123 J. Leighton Stuart
No. 41
Memorandum of Conversation, by
Jeffrey C. Kitchen, Special
Assistant to the Secretary of
State
In his call on the Secretary this afternoon, Ambassador Stuart1 said that he desired to go to Taiwan. He said that his doctors had told him that he could travel if he waited until the end of August and if he made the journey by ship.
The Secretary said that he was sorry but he thought that this was out of the question. The Secretary said it was apparent to him [Page 82] that the Ambassador could not be expected to perform the rigorous duties of a chief of mission. Obviously, such an effort would kill him and the Secretary would have nothing to do with it.
Ambassador Stuart said he was afraid that that would be the Secretary’s reply, that he accepted it, unhappily, but nevertheless he accepted it. The Secretary said that the Ambassador’s central effort had to be to regain his health and that he should not consider any other activities at this juncture.
The Secretary did not press this point any further in connection with the recommendation that the Ambassador be asked to submit his resignation.2 The Secretary told me that he did not have the heart to do it and that he thought it was appropriate that he leave the above ideas in the Ambassador’s mind and that the Department should follow up after an appropriate interval.
- J. Leighton Stuart, U.S. Ambassador to China, had been in the United States since leaving Nanking in August 1949.↩
- An attached memorandum of July 23 from Assistant Secretary Allison to the Secretary made this recommendation; it stated that in a conversation with Acheson on Aug. 23, 1951, President Truman had approved a plan to request Stuart’s resignation, but that Dean Rusk, then Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, had been unable to discuss the matter with Stuart, and that a letter to Stuart signed by Acheson on Apr. 7, 1952, requesting his resignation, had not been delivered because of the precarious state of Stuart’s health at the time.↩