369. Memorandum of Telephone Conversation Between President Kennedy and the Under Secretary of State (Ball)0
JFK: Have we changed from 50-50 to 20% to 30% as the papers say?
GWB: No, not at all. Even what we talked with the Trade about yesterday was that we would get out some ground rules which would call for 50-50. Now if they canʼt find 50% within the guidelines then of course, it may turn out to be less than that.
JFK: I donʼt think it should look like we are doing—you know we have two stories in the paper this morning. One that we are dropping that thing to 20-30% after I said it would go on American bottoms and the other that we are giving this credit.
GWB: I feel just exactly as you do about it. The story that Bill Blair had in the Times on Sunday—I got wind of it late Sunday night from one of the wire services. I got a hold of Reston and he had Blair call me and I put it up to Blair and he said he got it from the tops of one of the Departments concerned or near the top and he is so near the top I canʼt believe the story is wrong. I said, it is wrong and I wanted to deny it. He said it had gone to bed in the first edition and Iʼll see if I can get a denial in the second edition.
JFK: What was the story?
GWB: It was a fairly detailed story of all the preliminary planning we’ve been doing and thatʼs where the 20-30% business got into it. Somebody …
[Page 805]JFK: Leaked it out.
GWB: Yes. Blair covers both Agriculture and Commerce so it was one of those places. He didnʼt come over here.
JFK: We donʼt want to be getting ourselves into more trouble than we need. Before it drops from 50-50 Iʼd like to be …
GWB: We’re not going to do a thing to drop it from 50-50. As far as the Governmentʼs position is concerned, we are prepared to make a finding that not more than 50% can be carried in American vessels but then the guidelines are that up to 50% has to be carried in American vessels if they are available.
JFK: Will somebody support us by showing that our finding about available [ships] is not capricious?
GWB: Maritime claims they can document it completely.
JFK: We just donʼt have the ships.
GWB: The ships just donʼt exist because they are all occupied for the next six months.
JFK: The other part is this story on the credit—that we’ve changed that—that we’ve changed terms.
GWB: Thereʼs nothing in it. There is a lot of gossip going around in the trade and of course in the Departments there has been a certain amount of work going on. The Maritime Admin and the Agriculture Dept and people talk so much.
JFK: How are you proceeding on it in any case?
GWB: We’re not going to touch the Russians until the autobahn thing is cleared up. They may come to see us today. The move is on their part now to come back with some reaction to what we gave them on Friday. I donʼt think we should be in communication at all with them until they get this thing cleared up cause we might want to break this.
JFK: Fine
- Source: Kennedy Library, Ball Papers, Telephone Conversations, USSR. No classification marking. No drafting information appears on the source text.↩