Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, East Asia-Pacific Region; Cambodia; Laos, Volume XVI

470. Memorandum From the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (Merchant) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Parsons)¹

Washington, December 2, 1960.

This morning following the NSC meeting,² I gave Mr. Dillon a summary of our discussion with Defense yesterday morning concerning Laos.³ I also gave him to read the draft telegram to CINCPAC⁴ submitted to us yesterday by Defense subsequent to our meeting. I told him you and I approved it but only provided that two additional lines (providing for prior reference to Washington) were added to the message. Mr. Dillon approved the draft telegram thus amended and agreed that prior reference here was indispensable. I mentioned that our reluctant agreement to authority to move as far as Paksane rested in part on our understanding that the terrain was such that there was no defensible stopping point short of Paksane once the river was crossed, and in part on the military desirability of holding a bridgehead across the river as a basis for a possible later advance to Vientiane. In this connection, I pointed out the fortunate circumstance from our point of view that the current fighting had broken out twenty miles south of the truce line, and hence the onus for it could be clearly placed on the Kong Le forces, with the result that crossing the river in pursuit, if the Phoumi forces were successful in the action, did not have the same serious connotation that would have followed from an initiation of fighting by Phoumi having started from the truce line itself.

Subsequent to having informed you of the above conversation with Mr. Dillon, Mr. Irwin called to say that he had just had some new language for the final two lines laid before him which had originated in the State Department. In this redraft, it was a substitution of “major thrust to Paksane” for the original words “major thrust to the north” which I had told him before the NSC meeting you and I interpreted as meaning the launching of a movement to Vientiane. (In that earlier conversation, Mr. Irwin told me that our original two-line addition was acceptable to him.) Mr. Irwin and I thereupon agreed over the telephone that we would let our two staffs work further on language until either they reached agreement or produced a clear-cut issue which he and I could then consider.

1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, 751J.00/12–160. Top Secret.
2. See supra.
3. No record of this meeting has been found.
4. Presumably a draft of a telegram from the JCS through CINCPAC to the PEO representatives in Laos with a copy sent to Vientiane. The Department of State summarized this draft JCS telegram for Brown in the last paragraph of telegram 571, infra. This message was subsequently revised; see footnote 7, Document 474.