Office of the Historian

177. Memorandum of a Conversation Between the President and the Secretary of State, White House, Washington, December 22, 1956, 6 p.m.1

Washington, December 22, 1956, 6 p.m.

I gave the President a draft (copy attached)2 of the proposed message to Congress. He went over it and made a few minor suggestions and expressed his satisfaction with the draft, saying this is a “good paper”. General Gruenther, who had been playing bridge with the President, was with us during this part of our talk and also read the draft.

I said to the President and to General Gruenther that I thought we should not disguise from ourselves that this prospective action might involve a very sharp Soviet reaction. I related my remarks to what I had said at the NSC to the effect that the successive setbacks of the Soviet rulers in terms of the Communist satellite parties in free countries, the satellite governments in Eastern Europe and internal unrest in Russia itself combined to make it hard for them to accept any further setbacks.

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[Here follows discussion of unrelated subjects.]

  1. Source: Eisenhower Library, Dulles Papers, Meetings with the President. Secret; Personal and Private. Drafted by Dulles. A handwritten notation on the source text reads: “No dist[ribution].”↩
  2. Attached but not printed.↩