JOHN FOSTER DULLES CENTENNIAL CONFERENCE

The Challenge of Leadership in Foreign Affairs

Saturday, February 27, 1988, 9:00 am

Speakers:

"PROJECT SOLARIUM": A Collective Oral History

DR. IMMERMAN: What I'd like to do, I'd like to begin by generally addressing these questions to both General Goodpaster and Ambassador Kennan, but certainly, Mr. Bowie, should you want to add what you know, we'd appreciate that also, and the question contains many parts and you can answer one or all of them, as you would like. But the first thing is, how did you first learn about Solarium; in other words, in what context? And along those lines, do you know why you were selected to participate; and, more specifically, why you were assigned to a specific task force. I should say that Ambassador Kennan chaired Task Force A, General Goodpaster was on Task Force C, and the reason I asked that latter question is whether you feel that your assignment in a sense reflected recognition of your previously-held views, or simply as an expert in this entire area it was believed or assumed that you would be an effective advocate regardless of which task force you happened to be on. Ambassador Kennan or General Goodpaster. GENERAL GOODPASTER: Why don't you start, George. AMBASSADOR KENNAN: I better go up there because it's better to face people. At the time when this concept came into existence, which I suppose was along about May, 1953, wasn't it, I had been away from the State Department for a couple of years. I actually had left the foreign service. DR. IMMERMAN: That's correct. AMBASSADOR KENNAN: or was just in the process of leaving it actually, I had officially severed my connection with it in March or April and there was a three months time span that was running out during which I think I continued to receive my salary. And in the midst of that, in the month of May, I was approached -- I don't think it was by Mr. Cutler, I think it was by C. D. Jackson. He described this exercise, and said the President wanted me to participate in it and to lead one of the task forces. It was all highly secret -- you have no idea how well this was protected; nobody knew about it that whole summer despite the fact that fifty to a hundred people were involved in it. I was not permitted, nobody was permitted, to say anything about it. It began -- you have the dates here -- in June I think. DR. IMMERMAN: June, correct. AMBASSADOR KENNAN: And we worked down in the old War College, where I had only recently been as Deputy for Foreign Affairs and had lectured extensively. We, each task force, as I recall it, consisted really of between five and seven people. I was very fortunate in the ones that I had around me. They were drawn from different departments of the government, and some of them were even outsiders. Our instructions were as described here; that is, it is my impression that we were not asked to take that paper, as something that had been approved and that we had to recognize as valid. We were, however, to approach it critically ourselves. But we were to take off from that paper; where we disagreed with it to say that we disagreed; or where we were in accord with it, to say so and to base our paper accordingly. I suppose I was selected for this because I had been somewhat earlier, for three years, head of the State Department's policy planning staff and was regarded in certain respects as one who had played a permanent part in devising the first reaction to what was seen as the Soviet threat. And, therefore, since this first task force was to operate roughly within the framework of what we had been doing, I think it probably occurred to the organizers that I would be a good person to explain it and to lead that particular task force. So this was done and you know the rest. We worked for some weeks down there. We had access to all the information that anybody could have had access to, I think, in the United States Government: intelligence information and other. We talked these things out. I was not happy about this assignment; because I didn't like the general nature of the thesis that we were supposed to defend being prescribed for us in advance. I was sometimes accused of arrogance, and I'm afraid there was some justification with the accusation. In any case, I was used to stating my views independently and I didn't like to start by being known as the defender of a given position, however vague it was. I also, of course, had to compromise this position by reconciling views within our task force. That was probably good for me, and good for the government, but what came out of it was not entirely my view. The political parts of it, historical and, if you might say, philosophical parts were my own. I wrote most of those parts. But there were other large parts dealing with governmental expenditures, military preparations and so forth where other members of the task force took the lead and did most of the drafting. To that, we all agreed. We all knew we couldn't expect to put our own personal opinion through pure -- that we would have to come to some sort of a collective idea about these things, and that we did. I noted, reading over the paper today (it's the first time I read it over for all these 35 years or whatever it is) that we did say from there that while our task had been prescribed for us, nevertheless we were all prepared to stand by the statements made in the paper. I cannot judge from this distance how useful this paper was or how useless. It probably had less importance than we thought at the time, perhaps greater importance today historically. I say we thought it had less importance than we thought at the time, this was for the reasons that you have described. It gradually sank down into the sands of the vast bureaucracies of Washington and got, so to speak, absorbed into all the rest of governmental thinking that went through so many committees and so many -- well, by the time it had gone out to the departments and their views had come back, what emerged in the end was something not too different from what had existed before we came into the picture, but with a greater stamp of presidential approval than had existed before. This was, after all, a new administration. What had grown up before had grown up under the Truman/Acheson Administration; and to the extent that all this was acceptable to the new administration, it was important, of course, that President Eisenhower should approve it. And I think the new administration was in accord with what finally came out of it. And a good deal of our report of the Task Force A had, I think, the new president's approval because when July 26th came and we all got together in the basement, as I remember it, of the White House, members of the cabinet were there, I derived, I must say, a certain amount of amusement from it, because I had to present our whole task force's report personally, and Foster Dulles sat at my feet and was thus instructed on what the policy ought to be toward the Soviet Union. Since it was only three months since he had fired me from the Foreign Service, this gave me a certain satisfaction, I must say. I could talk, and he had to listen, for about a half an hour. But I didn't know what happened after that. What you were telling us today was new to me. I