John M. Steeves Oral History Interview—JFK #1, 9/5/1969 Administrative Information

Creator: John M. Steeves Interviewer: Dennis J. O’Brien Date of Interview: September 5, 1969 Location: Washington, D.C. Length: 53 pages

Biographical Note John M. Steeves (1905 - 1998) was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (1959-1962); the Ambassador to Afghanistan (1962-1966); and the Director General of the Foreign Service (1966-1969). This interview focuses on Steeves’ many roles within the Foreign Service, comparisons between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations in regards to Southeast Asia, and Steeves’ concerns with American foreign policy, among other issues.

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Transcript of Oral History Interview These electronic documents were created from transcripts available in the research room of the John F. Kennedy Library. The transcripts were scanned using optical character recognition and the resulting text files were proofread against the original transcripts. Some formatting changes were made. Page numbers are noted where they would have occurred at the bottoms of the pages of the original transcripts. If researchers have any concerns about accuracy, they are encouraged to visit the library and consult the transcripts and the interview recordings.

Suggested Citation Steeves, John M., recorded interview by Dennis J. O’Brien, on September 5, 1969, (page number), John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.

CE:reRAL SERVICES AD:/,I~ISTAATION l:O'.TIONAL ARCHIVES A~'D RECORDS SERVICE

Gift of Personal Staterr.ent

ay Jo!"in J.1 . Steeves

to the

JOHN F . I

I, John M. steeves of 1·:asni!1gton, D . c . , do hereby give to t11c John !". Kennedy Library, :'or use and administra­ cion Lherein, all my rights , title and interest , except as hereinafter proviclod , to the t<&pe recordings and tr;:mscript of che interview:; conducted at Washington, D . C . , on Septem­ ber S, 1969 and June 17 , 1970, for tne John F . Kennedy Library. The gift of this material is made subject to the following terms and conditions:

1 . The interviews are to he closed to general re­ search until July 30 , 1991 .

2 . Researchers who have access to the transcript o:: the Jn terviews may listen to the tapes; however, this is to be for background use only. Researchers may not cite, paraphrase or quote from che tapes .

3 . l 1'1crcby assign literary property rights in the intervi~'"s to the Uni led States Governm~nt .

4 . A ft.er July 30, l 5191, copies of the interview transcript may be provided only to researchers acLually pre­ senting themselves at the Kennedy Library.

5 . This agreement may be revi.scd or amen<:led by mutual conscnL of the parties undersigned .

__ 4:_~__ _<1-.~v-- ,~/-3--KJ.~.,~ (6 1 ,M . Steeves Arc~ivist of the Un,it;;ed States

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• John M. Steeves—JFK #1 Table of Contents

Page Topic 1 Steeves’ various roles within the Foreign Service 2 Commander-in-chief, Pacific (CINCPAC)’s Far East policy 3 Steeves on the “neutralization” of Laos 5 Prominent role of Assistant Secretary of State Walter S. Robertson 11 Relationship between the CIA and Far East Bureau 14 Steeves on the disinterest of President Eisenhower in regards to Southeast Asia 15 Vietnam as top priority for the Department of State 18 On J. Graham Parsons as ambassador to Laos 20 Steeves’ on the foreign policy weaknesses of the US 26 Differences in policy of the Department of State and Ambassador to Laos 28 Secretary Rusk’s concerns in Southeast Asia 31 Steeves’ first meeting John F. Kennedy (JFK) 34 Steeves’ condemnation of the gradual response doctrine in Vietnam 38 Tensions between Steeves and Averell Harriman 41 Conflict between Soviet Union and China 49 Steeves’ admiration for Secretary Rusk

·{

Oral History Interview

with

JOHN M. m'EEVES

September 5, 1969 Washington, D.C.

By Denni s J. O'Brien

For the John F. Kennedy Li brary

o' BRIEN: I thi nk it would be well worthwhile if we could go into some of the ideas and attitudes and people that were involved in Far East policy in the late fi~ies to get some perspective on developments that were taking place in that time. Then I think, perhaps, it might be well worth­ while to go into some of your background. You were with ( CINCPAC LCommander-in-Chief, Pacifii] for a while, weren't you, as a political-military advisor?

STEEVES: Yes, that was one of my incarnations. A rather unusual thing about my career in the Foreign Service is that I spent nearly ten years of it very closely associated with the military in one way or another. I opened the office of the political advisor down in Okinawa under-­ the Ryukyus Command. But even before that, I was the head of the embassy side of the Joint Embassy Far Eastern Command Team following the return of independence to Japan. General Charles Lawton was in charge of the Far Eastern command side. He later went to Korea. Then I went to Indonesia for a brief period, but when I came back from that, I went to the Ryukyu Islands. Following that, I went to CINCPAC to open the first office of the political advisor there when they made a joint command eut of that, when Admiral '[Felix BJ stump was named as unified Commander of the entire Pacific area with headq~ers in Honolulu. We had the four services there, then the joint command over the whole thing.

O'BRIEN: Well;.: what ·'.:; is . the2thinki.ng on the part of the people in CINCPAC during this time towards Southeast Asia, particularly towards a place like Laos?

STEEVES: It's kind of ha.rd to generalize, but I think that I -2-

can because there wa.s a common denominator, thread, that ran through the minds of certainly all the military people and was shared by quite a few of us that were closely associated with the military: that in meeting the challenge of aggressive communi sm in that part of As ia in those days, that it needed to be stopped. Now, that could be expressed in many, many di fferent wa.ys, but some of them were, of course, of the type that were the "draw the l ine boys." 'Step over that line and you get clobbered. 11 There was the other variety that took the saner view that you resisted aggressive tactics no matter where i t came about, but it wasn't a case of stepping over lines and all the rest of it: Where the challenge was, there you met it.

So I think that by pi cking your way through all of those policies, the one that received the most support in council is the thread that ran through all of CINCPAC' s thinking and that was : "So they are s bowing their hand in Laos , meet it in Laos. It' s not a very convenient place to fight, but the communists don't pick convenient places or times in order to f i ght. But don't allow them to get away with it. If you stop it in Laos, you may not have to face it in other parts of Southeast Asia later. 11

( I noticed the other day that somebody got a hold of a classi fied quote out of one of my papers somewhere. Where he got it I don't know, but he quite accurately quoted me saying in a policy paper I wa.s writing at t hat time--in fact, I guess this was af'ter I came back from CINCPAC and Hong Kong, when I was in the Department as the deputy Assistant Secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs--that if we don't live up to our responsibilities and commitments in Laos today, that we will face it tomorrow in Vietnam, and it will make our experience in Laos look like a Sunday school picni c. It turned out to be somewhat prophetic.

O'BRIEN: Are you thinking at this time of aggression in terms of Korean type aggression?

STEEVES: No. You see, this is quite a different pattern. In Korea they came across i n force . in more of a traditional type of a land mass action, mass troops. And as you will remember, in Korea that type of tactic got them all the way down to the perimeter of the last city in the toe of Korea before they were finally turned back.

In Laos and Southeast Asia--in fact in Vietnam at the present time, just in a more intense way--they're following out the communist tactic that Mao Tse-tung once upon a time said: "Efforts of this nature are somewhat like the fish in -3-

the sea, they never have a front." You're never going in any direct direction, you infiltrate. Wars of national liberation are largely fought that way. You mix yourself' in the medium of the country or the various media in the country wherever it may be. You pick a person off here; you assassinate an individual there; you infiltrate and influence a group there; but there's no defined line where you can get at them. And that's the type of operation that we have faced in Southeast Asia, and, of course, the most difficult one for us to face.

O'BRIEN: Well, the military people, in your association with them in CINCPAC, was there an awareness at that time of the nature of what was going on in Laos and Vietnam in '59 and--well, of course that's a little early-- but this type of war of national liberation?

STEEVES: I think there was. You have to think in terms of some of the types of operations that were going on and what they would have done if they had. had their druthers. The Pathet Lao, for instance: When the Pathet Lao, which is a communist group within Laos, in conjunction and. with assistance from North Vietnamese regulars, when they would come in in force and take over an area like the Plaine des Jarres, then I think that the military took the viewpoint that if they had to be bombed out of an area of that nature, you did it, and to issue t hem a pretty stern warning that this is what they would meet.

Under the SEATO LSoutheast Asia Treaty Organizatio!il treaty we have always referred to Laos, cambodia, a.nd Vietnam as the protocol states. Although they were not part of the SEATO arrangement, they were covered under the SEATO umbrella, and whatever responsibility we had, we assumed that it would mean our involvement if aggression took place in those areas. Therefore, at one particular critical time when the Soviets tested us to see whether or not we meant what we were saying or not and began to supply the rebels openly during a period when they were in control of the Vientiane airport, the military people and those that took a rather strict interpretation of our responsibilities said what you ought to do is shoot the Soviet planes out of the air, and this would have settled that. The Soviets would have said, "Whoops! I guess we went a little bit too far. These people really mean what they say with respect to guaranteeing the national integrity of Laos," and they (the Soviets) probably would have backed out. When we did nothing, that kept them coming.

