[Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Notice Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview. RESTRICTIONS Opened December, 1979
[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Oral History Interview with
June 13, 1975 by Richard D. McKinzie MCKINZIE: Ambassador Mathews, I think a lot of historians, economists, and political scientists became interested at one time or another in why people choose a career in Government. I wonder if it would be appropriate to begin asking you to describe what led you to Vancouver in 1935 as Vice Consul? MATHEWS: Well, in my case it was fairly simple, because in 1924, when the Rogers Act (setting up our new Foreign Service) was passed, somehow or other I heard about that, and a brochure describing the act and what it was intended to achieve came into my hands. And I thought this sounded like an awfully good thing. So, while my ideas shifted from time to time, from 1924 on I decided I wanted to be a Foreign Service officer and in the United States Foreign Service. And my university studies were more or less directed in that way, with an emphasis on economics. Then, in 1931, I took the examinations, passed them. And, of course, this was the height of the depression, and it caught me with a few others who passed the examinations in 1932. We waited until 1935 to be appointed to the Service, at which point I did go to Vancouver as Vice Consul. MCKINZIE: Did you, when you were preparing, ever consider taking one of those special Foreign Service preparatory schools? I understand at that time there was something called the Emerson School or the Emerson Academy here in Washington, and a number of people who did not live in the area came here to take those kind of cram courses for the exams. MATHEWS: No, I didn't. This may have been, in part, just because I was ignorant. I was living out on the Pacific Coast and really wasn't aware of these things until I came back here to take the examinations and encountered others who had attended some of these schools. I did my own cramming. I took a trip to Europe in the summer of '31 and then came back and stayed with an aunt on a farm and did a lot of reading on my own for about two or three months before taking the written examinations. So, I had my own cram course. MCKINZIE: A number of people who have gone into the Foreign Service have said they were greatly influenced by one particular economist, one political scientist, or someone who taught a course in international relations who gave them a particular view of the world. They started off with that, and then proceeded to develop on it or to modify it in the course of their early career. Did you have a particular view of the world, of economics, of U.S. position in the world when you took the exam in 1931? MATHEWS: No, I wouldn't say that I did. MCKINZIE: When did you begin to develop that in the course of your career? MATHEWS: Well, in my case, anyway, it was never a fixed view. I would say that I hope I learned as I went along, and my perceptions of the world and the United States role in it, I think, changed constantly. This was in part because of changing world conditions. Obviously, the attitudes one had before World War II were quite different from those one had after World War II and in the succeeding years. Our position in the world, the requirements on us, were much different in the fifties than they were in the sixties, and, obviously, things are much different in the seventies. MCKINZIE: Indeed. When much of the planning, much of the shift in thinking in the Department, was going on, you were in Afghanistan as 2nd Secretary. There was a considerable amount of postwar planning which was dominated, at least in part, by Will [Willard] Clayton and Leo Pasvolsky -- people who had a view of the way the world ought to be. It was an economically open world -- in a sense, a free trading world, one in which economies would be integrated; the supposed result of that would be a kind of common rise .fin the standard of living. How well aware were you, in your post in Afghanistan, of these kinds of postwar plans? MATHEWS: Almost not at all. There was very little provision in those days for getting information on that kind of Washington activity out to the field. I suppose we would have received some information output from time to time, but it would have been so little that, for all intents and purposes, this was, going on in Washington, and we didn't know anything about it. Our focus was on our day-to-day problems. I was 2nd Secretary; I was the only Secretary. In other words, in those days there was a legation; there was a minister; myself; a vice consul; a clerk; and a military attaché, and that was it. I was there at the end of the war, of course, and there was a lot to do, and so, we didn't know, and I suppose it would be only fair to say we didn't care what they were doing in Washington at this time. MCKINZIE: So, such questions as the future of South Asia, or the future of Asia, the defeat of Japan, and the civil war which was evolving in China were not large questions at a post like yours? MATHEWS: Not really. In other words, when you put it in those terms of what was happening in South Asia, obviously we did have an interest and some thoughts on that, because we were very close to it. And from what we knew, we assumed that there was going to be independence in the subcontinent. The Chinese situation we knew less about, I would say. Our Chinese colleague there, who, of course, was still linked with the Chiang Kai-shek Government, was perturbed. But you know, somehow, this didn't impinge on us as much as what was happening in the south, where, understandably, there was much more contact. The British had interest in the south, and we were close to the British, so we knew more of what was going on and had some views about this. And my chief, the then minister, Cornelius Van H. Engert, was probably our finest Near East expert; he probably knew more about the Near East than anybody else in the Service. He had quite definite views about India and used to go down there on his vacations. And I know that he sent his own personal reports back to Washington. These were not in his role as minister to Afghanistan, because he had no mandate to write reports on India, but I know he used to send letters back to his friends in the Department. Now, what the content of those were I don't really know, but I think, from what I know of him and his attitudes at that time, that he would have thought it much better to move slowly towards independence rather than rapidly. MCKINZIE: Did you get a chance to go to India at all while you were in Afghanistan? MATHEWS: Only down to the frontier. In other words, once I got into Afghanistan I stayed there until my tour was up, except, as I say, for brief trips down to the shore on various occasions. But then, of course, after leaving Afghanistan I went to India and served in Calcutta. MCKINZIE: Yes. This was a period, too, when the United States was "falling out of love" with the Soviet Union. When those postwar revelations about Soviet intentions were shattering the people's confidence and their hopes for the future, how did that all ring in Afghanistan? MATHEWS: Well, there were two ways -- I suppose three ways -- that we became aware of this in Afghanistan. When I went out from Washington to Afghanistan, it was sort of the height of the honeymoon period, and when I got there I found that relations with the local Soviet Embassy were reasonably cordial; their people came to parties and things of that sort. Well, then, among the things that happened was one in Iran, the Azerbaijan crisis. Well, we didn't have anything to do with it; we were close enough that it was an interesting thing, and we did hear something from Washington about that and had some discussion with the Afghan Government. The other thing was a purely local business, but which showed that the problems were with the Russians. Of course, when I got there -- and Afghanistan was neutral -- the German Embassy was still operating. The Italian Embassy had closed down by the time I got there, although there were still some of the Italian diplomats there. And, of course, the Japanese Embassy was going strong. Well, when the surrender in Europe came and the German Embassy was closed down, the British and the French and ourselves agreed with the Russians that the personnel of the Embassy would be sent back to Germany through Russia. The strict understanding was that this would be done quickly and that these people would be made available for interrogation by our intelligence services as well as the Russian