went back into private life and lived out in the country and I just didn't know what occurred. A lot of our report -- I think most of it -- that related to financial matters (the financing of national defense, how large an armed establishment we needed to have, what it would cost us, how much we had to rely on our allies and all that) went through, I think, quite successfully and was adopted into governmental practice. The political parts of the report I think were accepted silently by those who listened, but were not taken too seriously. To me, reading it over again today, I think the most interesting and most significant parts were those relating to Germany. I had succeeded in getting into the report some of my own thoughts about Germany and about the need for our having a more plausible negotiating stance over the question of German unification and the future of Germany. Up to that time what we had been saying amounted only to this, that if you Russians want to get out of East Germany, that would be acceptable to us, but we wouldn't pay you anything to do it. We wouldn't consider withdrawing our own forces from Germany or anything of that sort. Of course, that was not a realistic negotiating position. There was nothing in it for the Russians, no reason they should have accepted it. And I had tried for years, and continued to try for a couple of years after that, to see to it that we had at least a negotiating stance which would have been more forthcoming and would have put the onus of holding out against German unification more on the Russians and less on us. That was all argued in the report. But I can see in the later records of the United States Government absolutely no impact of that at all. This position ran counter to the ideas of the West European division of the State Department who were very quiet, polite, but stubborn people, and they went right on with their own ideas, which were the ideas of the French and the British, and didn’t allow themselves to be influenced at all. On other political parts of the paper, I think that we were moderately successful, but not entirely. As I say, the whole set of papers became within a few months absorbed back into the general workings of the Washington bureaucracy. The President got up at the final meeting on July 16th, after the others of us had presented our reports, and spoke about the whole range of these problems. He spoke, I must say, with a mastery of the subject matter and a thoughtfulness and a penetration that were quite remarkable. I came away from it with the conviction (which I have carried to this day) that President Eisenhower was a much more intelligent man than he was given credit for being. But like Foster (although in a different way) he didn't reveal how discriminating and thoughtful a person he was, nor how well he could present all these things. But, in any case, what he said on that occasion gave me the impression that he was in general prepared to accept the thesis we had put forward, that our approach to the problem of the Soviet Union, as it had been followed in the immediately preceding years was basically sound, that this or that feature of it could be improved or altered, but that we'd had no need for a drastic change of it. This all rested on the thesis of my task force that we were not really doing badly in the cold war, that our position had not deteriorated vis-a-vis that of the Soviet Union. The greatest apparent deterioration since 1945, was, to our mind, the communist revolution in China. But we pointed out that even then, the Chinese would, in the normal course of things, become more and more nationalistic and less and less available as a puppet for the Soviet Union. All of that, I think, was accepted. So if you could say that the Solarium exercise had any effect, I would have said that it was to clarify the general outlook of a new political administration, and to prod a lot of people in the Washington bureaucracy, military and civilian, into taking a new look at the things we had been trying to do, and to see whether they could not improve on our previous performance. That was, as I see it, its immediate effect. It's interesting to look at these papers 60 years later, and I think you learn a lot from them. DR. IMMERMAN: Thank you. General Goodpaster, looking at it from I guess Task Force C, which is probably a different perspective. GENERAL GOODPASTER: That's right. Well, first let me say I'm just delighted to have had the privilege to be here and to hear this exposition by George, which I highly commend to you. I think you have just spent some of the most valuable moments of your life of scholarship listening to what he had to say. George, once more my profound congratulations. How did I first learn about Solarium? Well, I had been a staff officer at S.H.A.P.E. when then-general Eisenhower set up the headquarters. I had worked very, very closely with him on matters of security policy, of course with the direct relation to military planning, but in the context of what was then called the political economic capabilities of the member nations. That's the famous three wise men operation, Averell Harriman, Jean Monnet and initially Hugh Gaitskell, succeeded by Edwin Plowden. I was General Eisenhower's representative, liaison officer to that group, and was brought into very close and continuous contact with him on issues of that kind. I remained, of course, in contact with him until he returned to the states in May of 1952 to run for the presidency. He was succeeded by General Ridgway and then by General Gruenther, as the supreme allied commander, the top N.A.T.O. commander in Europe, and I stayed on as a staff officer in S.H.A.P.E. I had occasion to come back to the States with General Gruenther who was testifying before the Congress and seeing then-President Eisenhower in, it would have been April, perhaps early May, of 1953. While I was there, I went around to the White House to visit with some of my friends who had been at S.H.A.P.E., General Paul Carroll in particular who was a staff assistant to Eisenhower at that time. I had lunch with him. And joining our table was Brigadier General Bobby Cutler, a Boston lawyer and banker who by that time was serving as Eisenhower's special assistant for national security affairs. The moment Pete Carroll introduced me to Bobby Cutler, Cutler's eyes opened up and I could tell there was really something on his mind. We had an interesting conversation but he did not reveal what was on his mind. He told me in June when I came back to participate in the Solarium exercise, that at the time of the luncheon he had just come from a talk with Eisenhower, and Eisenhower was assigning individuals to each of these task forces by name and giving his reasons for doing so. And as Bobby Cutler told me (and as Eisenhower himself told me later when I came to join the White House staff, succeeding Peter Carroll who died of a heart attack in 1954) as Bobby told me, President Eisenhower had put me on Task Force C. He wanted the rollback option thoroughly evaluated, and as he said he wanted somebody with some common sense (using his term -- I don't claim that for myself) on Task Force C to see that they didn't go completely off in their analysis. I had had no particular prior