54. Memorandum of Conference With the President, Washington, December 15, 1956, 2:30 p.m.1
OTHERS PRESENT
- Secretary Dulles
- Under Secretary Hoover
- Colonel Goodpaster
Secretary Dulles met with the President on his arrival from Paris. He handed the President a proposed draft statement which might be issued as a press release, and the President indicated his full approval.2 He said that the NATO Meeting had gone as well as could reasonably be expected. He thanked the President for his quick support regarding the question of a possible tri-partite meeting, and said that pressure for such a meeting did not develop.3
He said that the biggest difficulty had been the desire of NATO countries to have U.S. policy made in the NATO Council. He had stressed that we stand ready to discuss policies—and prefer to do so earlier rather than later—but that we could not commit ourselves to anything of this kind. The President interjected that the others obviously could not either, for constitutional reasons.
Mr. Dulles said that the NATO countries had suggested a communiqué implying that all the countries, the U.S. included, had concerted a policy of handling the Middle East situation. When Mr. Dulles pointed out how such a statement would appear to world opinion and asked them to reconsider their proposal, they dropped this provision. The Secretary said it was difficult to find and to follow the narrow path between, on the one side, strengthening NATO, and, on the other, avoiding the appearance of “teaming up” and taking positions in the UN as a bloc.
He said the Council had adopted the Report of Three,4 and commented that we must strengthen our political representation at [Page 165] the Council in order to be able to discuss our policies fully and effectively as contemplated.
He told of some of the difficulties encountered in preparing the Council’s military directive.…
Mr. Dulles said that one good feature of the meetings was the evidence of closer German relations with the British and French. The Germans readily accepted the principle of giving another year of financial support to the costs of British forces in Germany. The French and the Germans seemed to be working well on the Saar problem. The British are moving towards support of the common market (although on the basis that the Suez incident has shown that they can no longer act as an independent great power; the President said that no one can).
Secretary Dulles commented on the great change that has occurred regarding the significance of satellite forces. The sixty satellite divisions can no longer be regarded as an addition to Soviet forces—in fact they may immobilize certain Soviet forces.
[Here follows discussion of the Suez situation, scheduled for publication in a forthcoming Foreign Relations volume.]
Colonel, CE, US Army
- Source: Eisenhower Library, Whitman File, Eisenhower Diaries. Secret. Drafted by Goodpaster.↩
- For text of Dulles’ statement issued on December 15, see Department of State Bulletin, December 24 and 31, 1956, p. 981.↩
- Reference is to discussions Dulles had with the President in Augusta, Georgia, on December 2 on his way home from Key West. The Secretary had been in Florida recuperating from surgery performed on November 16. In his December 3 memorandum of his conversation with the President, Dulles wrote that he felt that the era of tripartite meetings had about drawn to a close and he hoped to avoid any such meeting in Paris. He told the President that it was increasingly difficult to maintain the illusion that France was one of the great world powers, and that this was increasingly an irritant to countries like Germany and Italy. (Eisenhower Library, Dulles Papers, Meetings with the President) For text of Dulles’ statement of December 2 in which he reiterated the President’s strong support for the United Nations and for NATO despite recent strains in the Alliance, see Department of State Bulletin, December 10, 1956, p. 912.↩
- See footnote 12, Document 48.↩