Office of the Historian

Eisenhower Library, Hagerty papers

No. 412
Extract From the Diary of James C. Hagerty, Press Secretary to the President

[Washington,] November 29, 1954.

Monday, November 29, 1954

In Augusta.1

Out to the office at the Augusta National at 8:15. Talked to the President about Dulles’ speech in the evening in Chicago2 and recommended to him that I thought it would be a good idea if Dulles would take a firm stand against blockade of Chinese Coast. The President thoroughly agreed and repeated his conviction that a blockade is an act of war which could at best lead only to serious consequences. “I am completely beginning to lose my patience with Bill Knowland. He has made the most irresponsible statements of late which are hurting us very much with our allies.3 Can’t he see [Page 957] that this move by the Chinese is part of the general Communist plot to try to divide us from our western allies and try to defeat ratification of the Paris agreements?”

The President thought I should call Dulles and I finally reached the Secretary at Chaumount, New York. He told me he had been thinking about the same thing and that he wanted me to get approval from the President to say that the Russian Communists were deliberately talking peaceful co-existence for the benefit of the western allies and that the Chinese Communists were deliberately trying to act provocative and cause incidents to cause trouble between the United Nations and the western allies. I told him that the President wanted him specifically to mention the blockade as being an act of war, and he said he would be delighted to do so. He asked me to check back with the President and I did so—reaching him on the sixth green. The President thoroughly approved what Foster was going to say, and I so reported to the Secretary.

Earlier in the morning I also had a discussion with the President on what I believe was a need for him to speak out strongly against Knowland and those within the Republican Party who were engaging in this saber-rattling talk. The President did not say he would not but thought it would be better to have Dulles take the lead in his speech tonight and then have Dulles have a press conference to handle the details prior to the President’s press conference. Consequently I cancelled out a conference scheduled for tomorrow and the Secretary arranged to have his conference on Wednesday.4

Airborne from Augusta at 4:50—Into MATS Terminal in the new plane in an hour and forty minutes.

  1. Hagerty was with the President in Augusta, Georgia; they returned to Washington that afternoon.↩
  2. The text of Dulles’ speech, made before the National 4–H Club Congress in Chicago on Nov. 29, is printed in Department of State Bulletin, Dec. 13, 1954, pp. 890–894.↩
  3. At a news conference on Nov. 27, Knowland had proposed a naval blockade of the China coast unless the flyers were released; reported in the New York Times, Nov. 28, 1954.↩
  4. Dec. 1.↩