166. Diary Entry by the Ambassador to the United Kingdom (Bruce)1
[Here follow 2 paragraphs on unrelated matters.]
Met George Ball and Dean Acheson this afternoon to talk over an informal agenda for our meeting with the President. Dean will argue in favor of his draft aide-memoire to the French;2 George will propose the text of a letter to Prime Minister Wilson to be delivered prior to the Erhard visit to London on Monday.3
We reported to the President at 6 p.m. in the Cabinet Room. Those present were Secretaries Rusk, McNamara, Ball, Acheson, Bruce, Moyers, Bator, Rostow.
The first matter considered was the proposed letter to Harold Wilson; the import of it was to warn the PM not to be too exacting in his attitude toward the Germans next week, and to avoid freezing policy on the nuclear sharing issue. It was decided to amplify the message in a redraft, but the President approved the underlying principle.
Next, Dean Acheson was asked to comment on his memorandum concerning matters that might be raised in negotiations with France over NATO.4 Dean felt the most important ones were: (1) The presence of French troops in Germany; (2) Allied overflights through French air space; (3) Continued transportation of oil across France; (4) Reentry rights into facilities in France in case of war. The termination of valid bilateral agreements between the United States and France, denounced unilaterally by France, concerned us but was not an alliance affair.
Acheson believes there is probably not much to be gained substantively in negotiating these items, but we should at least go through the motions, and establish a record.
Consideration of this paper spilled over into discussion of a draft aide-memoire suggested as an answer to that of the French Government sent us on April 22, 1966. The President must have been primed in advance to object to it, for his first comment was he wanted nothing of this sort committed to writing, since he would find it reproduced in the New York Times, and elsewhere, before its delivery in Paris. This led him into what seemed to me a wholly intemperate attack on United States officials who had assailed President De Gaulle for his NATO stance. I [Page 392] confess I was not sufficiently familiar with what Max Frankel, Ben Welles, and other journalists cited by him have written to judge whether there was any real basis for LBJ’s criticism of officials’ speeches and testimony before Congressional Committees. I do, however, believe LBJ’s hypersensitivity to newspaper gossip is disturbing, unwise, and undignified.
It is never difficult to ignite the Acheson powder magazine, and the President’s spark set off an explosion. Dean said he resented the President’s inferences about his own statements, as well as what he had said about George Ball. Acheson was furious, so was the President. Ball asked whether LBJ had ever read George’s speech to which he had referred as injudiciously attacking the General.5 The President said he had not, but his policy was that no one in the Administration should contravene his orders about being scrupulously polite in references to the General. The fat sizzled in the fire for quite a time. Dean Rusk tried diversionary tactics, and McNamara finally intervened effectively with a discourse on military complications in NATO. Acheson visibly seethed in silence; LBJ looked like a human thundercloud. It was an unpleasant experience. Eventually, the question posed by the paper was resolved by compromise; Rusk will talk about it with Couve de Murville at Brussels in early June.
I responded to a Presidential inquiry with reflections on what I thought were the cardinal problems raised by the French defection from NATO.
[Here follow 10 paragraphs on unrelated matters.]
- Source: Department of State, Bruce Diaries: Lot 64 D 327. Secret.↩
- See footnote 4, Document 165.↩
- A copy of this draft, which is generally the same as Document 168, is in Department of State, Presidential Correspondence: Lot 67 D 272.↩
- Document 163.↩
- For text of Ball’s April 29 speech, see Department of State Bulletin, May 16, 1966, pp. 762–768.↩