278. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson1
Pressure is building up for followup on the recommendations of the White House Conference on International Cooperation.2 Senator Clark spoke on the floor, and the House delegation to the Conference has reported to the Speaker urging vigorous implementation of Conference recommendations. Important private citizens, greatly enthused by the conference, are beginning to ask whether anything will come of it. Dick Gardner will keep the issue alive with a book on the Conference this fall.
Our problem is to lay the Conference to rest decently. We do not want to perpetuate it. On the other hand, it would be a bad mistake to ignore the Conference recommendations completely. Too many influential citizens invested too much time, thought and energy. Ignoring their work would unnecessarily antagonize some of our best foreign policy constituents. Besides, there are some good ideas (maybe as many as 200 big and small) among the recommendations, and we might as well take some credit for them.
As I see it, there are three ways to handle this problem, making the most of the sensible Conference recommendations and scrapping the useless ones:
Course #1: Decentralize implementation to the agencies. State Department recommends (attached)3 that you direct: (1) the Government departments and agencies concerned to implement those ICY recommendations which are in the national interest; (2) the ICY cabinet committee chairman to send each private sector chairman a copy of the progress report (attached);3 and (3) each Government committee chairman to inform his private sector counterpart that he will be available for further consultations as desired.
This would push implementation of recommendations down into the departments and, in effect, bury the Conference without further ceremony. In my view, this would unnecessarily give the private people who participated in the Conference—people who are basically sympathetic with your foreign policy aims—a cause to say we are deaf to new ideas.
Course #2: Centralize and spotlight implementation under White House supervision. Enthusiasts like Senator Clark would like you to appoint [Page 492] a small secretariat in the White House or in the Vice President’s Office to push the Conference recommendations through the bureaucracy. They would also like to set up a group of leaders from the citizens’ committees to provide a channel of continuing communication.
I do not recommend that approach either. It would go too far in perpetuating the Conference machinery. It could produce too much publicity and pressure for some of the recommendations on which we are not prepared to act.
Course #3: A Compromise. The course I favor (Budget Bureau and Doug Cater agree) is for you to assign an in-house committee headed by Charles Schultze to review the Conference recommendations in the context of preparing your FY 1968 budget and legislative program. You might even assign one of the summer task forces this responsibility, though it is mostly an in-house job since the outsiders have already had their say. We would set this up with a simple memo to department and agency heads (draft attached)4 asking their cooperation. Then we could put out just enough of a press release to show we are not letting these ideas die.
My idea of the committee would be to include the Budget Director (providing the staff work), Joe Califano (in connection with the legislative program), myself and maybe one non-government participant we could trust (to give the outsiders testimony that we have given their ideas a fair shake). This would be mostly dressing up for public consumption work Budget would be doing anyway in the normal budget process. We would just give a little special attention to programs recommended by the Conference so we could produce a good box-score next January.
I think this is the least we can do. Burying this show as State recommends risks a bad political backfire. Handling it this way would give an appearance of honest White House attention without perpetuating the Conference or associating you any further with its unpalatable recommendations. There are enough good recommendations that I think we could put together a pretty good story for you in January about how many you have incorporated in your program. By good public relations, we could create a glowing picture of your new efforts to tap good minds everywhere.
I see this as complementing our new efforts to increase State Department use of consultants. It is a one-shot deal to screen out good ideas from one of the “[illegible] consultants” we have ever put to work. We will not reassemble that group, so there is no conflict with our new program. However, the image of giving their ideas full hearing [Page 493] would nicely complement announcement of your new program to tap the best private thinking on a permanent (and less cumbersome) basis.
There are other advantages in forcing the bureaucracy to follow through on the conference recommendations and on the private contacts they established during the conference. One of the big bottlenecks as we begin adding an international dimension to the Great Society will be to get the traditionally domestic departments like HEW, Interior, and Justice to think in international terms too. If we can perpetuate their contacts with internationally minded private experts and make them think about international programs, we will begin bringing them along into the foreign field. This would not distort any existing or planned programs for expanding use of consultants. It would just underscore their importance.
Approve your compromise (Course #3)5
- —Prefer anonymous committee of advisers
- —Prefer task force
Approve State’s approach (Course #1)
See me
- Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Gordon Chase Files, ICY—Vol. II. Confidential.↩
- See Document 276.↩
- Not found.↩
- Not found.↩
- This option is checked. On August 1 Rostow told the President that Charles Schultze had agreed to chair the committee and that they would like to ask Ray Nasher to “sit with us as the one outsider.” Rostow explained, “He worked with us as Executive Director of the Conference last fall and is safe.” (Memorandum from Rostow to the President, August 1; Johnson Library, National Security File, Gordon Chase Files, ICY—Vol. II) In an August 26 memorandum setting August 29 as the first meeting date, Saunders told Rostow that part of the purpose of the first meeting was to give Nasher a sense “that this review is serious business.” “Schultze will have him to lunch, and we’ll brief him to the hilt,” he added. (Memorandum from Saunders to Rostow, August 26; ibid., Subject File, ICY)↩