302. Memorandum of Telephone Conversation Between the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs (Satterthwaite) and the Ghanaian Representative at the United Nations (Quaison-Sackey)0
SUBJECT
- Appointment to Call on President Nkrumah
After consulting the Secretary this morning we requested through the Ghanaian Mission an appointment for me to call on President Nkrumah. At the time latter had called on the President I had told him I would request an appointment to call on him. He replied that he [Page 664] would be glad to see me. The Secretary had suggested that I express to Mr. Nkrumah our surprise over the contents of his speech at the General Assembly yesterday.1
About 3:30 this afternoon I received word through Mr. Dickenson that the matter had been taken up with the Ghanaian Foreign Minister, who expressed surprise at my request in view of the disparity in rank. I suggested to Mr. Dickenson that he phone back to the Ghanaian official with whom he is in touch to say that I, of course, accepted this, but to point out that Marshall Tito had been glad to receive the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs and that President Olympio had received me. Ambassador Quaison-Sackey thereupon phoned to say he thought that the Foreign Minister had been misunderstood; in any event, that Mr. Nkrumah did not know of my request, that he was very friendly and would not stand on rank.
The Ambassador then remarked that his delegation had been very surprised at the Secretary’s statement criticizing President Nkrumah’s speech.2 I replied that we were even more surprised at the contents of this speech. I noted that although he had already arrived in New York, President Nkrumah had not been present when President Eisenhower delivered his speech. In contrast, President Nkrumah, with great display, took his seat at the head of his delegation to listen to the 2 hour and 20 minute speech of Premier Khrushchev.3
As to the content of the speech, I pointed out that except for Nkrumah’s personal praise of Secretary Hammarskjold, it was difficult to find a word in the speech showing any understanding of the position of the West in the East-West conflict. Moreover, in Nkrumah’s discussion of the Congo no mention was made of the unilateral intervention of the Soviet Union outside United Nations channels involving the arrival of several hundred Soviet technicians. Certainly, therefore, the content of the Nkrumah and Khrushchev speeches and the display attached to the reception by the eastern bloc delegates of the Nkrumah speech gave us every reason to believe there had been collusion between the two. Ambassador Quaison-Sackey said this was not the case, as he, himself, had fixed the time for Nkrumah’s speech several weeks ago. He also remarked that the applause of the eastern bloc was due to the fact that Nkrumah’s speech was anti-colonial in [Page 665] tone. I said that this seemed ironic to me, since in our view the Soviet Union was the greatest and most extreme colonial and imperialist power in the world today.
The tone of the conversation was friendly at all times on both sides. The question of an appointment for me to see Nkrumah was left open.4
- Source: Department of State, Conference Files: Lot 64 D 559. Official Use Only. Drafted by Satterthwaite.↩
- The speech largely concerned the situation in the Congo. It declared that the Congo was an African problem which could only be solved by Africans, urged that the U.N. Force in the Congo should be restricted to Africans, supported former Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba as head of the Congo government, and criticized actions taken by the U.N. Command. For text, see U.N. doc. A/PV.869.↩
- Not further identified.↩
- On September 23; for text, see U.N. doc. A/PV.869.↩
- No record of such a conversation has been found.↩