611.90/5–1952
Memorandum of Conversation, by Lucius D. Battle, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State
Memorandum to S/S
Following the meeting at the White House today which the Secretary, Mr. Lovett and General Bradley attended with the President, the Secretary told a group in his office the results of the discussion.
Regarding Indochina and Southeast Asia, he said that they had gone over the paper which he took with him.1 He said the military [Page 145] people were agreed on what was to be done now. They said that unless Congress cuts the funds badly there would be funds available. He said that Mr. Lovett and General Bradley both mentioned the importance of having a better government in Indochina.
The representative of the military establishment as well as the President agreed on the necessity for the warning statement. They felt that there must be some measure of agreement on this statement but not necessarily on all points. The JCS have prepared a paper criticizing our paper but apparently not violently.2 The Secretary said the only point General Bradley mentioned concerned the last sentence of our paper.3 The point seems to be that they interpret this as a direction to them to fight a kind of war they fear they could not win.
The Secretary said we would go ahead with the NSC paper on Southeast Asia and were to run this one and the NSC paper through side by side.4
As to what the Secretary says in his discussions with Mr. Eden and Mr. Schuman, he is to stress the necessity for getting ahead with the native army, stress the importance of a warning to prevent the Chinese from coming into the conflict, and to try to get the largest degree of agreement possible on the content of this warning.
[Here follows an account of Secretary Acheson‘s report on the part of the White House discussion which dealt with European questions, particularly the matter of Berlin; for text, see volume VII.]
- Reference is to Position Paper on Indochina for Discussions with the French and the British, May 15, 1952. This paper, prepared by Charles C. Stelle of the Policy Planning Staff, reflected comments by various offices of the Department of State. On May 17, it was transmitted to the Secretary of State by the Policy Planning Staff, the Bureau of European Affairs, and the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, as an annex to a briefing memorandum prepared for the May 19 meeting, not printed. (751G.00/5–1752) A revised version of the position paper of May 15 received interdepartmental approval as document SCEM D–6/11, May 21, p. 150. SCEM D–6/11 differed from the May 15 draft as transmitted to Secretary Acheson on May 17 only in that it incorporated modifications suggested by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a memorandum to the Secretary of Defense dated May 19, which is printed on p. 147.↩
- For the memorandum under reference, which was transmitted by the Secretary of Defense to the Secretary of State on May 20, see p. 147.↩
- The sentence under reference and the modification proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff appear in paragraph 2g of the JCS memorandum to the Secretary of Defense, May 19, p. 149.↩
- Reference is to the NSC 124 series concerning United States objectives and courses of action in Southeast Asia. Reports in this series and related documentation are included in material on general U.S. policies with respect to the East Asian-Pacific area in volume xii.↩