Office of the Historian

711.00/11–552

Memorandum by the Secretary of State of a Meeting With the President1

secret
Washington, November 5, 1952.
  • Subject:
  • Liaison with the New Administration

I went over with the President the matter of the urgent need for liaison with the incoming Administration. I mentioned the topics listed in Mr. Nitze’s memorandum2 as some of the instances where we were being forced daily to make decisions with which the next Administration would have to live and the resulting need for consultation with them.

I reminded the President that Mr. Lovett had already spoken about a similar need in the Defense Department and I felt sure that the same situation existed in the Treasury. The President thoroughly agreed and told me that he had already sent a telegram to General Eisenhower asking him to appoint a liaison officer to work with the Bureau of the Budget on the budget which would have to go to Congress not later than January 18. He showed me a telegram from General Eisenhower accepting this suggestion.3

The President then went over with me another telegram which he will send to General Eisenhower and release this afternoon asking the General to meet with him in the White House in the next few days to arrange the broader question of liaison and the transfer of power from this Administration to the next.4 He hoped [Page 2] that the General would accept this invitation and said that if and when he did, he would ask me to return from New York5 and have Mr. Lovett, Mr. Snyder, Mr. Lawton and me meet with him and General Eisenhower to discuss the whole problem. If he does not get a reply, he will address another communication to the General.

  1. A notation on the source text indicates copies were sent to Under Secretary Bruce, Deputy Under Secretary Matthews, and Deputy Under Secretary for Administration Humelsine. A copy of this memorandum is also in the Secretary’s Memoranda of Conversation, lot 65 D 238.↩
  2. The reference memorandum cannot be further identified.↩
  3. Neither telegram has been found in Department of State files.↩
  4. President Truman sent a very brief telegram along the above lines to President elect Eisenhower on Nov. 5, 1952. The text of this telegram was released by the White House the same day and is printed in the Department of State Bulletin, Nov. 17, 1952, p. 771, along with the footnoted information that President-elect Eisenhower telegraphed his acceptance of President Truman’s suggestion on Nov. 6, proposing that a meeting be arranged for sometime during the week of Nov. 17. The texts of both the Truman telegram of Nov. 5 and General Eisenhower’s reply of Nov. 6 are printed in Mandate for Change (Garden City, N. Y., 1963), p. 84, along with the information that upon conclusion of this exchange Eisenhower appointed Joseph Dodge, who would become his first Director of the Budget, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, recently defeated for reelection in Massachusetts by John F. Kennedy and Eisenhower’s first Representative to the United Nations, as liaison team with the outgoing Truman Administration.↩
  5. Secretary of State Acheson had been attending the Seventh Session of the U.N. General Assembly.↩