intelligence. Well, of course, what happened was that these characters disappeared into Russia for months -- well, actually, I think it was more than months; I think it stretched out for well over a year. And our efforts to find out from the Russian Embassy what had happened to them got no useful response at all. And then, not long after V-E Day, it was quite apparent that the Russian Embassy had had orders to tighten up again, and the contacts with other diplomatic missions were much more difficult. So, this was the kind of indications that we got there that the honeymoon was coming apart. MCKINZIE: As a point of interest for the record, how did you handle social activities when you had enemy official posts in the same city? Did you ever mess up the invitations and send them to both sides? MATHEWS: There was no problem there, because Kabul was a small place; everybody knew what the situation was. Obviously, if the Afghan Government gave an official affair, it handled it in a way to make sure there would be a minimal contact between the Axis representatives and the Allied representatives. And as far as the diplomatic corps was concerned, it was handled with no problem. It was an interesting situation. MCKINZIE: What occasioned your transfer to Calcutta in 1946? MATHEWS: Well, I had spent about as much time as I was supposed to in Afghanistan; it was usually considered to be about a two-year post. And then it was clear later, although I wasn't aware at the time, that they had already decided in Washington that they wanted me to come back and join the South Asian office, and they wanted me to have some Indian experience before I did that. So, that was really why I was sent down to Calcutta. MCKINZZE: You were there at a very critical time. MATHEWS: Oh, it was a terrible time. MCKINZIE: Could you describe your activities? MATHEWS: Well, we arrived in Calcutta in early '46 and stayed on for a bit over a year. But this was at the time that the animosity between the Hindus and the Sikhs on one side and the Muslim on the other came to a peak in the Calcutta area. There were terrible riots which lasted for weeks; thousands of people were killed, and there is no real way of knowing how many people were killed in those riots. But life in Calcutta -- which is never very easy -- was terribly depressing and grim. You know, you came home from the office, there was a curfew, and despite the curfew you sat around at night and you could hear the screams and yells and see the fires burning elsewhere in town. And, as I say, this went on for weeks. MCKINZIE: Was there anything the foreign community could do, or tried to do, in that period? MATHEWS: Not really. In other words, you know, the British were still there; it was still the colonial government, and the British Government, the Indian Raj, was not able to do much about it. Efforts were made to bring leaders of the communities together, and this finally was done. This was, in part, why the rioting finally ended, although think it was more that people simply got exhausted than that the negotiations were all that effective. There were the stories of the spunky little British woman on her bicycle who would come into an area where there was rioting going on and jump off her bicycle and rush up to these big burley people hacking away at each other, saying, you know, "You must stop this." And whenever this happened, the little British woman was treated with the greatest of courtesy and told, "We're terribly sorry, and now won't you please go away and not interfere with us?" As things did begin to simmer down, I think that some of us in the foreign community were able to be helpful in reestablishing communications by inviting people from the two communities to the same party. And I remember my wife and I did that once, invited one of the Muslim leaders and several of the Hindu group. There was sort of a shocked silence when this fellow first came in, but then it worked out. They finally got to talking among themselves, and it was a huge success. And there was a fair bit of that sort of thing done, but not at the peak of the riot. In other words, there was very little that could be done about it then. MCKINZIE: One of the jobs of Consul is taking care of the lives and property of American citizens. What was the extent of American investment? MATHEWS: In Calcutta at that time? I don't really know in terms of figures, but not great. MCKINZIE: So that this was not then one of the preoccupying and underlining problems? MATHEWS: No. In other words, .American property might have been damaged in the course of the riot, but none of this was directed against foreigners; it wasn't directed against the British, and it wasn't directed against any other foreigners. It was purely internal and nasty; Hindus and Sikh against Moslem and vice versa. MCKINZIE: At that time did you begin to form some ideas about the best course for India to follow and what India was going to need in the way of guidance and assistance from the rest of the world, or did your views on that mature later? MATHEWS: Well, I'd got far enough along in thinking about it at that point to hope that there would be one India -- that there would not be a partition -- and a general recognition that India would need a great deal of help, if and when it became independent. By that time, it was clear the British were going to pull out. But, I had no program mapped out. MCKINZIE: Franklin Roosevelt is alleged to have been ecstatic at the prospects of the British pulling out of India because he had a very anti-colonial stance. How much of that was still residual among the Americans with whom you worked? Now, I have the distinct impression that during the latter part of the war, when colonial questions arose, most people in the Department took a Rooseveltian view: the less colonialism, the better. MATHEWS: Yes, I think this is true. It's certainly true of those I was working with, my own attitudes. In other words, with respect to India, all of us thought, you know, independence, the sooner the better; they're going to have lots of problems, but the day of the British Raj is over. And there are an awful lot of the British who had that same view at that time. The handwriting on the wall was there, and the urge to empire had got pretty feeble. Despite [Sir Winston] Churchill, the fact is there just is an awful lot of English people who were quite willing to preside over the liquidation of the empire. MCKINZIE: Then you were there for about a year, and then were, in fact, brought back to the Department. Had that been good training to have been in Calcutta, or was the scope of work to which you were assigned in the Department so much broader that it occasioned little use of that training? MATHEWS: Oh, no, the assignment in Calcutta was of tremendous value and gave me an understanding of what was going on that really I couldn't have had if I hadn't been there. When I came home, the first thing they did was ship me off to the University of Pennsylvania, along with one other officer; we were the first South Asia area students the Department ever produced, and we spent the summer session at the University o£ Pennsylvania. I didn't study the Hindi language, because I was going to stay in Washington. He did study the Hindi language in addition to the cultural and economic courses. And that, too, was a tremendous help in preparation for the job I had to fulfill the next few years, because it gave me a much broader view of Indian thought and Indian economy than I had been able to get sitting in Calcutta or even in driving across India, which I did do. When we left Afghanistan, we drove by car to Delhi and then had to give it up because it was the hot season and later went back to Delhi and drove the rest of the way into Calcutta by car. So, I have seen that northern part of India by car pretty clearly. MCKINZIE: When you came back and were in the process of doing this work at Pennsylvania, there were other things going on in the world that were eclipsing those kinds of problems. They were, in a sense, in a backseat position, because this was the summer of the Marshall plan, the planning for the Marshall plan, and so on. One of the things that always comes up in other areas -- from people other than Europeans -- is a contention that the "Europe first" foreign policy of the United States resulted in a favoritism, a discriminatory preference for assisting peoples to recover from the war and to develop, which was, as you know, an important part of U.S. economic foreign policy. Latin Americans, for example, said there should be a Marshall plan for Latin America. Were there overtures