71. Editorial Note
French Foreign Minister Couve de Murville met with U.S. officials on May 25, 1963. The memorandum of his conversation with President Kennedy at the White House on May 25 at 11 a.m. begins as follows:
"The President greeted the Foreign Minister and said he was glad to see him. He asked how things were going on in France. The Minister said the economic situation was generally favorable, but there was a danger of inflation. The government was taking certain measures such as limiting credit, increasing taxes, and liberalizing imports. The President stressed the importance the United States Government attaches to increasing the volume of trade. He said he thought so long as the interest rates and the costs of France and the United States remained relatively stable, we could look forward to such an increase. The Foreign Minister said he thought that the greatest need of the West was to have a sound monetary policy. This aspect of the common interest of the West was not being adequately discussed. The President agreed and said that matters of this sort tended to be treated too technically and to remain too much in [Page 169] the hands of the bankers, who do not see them in terms of the national interest.
"The President then turned to the US balance of payments difficulties. He said that the United States would be short another $2.5 billion this year. The danger was not so much a matter of loss of dollars, as the possibility of a run on gold. This was our big problem. The President said that every time it was proposed that we take some steps to bring our payments into balance, we were exposed to loss of confidence in our currency which took the form of a run on the dollar. Couve asked whether the United States Government had ever considered changing the international price of gold. The President asked in turn whether this would not cause a run on the dollar. Couve said it would not, because everyone would have already agreed on the new price beforehand, and each currency would be pegged to it when it came into effect. He went on to say that he thought that the United States was dealing with the problem of the balance of payments piecemeal. The United States, he said, does not have a real deficit. It has a foreign trade surplus. He said he thought that tourists should be counted under trade. He said the real trouble was that there was too much export of US capital abroad. The President agreed that tourists are a form of trade. He pointed out that we lose $1.5 billion under this category in addition to our expenditures for military and foreign aid programs. Couve observed that tourists represented something more than trade, that they played an important political and psychological role in international relations.” (Department of State, Presidential Memoranda of Conversation: Lot 66 D 149, April-June 1963)
The full text of this lengthy memorandum of conversation is printed in volume XIII, pages 769–775. A memorandum of Ball’s conversation with Couve de Murville on May 25 covering trade, monetary policy, and nuclear matters is in Department of State, Central Files, POL FR-US.