Office of the Historian

28. Memorandum From the Secretary of State’s Special Assistant (Hanes) to the Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (Murphy)1

Washington, August 12, 1955.

The following excerpt from the memorandum of the Secretary’s conversation with the President on August 11, 1955, is forwarded to you for your information.

“I expressed the view that the new atmosphere meant not a perpetuation of the status quo but rather the greater opportunity for change. The ‘security’ arguments of the Soviet Union had been downgraded and they did not have the same justification of ‘security’ for holding on to East Germany and the satellites. The important thing, I said, was to make it perfectly clear that we did not identify increased hope of peace with increased solidification of the status quo but rather the contrary, and that we now expected there to be changes in the European situation, as evidenced by the unification of Germany and greater freedom for the satellites. I referred to my book ‘War, Peace and Change’ as indicating my great belief that we could not have peace for long unless there was peaceful change.

“The President expressed himself as in complete agreement with this philosophy and said he felt it would fit well into a speech he was planning to make in honor of George [John] Marshall about August 25.2 He said he would take a look at the speech from this standpoint and then send it over to me to work on.”

John W. Hanes, Jr.3
  1. Source: Department of State, Secretary’s Memoranda of Conversation: Lot 64 D 199. Secret. Sent also to MacArthur, Bowie, and McCardle.↩
  2. Reference is to Eisenhower’s address before the annual convention of the American Bar Association, Philadelphia, August 24; see Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1955, pp. 802–809, or Department of State Bulletin, September 5, 1955, pp. 375–378. In this speech, Eisenhower evoked the qualities of John Marshall in the “crusade for peace and security” and stated that with this spirit the Delegation went to the Geneva Conference. At Geneva, Eisenhower continued, the United States did not let its eagerness to avoid war overshadow its concern to combat the perpetuation of injustices and wrongs, particularly in the case of the Eastern European satellites, where, to use Eisenhower’s words, “The domination of captive countries cannot longer be justified by any claim that it is needed for purposes of security.”↩
  3. Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.↩