20. Memorandum of a Conversation Between the President and the Secretary of State, White House, Washington, February 14, 19551
[Here follow discussion of current relations with the Republic of China; a discussion of the merits of granting a loan to Mexico’s national oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos; a review of Secretary Dulles’ draft of a speech he planned to deliver to the Foreign Policy Association in New York on February 16; and a determination to invite Prime Minister U Nu of Burma to visit the United States in June.]
5. I discussed with the President the substance of the memorandum from Francis Russell on February 14, pointing out that before proceeding we should know in a general way whether the President might consider it feasible to recommend, if a settlement were arrived at, that the U.S. and U.K. would in effect jointly guarantee the territorial stability and if we would be willing to increase our contributions to the area to an amount which would in substance double them from the present rate of around $100,000,000 a year to about $200,000,000, or in other words $1,000,000,000 over say a five-year period. The President said, of course, he did not want to [Page 54] commit himself and that he felt somewhat appalled by the mounting total of requests for foreign aid. However, he agreed that we should make an all-out effort to get a settlement, if possible, before the elections of ’56, and he felt we might proceed to develop further the project. This was not, of course, any committal; that he would have to study the plan in detail and hear the views of Treasury, Budget, etc. I said we did not want or expect any committal at the present time, but that we had not wanted to proceed to develop the project beyond the present U.S.–U.K. study without his knowing in general what it might entail.
[Here follows discussion of training Cambodia’s military forces; factors involved in issuing Marshal Zhukov of the Soviet Union an invitation to visit the United States; and the current French parliamentary situation.]
- Source: Eisenhower Library, Dulles Papers, Meetings with the President. Secret; Personal and Private. Drafted by Dulles.↩