from anyplace that you know of, suggestions that the United States should undertake, at this time, a Marshall plan for South Asia? MATHEWS: Once in while you'd get this sort of thing from a South Asian or, more usually, an intellectual or somebody who was trying to score points against the United States. But, no, you didn't have that kind of pressure from South Asia that you had from Latin America. The South Asians, at that point, had not become accustomed to looking to us foxr help. And so when it developed later that India was facing a very serious food crisis and that we could and should try to do something about it -- from a humanitarian ground if none other -- we had great problems with the Indian Government, particularly with Prime Minister [Shri Jawaharlal] Nehru. While he recognized that there was a need and while he wanted help, he was exceedingly reluctant to be in the position of being viewed as accepting charity. And I suppose that we might as well deal with this right now; it's one of the aspects of this first big Indian grain deal. We were not as unsophisticated in those days as is sometimes thought, and when we were faced with this problem of a really massive shipment of food grains to India, those of us in the Department and in the other agencies of Government who were involved felt that it was not wise to put this up as a loan. This was so much money, and the Indians were going to have continuing problems; the thing to do is to make this particular food project a grant project and to give them the grain, so there would be no further demand on the Indian economy to pay back. And, obviously, there was a lot of dissension and discussion within the United States Government about this, but it was finally agreed within the executive branch that this was the way we should go. When charity came from the United States he preferred that this be a loan. Well, of course, it was a loan, because those who wanted to have it be a loan on the Hill simply seized on that and the ground was cut right out from under our feet in the executive branch. So, you had a loan, and in a sense, you know, we've only recently, in [Daniel P.] Moynihan's tenure, solved this problem, because some of the money that he in effect signed over to the Indians went back to that original grain deal, which was '49 or '50. MCKINZIE: But you ascribed this to national pride, or to Nehru's personality? MATHEWS: Well, this was hard to take apart, because, in a very real sense, Nehru regarded himself as India, and in many ways he was India. So, yes, it was national pride; it was his own personal pride; it was his feeling about the United States. Let's come back to that, because I think that's worth talking about a little more in detail, but not just tied with this food thing. MCKINZIE: Okay. When you came back in 1947 and 1948, was there a South Asian policy? Quite often people would ask of the people in the Department, "What is our policy toward so and so?" The Department would come back with; "Well, of course, we have a policy, and it's explained in so and so's statement of such and such." And you read it and it really doesn't explain it, so you have this sort of difficulty. MATHEWS: No, I think all of us who were working on South Asia understood what we were about -- basically, independence, which was there. To the extent that the United States had influence, it had used that influence -- and this, of course, was before I came into the then-division -- to try to avert the partition. We didn't have much influence, and, obviously, the British didn't have much either, because they didn't want partition, but it came. Partition having occurred, certainly our efforts were to do everything we could to prevent further animosity and hostility between Pakistan and India. This focused very largely on trying to find ways of defusing the Kashmir problem. MCKTNZIE: Who had the idea of taking it to the U.N.? Would that have happened anyhow, if it hadn't been pushed by the United States? MATHEWS: It'd be hard to say who really had the idea. You know, at that time it was just the thing to do. The United Nations was fairly new; this seemed to be an ideal kind of problem to put to the United Nations. Certainly, neither we nor the British wanted to. get directly involved with it, so that that would be. hard to say. I would just say it was sort of automatic, you know, with everybody -- this is what you did with it. And the parties themselves were quite willing to have it go to the United Nations at the outset; they both developed serious afterthoughts later. To the extent that we had influence, also, there was some concern at that time that there might be further partitioning of the subcontinent, and we thought that would be a major setback. And again with very little influence, really, but to the extent that we could have any influence, we were on the side of maintaining the integrity of India and Pakistan as they had emerged. This presented us some problems of posture and legality in such matters as the Indian military action against the State of Hyderabad. You know, in practical terms, there really wasn't much else the Indians could do. They were not about to put up with an enclave in the heart of the country that was ruled by a prince. On the other hand, what they did was purely illegal in any international law sense. And this created problems for us -- not serious problems, but we did have to take some positions in the U.N. that made it clear that we knew that this was illegal and we deplored the illegality of it, although we understood that, you know, there was no future for Hyderabad except as part of India. But this was the kind of issue that arose and complicated our relations with the Indian Government. And, of course, everything we did on Kashmir complicated our relations on both sides, because they were not looking for objective mediation; what they wanted was partisan support, both of them. MCKINZIE: Well, on the subject of partisanship during this period, you've mentioned the policy as being one of maintaining independence, of preventing further division of the area. But in the very largest sense there was a world to be won in 1947 through 1950-51, the cold war. Everyone was beginning to take sides, and, in fact, there were some people who were saying that not to take sides was to be immoral. I wonder if you could talk for a few minutes about alignment and the mention of that idea? MATHEWS: Yes. Well, in my time in the South Asian Office, to the extent that we were calling the shots -- we were calling the shots pretty well at that time -- there was no question of trying to enter into any sort of alliance with anybody in South Asia. Our view was that there was nothing to be gained by tying to make an ally of India or Pakistan or any other countries in that area, that we should try to maintain good relations with all of them, be helpful to them in economic ways, but stay out of it in terms of any military involvement. And not all of us in the office felt that way, but most of us did. I was in charge in my end, and those of us who felt as I did were pretty well able to guide this. The immorality thing came under Dulles, really, so you didn't have that kind of view. Now, having said that, we weren't operating in a vacuum, and we were very conscious of the comparison between what happened in India and what would happen in China. We did consider that we had a stake, a political stake, in the success of a democratic experiment in India, as contrasted with the Communist experiment in China. And we were obviously wrong,* in hindsight, but there was a good bit of feeling in those days, around '48, '49, 50,that the next five years would be crucial in this regard, and that it was important to do what we could to assist India and Pakistan. But, primarily, the focus was really on India in this context, to succeed as a democratic experiment. *By "wrong" my husband meant that we were mistaken in thinking that India was so dependent of the United States that they would fold in five years without great assistance from us. -- Naomi M. Mathews And you know, this was always in our mind. As I say, in hindsight, it turns out that they, got through that five years, they got through a good many other five years, and they had one crisis after another, but they've shown themselves to be pretty resilient. MCKINZIE: I wonder if you could talk about your feelings and the feelings of people with whom you worked about development of South Asia? Almost everyone agrees that President Truman's inaugural address in 1949 -- the announcement of his fourth point, talking about technical assistance -- was something that no one had anticipated, that it was not an idea which came out of the structure of the State Department, and that we went up on the Hill, again you could just imagine the sort of pulling and hauling on the Hill about this, with some people bitterly opposed to a grant -- and some just bitterly opposed to the whole idea, but not many of those. But there was an awful lot of feeling that there ought to be a loan and we ought to get paid back for it somehow. But I think it's fair to say that the Executive had pretty well won the Congress over, and there was, I would have said, a very good chance of getting congressional authorization to send this grain to India on a grant basis. But in the course of the discussion in the Congress, things were said (as are always said in the Congress), and some of these came to the attention of Prime Minister Nehru. And at a crucial point, when some of the crucial votes were going to be taken, he got very angry about this and blew his top and made a public statement to the effect that he didn't want anything. The Department, was, in effect, presented the idea and then had to implement it. MATHEWS: I think that's a bit of overstatement, but not a lot. You know, some things had been going on, so the Department was not completely virgin to this sort of business. There had, for example, been a Point IV program of sorts going on in Liberia from the wartime days, you see. And so I think it certainly is true that nobody had any idea of that -- well, I would say some people did, but it was a surprise to the Department, generally, that the President went as far as he did in his Point IV address. And it certainly required a lot of new thinking and action within the Department, but it wasn't all that new. MCKINZTE: Did you think that that idea of sharing technological abundance or abundance of knowledge was an appropriate way to deal with India's problems or Pakistan's problems? MATHEWS: Yes, not all by itself. In other words, I think we were very conscious of the need for capital input as well as technical input. But I think that we thought that Point TV could make important contributions. You were asking me earlier if I had any world view. Certainly, this was an area in which one's views changed over the years. I thought in those days, in the late forties and early fifties, that from the outside, with infusions of capital and technical assistance, you really could probably help a country like India to "take off," in the Rostow phrase. I subsequently developed grave doubts about this. I think that outside help can be helpful, but 90 percent of it's got to come from within the country; and if that 90 percent is not there, there's not really anything very effective that people from the outside can do about it. That doesn't mean I think we shouldn't give aid; we should give aid, but, you know, one does learn by experience, and I think that the record shows that it's very, very difficult for one country or a group of countries to help another country achieve an economic breakthrough. MCKINZIE: If you talked to people who were involved in the Point IV program, they would say that what India needed was more longhandled hoes or someone to tell them how to dig a better drainage. ditch or an irrigation ditch. And if you talk to the Indians about what they needed, the Indians would say, "We need a steel mill, because modern nations have steel mills, and they have this industrial capacity," and it seemed that, at least from the perspective of one group of developers, there was almost irreconcilable conflict between what some countries wanted, particularly a country like India, and what these people who considered themselves to be experts in development wanted. It would seem that you would be caught right in the middle there. MATHEWS: Yes, we were. And being in the middle position, I think that we tried to bring about some give on both sides. In other words, we were impatient with the prevailing view in the United States Government (which we weren't able to do anything about at that time), that, you know, we should not put money into government enterprises. The Indians had made it clear that if they were going to have a steel mill, it was going to be a government owned, or practically government owned, steel mill, so our people would not consider getting into that. As I say, we thought this was a mistake, that we shouldn't have been doctrinaire about it; that, obviously, a country of the size of India, with the resources that India had, could have more steel mills and use the steel very well. On the other hand, we thought that many of the Point IV ideas as to simpler ways of getting ahead to things were very good, and so we did, through diplomatic channels, work with the Indians to try to make them more receptive to that kind of approach. And, you know, this kind of thing is never just all black and white, because within the Indian Government there were a lot of people who were very sympathetic to the Point IV simplistic approach. It was a matter of strengthening those people's hands within their own government, rather than us going to the government. You know, this is the way these things work, or worked, or should work; you know, you never go in and pound the desk of the other government, if you can avoid it. You find somebody who wants to do the same thing that you want to do within that government and get them to go in and pound the desk -- not as your agent, but in terms of their own interest, what they want to achieve. And to the extent that you are able to assist them in that, you do it. But I'm not talking about covert stuff; I'm just talking about the proper exercise of diplomatic influence and encouragement and so on. MCKINZIE: After independence was established and some small stability had been achieved, what kinds of economic relations -- that is, mutually beneficial economic trade, commerce, between India, Pakistan, and the U.S. and Western Europe -- did you and the people you worked for expect? Was there a rosy expectation about this future? It didn't turn out quite that way. MATHEWS: No, not rosy expectation in the sense of the old cliche about if you can just sell one more of your crop of goods to the East Chinese, you'd have it made. No, I think it was a more hardheaded view than that -- that, you know, the money economy of India was still fairly restricted and that it was not going to be a massive trading partner with any of us. It was an area which we certainly wanted to develop; we hoped there would be greater opportunities for American investment than there ever turned out to be because of Indian Government policy. So, yes, we wanted to encourage trade, we wanted to encourage closer economic relations -- but not euphoria about this. In other words, it was the thing to do and it would be beneficial to all concerned, but it was not going to be anything that was going to shake the world. MCKINZIE: Now there were periods -- I can think of one in Germany in the winter of 1947, and I'm sure there were other periods in other underdeveloped areas -- in which there seemed to be absolute positive crisis. Starvation was imminent if something wasn't done here and there, and the United States, for humanitarian reasons, as well as economic and political reasons, found it necessary to take some sort of drastic remedial action. In almost every case, and if I can use the case of Germany as an example, there was also an accompanying plan to assure that that situation would not arise again. Western Germany, for example, integrated into the OEEC, was made a part of the Marshall plan organization. Now, in India, some developers kept saying that it was just an aversion of one crisis so that you could cope with the next, and that, in addition to improved technological capacity and injection of capital, you also needed to control such things as population. Were those kinds of hard subjects discussed with the Indians? MATHEWS: Well, yes. In other words, population as a problem was certainly discussed with Indians, because there were some Indians who were very anxious to discuss it. But it was certainly not anything that the United States Government was officially getting itself involved in. In other words, this came later, and, at that time, for the United States Government to have taken any position on population control, such topics, was just never seriously considered. I know that we had discussions among ourselves and sometimes had people in from the outside to talk about the problem of the population of India. And as I say, there were Indians who were very much interested in this, who talked about it, but