association with the concept or policy of rollback, and I think that that, indeed, was how I came to be on the Task Force C. I accepted the task that was given to me, which I understood to be for our group to take that line of policy and make the best case, the most persuasive case that we could for that policy. And we undertook during this period George was describing to do so. It was very interesting to me, to see how as we got into specific planning and evaluation and beyond rhetoric, if I can use the term, our thinking became more precise and a great deal more modest than some of the earlier public statements had suggested. Why do I think Eisenhower set up this group? Incidentally, it got the name Solarium, as Bobby Cutler and C. D. Jackson told me, because they had met with Eisenhower in the Solarium of the White House to talk about this idea, and to begin to take it from an idea toward a specific planning and evaluation exercise. It was characteristic Eisenhower; he liked to have very thorough, comprehensive evaluations made, targeted ultimately on specific options and specific lines of policy. We went through all of this; I would just add one point, George. I think that you were there when Foster Dulles came down, at least once and maybe twice, in the evening and met with us at General Lemnitzer's quarters there, Lemnitzer being a member of the task force that I was on, to discuss with us some of the questions that he had in mind such as the background of the study, the kind of assumptions that we shared, and the ultimate purpose of the safeguarding of our security and the security of our freedom of decision and the security of the values that underlay our whole system of government and political culture. On that premise, what would be the best route to try to pursue this? There had been in the air, for example, this idea of a date of maximum danger and we tried to reduce that to some more concrete and definite understanding. Our particular task force finally came down on the idea of a date when the Soviet Union could conceivably have sufficient atomic weapons and atomic power to do devastating damage to the United States or to pose very great threats to our allies in Europe. That was as close to a date of maximum danger that we ever came. I, myself, had had a hand in the analysis of this in N.A.T.O. when I was working as a staff officer with Eisenhower. We reversed then the idea of a date of maximum danger, and I still held that view. My colleagues on my task force, I think, accepted that there was no real date of maximum danger; rather, there was a time when we would begin to come under that kind of threat and that would provide a useful phase line for our analysis. George, do you remember the phrase that Foster Dulles used during one of those evenings? He said, "What we are hoping for is a time when the Russians turn their ponies back to the east, as Genghis Khan had done so many centuries before." We gave our presentations, as George has described; in our particular one we broke it up and Admiral Connolly, who served as the chairman of our group, gave our overall concept. That was followed by General Lemnitzer who gave in more detail just what our proposed program would entail; and then I followed with some discussion of how it would be implemented within the government and some evaluation of the range of outcomes that we might expect. President Eisenhower told me later that he was appreciative of the rather sober assessment that our task force had come to, and which it was my duty to present that day. Now, I would add to what George has said, first of all, a phrase that he, himself, used in describing Eisenhower's summation, which was a tour de force that has stayed in my mind as well. George who has this wonderful command of expression said once to me in another group that Eisenhower showed in doing that his intellectual ascendancy over every other man in the room on these issues. I would subscribe to that. Now, what did he get out of this? Task Force B was never really a contender -- the notion that you draw a line and that there is somehow a categorical moment when you unleash massive attack. It was well presented; General Jim McCormack headed that task force. It was as well presented as I think that idea could be presented, but it did not seem to command much support. So what was left was the proposal around which Task Force A had made its report and the proposal around which Task Force C had made its report. In the process of our evaluation, we had narrowed the lines of action that would be considered for the furthering of the rollback policy to political action plus possible covert action of many kinds. Noticeably missing was any idea of resort to military action which would have involved direct conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Even as thus confined, however, in Eisenhower's summation, one could see the demise of the policy of rollback. I don't think, George, that we told him that day anything that he hadn't thought through before. But he now had the best work of these three groups on which he could draw really to put behind him the rhetoric of rollback which had been a part of that electoral campaign. I think in Eisenhower fashion that was one of the things that he had intended to do. Now, he had added to the idea of passive containment the idea of political action and even some covert action aimed in particular at the Eastern European countries which could be used to augment containment per se. I think that's what he really wanted our groups to do, when he asked that we stay on and produce a synthesis for the consideration of the National Security Council and for his consideration. There was real resistance to that, however, on the part of our groups. We were exhausted, as I recall. We had been away from home a long time and had worked every day during that period. My recollection is that we started at eight o'clock and broke for lunch briefly, and for dinner. We might have an hour of exercise in the afternoon but then worked until about midnight and had done that for about five weeks. That was part of it. But another part was that at least in the view of some members of our task force, and I think the other task forces as well, there were differences of philosophical premise that entered into our reports. We thought that the product would be -- I think someone used the term mongrelized, if we attempted in that way to combine it. He had hoped that that would be done, and, indeed, that was the task that he was going to pass back to the planning board and into the government. How did this serve him? I know that from the time when I came back to be a staff assistant to him in late 1954, from that time on we really had gone beyond the time of talking about rollback which would involve the use of force. That was, I think, the contribution, or one of the contributions, that he had sought. I think that Foster Dulles was quite satisfied with what we came up with because our exclusion of rather radical and, in my view, quite dangerous use of force or use of the threat of force, was, I think, useful to Foster in terms of dealing with some of the talk and some of the proposals that were coming from the Pentagon at that time. So those are the principal