229. Memorandum of Telephone Conversation Between the Under Secretary of State (Ball) and President Kennedy0
Ball said he now has a telegram1 which he would like to read to the President (Ball reads cable). Ball said the cable would be directly from him (Ball) to Bobby.
The President said the only trouble is what the Dutch are saying is that they will permit the Indonesians to present their case and then if they can win a plebiscite they will be all right, but they are never going to go for that Sukarno. Ball said the real difficulty is that van Roijen said “we can’t give them our shirt before we sit down and they are not going to put us in a position of being able to tell the Indonesians before they sit down any particular outcome.” Ball said they are prepared to say “Look, let’s sit down and negotiate”. Ball said he is fairly sure that if they do sit down and negotiate.... The President said he thinks that if Bobby said that they [Page 520] would say “We can’t go for that” and give up. He said he thinks we should try to continue to get them to talk.
The President said he doesn’t think we should have Bobby ever suggest that that would be the solution because they would instantaneously turn that down and then talks would lose any appeal they may have. He said he thinks the suggestion would have to be that there would be more in the package than that because that is going to be obviously unacceptable to the Indonesians. The President said we should leave that out. Ball agreed and said we can simply say we can’t get any commitments, that’s even on an unofficial basis, to satisfy ourselves which would show considerable flexibility once negotiations get started and there is a very good chance that a solution would be reached. The President agreed. Ball said and not put any of the stuff in about the shape it ought to take. The President agreed. He said just leave those two sentences out about what it might take.2 He said he thought we should say that we recognize that this may not give him much but it is unfortunately all the Dutch will agree to.
The President asked Ball in his conversation with van Roijen,3 is he concerned that force is going to be used. Ball said they were concerned, but they are very stubborn people. The President asked if they didn’t seem worried and Ball said he thinks they are afraid, but they have got their pride up and their necks out on this thing and they have considerable contempt for the Indonesians. Ball said each side is pretty close to a settlement here, if we could just get them to sit down.
The President agreed. He said he thinks the telegram is fine if we can take out what the thing might look like.
Ball said there is one other thing. He said we got hold of Ned Kenworthy, who is doing the Times story, and Kenworthy said it will be a very different story from the Voss story.
- Source: Kennedy Library, Ball Papers, Telephone Conversations, Indonesia. No classification marking.↩
- See Document 230 for the telegram as sent after the President’s revisions were made.↩
- For the portions that the President and Ball agreed to leave out of the cable, see footnotes 3 and 4, Document 230.↩
- Ball had a discussion with van Roijen that day, but no record of it has been found.↩