it was not a subject which cropped up in official representations or discussions between the two governments. That isn't to say that a Point IV man talking to his counterpart in India might not have said, "You know, gosh, unless you can do something about the population growth, it's going to be terribly difficult," and his counterpart could have said, "Yes, you're right." It was that kind of thing, but nothing more than that. In other words, it was not that there was any lack of understanding that the population growth in a country like India was a tremendous block and handicap to economic development, but the state of thinking at that time was that this was not the kind of subject that one government pressed upon another. You know, there was a good bit of hassle in this government before we finally decided that we were willing to do so, and it was only in the Eisenhower time, really, that the decision was finally taken that we would, starting out very tenderly, add a population policy with respect to other countries. And this is still a highly contentious thing within the U.S. Government. MCKINZIE: Yes, you can say that again. MATHEWS: And within the U.S. public. MCKINZIE: Yes, true. MATHEWS: But going back to the original point you raised, certainly when we went into that first Indian food grain project, as an emergency, we were well aware that you had to try to do something. And the Point IV thing tied in here, because what we hoped was that through the Point IV techniques, working with the villagers and that kind of thing, you could bring about improvement in India's own agricultural techniques. Well, you know, it just turned out to be a, hell of a lot harder to, do that than anybody thought. Now, we're getting out of our time phase, but I think it illustrates that even as late as the early sixties, there was still in some corners this belief that country A on the outside could have a real impact on country B in terms of its economic development. I came back from Liberia in '62 to work in the African Bureau, and the job that I was assigned was to come up with a plan to bring Nigeria to an economic takeoff within ten years. This was our plan, an American plan, to assure that Nigeria would have an economic takeoff in ten years. Well, by this time, I had had enough experience with this sort of thing to be very reluctant to take on this job, but, anyway, this is what they wanted done, so we did it. Well, you know, as late as that there were still people around Washington who thought you could do this. I don't think you could find anybody in Washington that could do it. MCKINZIE: Where did military assistance come into your work? It did in the Korean war, of course, but was it before that? MATHEWS: Well, I said earlier that when I was in the South Asian Division office, those of us that were there at that time were very strongly of the view that we should not get involved with military assistance -- that the Indians and the Pakistanis have armies that are based on British, they have British equipment, and let's let the British take care of it; we felt this very strongly. Now, from the very beginning -- you might almost say on the day after partition -- there was, in the U.S. Government, in the Pentagon, and to some extent in the State Department, a strong view, based on the reading of [Rudyard] Kipling, that the martial races of India were in the north, and much was now Pakistan. And therefore, the sensible thing for us to do was to cozy up to these martial races; they would be a great value to us in the fight against communism, and we ought to certainly give the military assistance to and maybe have an alliance with Pakistanis. Well, I always opposed that, because it seemed to me that the only thing that the Pakistanis would want military equipment for was to carry on their battle with India, and vice versa. So, if we did get into a military assistance program with Pakistan or an alliance with Pakistan, this would only be used by them in terms of their conflict with India, and we would never get anything out of it in terms of our conflicting with communism. And I think the record shows that this is exactly what happened. So, as long as I was there, I resisted this and resisted it successfully. And when I, up until the time when I left the Department, went out in the field in late 51, there was no military program with Pakistan. I hadn't been gone very long before there was a military program. MCKINZIE: Well, what about the Pakistanis and the Indians, themselves; did they make representations? MATHEWS: The Pakistanis, yes. The Pakistanis had early on made approaches to us that they would like military assistance and they would like to be very close to us. They were quite prepared to enter into an alliance; they would have loved it. The Indians, no. I don't really recall any major efforts by the Indians to get military equipment from us. At that time, they were pretty well willing to go along with their British connection, and the British were quite willing to meet their needs. And then, of course, the Indians were further along, because such munitions manufacturing capability as existed on the subcontinent were pretty well in the Indian side; I think they may have had a small arms plant in what became Pakistan. And, you know, they just had more self-confidence about being able to help themselves in this field than the Pakistanis did. MCKINZIE: Throughout this whole period, when you were working in the Department, one thing after another seemed to be happening in Kashmir. What approach could you take? That is to say, was the purpose simply to keep it from blowing up or to determine wherein the virtue lay? MATHEWS: Not so much where virtue lay, because, for one thing, this would have been awfully hard to determine. No, I think mainly it was to try to keep the thing from exploding, but, also, there was really a genuine attempt to try to find formulas and ways of dealing with it that would solve it. Now, this was not easy; it's certainly not the Arab-Israeli thing, but it's that kind of problem, and, again, it's the sort of thing that outsiders really can't solve. I think in many cases we were able to prevent hostilities from breaking out; we may, on occasion, have made suggestions to the party that they found useful in terms of calming things down. But, goodness, the time that we spent trying to come up with schemes that would be acceptable to both sides and that would lead to a permanent settlement of the Kashmir dispute, in hindsight, was all a waste of time; and we spent a lot of time on it. MCKINZIE: Did you have anything to do with the appointing of Admiral [Chester W.] Nimitz? MATHEWS: Oh, yes, my goodness; there were a whole series of people and, you know, this was part of it: if you just find the right guy who had the prestige and the wisdom, maybe you could find the way out. Admiral Nimitz did wonders with this. It's hard, you forget names, but there was a fellow [Dr. Frank Porter Graham] from North Carolina who was involved before Nimitz, I think. Anyway, there was a succession of really outstanding people who took on the job of the sort of Kashmir representative, and, ah, the frustrations they experienced. MCKINZIE: They actually sent some people into the field a few times, as I recall, didn't they? MATHEWS: Oh yes, yes. Nimitz and this other fellow, whose name just won't come to mind, went out, and the people from the State Department went with them and just talked with the parties and talked with the people in Kashmir. And most all of this was under U.N., but we were playing a very, very active role. The Kashmir dispute came up for discussion in the Security Council quite often, and I was shuttling back and forth between New York and Washington fairly often in those days, to be up there sitting with our delegation when Kashmir was discussed. MCKINZIE: I wonder if you could talk for a little bit about how the posture of the State Department changed, and maybe even the tactics, when some crisis events occurred -- when, for example, China fell and then, subsequently, when the Korean war began. This would have seemed to have made the area considerably more sensitive than it was in 1947, when you came back -- certainly more sensitive than it was after independence and after partition. Do you remember anything particular about changes, or... MATHEWS: Well, this really gets at the way the Department and the Government was structured for the operation of foreign affairs and foreign policy. You see, I had come into the Department from Nicaragua in early '43 and served for over a year before going out to Afghanistan. And the impression