lines on which I would read this. And as I look back through the six and a half years that I spent with Eisenhower in the White House, this was the central line of policy on which he and Foster Dulles, in particular, guided the operations of the government over the remainder of his term in office. DR. IMMERMAN: I'd like to interject, we've not only seen demonstrations of tremendous recall but I also should commend all the participants, I sent them the reports in addition to a bunch of other documentation which I had hoped would not frighten them so much that they would refuse to participate, and not only did they not, but it's quite clear that they read all this material. GENERAL GOODPASTER: First time I had seen it in 30 years. DR. IMMERMAN: That's right. We can perhaps echo Melvin Leffler's request that these materials continue to be declassified, since particularly Task Force C which has just been made available within the last seven months. I'm going to come to Mr. Bowie very soon since evidently when the Solarium finally were able to go home and get some sleep, he began to lose his, trying to synthesize this without mongrelizing them or whatever. But if I can return for a moment to that July 16th briefing in which you both, you know, comment on really the masterful performance by the President in summing up, one of the other aspects of that briefing that struck me evidently took place right at the beginning in which the President referred to the striking similarities and parallels among the different reports, subsequent to which the task force members themselves, and particularly A and C, focused on what were to come to be as the irreconcilable differences between the two reports, particularly concerning the perception of the Soviet threat, and that perception is I think defined more in terms of intentions than in capabilities, which, of course, is always the most difficult aspect of threat perception. And I wonder if both or certainly either of you would like to comment on, one, if you have any hypotheses in a sense as to why the President would have focused on or discussed those similarities when the discussion then really revolved around the differences; but also whether those different threat perceptions were, in fact, part of the task themselves; in other words, to say this is the difference. Or whether those different perceptions came up through the process of your deliberations, considering I assumed you had access to similar intelligence material and that type of thing. GENERAL GOODPASTER: Well, can you hear me, will this record if I just sit here or should I come up and stand? Let me come up and stand, no problem. Let me give my view -- and I'm very hopeful that George can add to that -- because, just speaking for myself, I frankly didn't see all that much difference, in threat perception. And the longer we worked, the closer we drew together. When we eliminated that date of maximum danger and simply talked about the rise in their atomic capability, I would say that narrowed very greatly any difference. There would have been, I think, some differences within the task forces, within our own task force, for example, as well as between individuals in the various task forces, as to the likelihood and the effectiveness of possible Soviet brandishing of an atomic capability, or use of an atomic capability. I think that most of us -- this would be my recollection -- were very dubious that the Soviets would undertake an aggressive use of force against us. We saw the dangers more as possible division between ourselves and our allies. Also, weakness, particularly, in France had been and was still a matter of very grave concern to us, as well as the really difficult, complicated problems raised by the situation of Germany and the fact that we had very good evidence of the intensity of view that was held by the Soviets with regard to the future of Germany. That's about the way I recall it, and I think that's about the way we assessed it then. But I have to say that there were differences among the members of our team. I'm not sure that even today, I'm allowed to identify by name the representative who came to us from the C.I.A., but he was disposed to see this whole confrontation in much harsher terms, I think, then some of the rest of us and see the necessity for more vigorous and more assertive action on our part. But that difference was not so much between Task Force C and the other tasks forces as between one individual and another. DR. IMMERMAN: If I can just add something and perhaps you could address that and then, Mr. Kennan, perhaps you can recall. I remember one of the distinctions seemed to be in Task Force C, the argument was put forward that time was on the side of the Soviet Union, and that, therefore, although there was perhaps not the year of maximum danger, clearly more forceful steps need be taken. My impression is that Team A did not see it that way and, in fact, tended to perceive time on the side of the United States as long as certain policies could be continued. And that seems to be the fact that is emphasized or the point that is emphasized in that split in which the term "irreconcilable differences" is used. Now, that's not a specific type of thing, I realize, but it is a general frame. GENERAL GOODPASTER: Let me say that -- again, I'm just trying to pull this back from memory -- I think we did see a time of some increased danger, that we were, indeed, entering a time of increased danger. Nobody was avoiding that. We were getting into a nuclear world -- that's what it amounted to -- with major policy issues and confrontations still existing between us and the Soviet Union. So that was a matter on which we indeed were concerned. But even in our task force, I think we had the feeling that over a longer period of time the political system, the political culture of the West, would prove itself to be superior, and that the political culture and political system and particularly the police state type controls that existed on which the Soviet system depended were inherently vulnerable to erosion over a long period of time. So we had this increase in danger, but we also, I think, had the confidence then that over a long period of time ours would prove to be the stronger system. George. AMBASSADOR KENNAN: I have the same impression that General Goodpaster did. I don't think the differences really were all that great. There are elements of the views of both of these task forces, the A and C, which had been present in the policies up to that time and which continued to be present afterwards. They were not mutually exclusive. As to this question of the time of maximum danger: John Gaddis, who is here, and may speak to this himself later, mentioned this to me this afternoon. I had forgotten about it. It was quite true. But I think that as John Gaddis called my attention to the fact that this concept first appeared, I believe in N.S.C. 68. With that paper, and with Nitze's approach to things generally, I disagreed at the time. Actually one of the reasons for my leaving the staff at the end of 1949 was my disagreement with N.S.C. 68. I had the very strong feeling that the Russians were not going to attack us; but that, on the other hand, the strength of their armed forces, the