Office of the Historian

75. Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation Between the Secretary of State in Washington and Senator H. Alexander Smith in Princeton, New Jersey, February 10, 1957, 4:05 p.m.1

Washington, February 10, 1957, 4:05 p.m.

TELEPHONE CALL TO SENATOR SMITH IN PRINCETON NEW JERSEY

The Sec returned S. call from the previous day. The Sec said we are asking for pressure on Israel to comply. One has got a practical proposition here. If there was a UN resolution calling for sanctions against the USSR we would comply with it in a minute; it would not get to first base. We have no reason to doubt that the Canal will be open to Israel traffic, the Sec said. The Sec said that so far as he knew Egypt was today doing nothing wrong. The question of allowing ships through is very complex. The Sec said you could not equate it with invading another country and seizing its territory. There is a question of whether Canada is not violating our rights by opening a portion of the international waterway on its side but we have not invaded Canada. The Sec said that if you say you will not try to maintain world order until you can do it all over the world, you might as well disband the UN. The Sec said Israel was not talking about the Canal at all. It was not trying to condition its withdrawal upon its rights in the Suez Canal. The Sec said the Israelis have attacked far more than the Arabs; the Israelis have killed 10 Arabs to 1 Israeli. Hammarskjold has been trying, but Israel has never been willing to agree to station forces along the border. The Sec said we have put all the sanctions on Russia that we can and have cut trade. Sanctions on Israel would mean cutting out financial and business transactions. The sanctions would be economic; military have never been discussed. The Sec said in what respect was he (Nasser I think) defying the UN. The UN had no right to go in and take over the tolls. The Sec said he had not acquiesced in the 1951 Resolution2 and we probably should have done something about it at the time but we all acquiesced in it. Now he had agreed the Canal should be open to vessels of all nations. We do not know whether he [Page 122] will live up to it, but we have his agreement. The Israelis now claim the Armistice is no longer binding on them. The Sec said Green3 [here follows a phrase pertaining to a personnel matter] would be bitter. He had been so violently anti-Israel that his reports were no longer valid. The Sec said the people get the point of view of the countries to which they are accredited. If you added up all the requests it would run into billions of dollars.

The Sec asked when the report would be out, and asked if Gruenther had appeared.4 The Sec said (apparently re the ME resolution) that it limits authorization of funds. The Sec said there would probably be several days debate. The Sec said things were breaking pretty well for us.

  1. Source: Eisenhower Library, Dulles Papers, General Telephone conversations. Transcribed by Carolyn Proctor. The source text indicates that Proctor could hear only Dulles’ side of the conversation. The parenthetical insertions in the source text are Proctor’s.↩
  2. Reference is to the Security Council resolution adopted on September 1, 1951, calling on Egypt to terminate restrictions on Israeli shipping through the Suez Canal. (U.N. doc. S/2322) See Foreign Relations, 1951, vol. V, p. 848.↩
  3. Reference is presumably to Joseph C. Green, who served as Ambassador to Jordan July 1952– July 1953.↩
  4. Reference is to the Senate hearings held before the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Armed Services concerning the Middle East resolution. Gruenther submitted a statement to the two committees on February 11. (Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, Eighty-eighth Congress, First Session, on S.J. Res. 19 and H.J. Res. 117, Part II, pp. 906–908)↩