And this is eventually, of course, what ended up in the so-ca.lled neutralization of Laos. And I ca.11 it "so-ca.lled" because we got nothing out of that whatsoever. And this is a position I :fought very bitterly in the Department. All tM -4-

way through we were knuckling under to the French and the British and to some of our own people in going to a conference table where we had no position to protect. And consequently, we didn't protect it.

There was a joke that went around about that time where the expressi on was coined of "Cave with Ave." Averell Harriman was sent over to get some kind of an agreement out of Geneva, and to him, the agreement was the objective and the goal and he could care less what you got out of it. Well, what we did get out of it was nothi ng. All we did was to tie our independence of action, tie our hands and brought about the so-called neutral­ ization of Laos. But it was only neutral to us; it wasn't neutral to the other fellows at all. They stayed right in there, never took a man out, and then, of course, they have used that as a club over our heads in keeping us from doing anything in Laos at the present time, because they said, "You agreed in Geneva to stay out of there. "

O'BRIEN: Was there a good deal of optimism on the part--I'm talking about, well, both military and people in the state Department involved in policy towards Southeast Asia--was there a good deal of optimism in 1959 and 1960 in regard to the ability of Laos and, well, the ability of South Vietnam to withstand the kind of aggression that they were at this point, beginning to experience from North Vietnam.

STEEVES: There was no optimism that the Lao themselves could accomplish it. The question really faced us then, that later on faced us in a much larger way in Vietnam, that without the interference of people from the out­ side and the assistance of people from the outside, the Lao would not be able to do it themselves for very many of the same reasons that we now ascribe to the South Vietnamese: lack of purpose, lack of unity, their sense of nationhood hadn't developed that far. So we used to sit down at the numbers game to figure out how many Thais, how many Americans, how many Paks,--the Pakistanis were in in those days, too. They offered a complete division to help out in Laos, under the SEATO treaty, if we could fly them in. We decided not to. The British and the French very early showed their hands in indicating that they would not contribute a thing. So it was a case of the Thais and ourselves and the Australians and the Pakistanis if anything were to be done. It seems rd.diculously small numbers now, but at one time we were trying to raise thirteen thousand men to put into Laos to discourage the aggressive tactics of the North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao.

O'BRIEN: This must have been about 1961 or '6o? I • -5-

STEEVES: That must have been in 1959.

O'BRIEN: In '59? That early? On the part of mi litary people and their vi ews towards the L_Dwight D.:J'Eisenhower Administration at this point--of course there'd been a rather large cutback in, well, army and Marine Corps particularly, a good deal of emphasis on the Air Force--was there some feeling of frustration here in regard to the ability to raise the troops ?

STEEVES: There was, but I can tell you a very interesting thing that happened during that particular period-­ it was either late in 1959 or early in 1960; let me see, the Kennedy Administration took over in early 1 61, then i t must have been late 1 6o and early ~61, because it was the transfer between Eisenhower and Kennedy--to show you the type of difficulties we got into. Kennedy pretty much made up his mind, after a number of these bull sessions we were having, on what to do in Southeast Asia. He'd almost ma.de up his mind to commit American troops in small numbers and to put an air­ lift in if the Thais would contribute--they said they would and all the rest of it.

( We were having a meeting with the military people one morning, presumably to acquiesce to their feeling that we ought to go in and do somethin~, and Kennedy himself, personally, in questioning General [Lyma;n L;/ Lemnitzer and General {fteorge H;/ Decker discovered that they themselves were not aware of the flaws in their own plans. Such things as they had overestimated the capacity of the Vientiane field to land troops. And Kennedy said, "Well gentlemen, if you know no more about a plan that you' re trying to sell me than that, I'll have nothing to do with it. " And that was what put the quietus at that moment on any active intervention on our part, militarily, in Laos.

O'BRIEN: Let's backtrack just a minute. Would you say that your views were, at this point, in tune. Well, let's say from the time that you assumed the position of deputy Assistant Secretary, are your views in tune, let' s say, with those of the Department. Let' s take a couple people, perhaps Secretary {John FosteiJ Dulles and Assistant Secretary /jlalteiJ Robertson, would you say that there's a. •

STEEVES: Yes. I think that, to generalize again, that if I were to pick a person within the Department whose viewpoints on Asia, at that time, I'd pretty much agreed with it would be with Walter Robertson. C. I have always felt that that was a critical period for the

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stabilization of the situation in Asia. It was going through a period of flux af'ter the departure of the colonial masters and all the rest of it, and the communists would have made a great deal of progress through all of those weak, independent countri es i f they had not been challenged at all. And I think that even today, although our operations were not perfect by any means, that a combination of even weak mil i tary aid, economic aid, and the policy we followed of the containment of communism in that part of Asia has essentially paid off. I think if we had not even made those feeble efforts, that today we would see a far different situation in Indonesia, in Thailand, in Japan, in Korea, and everywhere.

Now, we may not have gone as far or as fast as some of us thought that we ought to at that time. For instance, I was very much of the opinion that we ought to meet a threat with some pretty drastic action in Laos. There were a lot of people that did not agree with me. As I've just told you, the way the thing reaJJ.y fell down was the military people themselves, af'ter espousing a policy, weren't ready to carry it out.

O'BRIEN: Well, keeping on Assistant Secretary Robertson at this point, what kind of person is he? What made ( him tick? STEEVES: Robertson, to begin with, is politically a conserva­ tive. He is a very die-hard, dedicated, anti­ communist. He is probabzy an extreme in that view. Walter Robertson simply won't bend on anything. He wouldn't even discuss policies that some of the rest of us would have been willing to toy with as theories.

For instance, I was always willing to explore the possi­ bility of us one day arriving at a "two Chinas" policy, at least talk about it. You need to know what your alternatives are going to be, providing the Nationalists never get back to the mainland. Walter Robertson was never even willing to dis­ cuss it. When we later got into the business of allowing Outer Mongolia into the United Nations, Walter was livid, aespite the fact that he was out of the Department. So, as a person, Walter Robertson was a man who came to the conclusion that the o~ way you can treat with coumrunism is to clobber them, and he was quite prepared to do that at any time and any place where you had the opportunity.

His thinking was made o~ the more intense because of his experience with George c. Marshall in China. Marshall, you know, tried to get the Communists and the Nationalists together, and he failed miserabzy. Walter was his chief deputy during that period, and if he ever had any moderate views

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before that, he certai.n]¥ lost them in his period in China . From that time on, he was a sole supporter of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists. He was a person who had the strong vi ew that you could never deal with the Communists on the mainland, neither in the United Nations nor in bi lateral recogniti on or anything of that nature, and I presume that he thinks that t o this very day.

O'BRIEN: He's a rather strong personality.

STEEVES: Oh, very, very, very. In fact, he was a stronger personality on policy so far as Asia was concerned than Dulles himself. He often found himself in a position where he was even having to stiffen Dulles.

O'BRIEN: When di d you first meet him?

STEEVES: Walter Robertson?

O'BRIEN: Yeah .

STEEVES: After he came back from China with the Marshall mission.

O'BRIEN: Are there any people within the Department or the ( military or, let's say in the National Security Council, at this point, that hold a different view, opposing vi ews to those of Robertson? Is there any di fferences, let's say, within the Far East division?

STEEVES: I think there's a wholesale difference of view now.

O'BRIEN: I mean at this point.

STEEVES: Yes . Oh, you mean the time that we're talking a.bout.

O'BRIEN: Yes, in the late fifties.

STEEVES: No, not very many. So far as the policy people were concerned, this was a pretty general}¥ accepted view. Maybe they might not have been as extreme as Walter, but there was no question about following Walter's lead in that type of an attitude. These were days, you must remember, when we felt that we were being actively threatened by a central, monolithic, communist force centered in :r.bscow, before the days when they had any trouble with Peking, and it was just a question as to how fast they would take over all of Asia, all of the Far East, all of the Near East and really threaten our borders if something didn't happen. And it was a. question a.s to whether you wanted to fight them in Asia., or whether you wanted to fight them on the coast of California.. Tfl.is was the simplified -8-

reasoning that people used.

O'BRIEN: Does Robertson dominate, let's say, people like yourself'--of course you come along a~er Robertson leaves, don't you? But before you came, did he dominate the people in the Far East on the policy scene?

STEEVES: Very much so. He was the most dominant voice, policy­ wise, in the Department of state. He was a very forceful individual, a very articulate man, and never any question about what he believed.

O'BRIEN: What's his influence and relation with J. Graham Parsons?

STEEVES: Very great, very great. You see, J. Graham Parsons was Walter Robertson's deputy, and then when Dulles died and Robertson resigned, Parsons stepped up to the Assistant Secretaryship and I came in as his deputy.

O'BRIEN: Does Robertson continue to have an influence a~er his retirement, in a sense, on policy?

STEEVES: Very little, I would say; to oversimplify it, none, because with Robertson, there was then the eclipse ( and the passage of many of those people that either followed his guidance completely or were greatly influenced by him. He used to have people closely associated with him and doing an awful lot of his paper work--like Ruth Bacon.