disparity between theirs and ours, was a reality and would not go away; it would remain a reality for an indefinite time; and that our plans ought not be laid toward an ostensible "peak of maximum danger"; they ought to be laid, in the military sense, in such a way as to endure for many, many years into the future as a permanent fixture of our policy. I'd just like to say one more thing that I hadn't really realized before, but this discussion now enlightens me about it. I now see more clearly why this exercise was held at the time it was held. Yes, a pattern of response to the phenomenon of the Soviet Union -- response to what was called then the Soviet threat -- a pattern of response to this had of course, been formed under the preceding Democratic administration. It had been quite clearly formed. And I see now that General Eisenhower didn't want to take this over without critical examination. He couldn't just say "because Mrs. Truman and Acheson thought that this was the way things ought to be; and I accept all of this automatically." He felt it the duty of a new administration to have a new look at all of this, to see how far it was valid or where it had weak points. And I suspect that the whole purpose, really, of the Solarium exercise was to have this kind of a review and to decide how much of the old Democratic policy, it would be permissible for him to take over and how it should be prepared and brought forward to the American public. GENERAL GOODPASTER: Let me add just one more point on what George has just said, if I may. On thinking back, I believe that in later times I explicitly discussed this with Eisenhower, but in any case it was quite characteristic of his way of doing business. He wanted to get, as we came later to express it, all of the responsible people in the room, take up the issue, and hear their views. He had what amounted to a tacit rule that there could be no nonconcurrence through silence. If somebody didn't agree, he was obliged to speak his mind and get it all out on the table or in the Oval Office; and then in light of all of that, the President would come to a line of action, he wanted everybody to hear it, everybody to participate in it, and then he wanted everybody to be guided by it. This exercise, indeed, did help to serve that purpose because, as you say, the cabinet officers were there, the Joint Chiefs were there, at the planning level the assistant secretaries were there. I think there were probably 60 or 70 people in the room, either including or in addition to the 20-odd members of our group. They were all there, they all heard his summary, and I think we had a pretty clear line then that we were able to follow from that time on. DR. IMMERMAN: Mr. Bowie. MR. BOWIE: Well, my participation took place in three ways. First, I had just shortly before come down to join the administration as the head of the policy planning staff when Solarium was germinating, just about that time. So in an informal way I was asked to join the little group that was planning it. I did not become a member of it, as I recall, but, in any event, I sat in to help in formulating the alternative possible courses that we would like to see examined. And then I had very little to do with it in the period in which the teams were actually working. Second I participated by attending the presentation and, as Andy says, they had all the cabinet officers, all the principal military people, assistant secretaries from the departments who had any possible interest, the members of the planning board and I think a few additional people like that. My feeling was that the purposes were pretty much what has been described, but, just to repeat, I think there were really three. One was a general reexamination. I think in general, Eisenhower essentially felt the containment policy was virtually the only feasible one, but it had been somewhat clouded by N.S.C. 68 which, as I see it, was a brief to induce Truman to break the $13 billion ceiling which he had placed on military forces, and I think the "period of maximum danger" was to try to make him face up to it -- and not be able to say, "Well, we'll put it off a little." I don't mean that people like Paul Nitze didn't really believe analysis but it was also fit in with the notion of forcing Truman to raise the defense budget which all the other members of the administration felt was necessary. This was in '50. And then Korea had opened up the question of how to deal with the peripheral areas, particularly as the public support for the defense of Korea had ebbed away and presented the question of: How do you fit the political with the military need? So I think Eisenhower wanted a review, a general look at the situation, and what would be an appropriate strategy to deal with it. Second, I think he wanted -- and I believe this was true all through the N.S.C. process -- he wanted to educate the people who were going to be involved in any way, he wanted them to hear the arguments, he wanted them to learn the background by hearing these experts expound it and by having the reports, and then he wanted them to hear him say, "This is the way it’s going to be." And, finally, I think he did want to bury the rollback idea. I don't think it was ever serious, but it had been in the campaign and it had been talked about and there had been a lot of people, particularly press, who said, "Well, this is what's going to be different." I think he wanted to make that clearly a thing of the past and finish it. As I say, all I heard was the final presentations. The President said they were remarkable in their clarity and the way in which they laid out the problem. After that and after the false start of asking the members of the task force to find some common ground, the whole thing was turned over to the NSC Planning Board, along with the New Look report from the Joint Chiefs, I think that was what you called the Sequoia exercise. Anyway, this was the Joint Chiefs' new look at the question of military structure and strategy. And the planning board worked on this, as you said, for a period of nearly six weeks or certainly a month and attempted to build on what had been in the task force reports, particularly Task Force A which was pretty much recognized as the principal basis on which the President had come down. That was the one that George had presided over which was essentially a modification or updating of containment to the situation as it was then perceived. But then it was necessary to integrate into this the views about the New Look with respect to military forces, and the result was N.S.C. 162/2 which was finally approved in October, October 30th. And I think if you read that over, it's not a bad document even today in pretty well laying out a fairly realistic appraisal of what was the situation. And it seems to me much less exaggerated in its analysis than what was later claimed to be the general approach of the administration at the beginning. For example, just let me call your attention to some of the assessments. In assessing the Soviet threat, there was a flat statement that there was very little chance of any deliberate Soviet attack or any desire of the Soviets for a general war, that the only way that was likely to happen was by mistake or