188. Memorandum of Meeting With President Eisenhower0
Present were members of the U.S. delegation to the surprise attack technical military discussions in Geneva beginning November 10, (Mr. William C. Foster, General Otto P. Weyland, and Dr. George B. Kistiakowsky), and the undersigned.
The President opened the meeting by inquiring about the departure time of the delegation. Mr. Foster responded indicating that they would depart in the early afternoon of November 5 and there ensued a brief exchange about travel conditions and the weather.
Mr. Foster pointed out to the President that the delegation was to meet with the experts of the other four powers on the Western “side” (UK, France, Canada, and Italy) on Friday1 in Geneva, after having spent a week in consultations with their representatives in Washington. He described the consultations here as quite satisfactory.
The President indicated that he had expected a searching inquiry at his press conference earlier in the morning about the surprise attack conference but it was not forthcoming.2 Mr. Foster said to the President that an explanation might lie in the fact that he had had on November 2nd, at the request of the State Department, an off-the-record press conference which was attended by 50 people and lasted 50 minutes; and this may have accounted for the lack of interest in the question at the President’s [Page 678] press conference. Mr. Foster said that he had emphasized the technical-military nature of the impending discussions and described our approach to the conference as being objective and serious. He then indicated that he would like, following the meeting with the President, to make a statement to the press in the same vein expressing the President’s interest in the conference and its purposes.
The President agreed that such a statement3 should be made saying that he felt it was well to publicize this effort.
Mr. Foster then reported to the President that he and his group had had fine support from the scientists in government, the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the State Department. He felt that an excellent team had been put together for the assignment. The preparation, he pointed out, had been difficult and massive, inasmuch as the whole spectrum of weapons and detection, inspection, and control techniques had necessarily been examined.
The President said that he understood because the problem was how to establish techniques to eliminate or minimize the chances of surprise attack; and that this is a very difficult task. He observed that following the rejection of his open skies proposal at the Geneva Conference in 1955, he himself would have had great difficulty in knowing how to go about the undertaking.
Mr. Foster said that if now the Soviets were willing to discuss open skies, his delegation was prepared to suggest photographic measures in real technical detail. Indeed, he felt that the delegation was prepared to discuss in detail and with clarity almost any problem which would arise in the discussions at Geneva. He also indicated that if the Soviets were not willing initially or at any point to get down to the business of the conference, the delegation was also prepared to argue questions of agenda, etc.
The President said that in his own experience this kind of discussion requires a great deal of patience. He said that talking with the Russians necessitated on occasions patience to the degree of wearing one’s self thin, because there have been occasions when, almost at the last moment, the Soviets have arrived at something acceptable to us. He said that the inherent problem was that of people who are characterized by honesty and good intentions combatting people who are dishonest and whose intentions are not good. Thus we will take and agree only to those things that we can prove.
The President then adverted to his press conference in the earlier morning saying that with respect to such phrases as “spending radicals,” he had made it crystal clear that he was not talking about the Democratic [Page 679] Party as such, but the “radical free spenders” in the Democratic Party. He emphasized that he said at the press conference that we must find some way to balance the budget and that this means scrutinizing expenditures every place, from Defense on down. He said that the United States is losing gold reserves and that we have a situation which will be intolerable unless we are able to bring expenditures in line with receipts.
Mr. Foster responded that in his opinion, the very thing that he and his delegation were about to engage in was the basis for hope for the future—that successful disarmament would make our budget problems easily manageable.
The President agreed, saying that we should think of all the things we might do if we had a Defense budget of only $25 billion, for example.
Mr. Foster then said that it should be understood that in the forthcoming conference we can only begin to shape the tools which may be used in the future, but that he was hopeful for progress and success in this effort.
The President then said that he would like to make one particular request of the delegation: he indicated that it is entirely possible that the Russians might become freely talkative, and he would be most eager to have their views toward Communist China. He wondered if the Soviets were not really becoming concerned about Communist China as a possible threat to them in the future.
Mr. Foster indicated that they would actively bear this request in mind. He said that it had occurred to him that there may be some chance that an exchange of views of this sort was one of the things the Soviets had in mind when they agreed to the discussions, expressing his view that if the Soviet Union were not worried, they certainly should be.
The President then said that somehow we must find a mechanism which will disclose and assist in the elimination of duplicating weapons systems and weapons systems of purely an interim nature, and which would identify those areas in which we had too much procurement. He felt, he said, that if we could ever succeed in getting the position of Director of Research and Engineering in the Defense Department filled, this would be a big step toward accomplishment of this requirement.
Mr. Foster recalled that he had said something along this line to the President a year ago.
At this point the President said that he understood that it was desired that pictures be taken of the delegation with him, and asked me to get the photographers in.
- Source: Eisenhower Library, Whitman File, Eisenhower Diaries, No classification marking. Drafted by Gordon Gray on November 6. Copies were sent to Ann Whitman and Andrew Goodpaster.↩
- November 7.↩
- For the transcript of the press conference, see Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1958, pp. 827–838.↩
- Not found.↩