Now, Ruth Bacon almost "out-Robertsoned" Robertson. She was absolutely inflexible in terms of our dealings on the China policy and the recognition matter in the United Nations. She's a great U.N. expert and knows procedural things up one side and down the other so that she was in a very powerful position to influence--not to carry out the wishes of Robertson. And Robertson, of course, thought that she was akin to Florence Nightingale because she could take care of, in a technical way, so well the things that he wanted to accomplish, which was the non-recognition of Communist China. And she was the one that carried it out.

O'BRIEN: Well, Parsons, though, is pretty much in agreement in his views towards Asia with Robertson, isn't he?

STEEVES: Oh, yes. Jeff and I think very much alike, still, till this day. You see, one thing that you have to remember is that those of us in deputy positions in one thing or another are to some degree--you don't compromise your conscience or anything of that nature--but to some degree : -9-

you ca:rry out the orders of your policy masters. Whereas we might have been willing to discuss some modification of a policy, we wouldn't do it when Robertson was in the chair. But when /jJea:if Rusk was about to come in and when the Kennedy regime was about to sit, we actually sat down and wrote a rationale for policies other than the one that we were following so far as Communist China was concerned, among which was the "two Chinas" theory.

O'BRIEN: I'd like to get into that, deeper into that, a little bit later. Taking Laos as an example, are Parson's views in any way influenced by his experiences there? Of course, this thing with Souvanna Phouma. : People like Bernard Fall and ~ogeiJ Hilsman suggest that Ambassador Parsons never really hits it off very well with Souvanna Phouma and that much of the antagonism toward Souvanna Phouma is the result of this personal kind of antagonism that's there.

STEEVES: I think that's true. They never did like each other very well personal1y, but there was something that came before that out of which the dislike for each other grew. And that was Jeff having the convictions that he did, like many of the rest of us did, that you never could ( deal with the communists by compromising with them because they work on the theory--whether it's a territory or a situation-­ "Let's divide it in half; we'll take my half and you can have your half. But then, immediately a~er the division takes place, they say, "What is mine is mine, and what is yoms is half mine. We'll negotiate for that now." And it was that type of an attitude that Souvanna Phouma was espousing and giving in to his hali'-brother Souphanouvong, who was the negotiator for the Pathet Lao, that made Jeff Parsons take such a strong oppositional view to Souvanna Phouma. He thought that he was being entirely too so~ and unrealistic, as I did, and as everybody else did at that time. Incidentally, jumping from that time to now, Souvanna Phouma has lea:rned his lesson.

O'BRIEN: Yes, I noticed that the other day.

STEEVES: He has discovered that when you get the responsibility finally g6ven to you, you don't deal with those people on that kind of a basis, despite the fact that he tried to force our hands and make us do it at that time.

O'BRIEN: Well, backtracking here, too, there's a good deal of activity by other agencies in a place like Laos. Of course, you have a rather large AID ~gency for International Developmen:!J program going. on there; you E_ave, through the Program Evaluation Office, a kind of MAAG LMilitary Assistant Advisory Groui/ operation going, as well, as I understand .I -10-

it, a lot of CIA [Central Intelligence Agencif act i Tity. What' s the feeling on the part of people in the Department in regard to Far East and their relationship with these operations? First of all, are you aware of the full extent of the involvement, let's say, of an agency like the CIA in--not only in Laos, but let's broaden it out to Cambodia and, perhaps, Singapore and places like this.

STEEVES: We sure were . One of the great problems we had in the-- I have to be kind of fuzzy about rrry dates here, I have to think of people that are associated with it. But anyway, the point is just as valid no matter who was in power. We got into a situation in Laos where it became pretty apparent that the CIA was following one policy and the ambassador another.

O'BRIEN: This was Ambassador {Winthrop G.J Brown? STEEVES: Nope . It was Smith, Horace Smith. Horace Smith got into terrible difficulty with the CIA. ~ote by interviewee: There is a mix-up here. Beginning at this point, statements refer to an episode in Singapore. Before this point one line out of place here because it refers ( to Laos;/ And the CIA, you see, were involved in the recruit­ ment of agents from the Singapore police. They (The Singapore police) actually had two of our CIA fellows in the clink for approximate~ a week before we could spring them by offering to give Lee Kuan Yew a letter of apology. Then somebody stupidly, several years later, when asked about this--in fact, it was only about three years ago--said, "No, we never wrote such a thing. " And when I read it out in Afghanistan I said, Hr.tr God, who in the world ever said that," because I know darn good and well that it was given to him. And the next thing he did was produce the letter •.

O'BRIEN: What's the reaction to this in the Department? For example, I suspect you're in contact with Desmond Fitzgerald, who, as I understand it, the • STEEVES: Oh yes, a very close friend of mine.

O'BRIEN: First of all, as long as we're talking about Fitzgerald, what kind of person is he?

STEEVES: He's dead, you know.

O'BRIEN: Yes . Excuse me, I knew he .was: . f I STEEVES: Des was a wonderful fellow, very bright. He never -ll-

had any use at all for this secretism of CIA. So far as I know, he always played very fair with me. I was the liaison in many ways between the Agency and the Bureau--at least I carried that on the day-to-day business; we had meetings with them a.nd all the rest of it--so that they would often confide things in me, even during the formative period before it went any f'urther, and Des was the fellow that did that. So I had a very high regard for his personal integrity, for his intelligence, and all the rest of it. A fine fellow.

O'BRIEN: In his attitudes, how would you categorize him, let's say using Assistant Secretary Robertson as a kind of.

STEEVES: Much more of a moderate. Much more of a moderate and much more flexible. He believed in the same goals, I'm sure, that Robertson did, but he felt there were other ways of doing it that were just a little bit more subtle than meeting everything with a frontal attack.

O'BRIEN: Can you think of any major instances which he may have, perhaps, opposed or disagreed with some of the dominant attitudes in the State Department--perhaps, ( [f..ssistaniJ Secretary Parsons. STEEVES: Right off, I can't really. No, I can't. As you can imagine, in the rough and tumble of the discussion on what we did about the knotty situation in Laos, there were all kinds of views expressed from day to day, and there were positions explored, whether you believed in them or not, to see if there might be another way out, and you can very easily get yourself tangled up in your memory of how those things went.

For instance, he, naturally, backed the operations of his people in the formation of this junior rightest league that the Phoumi-ites ["Plloumi Nosavai/ were operating. And at times, obviously, we would express doubts as to whether or not Phoumi could carry it off, whether or not it was being counter­ productive; and I'm sure that at times of that nature that Des would probably disagree with that opinion that we might have been expressing.

O'BRIEN: You ever go to a higher level, let's say to the Secretary, in an attempt--well, particularly after this Lee Kuan Yew. incident and some of the problems in Laos--did you ever go in an attempt to check or, in a sense, put the CIA into line?

STEEVES: Oh, yes. And in theory, you see, this is presumably -12-

something that doesn't take place, and it shouldn't take place. A~er the Kennedy letter (of which he issued two) I've forgotten the number of them now, but the Kennedy letter made it patently clear that the ambassador was in charge of his affairs and that included the CIA and every other Depart­ ment operation in his field except in theaters where active military operations were going on and then the comma.nder-in- chief of military operations could report separately, and this was a matter of negotiation rather than clear-cut order under the Kenne dy letter.

I used to take the position then, I took it later as the ambassador and I take it now, that a strong ambassador never needs to have that kind of trouble with the CIA. I dealt with them in Indonesia with the utmost cooperation. I have a very high regard for the team that I had with me up in Afghanistan, no trouble whatsoever.

But using the Afghanistan experience as an example, I went over to the CIA and sat down with the people over there, and I said, "Now listen. Let there be no question about our relationships. There will be no side reporting that I don't know about if I want to know about it, and I will make the decisi on whether or not I want to be le~ out or not for ( obvious reasons. When it comes to the knowledge of agents, I'll make the decision if I want to know the agent's name or whether I don't." And I said, "If I ever catch anybody dis­ obeying that principle, he'll be on the next plane home." They understood it, and I never had anything but the finest of cooperation. I had three different CIA heads, and they're all still very close associates and friends of mine to this day.

O'BRIEN: Was there a good deal of confusion in the policy­ making process in this period of, let's say '59 and 1 60, while you were there as deputy Assistant Secretary? Was there a good deal of conf'usion on the part of lines of authority? Are you suggesting, for example, that the CIA has some activities that they're going on that the Ambassador doesn't know, the Department . •

STEEVES: Yes, and I'll tell where the point is where you get this divergence. It's in what the CIA refer to as the operations. And this was kept so separate that ~ey were even isolated from each other. And you were never sure that one of the Agency representatives coming over and talking to you about country X knew himself what this super secret outfit was doing with respect to operations.

Now, those operations were all supposed to be cleared -13-

with a very, very small, care:f'uD.y held group of panelists chaired in the White Hous e. But in the days when people were busy and details sometimes not taken care of, I fancy that they went along on an operation without the daily check, so that policy makers in the Department of State, even up as high as the Secretary of State, may not have been aware of how far they had gone with some things.

