378. Letter 26 from McConaughy to Johnson1
You are not the forgotten man despite the rather long interval between letters recently. With our forces rather widely scattered, there has not been much that I could give you which would add to what you were getting in the official telegrams. That is still essentially the case. So this letter will be rather short. I have just checked with both Mr. Robertson and Bill Sebald. They have no special sidelights on messages to convey and suggest that I defer any long letter until early next week. We are meeting with Herman Phleger at noon today. By Monday we should be able to take his views and the latest thinking of the Secretary into account.
We have a feeling that we may be getting into a fairly tight corner on the renunciation of force item although basically our position is unquestionably sound. It seems to us in FE that we are suffering from our inability to state our precise position fully and frankly to key friendly governments; from the need to pull our verbal punches to some extent at Geneva in order to insure the continuation of the talks; from the increasingly serious misgivings of the Chinese Government (see Taipei’s 463 of Nov. 17 transmitting the note of Foreign Minister Yeh to the Secretary); from the clever way in which the Chinese Communists are [Facsimile Page 2] attempting to seize the initiative on the renunciation of force item and masquerade as the real sponsors of the renunciation of [Typeset Page 522] force concept. We are getting an increasing number of queries as to where we expect to go if the Chinese Communists should unexpectedly agree to sign some form of textually acceptable renunciation of force declaration? Taipei clearly believes that the Communists might be willing to sign some such form of declaration with no intention of observing it longer than it served their purposes. Taipei knows that no such declaration can be self-enforcing and they believe the Chinese Communists would not hesitate to try to rationalize a violation of any wording which might be proposed. Taipei is asking with increasing insistence, “Where would you go after you got an agreed announcement on renunciation of force?” We are drafting a message to Rankin which spells out to some extent the rationale behind the Geneva Ambassadorial talks. There may be some tendency on the part of our people out there to look at the problem almost exclusively in military terms. More of all this next week.
On the repatriation question, I am enclosing a copy of an Aide Memoire we are giving the British which answers some of their questions on the stand we would like for O’Neill to take in regard to letters and visits to prisoners, the obstruction issue, and the special responsibility resting on the Chinese Communists to establish contact between O’Neill and the prisoners in view of the inability of the prisoners to take any initiative without the consent and assistance of Chinese Communist authorities. We are enclosing a copy of the report of the interview with Downey on November 15. We are also sending you separately a copy of the memo of conversation between Indian Ambassador Mehta and Mr. Robertson which took place yesterday.
[Facsimile Page 3]We are working on a revision of the draft public statement (your 1141). Presumably there will be no occasion to use this right away but we hope to have some concrete suggestions for you before the next meeting. It seems to me that there are various little straws indicating that the Chinese Communists may be laying the ground work for a resort to the public forum later. The casual suggestion of Tuesday for the next meeting is one such straw.
I hope you will find our proposal to substitute Dave Osborn for Doug Forman acceptable. Doug’s family situation seems to call for his early return. Dave is outstanding and will bring considerable originality, resourcefulness and fertility of mind as well as a good basic knowledge, both general and particular. His report of current thinking here, such as Doug brought you in mid-August, will also be valuable to you.
We are working hard on the Ekvall case and hope to have a solution although it is too early for you to take this for granted. The bureaucratic hurdles encountered on such a seemingly simple problem are well-nigh incredible. I was glad to get your letter No. 17 of Nov. 4 (which took 10 [Typeset Page 523] days in transit). Bill Sebald appreciated your letter of Nov. 11 and asked me to acknowledge it in his behalf.
Regards and good wishes,
- Source: Department of State, Geneva Talks Files, Lot 72D415. Secret; Official–Informal.↩