miscalculation. It was assumed, however, that the Soviets would try all the other things which were possible to try to expand their area of influence. Second, it was asserted that there was firm control of the satellites which wasn't likely to be shaken in any near term, despite the uprising which had taken place in East Germany in June. Third, there was a flat statement that Communist China was not likely to have the regime shaken in the absence of some general war. And finally it was stated that the U.S.S.R./Chinese alliance was firm, but I think what's interesting was the statement this early that with the death of Stalin and the Korean truce, Communist China may tend more to emphasize its own interests, though limited by present military and economic dependence on the U.S.S.R. In the long-run, basic differences may strain or break the alliance, but at that time it seems to be firmly established. This is in keeping, it seems to me, with the general idea that containment meant you were counting on forces of change, natural forces, nationalism, internal social change and the like. With respect to military capability, as I say, NSC 162/2 adopted the New Look which stressed the necessity for the capacity for massive retaliation; at the same time the necessity for flexible mobile forces which could be moved to areas which might be threatened. This was an effort to find a way out of the box of the Korean war, to avoid meeting aggression necessarily at the point where the aggression occurred. I think Dulles' felt he had contributed the concept of having mobile forces which would be available to punish aggression, but not necessarily by massive retaliation. Third, stress, heavy stress, was placed on the absolute necessity of allies and the fact that there were many strains on the allies which would have to be dealt with in order to keep the alliance cohesive. There is another thing that's, I think, quite interesting, as early as this -- it was, after all, the middle of '53 -- and that's the stress on the desirability or the necessity, despite the hostility, of trying to seek agreements with the Soviet Union wherever it might be possible; and that these could deal with specific problems or could deal with or should deal, if possible, with arms control, reduction of armaments or reduction of military threat, as long as it could be verified. Then with respect to the uncommitted areas, there was pretty clear recognition that they are antagonistic to the West, and for historical reasons were unwilling to commit themselves in very large part, and yet their orderly development was important to the situation the West, and that the West should make an attempt to assist them in both their political and their economic evolution. And then I think perhaps one of the most important points was the awareness that the American monopoly of nuclear weapons or its predominance in nuclear weapons was not going to last, that this was already beginning to erode and that this would change the situation. And the last paragraph of this whole document says: "The foregoing conclusions are valid only so long as the United States maintains a retaliatory capability that cannot be neutralized by surprise Soviet attack"; and there was, as I said, stress on the fact that the Soviets would be increasingly getting greater nuclear capability but that did not necessarily mean they would be able to neutralize the American capability. The last sentence is, "Therefore, there must be continuing examination and periodic report in regard to the likelihood of such neutralization of U.S. retaliatory capability." So essentially the Planning Board took Task Force A's report as a base, introduced into it the military strategy and structure which came from elsewhere. I don't think there was any inclusion or any significant inclusion of the idea of drawing the line in the sense in which it was used in Task Force B. There was a drawing of the line through the making of the succession of pacts which were not seen at the time as duplications of N.A.T.O. N.A.T.O. was seen as, in fact, creating an effective military capability; the others were really just seen as drawing the line against aggression. But they were not drawing the line in the sense of asserting that there would be general war if it was crossed. This is where the flexible capability came in, and it was expected if the perimeter was crossed, in any area except the N.A.T.O. area, that they would deal with it via flexible mobile capability, rather than a repetition of Korea. And finally I think Task Force C was not accepted at all. Thank you. DR. IMMERMAN: John, and then Dick, state your name and speak so it can go on the record. John Gaddis. MR. GADDIS: Well, I want to ask about another document that hasn't been mentioned yet, and I think this is one of these Duck Island memorandum by Dulles, I'm not sure, but this is Dulles' memorandum of September 6th, 1953, now published in Foreign Relations, which is the one in which he calls for an eventual mutual withdrawal of Soviet and American forces from Europe. This is the anticipation of Ambassador Kennan's Reith Lecture position, but five years earlier, which, I must say, really amazed me the first time I saw this document out in the archives. This is September 6th, 1953. It's about a month after, a month and a half after the presentation of the task forces but before N.S.C. 162/2. From what I can tell -- and the documentation on this has not been published in Foreign Relations -- this idea for a mutual withdrawal from Europe was actually incorporated into some of the early discussions of the Atoms for Peace speech but is finally shot down on a couple of grounds. Eisenhower raises the position that to talk about withdrawal from Europe at this point might make the allies nervous. Bob Bowie makes a very interesting point which is that on the one hand you're talking about withdrawal of American bases from Europe, but, on the other hand, you're talking about the New Look which is increasing reliance on nuclear deterrents. The deterrent is a forward-based deterrent which requires the presence of bases in Europe. How can you have one without the other? You can't do one without destroying the other. And eventually, as far as I can tell, this is -- and then Dulles themselves develops reservations about this because of E.D.C. coming up and, again, it's a bad idea to discuss it. So it gets relegated then to something like a long-term aspiration. But I would like to ask our three participants, and particularly Bob Bowie since he figures in the documentation on this, what he remembers about this particular Dulles initiative, which was also very far-reaching in its implications. MR. BOWIE: My memory of this is not what I would call sharp, but I think I can try to tell you a little bit about how it fit in. It actually didn't figure, as I recall it, at all in the preparation of N.S.C. 162. It was something that was related entirely to a separate line of activity in connection with Atoms for Peace. Can I take two or three minutes? DR. IMMERMAN: Certainly. MR. BOWIE: The Atoms for Peace or exercise went on virtually through all of 1953 before the actual delivery of the speech in December of 1953 before the U.N. Acheson some months before the end of the