O'BRIEN: Well, when is the point of change in which a more coordinated effort or more coordinated front i s put forward? Do you see this in the Eisenhower Administra­ tion; or does i t come along with the Kennedy Administration, or doe s it ever come?

STEEVES: It came along in the Kennedy Administration. After the Bay of Pi gs and things of that nature, they said, "Let's have no more of this business of divided operations." And this was the father, really, of the Kennedy task force. This didn't work too well, either, for a while because they were too big and they were set up apart from the bureau machinery and were kind of working in the Operations Center, and then we had another type of difficulty. Through that gradually evolved a more powerful ( country director concept, who now has his coordinating group with in the bureau; and within the Department as a whole, it had coordination at the under secretary level.

Now jumping to the present day, this is not working again. You're having colossal conf'usion down in the Department because the SIG ~enior Interdepartmental Grou"fi/ IRG ["""Interdepartmental Regional GrouiJ business is not working. And what you've essentially got, in my opinion, is whatever coordination there is on national security affairs is being coordinated on the National Security Council level in the White House under /Jf.enry A;J Kissinger, rather than in the Department of State, just through sheer necessity.

O'BRIEN: So in a sense it's gone the full circle again?

STEEVES: It's gone the full circle. And if they don't watch this, what will happen is __y;ou'll go back to the old National Security /J,ounciy days when it was so in­ effective under Eisenhower with the OCB, the Coordination Board that became an absolute farce.

O'BRIEN: Well, it's been suggested that the policy directives that were coming out--this is more of a field comment than anything else--that were coming out of Washington looked as if they were written by a good many people, and there

. -·- ... - . ------·- .----~-· . --- -·----~-.. -14-

was some conf'usion as to that. Now

STEEVES: Lowest common denominator of agreement was what the CAB papers always turned out to be.

O'BRIEN: And this is it from the OCB.

STEEVES: Coordinating.

O'BRIEN: Operations Coordinating Board.

STEEVES: Yeah, OCB.

O'BRIEN: Right.

STEEVES: Yeah, OCB. That's right.

O'BRIEN: And it's because of the various agencies and the people that are.

STEEVES: That's right. It became bureaucratized. Chiefs would send their deputies, and they'd sit around for days haggling over words and finally come out with a commonzy agreed--and by the time it came out, the thing was ( either obsolete or obsolescent, and operations had gone on with­ out it.

O'BRIEN: Do you remember any particular decision in regard to Laos--well, any major problem in that period of 1960 and early '61 before the Kennedy Administration comes in where this was particularly in evidence?

STEEVES: It was very much in evidence so far as making up our minds about what we were going to do about Laos. Whatever our big troubles in those days about any­ thing that had to do with Southeast Asia or especially Laos was to some degree a reflection of the disinterest of the President himself and abysmal ignorance. Eisenhower just couldn't care less.

I went over person~ to make a personal presentation to Eisenhower one day. And after I had told the whole horrendous story, with tears in my eyes, darn near, about what had to be done--he was kind of looking out on the rose garden--he turned around and he said, "Ah, that doesn't sound very serious to me." He said, "Why don't you give that guy Souvanna Phouma six thousand dollars and he'll forget it." And as I recollect it, he even mispronounced Souva.nna Phouma' s name. He barely knew who he was. He barely knew what the issue was. And to think that a royal prince that was as deeply involved in his nefarious affairs as Souvanna Phouma. was, a guy that was darn near a -15-

I

millionaire already (that he'd made from profits from fleecing us in the airline and one thing or another), would be even remotely influenced by offering him six thousand dollars.

But that was the period when Andy Goodpaster was really President of the United States. When you couldn't get any sense out of Eisenhower at all or any understanding or get him off the golf course long enough to sign a paper, well, you'd go to Andy Goodpaster, and he somehow or other would get it straightened out. But you can see that any mechanism, like the CX::B in one way or another during those days, was just absolutely a nonentity. They were doing nothing but sitting around in kind of a club discussion.

O' BRIEN: Of course , today, Southeast Asia is of primary importance and in the focus of attention and everything else, but how is it within, let's say the structure of decision-making and foreign policy. Well, first of all, how is it in Far East, at this point, in terms of concern on the part of people like yourself? Of course your interests lie all the way from northern-­ from Japan and Korea down to Burma. I believe Burma is

STEEVES: Yes. Far East goes all the way to Burma.

O'BRIEN: How does places like Laos, problems in Vi etnam rank in importance at this point?

STEEVES: Oh, there's nothing that comes anywhere close in priority to Vietnam. This is not only true in the Far Eastern Bureau, but almost the entire Department; this consumes 75 percent of everybody's time.

O'BRIEN: At this time, 1959 and '6o?

STEEVES: Oh, oh, no. I get mixed up a little bit in this \ historicaJ.. O'BRIEN: Okay;.

STEEVES: Oh, back in 1959. Back in 1959 it was very much of a concern of those of us that were directly dealing with it, but it was not a wide concern of the Department, as a whole. This was a localized affair that we were deeply concerned with, but it was pretty localized.

O'BRIEN: Well, you're drawing most of your ambassadors in these countries from basically the European area, aren't you?

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STEEVES: During that period? O'BRIBN: Yeah. For example, ffrederick E. , JrJ Nolting and Ambassador {Wi lliam c;J Trimble are basica.l.ly people with European experience, aren't they?

STEEVES: Yes, but that was pretty evenly divided. It is true. Parsons we had in Laos a:rter [Charles w;J Yost. And a:rter Parsons we had Horace Smith. Horace Smith is a Far Easterner. Af'ter Horace Smith, we had Win Brown. Af'ter Win Brown . No, I would say they were to a large degree people that were either Far Eastern people or had served in the Far East. And the exception reaJJ.y would be Nolting who was brought in and Trimble whose background had been Germany and. •

O'BRIEN: Well, how do you find an ambassador for a Southeastern nation at this point? How is he chosen?

STEEVES: At that point, back then?

O'BRIEN: Yeah.

( STEEVES: One thing I'm afraid that always had to figure very heavily in getting somebody for Saigon, was somebody that knew the French and knows French. So we had to get people that were fluent in French. That's la.r$ely the reason for Nolting, that was largely the reason for [Eldridgij Durbrow, and Freddy ~· Frederic_!Y' Reinhardt.

O'BRIEN: And how about Trimble for Cambodia?

STEEVES: Trimble for Cambodia French, perfect. So it was looking over the available people of that rank and with that language skill, and, as I said, I'm afraid knew the French because of the preponderant French influence in the area, still, that caused us to choose people of that nature.

O'BRIBN: How about these people now that were coming in, that were not necessarily Asian in their background experience? Do they pick up pretty well, and do they get a grasp of the country? How do you look at them as ambassadors?

STEEVES: Every one of them that I know of--and I dealt with them all from Reinhardt on down; I didn't have any­ thing to do with /}. LawtoEJ Collins when he was in there, General Collins, for a little while--but every:ine from Reinhardt on down, in Saigon, I considered to be very

- ----.:----·- ----·-- ---·------~ - -- effective and very good. Durbrow was excellent. I spent a lot of time with Durbrow in Saigon. Freddie Reinhardt I think was good. Nolting was good. But, of course, you know, Nolting to this day suffers from what he thinks was one of the worse policies that we ever got ourselves into, and that was turning our back on /jigo D i~ Diem.

O'BRIEN: Yes, I understand.

STEEVES : I think that he personally just suffers about that still. And then, of course, the period of the war, and we have the history of it since then.

So far as Cambodia i s concerned, Carl strom was very good; kind of a Presbyterian minister type of fellow. /Jlorodoi/ Sihanouk used to get fed up with his preachments, but other than that, he had a good influence and was a good fellow, a man of great integrity and wi sdom. Trimble, I think, was weak. Trimble was afraid of Sihanouk. I used to go with Trimble to see Sihanouk, and he really had the tremors. I don't know why, but he always seemed to be very, very, nervous. But even with that, he did pretty well. The person that came to a cropper with Sihanouk was Bob McClintock. He was just too much of a fancy dandy for Sihanouk's liking; Sihanouk's like that too much himself. He wants to be the person that does the unorthodox thing; he didn't want an American ambassador to be doing them.

O'BRIEN: You had a rather serious series of congressional hearings that took place on the AID program in Laos in 1959. What are your impressions of this, as far as. Did these hearings affect policy toward Laos from that point on?

STEEVES: They had more of an effect on AID, there and in other places, than they did on Laos. This was just the answer to a maiden's prayer, so far as [Otto E;/ Passman and people of that nature were concerned, to find this type of thing in an AID program.

And I must say that--having moved into Laos at the time that we di d, when it was practically collapsing--that the unification of the little principalities up there underneath the Royal Lao government was not working. They didn't even have a stable currency. And you know the way they pumped currency into the country was to go in and sell commodities in order to raise counterpart funds to keep their currency afloat. And I'm afraid that the AID people just allowed any damn thing to take place. That's where Souva.nna Pb.ouma made his money and other people around him. Yau could find the

~-.,.-- - -~ ------18- C. most useless thing floating around on the market in Vientiane that had been brought in and sold for kip. It was the stupidest thing on earth.

