460.509/10–1251
The Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations (McFall) to the Director of the Bureau of the Budget (Lawton)1
My Dear Mr. Lawton: Reference is made to the Bureau of the Budgets memorandum of October 12, 1951,2 transmitting a copy of the enrolled bill H.E. 45503 and requesting the comments of the Department of State regarding this legislation.
As you are aware, the Department was given an opportunity to comment on the bill in its original draft form and on that occasion suggested certain substantive changes which were in the main accepted.
Since then the Department of State has followed very closely the progress of this bill through the Congress. Although the Department, as is indicated later in this letter, has some serious question about the principle upon which H.R. 4550 is based, particularly in view of the present role of United States assistance in supporting an accelerated defense effort by the free world, it is the Department’s view that H.R. 4550 is on the whole more workable than existing legislation. After a thorough analysis of the provisions of the bill, the Department concludes that it will be possible to carry out its objectives without jeopardizing the foreign relations and the overall security interests of the United States. The Department accordingly recommends that the President approve the bill.
The Department wishes to take this occasion to urge that approval of H.R. 4550 be treated as a routine matter, and that no public statement be issued at the time of its approval. Many countries, particularly [Page 1203] our NATO associates in Western Europe, view legislation such as the Kem Amendment and H.R. 4550 as instruments by which this country unilaterally seeks to impose a policy of economic warfare upon them. The NATO countries have demonstrated their willingness to cooperate in a multilateral program of security export controls where the intent is clearly to deny to the Soviet Bloc goods which are of importance to the military potential of the Bloc but they do not feel that it is in the security interests of the free world to undertake outright economic warfare. In particular they feel that the questions of policy with respect to East-West trade should be arrived at through the normal course of intergovernmental negotiation and not imposed by one country upon other countries. They have made their views on this subject particularly clear since the passage of the Kem Amendment in June.
As Mr. Harold Linder mentioned during his discussions with you and others in the Bureau of the Budget on October 12,4 the Department of State recommends that in implementing H.R. 4550, there be the fullest possible reliance on the facilities of existing agencies and existing interagency organizational arrangements. In particular, the Department urges that the NSC Special Committee on East-West Trade continue as at present to serve as the mechanism for interagency consultation in implementing the bill. Not only will this insure a minimum of confusion in the division of responsibilities among the several interested agencies, but it will also insure maximum consistency between the actions taken under the bill with respect to trade and the actions in closely related which are being coordinated by the Department of State in implementation of NSC 104/2.5
Sincerely yours,
- Drafted by Coster and Wright and cleared with Linder, Camp, Kirlin, Vernon, and Hinman.↩
- Not found in Department of State files.↩
- For information concerning the Mutual Defense Assistance Control Act of 1051, see the editorial note, p. 1176.↩
- No record of this conversation has been found in Department of State files.↩
- Dated April 4, p. 1059.↩