Eisenhower Library, John Foster Dulles papers
No. 476
Memorandum of Conversation, by
the United States Representative at the United Nations
(Lodge)1
personal and private
Participants:
- Prime Minister Winston Churchill
- Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
Dinner at the White House on Saturday evening, June 26th. Those present included on the American side the President, Dr. Milton Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, Lewis L. Strauss, Bernard Baruch, Arthur Summerfield, Admiral Radford, Bedell Smith and me. On the British side there was Churchill, Eden, Casey, Lord Moran, Lord Cherwell, and Churchill’s son-in-law, Christopher Soames.
The President wore the British Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with two battle clasps, one for the First Army and one for the Eighth which had been given to him by Churchill. He is the only man except for Lord Alexander who can wear that medal with those two clasps. He told me before dinner: “I need a new decoration the way a dog needs a new flea.”
Churchill came to the upper room before dinner and sat down, being the only man seated. I knelt beside him and told him how touched I had been in France in the winter of 1944 when he had visited the French Army front and had not only recognized me but had remembered that I had resigned from the Senate. I told him that I realized at that moment that he was not only a great statesman but also a great politician.
He seemed to enjoy the remark. He said that he was not at all sympathetic with the communist government in Guatemala and, as a matter of fact, that he had always believed that it would have been much better to have organized world peace on the basis of a few strong regional organizations, which might then choose representatives [Page 1108] to a central world organization. He appeared, therefore, to be in sympathy with our attitude on the question of not using the power of the United Nations to abrogate the power of the Organization of American States.
Bedell Smith came over and I joined a group in which Eden was present and told him how much I had appreciated the abstention of the British in the Security Council held on Friday. He said: “It will mean a lot of trouble for me explaining that in the House of Commons.” I said that it should not make too much trouble for him inasmuch as two minutes earlier I had been told by the Prime Minister himself that he had long favored strong regional organizations.
Both Admiral Radford and the President were intensely interested in all the details of the Security Council meeting. I told the President that our tactics resembled those of the fair-play amendment at Chicago. He laughed and said that he understood.
At dinner I sat between Casey and Admiral Radford. Casey said that the Chinese communists were terribly anxious to get into the United Nations and would do a great deal to get into it. But he did not say just what it was that they would do. He said he had talked with Chou for an hour and had been very much impressed with his eyes and with the fact that he thought Chou really wanted peace in Indochina. I said does that mean that they will want to take the Hanoi delta first and he said: “Oh, yes, of course”, but that he thought they could be persuaded not to take Laos, Cambodia and Southern Vietnam.
After the dinner was over, we all met in the Red Room and I was one of the last to leave the dining room. Churchill was sitting on one end of a sofa and the President asked me to go and sit next to him, where I stayed for the balance of the evening. Churchill talked extremely freely. I began by telling him what my Grandfather had written in his diary, that he had met Churchill in an English country house when Churchill was a very young man and had predicted that Churchill would go very far. Churchill said: “Theodore Roosevelt never liked me at all, but I don’t know what it was that I did. Maybe I lit a cigar at the wrong time. But Alice Long-worth always liked me.”
He got on to the question of his early detestation of Bolshevism and communism. He spoke of how when Bolshevism first began many people had thought it was a peace movement and he had seen it for what it was, and had given 200 million pounds of British surplus military equipment to General Denikin and Admiral Kolchak. He said that if Denikin had not tried to take in so much territory and had not become so dispersed but had concentrated himself along the railroad that he might have gotten himself to [Page 1109] Moscow. As it was he got to Tula which was closer than the Germans ever got.
Today he said the average Russian wants “knick-knacks for his cottage”. He wants movies and bars and football. He wants the kind of fun that people have in a democracy. But they have had 50 years of the most horrible existence what with the Czars, the two world wars, and the oppression of their own rulers. It has all been dreadful beyond description. Stalin made the immense mistake of thinking that he could go on to world conquest, thereby losing the friendship of the United States and the United Kingdom and bringing into existence a system of alliances which no one had ever thought of before. Today 6 million communists in Russia rule over 200 million. It is the most highly privileged class in the world. This communist membership is something that they pass on to their children.
On the subject of China, he said that the Chinese communists had been given diplomatic recognition when the labor government was in power and that he would not have done it had he been in power himself. In fact he had advised the labor government not at any rate to extend de jure recognition to them and thought it had been a great mistake to have given them both de jure and de facto recognition. But, he said, when he came to power, things were relatively peaceful, so he did not make other arrangements, although “they have treated us most horribly”. Now he said the Chinese were at last sending a representative to London but he felt there was “absolutely no hurry about it” and “it really didn’t mean a thing”.
He said that admission to the United Nations was an entirely different and distinct matter from diplomatic recognition. As regards the United Nations he felt it was absolutely out of the question to admit the Chinese communists “as long as the Chinese communists are at war with the Assembly—and until they have concluded a peace on Korea”. Then you would have to admit them. He repeated twice “not until they conclude a peace”. I asked, when he said a peace whether he meant a definite treaty, and he said: “Yes, a treaty.”
Churchill had said that he had told the Senators in the afternoon2 that it was a marvelous thing for the world that Eisenhower was President. He also spoke of the President’s December 8th proposal for a stockpile of fissionable materials3 and said he thought [Page 1110] it was a wonderful thing and “that it should not be dropped.” When I asked him whether that meant that we should go along without the Russians he said that we should not drop it but that the cabinet had felt in view of the shortage of British fissionable materials that we shouldn’t hurry about taking it up.
. . . . . . .
He said when it came to trying to foresee the course of a future war, he thought that he could pretty well estimate how a future war could go, if it were fought with atomic bombs, but, he said, when you come to figure it with hydrogen bombs it becomes absolutely impossible. Nobody can figure it. A nation that had one-tenth as many hydrogen bombs as another, can nevertheless win the war by being the first to attack and thereby completely destroying the 10 to 1 advantage which the other nation has got.
He said that he could not forget the extraordinary situation which existed in this country during World War II when Admiral King was conducting the war in the Pacific with a Marine Corps of a million men in addition to the Navy, and Marshall was conducting this immense land war in Europe, and the pressure was constantly on Roosevelt to put a greater effort in the Far East. Churchill said: “I, of course, thought Europe was the most important place because I lived there. I never was much of a China man myself. I used to say to President Roosevelt that he preferred the Chinese empire to the British Empire. I told him that China would be divided by war after World War II.”
He spoke about General Auchinleck and of the fact that he never would concentrate himself on the war in the Libyan desert but was always looking over his shoulder at Iraq and the Middle East. He felt that General Ritchie might have been a good Corps commander but was totally unsuited to command the Eighth Army. He kept urging Auchinleck to go out and take command himself and Auchinleck finally did but only when it was too late.
In my earlier talk with Eden I asked him whether he felt the Soviets should be allowed to use the Security Council to nullify NATO and he said: “Oh, no, certainly not.” He said that Dulles had told him to read the speech which I made in the Security Council on Friday. I told him that Dulles had actually really been the author of it and that I could therefore heartily advise him to read it because it set forth a very fundamental point.
- The source text was attached to a brief note from Lodge to Dulles, dated June 29, suggesting that Under Secretary Smith, Murphy, and Merchant, inter alia, should see it. The source text also indicates that Dulles saw it.↩
- Regarding Churchill’s luncheon with members of Congress, see the attachment to Document 474.↩
- For the text of President Eisenhower’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on December 8, 1953, entitled “Atomic Power for Peace”, see Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953, pp. 813–822 or Department of State Bulletin, Dec. 21, 1953, pp. 847–852.↩