When I went through there on my way to take up my responsi­ bilities in CINCPAC in 1957, I believe i t must have been as I recall the days, I said to the PE C ~oJ ram Evaluation Offici} people up there and the AID folks, Gee you lmow this i s not going to be any of my direct respons ~b ility, but you fellows have told me enough today for me to say to you that you'd better get thi s cleaned up and cleaned up fast, or you're rea~ going to be in trouble up to your neck." And a lot of that rubbed off on Jeff, you know. There never was a more honest or correct or decent fellow on the face of the earth than Jeff Parsons. But he had to take a lot of the brunt of that because it was assumed that he, being the ambassador, that much of i t was under his management. And the facts of the case are that this was another case where the agencies did pretty much as they pleased, and you just never could get a grasp on it from the field.

O'BRIEN: Well, how was he affected by this i n the rest of his tenure as Assistant Secretary?

Sl'EEVES: Certai.n.cy-, to begin with, not at all because he came ( out of Laos with a very find reputation. That's when he came back to be Walter Robertson's deputy. And he stood very hi gh with the Eisenhower-Dulles group, and he stepped up to be Assistant Secretary. If the normal sequence of things had gone on at that time, there's no question that Jeff would have gone on from there to be Ambassador to Japan. In fact, my own beli ef is that's where he ought to be today. But when the Democrats ca.me in, and there was a great change in the policy of the appointment of ambassadors and all the ·, rest of it, Jeff was shunted off the Sweden, and that was the end of that.

0' BRIEN: Well, as a result of those AID hearings and some of the stuff that's been put out by people like Hilsman and Bernard Fall--they re~ criticized him quite severely--how has he been effected by this as a person? Has it gotten to him at all?

STEEVES: Oh, yes. Yes, he feels very incensed about it. And of course, knowing from his own personal relationship with it the details that in his own mind justify what he did or what he didn't do, it makes him terribly angry at these people that oversimplify the whole business and say, "If we'd done this and done that, or if Parsons hadn't been so stupid, why, this wouldn't have taken place." -19-

O'BRIEN: As I understand it, you have a lot of differences between the embassies and actual friction between the embassies during this period of '59, 1 60, 1 61, particularly Saigon and Phnom Penh. What constituted that, or am I assuming that there is something that is not there?

STEEVES: I'm trying to recall, and the very fact that you mentioned it did trigger a bit of memory in my mind. I think that it arose over Durbrow' s rather hard opinion on how to deal with the communists and his term as ambassador in Saigon, where he felt that Win Brown in his feeling of sympathy and his willingness to cooperate with a guy like Souvanna Phouma was stupid. They disagree about that to this day, whenever they get together. It could very well be that was also slopping over into the relationships between the embassies in Phnom Penh and Saigon.

You see, Durby--you asked once why we sent certain people to some of those places--Durby, in Paris, was a classmate during his days in the University of Paris with the now King of Laos ~avang Vatthama__J.

O'BRIEN: Is that right?

( STEEVES: He knew them all very well, personally. He was fraternity brothers with some of them. And so he knew them by their common street names, bad caroused with them in Paris and everything else. And he knew pretty much what they were like and what they thought on the side, and they would often confide in Durby what they wouldn't officially, now that they have risen to the level they have.

O'BRIEN: In decision-making on Laos, in these years, is there any major consideration that's given, let's say-- or not only consideration, but is there any pressure coming from countries like Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam? I guess what I'm saying is that you have four nations here, and they all--with borders and everything--have certain common problems.

STEEVES: Yes. There was all kinds of pressure on us for aid and for backing, but we were always uncertain because of their ineptness and lack of experience in using it. The development of corrupt regimes made the situation very difficult for us.

I don't think there's any doubt about it that if we had been willing to pour in as much money as he wanted and to give as much military assistance as he wanted, that Sihanouk would have been in our hip pocket all the way along. Sihanouk's

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disillusionment with us came when he decided that he wasn't going to get enough out of us, either in the area or in Cambodia itself, to guarantee his type of regime and Cambodia against what he saw coming so far as the communists were concerned. And he has told me many times that it was just plain calcula­ tions as far as he was concerned, not sympathy. He said that he hates communism worse than we do--he had more reason to know something about it--but all he is doing is cooperating with the inevitable.

O'BRIEN: Well, how do you deal with a problem like, well, Sihanouk, particularly, in which, as I understand it, the "free khmer" movement draws some of its resources and f'unds from legitimate political authorities in South Vietnam. How do you deal with a problem like that in which you have a good deal of friction? Or how were you dealing with the frictions between South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1960?

mEEVES: Well, of course, we were largely successf'ul in keeping them from open warfare. We just beat a track between Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Bangkok, and then back over it again over individual issues and over talking to individuals to try and get them to cooperate. We used persuasion and everything that we could to keep them from each others throats. Those old animosities run way, way back, and it's awfully hard to rid those countries of them. I am sure that if we · had not interposed our influence and almost threats, at times, that the Thais would have tried to overrun Cambodia.. And I'm sure that between the Thais and the Annamese-­ the South Vietnamese at that time would have subdued Cambodia.

BEGIN SIDE II TAPE I

\ O'BRIEN: Okay, we were talking about Sihanouk. \ STEEVES: Yeah. We have paid a terrible price in Southeast Asia for what I think is one of the policy weaknesses of the United States, and we are not constant and resolute enough. We are an impatient people. And between administrations and even within the same administration, at times, we have a tendency to get fed up with something that we're following and we don't stick to it through thick and thin over the decades. And this is bad, especially for people who depend upon us.

If we had, for instance, gone in to the SEA.TO arrangement -- -2l-

if the British and the French and ourselves had stuck with that through thi ck and thin, and the Thais the Cambodians and the Laos and the Vietnamese, for instance, had seen for sure that there was going to be no wavering, history in South­ east As i a would have been a lot di fferent. But the trouble i s that we can never agree among ourselves. And we first of all thi nk i f we throw i n a lot of people and a lot of money we'll solve i t qui ckly and get out of i t. And if that doesn't work, then we get fed up with it.

We talked ourselves i nto a policy with respect to AID that was just about as sil:cy" as you can imagine, even having it sancti f i ed by writi ng i n to the country justifi cation programs a secti on that indi cates when we i ntend for that AID program to be phased out. The economic development of underdeveloped countri es l ike As i a i s a century problem, certai nly a half a century problem, and not to be thought of in terms of five years. How ridi culous i t is for us to wr i te i nto every country justificati on program, each year, how far we're going to be towards the elimination of it at the end of the year.

Well, thi s is a reflection of this i nconstancy and the "quick i n, quick out" attitude that Ameri cans have. And we have followed it in other l i nes of our operations, too, whether i t is military support or a constancy in policy. Some of these weak l i ttle countri es, they want to be fickle if they want to be, but for goodness sakes, they don't want the great United States to be fickle. But we are. As Sihanouk pointed out to me on many an occasion, he never knew when he might turn around and f ind we weren' t there.

And this is basical:cy" the trouble with Thanat Kb.oma.n. Thanat Khoman has been a very close associ ate of mine ever since we were young first secretaries together in Delhi, twenty-three years ago. And with every stage of the development of Thai policy, ever since Sarit LMarshal Sarit Thanara!ltook over with his military coup out there, Thanat used to tell me on the s i de when it was coming off. He came through Honolulu and told me when Sarit was going to take over and tha.t _·he was going up to be his foreign minister. He gave me the dates and the plan and everything. He has been very honest and straight­ forward with me ever since.

But Thanat, at times, is fit to be tied over just such •' things as recently have happened, where you send the President of the United States out there, and he says one thing in one place and another thing in another, and then he turns around and finds he is now caught in a public debate as to whether or not the Thais have asked for the American troops to be there, or whether we' re going to stay, or whether Thailand is making

~~--- --~ - ., -22- (

illegitimate use of us. And so in kind of a pique and utter frustration he's saying, "Well, get them out of here!"

O'BRIEN: Well, how do you look at people like Sihanouk and Thanat Khoman as statesmen, considering thei r own i deas, go~ls, and national interests.

STEEVES: Well, they're entirely different and they hate each other, so they would never want to be compared, ~ughtei/ But they're very sophisticated, very wise, and very able--each in his own way. I would be proud to compare in wi sdom any of our own people with Thanat Khoman. He' s a very bright and a very learned fellow. No two ways about it, extremely good. Sihanouk is exactly what he i s often descri bed as being, the caprici ous, mercuri al--he hates that word. ~'Nobody calls me mercurial! I don't want to be mercurial!" £"LaughteiJ But when it comes to the selfish interests of Cambodia, he has done some very, very fancy footwork and has kept himself on top of the heap, in a way that would do credit to almost anybody, wi th very little force and very little power. He is a clever l i ttle guy.

