Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, The Near East, South Asia, and Africa, Volume V, Part 2

501.BB Palestine/3–948

Memorandum by Mr. Robert M. McClintock to the Under Secretary of State (Lovett)

secret

[Washington,] March 9, 1948.

Three telegrams¹ are attached for your signature pursuant to our conversation this morning.

I talked to Mr. Rusk at 11:25 a. m., by telephone. Fortunately USUN had arrived at the same conclusions as we, and Mr. Rusk has already had conversations with Mr. Tsiang of China and M. de Rose of France in which general agreement was reached on the need for interrogating the parties. The French and Chinese were pleased with our proposed questions and Tsiang expressed the opinion that they went to the core of the problem.

I suggested to Mr. Rusk that for the record an effort should be made again to invite Gromyko to participate and that we hoped that the interrogatories would be conducted by the Big Three as a group and not separately.

I drew to Mr. Rusk’s attention the article on Page 3 of this morning’s New York Times, in which the legal experts of the UN Secretariat are quoted as affirming the legal authority of the Security Council to partition Palestine by force, as well as establishing the opinion that the UN Palestine Commission “will become the legally constituted government of Palestine after Britain surrenders the mandate on May 15.” Mr. Rusk said that this was a working paper which had been asked for by the Palestine Commission and that it was dated February 3. Secretary-General Lie had, however, submitted it informally to members of the Security Council yesterday.

I commented that it was most unfortunate for the public impression to get around that the UN Secretariat had prepared a refutation of Senator Austin’s statement of February 24, to say nothing of rendering an opinion on the question of who had responsibility for Palestine after May 15. I suggested that Mr. Lie had better set the record straight as to the date and origin of this paper and that we might wish to inform Mr. Lie, since he had comunicated to us as a member of the Council, that we did not concur in his legal opinion.

Mr. Rusk said we should not be surprised to see press accounts quoting “a Russian spokesman” to the effect that the Soviet Union will advocate that the Security Council implement by force, if necessary, the partition plan. The “Russian spokesman” is Mr. Gromyko.

1. Presumably telegrams 122, 125, and 172, immediately following.