370. Notes of Telephone Conversation Between President Kennedy and the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Harriman)0
ROUGH NOTES ON JFK CONVERSATION
JFK—Unfortunate—we probably should have come through more powerfully—that the President and Administration were fighting for it and we were having trouble with the Congress so it wouldn’t be the US.1
[Page 799]Why don’t you say—the President is trying to get this bill straightened out—he believes in our relations—you know what happens in politics—US has been carrying on a heavy aid program for 15 years—gold problem—carrying big deficit—and therefore he should understand what our problems are—just feeds anti-Americanism.
H—This Macapagal is afraid of his political future or has no sense.
JFK—That’s what we ought to determine.
K [H]—I am making this effort, etc.
K—We sometime ought to point out the Republican actions on foreign policies have caused us trouble in the Philippines as well as other places.
- Source: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Harriman Papers, Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, Telephone Conversations. No classification marking. Apparently dictated by Harriman.↩
- Reference is to the defeat of the War Powers Bill and the Filipino reaction, especially a statement by Macapagal as reported by a Washington paper apparently tying the deterioration of U.S.-Philippine relations to U.S. base rights in the Philippines; see footnote 2, Document 371.↩