O'BRIEN: Well, do you feel his statements and suggesti ons ( i n 1960 in regard to the making· of Laos into a buffer state was, in a sense, reali stic for his country?

grEEVES: That was the time when he came to the conclusion that you had to do something to stop--what he thought--annoying Peking, and the neutralization of Laos was, therefore, a policy that he agreed with because he thought that might stop them before they got to Cambodia. But what Si hanouk would have preferred would have been a security guarantee and pact with the United states to keep the communists out of Laos and out of Vietnam and out of Cambodia. Now it's anybody's guess as to whether he would have been faithful to that viewpoint and not played footsies with the communists after we gave the guarantee to him, but that's wba.t he really wanted at that time, was an assurance that he would not have to knuckle under to Peking.

O'BRIEN: Was there ever. - a:ny thinking in the Department that that should be extended to him at this point?

grEEVES: Yes . I can only conjecture that if we had gone as far as a Dl:llles or a Robertson or some people of that nature were concerned, we probably would have gotten into Southeast Asian affairs that deep]¥ at that time, again, considering that we were then carrying out what we called ( a forward strategy where it's far better to fight your battles -23-

a long, long way on the other s i de of the Pacific rather than getting closer to home, and stop them before they start.

O'BRIEN: Well, the Thais become rather dissatisfied with SEATO and become dissatisfied with U.S . policy in 1960

STEEVES: Oh, absolutely livid, just livid about SEATO.

O'BRIEN: What's the basis of that?

STEEVES: Mistrust of the French and the British and annoyance at us because we allowed the French and the British and then later on the Paks to ccmpletely erode SEATO and keep up its shell and facade and do nothing substantively to live up to SEATO's alleged responsibi lity; this is what used to make Thanat so mad .

O'BRIEN: You have both the Vi etnamese and, in a sense, the Thais that were pressuring Sihanouk at various times. Is there anything that's done in attempting to cut off some of the aid and assistance that was going out of both Thailand and Vietnam to some of the anti-Sihanouk people in ( Cambodia? STEEVES: No cut off of aid, but there's always written into these military aid programs the restrictions for what they can be used. And we were standing there with a ruler to rap their knuckles if we caught any military equipment in Thailand being used agai nst the Cambodians or vice versa. And I nzy-self was the individual that was sent out on an occasion or two to talk to the Vi etnamese and to take a passing squint at it through Cambodia and find out in Thailand just how those operations were being equipped.

O'BRIEN: How were they being equipped?

STEEVES: By us. In all three places at that time. And~ opinion is that they were pretty caref'ul, pretty caref'ul about it.

O'BRIEN: Yes. You mean they were being equipped. I'm not sure that I quite understood that. Were these actually going into these groups? This

STEEVES: Military equipment?

O'BRIEN: Military equipment going into Cambodia?

STEEVES: No. -24-

O'BRIEN: No.

STEEVES: No, I don't think so.

O'BRIEN: Well, then you di dn't see any evidence of that at all?

STEEVES: I didn't.

O'BRIEN: Well, when things really began to deteriorate in Laos in 1960 with the coups that occurred-­ Kong Le and some of the others--what's happening within the Department in regard to. Were you attempting to pi ck out one of these people, General Phoumi, for example?

STEEVES: Yes, and we. God, we. The king was vacillating, but we respected him. Souvanna Phouma was playing footsies with the cormnunists and talking neutrality when we were sure what he had in mind was handi ng over the whole blooming thing to the communists and the Pathet Lao. Phoumi, the r i ghtist, was attempting to woo us to fight Souvanna Phouma. We stood for him i n his anti-communist stance. And so here was your question, "Who in the world are ( you out for?" The policy that we tried to follow for a while was to get rid of all except the king. And we tried our damndest to get the king to use his royal prerogative in taking over things and putting an honest man back into the prime ministership like Phoui Sananikone to run the country and thumb our nose at Souvan.na Phouma and tell him to go with the Pathet Lao ::-.if : _ he wanted to because he was up in the Plaine des Jarres with the communists, you know, and with the Pathet Lao ;and only coming down occasionally to cause us trouble or go down to see his friend Sihanouk.

Phoumi, we always knew, was either stupid, inept, corrupt-­ he was a bastard, but he was our bastard, and that was the trouble. And so when we couldn't make the other oracle work, then we used to go to his uncle, who was Sarit in Thailand and say, "For God's sake, get Phoum.i down here and tell him just how serious this whole business is and what he's got to do. He's got to stop being corrupt. He's got to do this; he's got to do that; and he' s got to do a few other things." And then we'd be reassured for a little while and on we'd go. Then, that wouldn't work. Then we'd make a personal appeal to the king, and the king would not use his royal prerogative to do anything, but he would sit there to see which side was going to win so that he could appoint some prime minister. This was ( the frustration that we were going through. -25- . '

I.'

And you can imagine that at any given time, from Birf given viewpoint, that there were a wide divergence of views. But what we were trying to bolster. I guess the central policy that we were trying to bolster at that time--that Jeff Parsons agreed with, and I agreed with, the White House, and everybody else--was that we must stick with the anti-communist group .no matter how bad they were . Try to reform them, try to control them, but you couldn't stop paying the troops. You couldn't stop aiding the country. All you could do was put up with their nonsense as best you could and try to control them.

That was the reason that I felt very strongly that I never wanted to get sucked into that conference in Geneva. I fought it to the very last day because I was sure that what would happen was that we would get drug over there, and then we'd agree to anything in order to get out of it, and because I lmew what President Kennedy was saying. Kennedy was saying, "Well, the one thing I sure don't want to do is to get our­ selves involved on the ground in Southeast Asia." And he said, "/JJOuglaiJ MacArthur has said so, Eisenhower has said so, and the senators say so, so get us out of that somehow." That became his slogan. And that was Averell Harriman' s marching orders. So all we were doing was being lambs led to the slaughter . ~ opinion was, if you're going to do that, you could do that without going to a conference--just walk out!

O'BRIEN: Well, how did the commission of ~ssistani} Secretary Parsons, Admiral ffierbert D. 7 Riley, and J obn Irvin originate when they went out there in the fall of •

STEEVES: Well, the way that originated, we were in the midst of one of these terrible flummoxes one weekend-­ telegrams flying in, Horace Smith complaining about his CIA people working behind his back, Phoumi getting out of line, intelligence murky, the king not being willing to act-­ and so somebody said, "Well, what we need is a unified position out there, one; better intelligence, two; and some quick advice \ and counsel on the ground. So Jeff was on vacation or somewhere or another back here. It was in between two of his assignments. We sent him a telegram and told him to meet John Irvin in New York and fly out to Honolulu and pick up Herb Riley. There we had a person with a strong military view, we had Irvin from Defense, and we had Parsons, who we felt--other than Souvanna Phouma.--would be pretty influential with any of them, to go out and talk turkey to Horace Smith and to Phoumi and to the Agency people.

To this day, Jeff is angry about that mission. We sent him out to accomplish the impossible. They came back with

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just about the same divided opinion that they went out with. Herb Riley came back still recommending that we pour in arms and ammunition to Phoumi, and probably committed CINCPAC to a continuation of that type of an operation when they were out there. Jeff Parsons felt that he hadn't accomplished a damn thing in stiffening the king~ backbone or getting any sense out of Horace Smith--and not mu.ch was accomplished.

O' BRIEN : Well, it's been rumored or reported someplace that-­ not Jeff Parsons but Admiral Riley and Jack Irvin met General Phoumi somewhere (I believe it was Cambodia) and

STEEVES: Thailand.

O'BRIEN: Was it Thailand?--and simply told him not to l isten to the ambassador.

STEEVES: I don't know if they were that blunt about i t, but the fact about the secret meeting and telling him to maintain his strong stance and they'd stand back of him is true. It's true.

( O'BRIEN: What was the reaction of people like yourself and Jeff Parsons at this?

STEEVES: Madder than hell. But yet, on the other hand, kind of hoping against hope that they were right there, that the people who had the hardware and money could make i t work, /.:fAughte"E] but we wished that they had cut us in on it.

O'BRIEN: Well, was there any substantial differences at this point between the ambassador and the Department on policy? I understand that they •

STEEVES: Yes. Quite

O'BRIEN: acted quite differently towards Souvanna Phouma.

STEEVES: Yes, quite a gap. This was the starting of a philosophy that if you only treated Souvanna Phouma right, he could be our neutralist. And it was a philosophy that carried through Horace Smith, on through to Win Brown, a.'iid on through to Averell Harriman and the conf'erence in Geneva, and all the way along. I must say that I was wrong to the extent that I did not believe that Souvanna Phouma ever would recognize his error and become an anti-communist or anti-Pa:thet ·ta.o again. I thought that under t:!:J.e guise of neutrality he would essentially practically hand the country over to the communists.

-~------...- -- .. -...------. \ ., -27-

That he has not done. He has learned his lesson. He got his fingers burned. And, of course, he's still our problem, but he's a problem on our side. So the people that did believe in him to tha.t extent and to the extent that he has been helpi'ul had that to chalk up as a credit for that miserable Geneva Conference .or the Fourteen Nation Conference.

But Horace Smith began to feel at that time that Phoumi was an uncertain quantity, and you'd better saw him off at the knees . The Agency and the military would not have any of it. I was not sure enough and Jeff Parsons was not sure enough that either one of them were right. We would have far preferred somebody a little bit surer like Pb.oui Sananikone that we could have believed in.