Truman administration, had named a committee headed by Oppenheimer with Mac Bundy as executive secretary, to do a study of American positions towards arms control. I think they were really expected to come up with proposals. The report was delivered, I think, about the day that Truman left the White House and so it was really on the desk of President Eisenhower. He took quite an interest in it and had discussions with Oppenheimer and, indeed, encouraged Oppenheimer to write an article for Foreign Affairs which Oppenheimer did in June of 1953, which essentially summarized the conclusions of this report. The report provided very little in the way of any effective proposals for arms control. But it stressed the image of the two scorpions in the bottle; that the Soviet Union within a very few years would have the great nuclear capability and each side would be able to destroy the other. And this point was indeed picked up, so to speak, in N.S.C. 162 - the facts of the emerging Soviet capability. The report also had said that this reality was such a major element in the situation that the United States Government, the President, ought to launch something called "Operation Candor" which would make the general public aware of the enormous threat from any kind of a general nuclear war. So Eisenhower asked C. D. Jackson who was there in the White House - he was from Time Life and a publicist - to prepare a series of possible talks for this purpose. And C. D. Jackson went at it with a will and worked out a plan for six or eight speeches, all of which had the general effect of simply saying, "We face a horrendous future with the prospect of total annihilation." Ike was not prepared to make a set of speeches which merely focused on that ominous threat. He said, "What can I say about what we can do about it?" And so that led to a series of efforts to try different ways of having something positive to say about it. In about September, one thought that was thrown out was, well, maybe we should suggest that what we should try is for a grand solution, a grand settlement. And while I don't remember the Dulles outline on the yellow pad, I would suppose it was almost surely as a result of that effort. Anyway, I remember well talking with Dulles about the subject. The State Department was asked to prepare a draft laying out what we would propose for some grand settlement? And so then the task fell to the state policy planning staff to try to put together a draft. Well, what it amounted to was essentially suggesting readiness to negotiate on a whole range of things, but not wanting to be precise about exactly what you would be willing to do or settle for, and not knowing really whom you were offering it to, because the Soviet leadership was still in flux after Stalin, and their policies, as we saw them, were just holding policies; they had not responded to the speech by Eisenhower in the middle of April, essentially saying can't we go for arms control, end this wasteful spending on armaments. And so a proposal was kind of shooting into the void without knowing how far to go or really how to lay it out. I'll admit that the result was not a document which I was very proud of. And then when it was turned over to the planning board, they took potshots at it and very effectively. And so this course was more or less recognized as a nonstarter: that you just couldn't layout some grand settlement at that stage without either rocking the boat on our side, or giving your hand away or whatever else. So I think that's where that died. And then just about the same time Eisenhower himself came up with an idea in September. He had been off, I think, in Denver, and came back to Washington for a few days and he wrote a little note to Jackson, I think, and Strauss saying, Why couldn't we make a proposal under which both sides turned over some amount of fissionable material to the U.N. or some other common body in order to gradually reduce the nuclear capability; and we could avoid what was recognized as a very serious problem, the whole problem of verification, because whatever was turned over there it was. And, of course, it was easy to say, "Well, that doesn't affect the real situation much," and he understood that thoroughly. What he said was, "Look, we've got a lot more than they've got so we can certainly make a good gesture as a minimum; and, second, it might even have the effect of opening up discussions, it might just be a starter, it might be a foot in the door, even if it isn't terribly significant in and of itself. There was a real doubt about how to get a discussion started; since the grand speech in the middle of April hadn't gotten any response, maybe a small step which was not very controversial and not very significant, coupled with the idea of an international atomic agency would start the process, and highlight that there was an international problem that ought to be dealt with that way. So that idea was ultimately was incorporated in the speech, after going through the A-B-C's to vet it. That basic component was originated by Eisenhower himself, after having explored the other possible ways of doing something positive, and that was what was proposed in the Atoms for Peace. DR. IMMERMAN: Richard Challener. MR. CHALLENER: Really two quick questions. I was struck very much by the timing the first time I read that. I'm wondering if you feel that the actual event of the East German uprising, that the problems that that raised for rollback and things like that in the late spring of '53 had any impact upon your thinking at the time and may in some way have contributed to the outcome. And, secondly, the thing which has intrigued, I think, all of us, why is it only today, the last few weeks, Task Force C has been declassified, why is it of all the documents, so to speak, of the early years of Eisenhower, this has been the one which has been the most closely-guarded secrecy and you still feel, for example, that you can't mention the name of an individual who was involved? DR. IMMERMAN: I can just add one thing to that. Also Mr. Bowie knows for the last I don't know how long I've been trying to get the planning board papers that went into this and came out, and for reasons that will never be explained they are not even undergoing the review at this point; that's one of the reasons that we've had such a difficult time with the paper flow. Would anyone like to perhaps discuss, first of all, the possible impact of the East German uprising, and, for that fact, even the death of Stalin would be involved in that also. GENERAL GOODPASTER: Let me speak very briefly first about the release of Task Force C. I don't know, since nobody called me and asked me whether it should be released or not, but my speculation is that it was slow in being released because it did have a large covert operations section. You may notice there are quite a number of pages blanked out. Now, much of that had quite a creative aspect to it, I have to say. But that may very well be why. Now, on the two things, the death of Stalin and the German uprising, the decision had been taken to establish this exercise before the German uprising. We did learn of the uprising while we were engaged in our study, and it concentrated the mind a good deal that here you