Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Western Europe and Canada, Volume VI, Part 1

850.33/6–2253

No. 173
The Director of the Office of European Regional Affairs (Moore) to the United States Representative to the European Coal and Steel Community (Bruce)

confidential–informal
official and personal

[Washington,] June 19, 1953.

Dear David: I want you to know exactly what happened with respect to the release of the exchange of letters on the possible loan to the CSC.¹ After we had received copies of the Committee replies and agreed with them that the exchange would be made public on Wednesday, I got Livie to raise the matter Tuesday morning in the Secretary’s staff meeting. The Secretary agreed that the President should personally make a few remarks along the lines of the notes that I showed Monnet, a copy of which I am enclosing. The Secretary instructed McCardle to get in touch with Hagerty and make the necessary arrangements. After getting word of this from Livie, I sent all the necessary material down to McCardle’s office right after the meeting. That afternoon when I was trying to clear Edcol 72 of June 16² with McCardle I discovered that he had not yet done anything about the matter. I waited in his office while he talked to Hagerty on the telephone. Hagerty said that this was pretty late and that there was already a full schedule for the press conference the following morning; however, he asked McCardle to send in the documents and he said he would see what he could do. I then reported the status of the matter to Rod O’Connor and he said he would call Hagerty also to emphasize the Secretary’s personal interest in this matter.

The next morning McCardle’s office notified me that the President would have a special press conference that afternoon on the CSC matter. This was the situation when I talked to you on the telephone. I later learned that the President had merely mentioned the exchange of letters in passing in his press conference in the morning and that Hagerty had done the talking at the conference to release the letters that afternoon.

The announcement got a rather poor play here, partly because of the circumstances, but in large part also because of the Korean and German developments the same day. Perhaps the effect was somewhat better in Europe. We made sure that the correspondents of the European wire services were notified.

I hope that Jean Monnet will understand that I personally did everything possible to ensure that his wishes with respect to the way this matter should be handled were carried out and I deeply regret that it did not come out exactly as he might have wished.³

Sincerely yours,

Ben T. Moore

1. For information concerning the exchange of letters between President Eisenhower and Senator Wiley and Representative Chiperfield, see the editorial note, Supra.
2. Not printed, but see ibid.
3. In a letter to Moore, dated June 22, Bruce stated that everyone, including Monnet, understood what happened and that the way this information was handled made very little difference because the publicity given to it in Europe was widespread and satisfactory. (850.33/6–2253)