221. Letter from Acting Secretary of State Herter to the British Ambassador (Caccia)0
Dear Harrold: I appreciated very much the promptness of your report of the Prime Minister’s talks with Adenauer and brought your letter of March 131 immediately to the attention of the President. He has asked me to let you know and to ask you to inform the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of his concern about several aspects of this report.
First of all, on the question of the proposed commitment to a definite date for the Summit Conference we feel strongly that if we give Khrushchev a date at this point the Foreign Ministers Conference would be condemned to sterility. On the other hand, if we indicated that as a minimum the Foreign Ministers meeting would have to reveal some prospects for serious some negotiations, then we would enhance the chances of getting something constructive out of the May meeting. Moreover, the policy which we consistently followed throughout the exhaustive exchanges of last year—that a Summit meeting could only be accepted if preparations give a real prospect for reaching agreement on significant subjects—is well-known to Moscow, as well as our own peoples. Recession from this position at this stage would risk getting a dangerous impression of weakness. Actually the President himself agrees that we should be relatively forthcoming on a reply as regards a [Page 485] Summit Conference and personally proposed new formula which we have introduced into the working group in Paris as follows:
Assuming that the Foreign Ministers meeting gives promise of progress at a Summit Conference, this Government would be happy to participate in such us a Summit Conference at any reasonable place and time.
Supplementing this, we think it would be possible to allow our Ambassadors in Moscow to indicate to the Soviets that a Summit Conference might be contemplated next summer provided there was satisfactory progress at the Foreign Ministers Conference. Under the natural assumption that the Conference were held outside United States, it should be borne in mind that our constitutional system for severe limits on the time the President can be continuously out of the country. This is possible for only a few days.
Our own basic estimate is that we see less dangerous than you apparently do with the Russians taking precipitate action with respect to access or the threatened conclusion of a separate peace treaty with East Germany. In fact we did receive the impression from reports that Prime Minister’s talks with Khrushchev that you felt the danger of precipitate unilateral action by the Russians had lessened.
As you know, our formulation of the agenda item was taken deliberately from the communiqué including the Prime Minister’s talks in Moscow with Mr. Khrushchev and hence represents a formulation to which the Russians have publicly subscribed. We think it would be difficult for them to turn this down. Of course, the French think that we should be even more specific and the problem might be met by adding a sentence and our note to the effect that: “Naturally any of the four participating governments should have the opportunity to raise for discussion any question which it may consider relevant to the problems under consideration. This seems close to be approach suggested in the British text tabled in Paris.2 Except for the question of fixing a date for the Summit Conference we had had the impression from your letter of March 9 and from reports of our representative on the Working Group in Paris that there was in fact little substantial difference in the views of the four Governments on the content of our reply to the latest Soviet note. Frankly, we [Page 486] had hoped that it would be possible for the Working Group to finish coordinating the replies this week so that they could be delivered to Moscow even before the Prime Minister’s arrival here. It had seemed to us that this might produce some useful reactions from Moscow which the President and Prime Minister could take into account in their talks. We recognize that this time schedule may no longer be possible. However, we still think that the Working Group should get on with the job without delay and that if the matter of commitment to a specific date for a Summit Conference were dropped, there should be no difficulty in prompt agreement. We hope you will agree to this.
I am informing the German Chargé here regarding the substance of this letter and asking him to pass our views along to Bonn.
Sincerely yours,
- Source: Department of State, Presidential Correspondence: Lot 66 D 204. Secret. Drafter by Kohler and cleared with President Eisenhower at a meeting with Herter during the morning of March 14. (Eisenhower Library, Whitman File, DDE Diaries)↩
- Document 217↩
- The text of the British draft was transmitted in telegram 3330 from Paris, March 13. (Department of State, Central Files 396.1/3–1359)↩
- Printed from a copy that bears this stamped signature.↩