O'BRIEN: So actuall:y you have a situation here in which you, in a sense, looked favorably at Phoui Sananikone, and the ambassador's recoIIDnending for Souvanna Pb.ouma, and the Department--or the Defense Department and the CIA is going wi th General Phoumi? And this is perhaps the

STEEVES : Yeah, we were going in three or four different ways, I'm afraid, at a very, very bad time.

O'BRIEN: And the anibassador is having some problems with his people? As I understand, there is a fellow there by the name of John Razey, isn't it?

~S: You don't mean Hekscher?

O'BRIEN: No , Razey. Well, I'm not

~S: I think there was on]¥ one individual. It must have been CIA Hekscher. You know, the thought just comes to me that we are not far, today, in our general attitude on a much larger issue in which we're much more deeply involved than we were in Laos. Everybody wishes that some miracle would happen that would make the North Vietnamese roll over and play dead or cooperate in some kind of a wash agreement. We don't want to do the nationall:y disgracef'ul thing and the dangerous thing, rea~, of walking out; we are not with the rightists to the extent that we're willing to go in and win the war no matter what it takes; so here we are in that vacillating period. So you've got a parallel, pretty much, going on right now as to what was going on back in 1959 and 1 60.

O'BRIEN: In many ways, yes. The Asian situation really hasn't changed.

~S: No. 0' BRIEN: Well, now we are right here at this point of the . transition of administrations. Now with the new people coming in, the new administration--Secretary Rusk, not only people in the White House but some of the people that are going to take on key positions in the administra­ tion--what do you recall in briefing these people and their understanding?

STEEVES: Well, I iiemember it very well because I was the person who used to take the telegrams down to Rusk when he was the Secretary-designate and give him a little bit of a briefing every morning on how things were in Southeast Asia. Rusk seemed like very much of a dove to the hard-liners in those days . It was largely because he just wasn't talking. Rusk has always had the habit of being a very good listener and never talking When he doesn't have to. He'd just say, "Thanks very much."

He also gave us the impression that he was not very much of an activist in taking military action or anything of that nature because he seemed to always be advising us to go and find out what the British thought. I used to get so darn mad once in a while when he would say, "Well, fine, fine, gentlemen. That's okay; Let me know what the British think." Well, I ( said, "I can tell you that before you go there that the British aren't going to do anything in SEATO." "Well, go and find out anyway.

French, the same thing. Averell Harriman always talking about French responsibility. Get the French to take the responsibility. This was the great clarion call he was making all the time in Geneva. And he knew darn good and well the French couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag.

But even with those rather noncommittal attitudes, Rusk said in those days--and I heard him say it many times since-­ but it struck me as significant that he said to me during those days, "You know, we are paying the price for a vacillation all the way down through Southeast Asia. " He said, "The first place they ought to have been stopped was at the Red River. And we have vacillated and didn't do anything about it and we've lost Vietnam. The next place that they ought to have been stopped was in Hanoi, and we didn't do anything about it. The next place we ought to have stopped them is here in Laos, but we probab]¥ won't do anything about it. " And this creeping aggression has always worried Rusk.

Another policy on which Rusk was very uncertain, so far as what he was saying was concerned to begin with, was the China policy. I thought that coming in under Kennedy that it -29-

( I wasn't going to be very long before we would get a directive out of the new Secretary telling us to f i gure out some new policy with respect to Communist China, rather than opposing their entry into the United Nations and continuing to be adamant about our own recognition of them. Rusk wasn't in office six months before he was far more articulate and far more stubborn in his attitude about the regime in Peking than his Republican predecessor had been.

And one of the things that led to this, one of the stori es that was told during that time--I heard Kennedy tell it himself'. He said, "You know, Eisenhower came in to see me yesterday." And he sai d, "He told me a very interesting thing. He said, 'Now listen, Jack Kennedy.' He said, 'You're now the President of the United States and you're not going to get any opposition out of me; you're only going to get help. And I'll do every­ thing I possibly can to back you up. But there's one thing don't you ever do or I will oppose you from one coast to the other.'" And Kennedy said, "What is that?" And he said, "Recognition of Communist China."

And he said, "I'm just not ready to take on the political opposition that Eisenhower could muster over that issue, 11 and ( so whatever device you fellows use in the United Nations about getting them into the United Nations or allowing talk to get current that we're about to recognize Peking and all the rest of it, you keep out of that because I simp:cy will not have it. 11 Now whether that influenced Rusk or whether he was carrying out a Kennedy policy or whether he himself very rapidJ..Y learned how terribly recalci trant these people can be at the Warsaw talks. But he became terribzy adamant.

I was i n New York once when. • In Rusk's early years, he went up there to the United Nations, and he had the habit, you know, of holding court, where all the foreign ministers that came for the opening of the United Nations called on him. And he had a kind of a ritual that he went through in setting forth certain outstanding policies that guided us. I remember as one of those points in the interviewing of fif'ty-six different foreign ministers one fall, that the first item that Rusk brought up, "Now you probab:cy would be interested in knowing where we stand in respect to Communist China?" He said, "This is a closed issue. Just don't bother me about that because we are not going to recognize Communist China and we are not going to give in on the China question in the United Nations." And I can hear him yet, leaning over and looking at the Australian foreign minister that was some- .what vacillating at that time. He said, "Is that clear?" And he said, "Yes, very clear." He said, "Fine, let's move

i- on to something else. " 1 --. I ' I

--~------30-

But that's just how hard-boiled Rusk was on this business of the China recognition. He was convinced that all they would do would be to make sport or take advantage of our seeming weakness and would never do anything to reciprocate the recognition. He was convinced of it.

O'BRIEN: What's going on in the Warsaw talks at this point?

STEEVES: Nothing. We have asked for another session and the Chinese won't

O'BRIEN: No, I mean

STEEVES: Oh, at that time?

O'BRIEN: in '59 and 1 60. What's the essence?

STEEVES: Substantively, the only thing that was going on at that time was attempting to get :f'urther word about the people that they still held--five or six lef't at that time. We were squabbling endlessly over getting them to agree in our relationships with each other to a denial of the use of force for accomplishing political purposes. A few ( minor things of that nature was what all of the conversation was taken up with.

O'BRIEN: Well, did you brief anyone else or make contact with anyone else in regard to the situation in the Far East, particularly Laos?

STEEVES: Geor:ge McGhee. George McGhee came back into the Department. I had known him before when he was the Greece-Turkey man in the old ~fiarry [ff Truman Administration and was later on the ambassador to Turkey. He was kind of the father of the economic aid to Greece and Turkey. Then he was out for a number of years and when the Kennedy people came back in, George came in as the counselor and was wading in very rapiQcy- to policy matters along with Rusk when the new team first came in. And I did used to talk to George quite a bit.

O'BRIEN: Did you ever have any contact with that task force that was established to study a number of different problems. I can't remember if Laos was one of the problems that they went into or not. One was /fayeif Rashish and--was it Stanley Schaetzel?

STEEVES: Obviously, I didn't.

O'BRIEN: Maybe they didn't focus on Laos.

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STEEVES: It might have been [Robert J;J Bob Schaetzel. O'BRIEN: Bob Schaetzel, that's right.

STEEVES: No. I didn't.

O'BRIEN: Well, how does McGhee line up in regard to Laotian policy at this point?

STEEVES: Very much of an experimenter and innovator; would have been willing, if he could have got high level policy backing to do it, to try almost anything. Of course George is one of the :f:'unniest guys in the world because he jumps sixty different ways within the hour, and about fifty-nine of them are trial balloons to see what you think. If you can find out the one which he rea.lly believes in, you know which to direct your comments at, but that's awf'ully hard to find out. But he was quite willing to experiment with the recognition of China or finding ways to get out of Southeast Asia; very much of a Harriman view when it came to things of that nature.

O'BRIEN: When's the first time you meet President Kennedy?

STEEVES: The first time I met President Kennedy was almost the second or third day he was in office. He called one of those bull sessions over in the Cabinet Room, and I ma.de the situation report on wbat was going on in Laos. Could it have been that same winter--or spring, it must have been--tbat we had {"Harolg Ms.cmiD.a.n over here. We took Macmillan out on the Honey Fitz. And I remember briefing the President and Ma.cmilJ..a.n while they were in the dining room, in the ward room of the Honey Fitz. And Macmillan said, "Well, this is the first time I've ever been served sandwiches and drinks by the policy briefer from the foreign office, " /Jaughtef/ because I was talking at the same time tbat I was passing things from the galley in to them.

O'BRIEN: Well, jou almost immediate4'" did away--when the Kennedy Administration came in--you almost immediate4'" did away with the OCB?

STEEVES: Yeah.

O'BRIEN: And now you have that special little group on Laos that's established.

STEEVES: That's right.

O'BRIEN: The membership of that is yourself'--I had a list of -32- < -

it--Desmond Fitzgerald.

STEEVES: Des Fi t zgerald and who else could have been on that? Oh, I've forgotten now.

