37. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to President Kennedy0
I talked at length to McCloy on Saturday, and I feel a little less gloomy about the disarmament negotiations.1 We have never planned to [Page 98] have any detailed proposals for June, and the Soviets acknowledge that. But their propaganda play is that we are stalling in our resistance to detailed discussions now, and they are unwilling to discuss the shape of the forum before they discuss “general views.” Stevenson and McCloy believe that this attitude proves that they no longer feel—if they ever did—that anything serious can be accomplished.
McCloy is continuing to make the general arguments which you have heard from him, about the control problem and the Troika and disarmament in supervised stages. He does resist my repeated proposal that he go after the Soviet plan in detail. His argument is that any discussion in detail will bring a demand for counter-proposals and involve us in real trouble with our allies and the Pentagon and everybody else who is awaiting a new agreed position on our side. It is certainly true that we do not have such a position to discuss now, though I myself find the argument unpersuasive.
In the circumstances, McCloy is beginning to feel that we should not go on with the bilaterals very much longer. Obviously, the two sides have quite different views as to what they should be discussing, and we do have a strong position in saying that we never intended to discuss detailed plans in June. We could therefore say that since there is disagreement, we suggest that both sides go back to their governments. We could add that we, for our part, will go on working on a basic plan which will be ready, as we always said, by the end of July. We could add our regret that the Soviet UN seems unwilling to settle with us the forum of resumed discussion, express our readiness to face this question whenever they are ready, and wind up by stating that if no agreement can be reached on this point (which arises because the Soviets walked out of the last agreed forum), we will gladly meet them at the UN in the autumn.
One great advantage of closing out these talks quickly is that they are pre-occupying McCloy at a time when we really should be pressing for serious headway on an agreed disarmament plan. Another reason, I fear, is that the gossip at the second level is that we are not doing a very good job in this particular debate (this kind of gossip should be taken with some reservation, because it often means simply that our spokesman is not saying exactly what the gossip wishes he would). McCloy is our man, and we can’t substitute someone else at this point. So the best way may be to let the talks end after a few more days.
One further thought—Foster is a serious administrator, and perhaps his first crash job could be to take the disarmament position and wrestle it into shape. I can press this with McCloy if you want.
- Source: Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Departments and Agencies Series, ACDA, General 6/61. Secret.↩
- These negotiations between McCloy and Zorin Began in Washington on June 19. Eleven sessions were held, the last on the afternoon of June 30. In the course of the talks, which did not result in agreement on an appropriate forum for multinational general disarmament negotiations, the two sides agreed to reconvene in Moscow in mid-July. Documentation on these talks is in Department of State, Central Files 600.0012 for June 1961. Telegrams Circular 2042, June 17 (ibid., 600.0012/6-1761); Nusup 1275, June 19 (ibid., 600.0012/6-1961); and Nusup 1304, June 30 (ibid., 600.0012/6-3061), all dealing with various aspects of the talks, are in the Supplement.↩
- Printed from a copy that bears these typed initials.↩