Office of the Historian

274. Memorandum of Conversation1

Washington, July 27, 1967, 12:30 p.m.

SUBJECT

  • Communist China

PARTICIPANTS

  • The Secretary
  • Deputy Under Secretary Kohler
  • Amb. Anatoliy Dobrynin, USSR

During luncheon today Ambassador Dobrynin asked the Secretary’s opinion about the evolution of events in China. The Secretary replied that we had the impression that Mao Tse-tung had not been able to establish the unity he was apparently seeking. The Ambassador replied that he quite agreed. The Secretary then said that he realized this might still present problems on the Soviet side, but that he felt that it would be useful if the two of us could before long exchange views and have discussions about China. He would think that the Soviets would not be too comfortable about this neighbor of theirs with its teeming population and food problems, with the longest common frontier in the world between the two countries, with Chinese development of thermo-nuclear weapons and MRBMs. Dobrynin’s attitude seemed to indicate some agreement with these remarks, but he was noncommittal. He commented only that Viet-Nam made impossible meaningful discussions between us on a great many subjects.

There then ensued a certain amount of inconclusive discussion of Viet-Nam along familiar lines during which Dobrynin said that the United States had not been very helpful to the Soviet Union in this connection and that it was the impression in Moscow that Secretary McNamara’s trip to Viet-Nam and new proposals for increasing our force strength there followed directly on the termination of the Glassboro talks between the President and Chairman Kosygin.

  1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, POL CHICOM. Confidential; Limdis. Drafted by Kohler and approved in S on July 25. The source text is labeled Part II of V.↩