I had while I was in the Department -- and I took it away with me -- was one of utter chaos. In other words, my view was that if the whole government was running this way, we couldn't possibly win the war, because you had intrigues and backbiting, and nobody knew really where they stood. This was Franklin Roosevelt's way of operating. Now, let me just skip over when I came back from India, and then after I had my stint in the Department on South Asia, I went abroad again. The next time I came back was in the Dulles era, and you had not the same sort of thing that prevailed in the Franklin Roosevelt time, but a general feeling around the Department that, you know, you weren't involved. Now I come back to how the Department operated in the days of Truman and Acheson -- well, first [George C.] Marshall. Marshall was still Secretary of State when I came back, but not for very long, and then Dean Acheson took over. You had a real understanding and meaning about this between the President and Secretary of State. In both cases -- but, I think, more so in Acheson's case -- you had a Secretary of State who was not afraid of the staff. It may seem an odd way to put it, but I think it's a fair way to put it. And you always had the feeling in those days that, as a member of the staff in the Department, you were called in and you talked with the Secretary and the other senior people before they made up their minds. Now, they might not accept what you had to offer, but at least you came away with a feeling that they seriously considered it before they had made up their minds what they were going to do, and that if you had a good case, you really had a pretty good chance of getting it across. Now, with that kind of an atmosphere prevailing within the Department, when crises developed you didn't have to go through all the rigamarole that developed later. The fall of China, I would say, caused a flap, and Walt [W. Walton] Butterworth there had to be shifted out of the Far Eastern office and replaced by Dean Rusk. There was a flap over getting out the White Paper on China, but this was not a crisis in the sense of the Korean war or some of the other things that have happened since. So, you know, they obviously had to set up a task force to produce the White Paper and that sort of thing, but I would say that from where I sat -- and bear in mind I was not directly involved in any of this, I knew the people involved -- I did hear of some overflow, but there was surprisingly very little overflow on South Asia. You were asking how much impact this had, and let me deal with that quickly. It didn't have a lot of impact. We used to sort of have to push to get an input -- not because anybody was trying to keep us out, but there was not a feeling that, in this particular context, what South Asia was thinking at the moment made all that much difference. But we always got a hearing; in other words, we would go and say, "Look, if you're going to do this about the Chinese, for God's sake remember the Indians feel this way about it." And this was listened to, and quite often what we did was illiterate in the light of that. But now, when it came to the Korean war, that was different -- but again it was handled basically within the framework of the Department. There was Alex [U. Alexis] Johnson, who was then my counterpart in North Asia; he was the office director for Korea and Japan. There were task forces set up, and, you know, there were lots of liaison with the Pentagon and all sorts of things, but basically all of this was structured under Alex. Now, this is, of course, where Alex took off. MCKINZIE: Right. MATHEWS: And that's the way it operated in those days, so that, you know, you didn't have the WASAG [Washington Action Group] sitting off in the White House, setting up special committees to deal with these things; it was done in the State Department. It was controlled by the Secretary of State, and obviously, from where I sit, these were the "days of yore" when everything was golden. MCKINZIE: All right. Periodically, there'd be a sort of "temperature-taking" of the state of the world done by the National Security Council or done by some special task force. Do you recall any of those coming around and having to educate people? In fact, the Policy Planning Staff came into existence about the time you came back. On this subject of organization -- and you're talking about Acheson having a pretty good feel for this -- did you have inputs for things like that when you thought it was needed? MATHEWS: Yes, we used to meet. In other words, the Policy Planning Staff had regular arrangements to meet with the operating offices -- you know, not often, because they couldn't, but they did get around. I would guess that, oh, we in South Asia met with them two or three times in the course of two or three years, which was enough. And then we were sometimes called upon for an input in a specific problem. But at that time, the Policy Planning Staff was focusing very largely on, first, Europe, and then after Korea, obviously, on the Far East. So, they weren't really all that much interested in what we were doing in South Asia -- you know, interested, but not as a current preoccupation, and not as something that they felt they had time to hive off some people and carry on long-range studies on. You know, the Policy Planning Staff was pretty small in those days, which had many virtues. But it did mean that there were only so many things they could do. Now, as far as the NSC structure, which did come into being in Truman's time, I don't recall any significant impact of the NSC operation on us in South Asia in those days. But I think the reason for this was that the initial and proper focus of the NSC structure was on much broader considerations -- in other words, you know, our overall position in the world rather than looking at it area by area. That came later and was really developed in Eisenhower's time. So, as I say, we knew there was an NSC structure in the process of formation, but it had very little impact on those of us who were working in South Asia, or for that matter, any place in the Near East. Oh, I take that back; I think that the Near Eastern people may have had more contact with it than we did. But you know, in a sense, NSC had not got around to South Asia. MCKINZIE: Right. You were still working there when Prime Minister Nehru came to the United States, and I wonder if I could ask you to discuss that? MATHEWS: Well, one of the problems we had in our relation with India was that there were many, many evidences that Nehru did not like the United States and, by and large, did not like Americans. There were some exceptions to this; there were some Americans he liked very much. And it occurred to some of us, around 1948, that he had never been in the United States and maybe the thing to do was to get him over here on a State visit and let him travel around the country; maybe what he saw would mellow him. So, we floated this idea through the bureaucracy, and it found favor. In due course, Nehru was invited and a mutually satisfactory date was found; and all of this took an interminable amount of nonsense, but it was done, and he came. I can't for the life remember which year it was; I think it was '49. Well, when it was agreed that he was coming and we started the planning for the visit -- he had written a book called The Discovery of India -- we decided that the theme of his visit was going to be "the discovery of America." He had never been here before, we were going to open the doors to him; he could go around and see what he wanted to see and learn about this country. And so much of what we organized, the statements we prepared and all that sort of thing, dealt with this theme. And Truman was just magnificent at the arrival. I don't know; the whole thing seemed to catch his imagination, and he gave his little welcoming address out at the airport and said that our guest has come for a discovery of America, and there was such genuine feeling in all of this that this was the height of the visit. He had broken through, and Nehru was obviously touched; and Nehru's response to that welcome was warm and friendly, so we all though, "Gee whiz, we're off to a good start." It went rapidly down hill. MCKINZIE: What do you mean? MATHEWS: Well, basically, what we didn't realize -- but certainly realized after that visit -- was that Nehru's anti-Americanism was so deep-seated that there was nothing that would really shift it. During his travels around the country, he saw the things that he didn't like and he didn't see the things that he might have liked. There were things