61. Memorandum of Conversation0
SUBJECT
- High level US-Polish Talks
PARTICIPANTS
- The Polish Ambassador
- Mr. Foy Kohler, Deputy Asst. Secretary, EUR
At his invitation I had a long tete-à-tete luncheon talk with the Polish Ambassador at his residence today. We had agreed beforehand to consider this a personal conversation rather than an official exchange.
I told the Ambassador that I sometimes wondered whether we should not have more contact with Mr. Gomulka remarking that neither our Ambassador nor other Americans saw him or were able to talk with him except very rarely and on a most casual basis.
The Ambassador became thoughtful, then said that this was a difficult problem. He said that Mr. Gomulka was in an extremely delicate situation vis-à-vis Moscow in trying to carry out a national policy. Obviously Mr. Gomulka could not pay a visit to the US—and with this I hastened to agree.
Ambassador Spasowski then went on to say that personally he had been thinking about the possibilities of some kind of high level contact. The visit of the five-member leadership group which had recently come to the US1 had been helpful, especially as respects the delegation leader, Mr. Boleslaw Jaszczuk, and Minister Franciszek Modrzewski. However this was not really a channel to the top levels of the party in Poland. He had been thinking about a possible visit to the US by Mr. Jedrychowski, who was more or less the equivalent in Poland of Mikoyan in the USSR, being an outstanding economic figure and close to Gomulka. He wanted to think this over some more and perhaps would have a chance to explore the idea further when he goes back to Warsaw for the Polish Party Congress in March. I said that he could be sure that we would give sympathetic consideration to any suggestions he might want to put to us in this respect.
- Source: Department of State, Central Files, 611.48/1–2959. Confidential. Drafted and initialed by Kohler.↩
- See Documents 56 and 57.↩