828. Letter 59 from Johnson to Clough1
Finally, after these long months we again had a little excitement. Thanks very much for your prompt action on my phone call. I am glad everyone agreed it was best quickly to put out something here. I am also glad everyone agreed that I had done right by immediately turning down his proposal rather than temporizing on it in any way until next meeting. It seemed to me clearly within my instructions to do so, and I felt any temporizing could only lead to confounding the confusion.
I sent you the full record by telegraph as there is no courier until Saturday, the meeting was fairly short and I thought it best to let you know exactly what was said in case anything further arises. You will note that I became very sharp in tone toward the end on implementation, and that I did not bring up “renunciation”. As the meeting had developed I felt it better to end on this sharp note, and that to have gone any further into implementation or into renunciation would have been anti-climactic. I made no move to suggest the next meeting and he came up with that.
As far as the correspondents are concerned I do not believe they have entirely closed the door but have left themselves some freedom of action. If they were really intelligent, from their standpoint, instead of just attempting to act clever, they would now give visas to a few Americans, have a few Chinese apply to us, and then [Facsimile Page 2] indicate they were waiting to see what we did before acting on the other American applications. At the same time they feel they have a very good theme in “reciprocity and equality”, particularly in Asian States and can be expected to play this hard.
They have just brought me in a Reuters ticker from Washington which I am enclosing. You can see this goes far beyond the line I was instructed to take today and is certainly no help to me here. I carefully avoided committing ourselves to admitting any correspondents, and indicated no interest in any agreed announcement on the subject whether the word “reciprocal” was used or not. I understood my instructions to refer to any “exchange arrangement”. If, as is likely, this issue is still alive by the time of the next meeting, I hope you will be sure that my instructions are as full and clear as possible.
[Typeset Page 1423]Incidentally, I wonder if we are perhaps entering into some semantic difficulty. As I interpreted, and I believe Peiping interpreted, our August 22 statement it meant that the U.S. would not give any visas to any correspondent bearing a Chinese Communist passport. As subsequently interpreted by the Secretary, we were prepared to accept applications from Chinese Communist correspondents but could not give any advance assurance as to whether any or what number would be approved. If we are in fact prepared to give favorable consideration to a qualified applicant it seems to me we are in fact giving reciprocity. In short, it does not seem to me as commonly used “reciprocity” necessarily involves one for one exchange. As a minor point in this connection, Bob and Ed have noted that the Chinese terms used for “equal and reciprocal” in his draft today are not the same as used for those terms in the “Five Principles”. (I am enclosing a copy of the Chinese text.)
Would you have Ekvall’s travel authorization 8-0200 of July 1 amended and his subsequent orders read so as to cover travel from any point in France on which he is on official duty to Geneva rather than just from Paris. Believe it or not he started his previous trip from Roquebrune [Facsimile Page 3] which is closer and cheaper to Geneva than Paris, but Embassy, Paris refuses to pay him anything for it because his orders read only from Paris. Such are some administrative minds.
Regards to all.