Secretary’s Daily Meetings, Lot 58 D 609

[Extract]

Memorandum of Conversation, by the Director of the Executive Secretariat (Humelsine)

secret

Subject: Summary of Daily Meeting with the Secretary1

Participants: The Secretary
The Under Secretary
Mr. Kennan
Mr. Rusk
Mr. Allen2
Mr. Humelsine

Item 1. [Action responsibility: Mr. Humelsine]3

Mr. Webb brought Mr. Allen along to the meeting to discuss some questions relating to the Congress on Peace and Democracy which is a meeting to be held March 24 under the sponsorship of a group including Mr. Harlow Shapley and a number of hard core Communists, as well as several high type liberals.4 The main question in regard to this meeting was whether we should issue visas to a group of Russians, including Mr. Shostakovitch, to attend. The pros and cons were gone into at length and Mr. Allen recommended that we grant the group visas. Mr. Acheson said that if we took that position it would be necessary to clear it at the Cabinet level. Mr. Webb asked Mr. Allen to prepare a paper setting out the pros and cons and giving his recommendations.5 [Page 807] He indicated to Mr. Acheson that he would prefer that he not give an immediate answer but think this over for a while and take it up again at the next meeting.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

[Carlisle H. Humelsine]
  1. Secretary of State Acheson met each morning with a few of his top aides. Under Secretary of States James C. Webb, Assistant Secretary of State for United Nations Affairs Dean Rusk, Executive Secretariat Director Carlisle H. Humelsine, and, in the early months of 1949, Director of the Policy Planning Staff George F. Kennan attended on a regular basis.
  2. George V. Allen, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.
  3. Brackets appear in the source text.
  4. The reference here is to the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held in New York, March 25–27. The Conference was sponsored by the National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions of which astronomer Dr. Harlow Shapley, Director of the Harvard College Observatory, was Chairman. The Soviet delegation to the Conference was headed by Aleksander Aleksandrovich Fadeyev, Soviet novelist and Secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, and Soviet composer Dmitrii Dmitriyevich Shostakovich. Secretary Acheson first raised the question of the Conference at his daily staff meeting of March 1. He told his aides that he had been called by Attorney General Tom C. Clark who reported the concern of David Dubinsky, President of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, over the holding of the New York Conference. The Secretary thought the matter ought to be looked into (memorandum of conversation by Humelsine, March 1: Secretary’s Daily Meetings, Lot 58 D 609).
  5. Whether Assistant Secretary Allen prepared a paper of the sort suggested by Under Secretary Webb cannot be determined. For Allen’s views on the question of the issuance of visas to Communists and their sympathizers, see his memorandum of March 28 to Peurifoy, p. 821.