that happened. Acheson gave a magnificent dinner for Nehru at Anderson House; this was before they had the facilities in the State Department for that kind of thing. And Nehru had brought Indira Gandhi with him as his hostess -- daughter. Well, daughter was seated -- I don't know, it struck me at the time she should have been higher up the table than she was -- down the table. It was a horseshoe table, and, of course, the inside seats of the horseshoe are way, way down. So I was way, way down, but I was sitting almost directly opposite Indira Gandhi, who was on the outside, which was highranking. Well, unfortunately, a little late and obviously having stopped somewhere for more than one or two bourbons and branchwater, John Snyder rolls in and sits down about three seats from Indira. I'm not sure whether he realized that Indira was there. Well, he sure as hell didn't know who Indira was and at that point didn't care, and he started talking about these foreigners who come over here and take our money away from us. And, of course, I was sitting on the other side, and it was either Dean Acheson's daughter or his daughter-in-law sitting next to me. And we did our best to sort of shout him down. And you know, he finally stopped because he'd lost interest in it, but anyway, Indira Gandhi was sitting there just seething -- and you know, she had every right to be. Now, she didn't like us either, but that didn't help. Well, anyway, it was that which she obviously reported to father in spades and with embellishment. Then, there was another kind of incident that Nehru frequently referred to afterwards as some indication of how gross and materialistic the Americans really were. It was during his New York stay; the big banks had got a lot of industrialists and people together who might be interested in investing in India, to eat with the Prime Minister and hear a little comment from him. Well, somebody said to the Prime Minister, while they were talking before the dinner, you know, "You realize, Mr. Prime Minister, that the people in this room represent 'x' millions of dollars." You know, it's not an unnatural thing to say -- it was true; it was, as a matter of fact, the way it was. Well, anyway, this just proved that the Americans always thought in terms of money and had no spiritual content at all. Well, in a word, the trip was not a success. He went home with no warmer feelings or better understanding of the United States than he had before. I think that the trip may have had some minor payoff in terms of impact on other Indian officials who understood what we were trying to do and who were sympathetic -- and we may, as I say, have got some minor payoffs, you know, but what we were aiming at was to soften Nehru, and that just didn't work. And he never did lose his sense of almost contempt for Americans and the United States, and, unfortunately, his daughter's got the same attitude. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I don't think they really belong here. MCKINZIE: If there's a contributing aspect to it in this period, I think it is relevant. MATHEWS: Well, there are a whole series of things. After the visit, I had sorted out my bruises and tried to figure out why, or what the problem was. Nehru was a Kashmiri Brahman, and Brahmans in India are not really democrats. You know, I'm not saying that Nehru was insincere in what he was trying to do with India; I'm just saying that as a person, with his cultural background, democracy is really repulsive to him, because a Brahman is a very special person who is far above the rank and file. He studied in England at a time of intensive anti-Americanism on the left and [Rt. Hon. Edward Richard George] Heath; that was the group he moved with. He was a Socialist; the United States was the grossest kind of primitive capitalism. I've sort of forgotten; I used to be able to sort of tick these all off. But in other words, it was this kind of thing; he was conditioned by a whole lot of influences that were indigenous in his own culture or that he picked up from the British; it was just almost impossible for him to take an objective look at the United States. Every time he looked at the United States, all of these stereotypes that he had acquired or these perceptions that grew out of his own cultural background just came down like a veil between himself and the United States. And we never did break through; I just don't think there was any way we could have broken through. MCKINZIE: You alluded earlier to the way diplomacy works, or the way diplomacy should work -- that you don't always wait until a crisis comes to deal with the top man; you find someone in the other government who has, for his own reasons, a desire to do this or that. Could you talk about second-echelon people in the Indian Government? They were, by and large, as I understand it, trained by the British, and some of them were extremely high quality civil servants. Did you find that to be true, that they were administratively competent men? MATHEWS: Yes, there were many highly competent people in the Indian civil service and in the diplomatic service. Of course, a good bit of the time that I was involved at this end, Nehru's sister was the Ambassador here -- Madam Pandit, or Mrs. [Vijaya Lakshmi] Pandit. She never liked to be called Madam; I don't know why. One time, I remember, she gave me hell for that. MCKINZIE: You mean pointedly? MATHEWS: Oh, yes, not publicly, but I went to see her for something and I said, "Madam Pandit," and she said, "Why do you call me Madam? I'm Mrs. Pandit." Well, of course, this all went back to Madam Chiang Kai-shek, and we got in the habit of calling foreign women who came in an official capacity "Madam" for some damn reason. I think she was aware of this, and since she didn't like Madam Chiang Kai-shek one bit, she didn't like to be called Madam. Well, unfortunately, Mrs. Pandit had exactly the same attitude as her brother and her niece, so that she was, by no means, the ideal Indian Ambassador in Washington, and she was very difficult to deal with. But she had some outstanding people on her staff. There was B.R. Sen, and I guess actually B.R. was here before Mrs. Pandit came. B.R. Sen subsequently became head of the World Food Organization, I guess it was. And then there was B.K. Nehru, who was the financial counselor and subsequently came back here as Ambassador, and who was really a tremendously able guy and a very perceptive guy. He was here when we were working on the food grain bill, and the day after Prime Minister Nehru pulled the rug out from under us, B.K. came in to see me and sort of looked around the corner of my door and said, "Will you let me in?" Well, he came and sat down and looked at me and shook his head, "I don't suppose you'll ever try to help any of India again." But, anyway, in terms of your original question, there was tremendous ability there. MCKINZIE: What about the Pakistanis, now? MATHEWS: The Pakistanis also had a number of very, very able people -- not as many as the Indians, because there weren't as many Pakistanis. And moreover, you know, there was the old history that it was the Indians, the Hindus, who first reacted to the opportunities of the British rule in trying to get educated and getting into the government machinery, even at a fairly low level. Muslims were much later than that, so that there just weren't as many. But I would say that of the really top-notch people on both sides, the Pakistanis were by no means at a disadvantage. In other words, there were people like Mohammed Ali, who was sort of the top civil servant in the early days of the Pakistan independence and who subsequently became politicized and was, for a while, Prime Minister -- a highly competent man in any system. I remember there were a lot of others, but they were spread thin. Of course, the Indians are spread thin, too, but the Pakistanis were worse off than the Indians. MCKINZIE: In 1951 you went to the field again and to Istanbul. Is it a post you chose? MATHEWS: Yes. Yes, I could have gone elsewhere, if I had wanted to, but I liked the idea. MCKINZIE: It's a little bit different from what you'd been dealing with for the last ten to twenty years. MATHEWS: Yes, this was part of it. I thought that it was time to get off somewhere else. I didn't want to go to South Asia; I'd had seven years of South Asia in a row, and that was probably enough for awhile. I expected to go back; I never did, but that's another story. So, there was an opening in Istanbul. MCKINZIE: Did you know Ambassador [George C.] McGhee? MATHEWS: Well, of course, yes; he had been the Assistant Secretary. Although the