396.1 GE/4–1954
The British Ambassador (Makins) to the Under Secretary of State (Smith)
My Dear Bedell: I put to the Foreign Secretary the suggestion which was made when I called on the Secretary of State and you that the meeting tomorrow at the State Department should be a meeting of the “Sixteen” and regarded as a general “briefing” meeting before the Geneva Conference.1 The Associated States will be added in view of the Indo-China item on the Conference agenda. It could if necessary be explained that the Secretary had seen all the Ambassadors separately before he left for London and Paris and was seeing them together on account of the time factor.
I have now heard that Mr. Eden agrees to this proposal. He suggests that it might be best to lay the main emphasis on Korea, and that the Indo-China question might rest on the substance of the communiqués issued in London and Paris. In this way any implication that the meeting is to begin the work of constituting the proposed South East Asia defence arrangement would be avoided.
Yours sincerely,
- See footnote 6, supra.↩