125. Memorandum of Conversation0

SUBJECT

  • Car Trip to Airport from Pittsburgh

PARTICIPANTS

  • Ambassador H.C. LodgeUS
  • Chairman N.S. KhrushchevUSSR

As we were driving to the airport in Pittsburgh on Thursday, September 24th, I said to Chairman Khrushchev that a number of people in Pittsburgh had telephoned me and had come to see me requesting that I make appointments for them to see him concerning so-called compassionate cases—families who were separated and who could not be reunited because of the failure of the Soviet Government to approve.

I had told these individuals that of course I could make no appointments for Mr. Khrushchev to see anyone, but I did feel that Mr. Khrushchev ought to know that this had happened to me in Pittsburgh in addition to the many letters I had received before Chairman Khrushchev’s arrival.

He said to me: I want to settle these matters. Please tell all these people to take them up with Ambassador Menshikov.” In this [Page 444] conversation and in the previous one with Mr. Garst he made it clear that he wanted to clean up these cases.1

I recommend therefore that the State Department, having in mind what he said to Mr. Garst in Coon Rapids, what I understand he said to Mr. Stevenson in the same place2 and what he said to me in Pittsburgh, get up their list of cases and take them up with the Soviet Government. The Department should carefully consider doing it through Mr. Thompson instead of through Mr. Menshikov because Mr. Menshikov can apparently always be counted upon to put any American request in its very worst light.

  1. Source: Department of State, Conference Files: Lot 64 D 560, CF 1474. Confidential. Drafted and initialed by Lodge.
  2. See Document 124.
  3. Adlai E. Stevenson attended a reception given for Khrushchev in Des Moines in the late afternoon of September 22, but no record of their conversation has been found.