odd thing was that when I accepted the assignment and even when I first went out, I didn't know he was going to come to Turkey as Ambassador. I'm not sure at that point he did either; he may have. But I was surprised when he did subsequently come out, because when I went out George Wadsworth was still Ambassador. But it had always been an interesting post, and there were circumstances that made it even more attractive at that particular time than it had been in the past, so I was pleased to go. Then problems did develop and I didn't stay very long. MCKINZIE: You went, though, at a time when the United State had an incredibly large investment in Turkey. For so long there had been very little, and with the Greek-Turkish aid program, of course, in '47, and then subsequently this Turkish rearmament and military assistance thing, I think maybe there was upwards of five or six hundred million dollars in the area. This must have been unlike any post you had ever been before in terms of the activities of the... MATHEWS: Well, it was certainly unlike any post I had, but not quite in the way that you are suggesting. You see, most of the activity that you're talking about was focused in Ankara or in the NATO headquarters down at Ismir, and in Istanbul there was relatively little of this. In other words, attached to the consulate general was a branch of the military attache's office in Ankara, and we had a lieutenant colonel and a couple of other officers and several enlisted men. There were a few -- I guess it was still ICA [International Cooperation Administration] in those days, or ECA [Economic Cooperation Administration], or something -- aid people in the Istanbul area, but very few, because most of the aid effort was out in the hinterland. So, except for the fact that Istanbul has always been a hotbed of political development in Turkey, and, therefore, we did have a reporting responsibility on political developments in Istanbul, which we fed into the Embassy, it was not all that different from any other consulate general. I had sort of a semi-country team; I'd get the top aid man in and the military type, and we'd meet maybe once a month, something like that, just to make sure that we all knew what was going on. But it was not the impact that you obviously thought there was. MCKINZIE: No, obviously not. MATHEWS: No. As I say, because of the nature of the Turkish Government and the nature of the things we were trying to do in Turkey, all of this was really focused away from the city. You know, you were training the troops out in the godforsaken Anatolian Plains, so that there just wasnt that much overflow in Istanbul. MCKINZIE: I'm not sure my next question is appropriate, then. There is a lot of talk in some European capitals about the "Americanization" of this or that country as the result of American aid efforts -- I don't mean that in the majority, in any sense. But it would appear that much of the Americanization which may have resulted would have occurred in the hinterlands, or in Ankara, or in the areas around the military bases, rather than in Istanbul, maybe. Could you see the result of American aid, and what forms did it take in Istanbul?' MATHEWS: No, not in Istanbul. And I would judge, you know, not really all that much in the rest of Turkey either. I think the Turks are perhaps the special case here. One may not turn down the other one. We thought they were for awhile or some of us thought that they were. I began to wonder about this in my very short time there, because you didn't deal with Turks very long before you realized that, boy, they were really steel underneath -- at least in Istanbul, a great deal of suave manners. In other words, you know, Istanbulis are the inheritors of a very, very long tradition that goes back to Byzantine times, and a cultured, sophisticated, upper class Istanbuli Turk is one of the most charming people you'd hope to meet anywhere; but don't cross him. So, anyway, you know, they've got a tradition of dealing with foreign influences that goes back a long way, and it struck me that one could see, in a fair number of Turks, a certain rubbing off of German influences, going back to these older Turks who dealt with the Germans in World War I times. But, you know, I don't really think that there was all that much, other than superficial, impact on Turks by our efforts. Now, don't misunderstand me; I think an awful lot of Turkish military officers learned an awful lot about military tactics and that sort of thing from us. But in terms of turning Turks into something resembling Americans, no. Again, superficially you might, you know; there might be more of them drinking Coca-Cola than used to, but that's not really important. You know, it's been a long time since I was there, and I've not been back, but I've talked with people that have been there. I occasionally run into Turks. A Turk's still a Turk, and they survived the American invasion pretty well. MCKINZIE: This post which you began in 1951 would have carried you through the end of the Truman years on into the Dulles period, but it was a short post for you. Did you come back to the Department before... MATHEWS: Well, I did afterwards. In other words, I went from Istanbul to London to attend the Imperial Defence College, and after a year there I went to Norway for a year and then came back into Dulles' Department in '55. MCKINZIE: What is the Imperial Defence College? MATHEWS: It's the British equivalent of our National War College. MCKINZIE: And how does one get the opportunity to do that? MATHEWS: You're lucky. No, I'm not quite sure how it works now, but at that time the British invited one State Department representative and one representative of our three military services each year, and I was chosen that particular year, a very interesting and very pleasant year. MCKINZIE: Did it help you in understanding British policy? MATHEWS: Oh, yes. Yes. MCKINZIE: Was there at that time, what some historians have referred to as a special relationship... MATHEWS: With the British? MCKINZIE: With the British, yes. MATHEWS: Yes, there was, and John Foster Dulles and Herbert Hoover did their best to break it up. MCKINZIE: You did feel this? MATHEWS: Oh yes. In other words, it was a difficult relationship, because the British were on the way down. This was quite apparent; it was apparent to them, although they just wanted to push it away. See, in '53, when I was at the Imperial Defence College, the full impact of the war was not apparent, and, you know, it was the fiasco over Suez that really made it clear that the British day was over. But I became aware, while I was at the IDC, that to the extent the British still had ambitions to exercise influence outside their own bailiwick, it was in the Near East; this was the one area where they still felt that they really had a responsibility to do something. And I felt it was highly desirable to keep them in that frame of mind, that this is a damn difficult area; they knew a lot about it, and we were learning. As we since found out, it's not an area where you want to be on your own in -- as we damn well near are right now. So, I came back feeling very strongly that, certainly, we ought to do anything that we could to keep the British concerned and involved in the Near East. And one of the first things that happened after I got back here was a meeting of some departmental people with some of the people in the Pentagon -- the basic State Department foreign office -- on the Near East, in which it seemed to me that our position was just making the British think that they couldn't look to us for any help or support whatsoever. And I went to one of the senior officers in this Department there and said, "Look, this is what it seems to me you're doing."
And, in effect, I was told to mind my own business, because this was clearly the way the Secretary wanted to play it. And so I'm sure the British went home from that meeting very unhappy, very uncertain as to where they stood with us in terms of the Middle East and the Near East. And, you know, our relations with respect to the Middle East went from bad to worse, which I think was a great misfortune. Now, of course, the British don't really accept any responsibility. [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Acheson, Dean, 50, 58 Butterworth, W. Walton, 50, 51 China, "White Paper" on, 51 Dulles, John Foster, 75 Engert, Cornelius Van H., 7-8 Foreign Service, establishment of, 1 Gandhi, Indira, 58-59 Hoover, Herbert, 75 India: Johnson, U. Alexis, 52 McGhee, George C., 68 National Security Council, 54-55
[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
|
