Office of the Historian

74. Memorandum From the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Bundy) to Secretary of State Rusk1

Washington, June 5, 1964.

For your meeting with Secretary McNamara and McGeorge Bundy at 5:15,2 to be followed by the meeting with the President,3 there are two papers. I attach the paper related to Laos,4 and my comments appear below. Mr. Sullivan will give you the paper on Viet-Nam3 with his comments.

The Laos paper accurately describes the discussion in the Executive Committee yesterday.5 You may wish to make the following additional points:

1.
At the bottom of page 2,6 you might note that the failure of the British to consult Souvanna may give us an immediate problem in Laos with Souvanna and especially the right. (We are drafting a long cable to Unger so that he will do all he can to ease this.)
2.
In the middle of page 3, as to military actions in the “pre-impasse” period, no mention is made of continuing and perhaps modestly extending T–28 operations and also reequipping Lao forces.7 These are modest measures but they might at least be noted.
3.
In the discussion of the “impasse” situation no mention is made of the possibility that Souvanna might himself make things extremely difficult for us at this point by yielding on the preconditions and accepting a Geneva conference. We can hope that our firmness and Unger’s persuasiveness would keep him from doing this, but the President should perhaps be aware that the situation could slide off very rapidly at this point. In our Excom discussion, we all recognized this danger and the possibility that it might virtually de-fuse the whole Lao situation as an aspect of any wider action we might decide on over the summer.
4.
The impasse situation might also produce a Communist declaration that they were forming their own government in Laos. This would indeed be a de facto partition, and we might then need to consider not only the various military steps discussed under paragraph 3 but also such steps within Laos, if Souvanna requested them, as reinstating the [Page 139] MAAG and putting substantial advisers into Lao units. The military effect of such steps would be modest but they would be a further sign that we were not prepared to stand for any Communist military action.

W.P.B. 8
  1. Source: Department of State, Bundy Files: Lot 85 D 240, WPB Chron, Mar/June 1962. Top Secret.↩
  2. See Document 75.↩
  3. See footnote 1, Document 73.↩
  4. Document 73.↩
  5. See Document 71.↩
  6. Reference is to paragraph 2 under Recommendation 3.↩
  7. Apparent reference to the last paragraph in Recommendation 3.↩
  8. Printed from a copy that indicates a member of Bundy’s staff, possibly Bob Barnett, initialed for Bundy.↩