him to make the many concessions which he had made. I further told Mendes that if France did not grasp this opportunity to settle the Saar, I personally thought it would be most difficult for the US to again ask Adenauer to make concessions on the Saar in some future negotiation. I further pointed out that in my personal view, unless this opportunity was seized by France it might mean that the Saar would eventually and in the not too far distant future return to Germany. Mendes listened with great seriousness and then said that he would inform himself promptly regarding this problem.
- This part of the conversation was summarized in telegram 4980 from Paris, June 22; for text, see vol. xvi, p. 1212.↩