317. Letter From the Secretary of State to the President’s Special Assistant (Stassen)1
Dear Harold: I have your memorandum of December 23.2 I am sorry that the matter of your May 31 memorandum to Zorin came up at my background press conference. What I said, however, could have been no surprise to you. You will recall that I cabled you on June 4, “I feel your memorandum to Soviet Delegation of May 31 exceeded your authority both as to substance and procedure”;3 and later the same day I sent you, with the personal approval of the President, the instruction [Page 782] to “notify Mr. Zorin at the earliest possible moment that the memorandum you submitted to him was not only informal and unofficial, but had no approval in its submitted form either by the President or the State Department, and that there are some aspects of the memorandum to which this government cannot agree at this moment. Therefore you will request that Mr. Zorin return the memorandum”.4
Under these circumstances, I could hardly have answered affirmatively the question of “whether this memorandum was representative of the views of the American Government”.
I might say that the view that your memorandum exceeded your authority both as to substance and procedure was concurred in at the time by both the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission.
Sincerely yours,
- Source: Department of State, Central Files, 600.0012/12–2457. Secret.↩
- Supra.↩
- See Document 222.↩
- See Document 223.↩
- Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.↩