611.61/5–2950
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Secretary of State
The meeting was arranged at Mr. Lie’s1 request. Present were The President, Mr. Lie, Mr. Byron Price2 and Mr. Acheson. Mr. Lie was in the President’s office for 15 minutes, the first five of which were taken up with photographs.
Mr. Lie said to the President that in his interview with Mr. Stalin3 he had stated that his impression from his talk with the President was that the President had a most friendly personal feeling for Mr. Stalin and that the President said that he would be glad to receive Mr. Stalin as his guest in Washington. Mr. Lie then reported that he had said to Mr. Stalin that perhaps some other part of the United States, such as Key West, or in a neutral country, perhaps Switzerland or Sweden they could meet. Mr. Stalin’s view was that there were so many difficulties now existing between the East and West that a meeting of the heads of state would not be profitable. He thought that at some time considerably in the future when these difficulties had been resolved except for one or two problems, a meeting might be useful. He did not foresee this at the present time.
[Page 1201]Mr. Lie then reported his discussion of possible periodic meetings of the Foreign Ministers in the Security Council. To this Stalin replied that acceptance of the Chinese Communists was a condition precedent to Russian return. After that condition had been fulfilled, it might be possible to have the meetings of the Security Council. In principle he accepted the idea and in principle he accepted Mr. Lie’s memorandum as a working paper on which possible agenda for such meetings might be based.
The President replied that since the acceptance of the Chinese Communists in the United Nations was a condition precedent and since the Chinese Communists had made that extremely difficult, he did not regard it as necessary at this time to comment on future meetings of the Security Council. The President had the gravest difficulty in seeing how relations of the United States and the Peking Government could be worked out in view of the total disregard by the Peking Government of international obligations and in view of its treatment of the United States Government and its representatives. Mr. Lie thought that in a few months the matter might be altered since he hoped that the Peking Government would mend its manners. The President said that such a development might be the situation, but that he did not see signs of it.
Mr. Lie then said that he hoped that in the fairly near future the President might find it possible to receive Mr. Lie and have me present if the President so wished, to have a longer talk about these matters. The President replied that he would be always glad to see Mr. Lie, but that his schedule was pretty full at the present time and the meeting would have to wait for a while.
After the interview Mr. Lie referred to this suggestion again. I said that all three of us had pretty heavy speaking engagements during the next month or so, but that the matter could be kept in mind for a time when the pressure of work was a little less.
I then said to Mr. Lie that I thought it most important that he should not give the impression that something mysterious was about to happen. He said he had done his best to counteract such an idea, without much success, but that he would continue to work at this and that he realized he must be very careful because any move that he made could cause a great deal of trouble. When we went into the room outside the President’s reception room where the press was gathered Mr. Lie said he had had an informal and confidential talk with the President, about which he was not at liberty to comment. He added that he wished to make it clear that he was not the bearer of messages between the President and Mr. Stalin.
- Trygve Lie was the Secretary-General of the United Nations.↩
- Byron Price was the Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations.↩
- Trygve Lie had traveled to Europe on a peace mission and had met with; Stalin for 90 minutes on May 15, with both Molotov and Vyshinsky present during a friendly conversation. At a press conference in Moscow on May 17, Mr. Lie stated that the discussion had been of a positive nature and covered a wide range of subjects. Among these were consideration of the international situation, the question of Communist Chinese representation at the United Nations, the “cold war,” atomic energy and the hydrogen bomb, and his own proposal for the holding of periodic meetings of the Security Council attended by Foreign Ministers or the heads of governments. He asserted that he had found Stalin in good health. For documentation on Lie’s peace mission and related matters, see vol. ii, pp. 371 ff.↩