Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXIV, Africa

401. Memorandum From Harold H. Saunders of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow)¹

Washington, November 14, 1968.

SUBJECT

• The Next Step in Nigerian Relief

It is worth a moment of your time to catch up on the Nigerian situation. Joe Palmer is back from Africa and Nick Katzenbach is engaging himself more deeply than ever. They may be approaching a sharp policy disagreement.

For the past several weeks, we have been struggling with a situation with two major elements:

1. The great humanitarian concern for starving people, mostly in Biafra. Our body politic from Ted Kennedy to the major religious-relief organizations has shown increasingly vocal concern not only over the present situation but over a possible major carbohydrate famine beginning in December. Against this background, we in the White House and people at the Katzenbach level in State have become deeply concerned over the thought of Lyndon Johnson leaving the White House with this kind of seemingly preventable disaster at its height.

2. The work-a-day problems of getting aid to the people who need it. AF and AID have pointed all along to the very real difficulties of getting the relief agencies to pull together and of persuading the two sides in the civil war to let them operate as freely as necessary. However, we seem to have reached a point where it is impossible to get either AF or AID to think beyond current limitations, so our recognition of real practical problems has assumed an overtone of pure negativism, at least in the public eye.

Nick Katzenbach’s response to this dilemma has been to set up this morning a working group that will report directly to him its analysis of a wide-range of new ideas—some wild, some not so wild.² The group will be mostly AF and AID types but Roger³ will sit in for us.

We don’t predict startling success because the problem really is a tough one. However, I think we have done about as well as we could hope to in getting the Department to take a fresh look at what is already a tragic situation and could get a lot worse.

You should be aware that Roger deserves full credit for having pushed the issue to this point. Using me as a sounding board, he has carried the ball in engaging the Katzenbach staff and in letting AF know that we just couldn’t afford to let this go on any longer.

Hal

1. Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, Nigeria, Vol. II, Memos & Miscellaneous, 8/67–1/69. Confidential.
2. The working group submitted a memorandum from Palmer to the Under Secretary on “U.S. Alternatives in the Nigerian Crisis,” December 1. (Department of State, Central Files, POL 27 BIAFRA–NIGERIA)
3. Roger Morris of the National Security Council Staff.