410. Memorandum From Harold H. Saunders of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow)1
SUBJECT
- SIG Meeting on Southern Africa Paper—2:30 p.m. Tuesday, December 3
Attached is the long Southern Africa NPP2 on the SIG agenda today. It is basically a ratification of present policy with a slight nudge toward tightening our ties with the Black African states in the area. In short, it’s a prescription for a holding operation since the authors are not ready and do not believe we have the capability to come down hard on one side of the issue.
Some of the specifics are such as:
- —Leave our NASA tracking station in South Africa but develop stand-by substitutes.
- —Resume naval calls only if our people are not subject to segregation or discrimination.
- —Re-open bilateral aid programs with the Black African countries as soon as we can persuade Congress to let us reverse the present trend toward phase-out.
The real choice the paper poses (pp. 27–36) is between (1) a “measured approach” of hoping to erode the walls of apartheid before they come crashing down and (2) a “harder line” of applying sanctions to Portugal and South Africa, and breaking our military and space links with South Africa until they begin to move toward majority rule. The paper’s main argument against the harder line is that it won’t achieve the results we want.
I guess this Administration is not the one to chart a new course, and this paper describes the elements of the problem well enough. The one role the SIG might usefully play at this stage is to record its views on whether time won’t soon run out on this holding operation. I suspect it will—both in our own black community and in Africa. If the SIG agrees, it might wish to put itself on record and put this high on the next team’s agenda.
Apart from the “alternative strategies” section (pp. 27–36), you need only look at the precis, pp. iv-xi.
- Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Hamilton Files, South Africa. Secret.↩
- Document 409.↩