had something rather concrete. As a result, one began to think it through in rather realistic terms rather than in some flight of imagination. You saw what the practical limitations were in terms of really doing something significant about it. As to the death of Stalin -- again this is speculation -- but I think I do recall some comment about that having been discussed and that discussion possibly having had a relation to the creation of the Solarium exercise. Bob may know, I don't know if you were down with the administration by the time that Stalin died but my impression is the administration did a great deal of floundering around trying to see what the significance of that might be in terms of U.S. interests and U.S. actions. That's as I've had it reflected to me, but I was not there really to participate in that. DR. IMMERMAN: Ambassador Kennan. One thing I'd like to add is that the Team A Task Force does specifically refer to the death of Stalin and of the possible impact that will have on East/West relations. Team B, if I remember, does not refer to it at all; and Task Force C has only a fleeting reference to it. But for Team A, it definitely does play a major role. MR. BOWIE: Well, I should have mentioned the death of Stalin as one of the initiating causes. It was assumed at least that with his death there ought to be a fresh look at what should be our policy and whether there should be any change. But I think it's fair to say that judgments were pretty much up in the air at the time, as to whether it had made a change and if so, what. You had the immediate creation of what was claimed to be collective leadership, but I think most of our experts took the view of Tommy Thompson, that there was just no way of knowing how stable this collective leadership would be or which of these people, if any, would be the ones who emerged as ultimate leaders. And you remember they went through several sequences from Malenkov and then Bulganin and finally Khruschev, and it took a period of practically three years before they really settled on who was in charge. So there was uncertainty as to exactly what would be the leadership, and also what difference it might make. But I don't doubt at all that the death of Stalin was one additional reason for this exercise. Second, as to the uprisings, they were referred to in N.S.C. 162. Paragraph five refers to the recent uprising and unrest in other satellites, which shows the failure of the Soviets to fully subjugate these people or destroy their desire for freedom. And these events necessarily placed internal and psychological strain on the Soviet leadership. Nevertheless, it concluded that the ability of the U.S.S.R. to exercise effective control over and to exploit the resources of the European satellites had not been appreciably reduced and was not likely to be so long as the U.S.S.R. maintains adequate military forces in the area. So I think that while the uprising was seen as proof that these underlying forces and ferment and nationalism were there, they were not thought at that point or in the near future to be likely to undermine the Soviet control. DR. IMMERMAN: We are beginning to run out of time so if there are a couple of quick additional questions. Jennifer. MS. LAURENDEAU: This will be very quick. One of the issues that was very dear to General Eisenhower's heart was somehow gaining control over the defense budget, and I wondered, given the outcome of the Solarium report, whether it's your sense at all that that was something he hoped perhaps to use to help him in that effort or whether you think he might have thought in those terms even earlier on. GENERAL GOODPASTER: He wanted us to have a look at the questions of military posture -- military force, composition of military force and the cost of military force. But I don't think that he was that as a major assistance to him in his control and direction of the military budget and the military program. He had taken those on quite directly in his talks with Admiral Radford and the Joint Chiefs and Secretary Wilson in Defense. He and Senator Taft had clashed very strongly over Eisenhower's idea of maintaining some enduring respectable posture of defense. Senator Taft had wanted to cut way back on the defense establishment, following the conflict in Korea. And Eisenhower had had to oppose that and did, with the idea and the argument that the worst thing possible was the kind of stop-and-start fluctuation that we had, seen in the past -- feast or famine, cutting way back and then getting into crash programs and that kind of thing. I think that he would have been surprised at, and would not have accepted, any idea of a large buildup or crash program. He didn't find it necessary to reject it because that wasn't, indeed, being proposed. But he had really taken that whole set of issues on separately and was relying on his judgment and his experience. You may know that he put together the first integrated budget after unification for President Truman. Truman had called him down from Columbia University to do that. There's more of a story than that, but essentially he had that background and he never lacked confidence as to his superior knowledge and readiness to make decisions about the level of the military budget, that it should be lower than the military people wanted and higher than Senator Taft and some of the others in the Congress were proposing. DR. IMMERMAN: Mr. Bowie. MR. BOWIE: I just want to confirm what Andy said from having been there. I think if you look at the Foreign Relations, Volumes for 1952-4, you'll find there was a succession of meetings with the military leaders and with Wilson and very much with Humphrey, and one of the things that does stand out and is, in fact, reproduced in NSC 162 is the two facets of national security right from the very beginning. One is to meet the Soviet threat to U.S. security; and the other is, doing so without seriously weakening the U.S. economy or undermining our fundamental values. And Eisenhower felt it absolutely essential to set a level of spending which you could maintain indefinitely without doing damage, as he saw it, to the economy. And, as Andy says, if you look at those meetings I think you'll see he had full confidence in his own judgment as to the level of military spending. He didn't give Humphrey everything he wanted either. And he stuck with what he thought was a reasonable balance, aiming initially at I think it was about 40-plus-billion, after the Korean war, which had left some legacy of unspent appropriations. And so he was able to use those funds without getting quite the same level of future appropriations, but then to bring it -- he hoped to bring it down to somewhere, I think, near around 35. GENERAL GOODPASTER: 35 was the figure. MR. BOWIE: But I don't think in practice he succeeded quite in doing that. I think really the defense budget fluctuated around 40 most of the time. But anyway, that's the general thrust. DR. IMMERMAN: It's been a very long day and I'm sure we're all very appreciative of our three guests. Unless anyone of them wants to make a last comment, what I would do is thank them very much and thank you all for not just the session, but the entire conference. (The session was concluded at three o'clock).