177. Memorandum of a Conversation Among the President, the Secretary of State, and the Under Secretary of State (Hoover), White House, Washington, September 6, 19561
[Here follows discussion concerning Cyprus.]
We then discussed the Suez situation. I read Loy Henderson’s last cable2 indicating there was no possibility of agreement on the basis of the 18–Power proposal but that Egypt insisted upon the sole right to manage and operate the Canal. The President then raised the question as to where we stood. He indicated that he thought we should take something less than the 18–Power proposal along the lines of the suggestion he had made to me in London with respect to “supervision”.3 He recalled that at the time I had said that it would not be acceptable to the British and the French. He asked what the attitude was today. I said I thought the passage of time was working in favor of some compromise and that they might take today what they would not have taken a month ago or a week ago. I referred to Dillon’s cable regarding French sentiment4 and the recent article in The Observer. I referred again to my suggestion as to a position based squarely on the rights under the Treaty of 1888 as giving us a much better negotiating position than any we now had where the alternative [Page 393] was either to ask Egypt for a treaty which Egypt clearly had the right to reject, or else to use force to try to impose such an arrangement. The President recognized the bargaining value of such a position but expressed doubt as to whether it was practically workable. Mr. Hoover agreed that it might not work practically as a permanent arrangement but that it immensely improved our bargaining and negotiating position.
I said that one of the problems we faced was whether we should put such pressure on the British and French that they could pass the blame to us for the subsequent losses they might incur in the Middle East and Africa as a result of Nasser’s “getting away with it”. I said if this happened, it could have a serious effect for some time upon good relations between our countries and certainly the existing British and French Governments would have a tendency to try to find an alibi for themselves in our action.
- Source: Eisenhower Library, Dulles Papers, Meetings with the President. Secret; Personal and Private. The source text indicates the meeting took place after the September 6 NSC meeting.↩
- Reference is to telegram 613 from Cairo, September 5, received at 11:36 p.m., not printed. (Department of State, Central Files, 974.7301/9–556)↩
- See Document 98.↩
- Reference is presumably to telegram 1075 from Paris, September 5, which reported the results of a recent survey of French opinion on the Suez affair, made by the French Ministry of Interior. The conclusions of this survey, as told to the Embassy in Paris by a highly-placed official in the Ministry of Interior, were: (1) outside of Paris there was very little interest in the crisis and a general antipathy to forceful measures; (2) in Paris, one school of thought maintained that military measures would result in the quick crushing of the Egyptian Army, thus putting the Arab world in its place and helping the French cause in North Africa; (3) a second school of thought in Paris, however, maintained that forceful measures were dangerous beyond all proportion. (Department of State, Central Files, 974.7301/9–556) A copy of telegram 1075 in the Eisenhower Library, Whitman File, Dulles–Herter Series is initialed by Eisenhower.↩
- Macomber initialed for Dulles.↩