O'BRIEN: Well, what do you recall about those meetings on Laos? We've talked about a few of them--the one in which the Joint Chiefs, General Lemnitzer. •

STEEVES: Haydn Williams must have been a member of that from the Office of ISA, Internati onal Security Affairs over in the Pentagon. That must have been where Haydn Williams came into this. What do I recall, again?

O'BRIEN: What do you recall about these meetings and the development of a new poli cy towards Laos?

STEEVES: Somewhat indecisive, exploring all kinds of avenues, not wanting to take the hard way because it was going to be costly, dangerous; but I think the general feeling on the part of people like myself' was--I always was in favor of progressively getting in materiel, troops, planes, if necessary, as rapi dly as our military posture would ( allow it and stop the nonsense in Laos. I was very much in favor of it. I never vacillated very much in my own thinking about it, and Jeff Parsons didn't~ Our problem was with the White House and with the Harri.mans and people of that nature.

O'BRIEN: And there was a very definite division of opinion between the people in the new administration and those who were held over?

STEEVES: There was, yes, especi ally a~er some of those things happened that I told you about earli er when Kennedy became disillusioned with the military.

O'BRIEN: Well, I have a list of White House appointments here. I ' m not sure whether this constitutes the group or not, but on that March 9th meeting there seems to be a lot of people there.

STEEVES: "Off the Record: Lemnitzer, Dulles, ffiicharif/ Bissell, ~cGeorgif Bundy, /Jalt w;J Rostow, [Chester V.J Clifton, ?JaulJ Nitze," yeah. "George McGhee," yeah.

O'BRIEN: Well, how did these people line up, as you recall, on some of the things that they were, perhaps

STEEVES: On this March 9th group? -33-

O' BRIEN: If that is the group?

STEEVES: Yeah. [""Iiyndon BJ Johnson wouldn't say a damn thing. You couldn't get a word out of Lyndon Johnson, the last thing in the world. He would sit there and look out the window. Never an opinion on anything. He was e i ther di sgruntled or something or other. You just couldn't get him to do a darn thing. Harry Felt, always gung-ho, wanted to clobber them. L_Robert s;J Bob McNamara, very dif fident, saying, "Let's don't do it. I just don't have the f orces to commit bot h in Europe and i n Asia, and we're just not ready. " That was always McNamara' s l i ne . Lemni t zer, as a true military man, was the fellow that was always backing up Felt and saying we ought to meet our mili tary commitments, but then when you pinned him down, hi s plans didn't hold water. He was the very fellow with the pointer in hand that Kennedy caught i n thi s illogical bit of reasoning that March.

O' BRIEN: The thought just came to mind, I heard somewhere that Roger Hi lsman took over a briefing one time from General Lemnitzer. Was that the meeting in whi ch he took the poi nter away from him and

( STEEVES: He wasn't here in that meeti ng. I don't remember that.

O'BRIEN: That mu.st have been about 1962 then.

STEEVES: Yes. I don't remember that. Allen Dulles, Bissell, Walt Rostow, Paul Nitze, /jewiiJ Lou Gleeck, and Des Fitzgerald I think were all convinced that we had to live up to our responsibility and do something. The people, at that parti cular time, that were raising the questions were Dean Rusk, George McGhee--just to pick out people from that particular--and the President himself.

O'BRIEN: Well, Rostow was suggesting even the incorporation of bombing, at this point •

STEEVES: Oh, yeah. He was.

O'BRIEN: supply lines.

STEEVES: Yeah. We were figuring out whether we could return to a crude type of bombing in order to use old planes with bombs no more sophisticated than stuff rolled into a drum and shoved out the door to blow up their camps up in the Plaine des Jarres.

O'BRIEN: well, how was the military in this regard?

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Were they willing to support a limited kind of' action at this point?

ill'EEVES: They were, yes. I would call it--in terms that we now have grown to accept--gradual escalation, escalated to any point that was necessary.

I might stop right here to tell you--with the advantage of' a certain amount of' Monday morning quarterbacking, now, that we all engage in--that I think that one of' the worst policies that we have ever adopted i n Vietnam, in view of' all that has taken place, is the doctrine of gradual response. You don't win wars that way; that politicalJ.y and psychologicalJ.y and militari ly, this has been disastrous; that you played into the hands of' people like cyndon Johnson, who f'ound it politicalJ.y advantageous to tell the American people that there really wasn't a war going on, that they didn't need to have their plush lif'e interfered with, there really is no war, nothing at all. He did it in his campaign, and although he then waged a very vigorous war about like his opponent would have, he still kept on this fiction that all we were doing was gradualJ.y responding, that there really weren't very many troops there, there wasn't much spectacular going on, even though we were r going af'ter it hammer and tongs but not doing it in the right ( place and the right way in the right time.

If' you're going to teach the Vietnamese a lesson, you ought to have blown Hanoi of'f of' the map and closed Haiphong and taken the consequences. You simply do not win wars by nibbling at the buds; you strike at the roots as rapidly as possible. And this business of' the gradual response in Laos, :Lf' we had given them an ultimatum and taught them a damn good lesson, I think that we might have stopped the whole thing up there.

O'BRIEN: Well, in these series of' meetings that are going on at this point. I've lost the chain. I'm sorry. Something that was particularly bothering me.

STEEVES: You were asking me, at one time, among the group, which ones that were for activism and doing something at the time and where were we getting kind of the opposition f'rom or those that were very uncertain.

O'BRIEN: Yeah. And we went through a number of these people. How does this compare with the former way of decision­ making, the former meetings that you had in the old Operations Coordination Board? Sure~ it's rather apparent that you've got a kind of openness in which people who are not

'-~-·~ - -.. --··-- -35-

reaJJ..y necessari~ knowledgeable about I.e.os can enter into a discussion. As I understand the f'unctions of the old Operations Coordination Board, you had much more of a kind of a bureau­ cratic representation of policy.

STEEN'ES: Well, you did because the circumstances were different, you must remember. Eisenhower ref'used to allow himself to get as deep~ involved in anything as we were in Laos. "Just don't look at it and maybe it will go away." And in fact, it wasn't blown up to the fever pitch that it was in his very last days in off: ce. He le:rt this nest egg for Kennedy, there' s no two ways about it. So during the Eisenhower period we did have a little bit of Victorian peace, and it allowed for the development of outfits like the OCB that did have the leisure time to sit around and drink coffee and argue about the angels on the point of a needle. And it kind of suited that parti cular period.

The Kennedy people came in, and they were going to solve all these things. They were going to stop this bureaucratic nonsense in which you sat around and argued in a bureaucratic way. You get the task force over here. You get the guys that are handling it and knock their heads together, and we'll find ( out what we' re going to do and go ahead and do it. So over­ night there was a change. "Let's decide what we' re going to do and do it, and decide what we're not going to do and not do it." This was the intellectual egghead, the Kennedy attitude.

O'BRIEN: Well, how was it sitting in on those meetings? You know, you were dealing with people that, I'm sure, they didn't know as much about Laos.

STEEVES: Yeah, but that certainly didn't deter them at all in having expert opinion, the whole series of them. {fa.ughteiJ And {Robert F;J Bobby Kennedy used to come in quite o:rten, sit in the back. other people of his type used to wander in occasionaJJ..y. I can't quite remember, now, who. His science advisor, ~erome B;J Wiesner, used to come in once in a while. They used to be persuaded about the position that people like myself and Walt Rostow would take on taking a stronger stand. I remember leaving those sessions thinking that we were pretty much of one position and go back to start getting the operations racked up to go ahead and getting orders out and one thing or another o~ to find they'd changed their mind~ .

O'BRIEN: Well, in these meetings that take place, where is the point where a decision to back a neutralist regime and Souvanna Phouma is made? Does that come a little later or somewhere a.round • STEEVES: That came much later and that really crystallized and came into play in mid-flight in the 1961 talks in Geneva. Up until then, Souvanna Phouma was looked upon as the bad boy: "He's gone off to play with harlots and living up there with his half-brother, and he's been going to Peking and Moscow for counsel and so on and so forth, and so let's have nothing to do with him." But then he finally came to the Geneva Conference to represent the neutralist vi ew in the three entities that talked there. They were going to have the Pathet Lao there; they were going to have the neutralists there; they were going to have the rightists there. The rightists refused to sit so we had a vacant chair to symbolize their presence. Then it became policy for us to try to work for a neutralized Laos and went so far as to say that that neutral prime minister to carry out that policy we will agree with the British and the Russians, that it is to be Souvanna Phouma. And that's the way it turned out.

O'BRIEN: Well, in the decision to go for a cease-fire, the evolution of this, initially, we were a little cold towards the idea, as I understand.

STEEVES: No, the cease-fire idea was one of the preconditions ( that Rusk set down before he would go to the Geneva Conference. We went off to the NATO {North Atlantic Treaty Organizatio!Y' Conference in Oslo, and we were scheduled to go down to Geneva to be there on--I've forgotten the date now. It was somewhere between the 9th and the 14th of May of 1961. Rusk said, "I will not go to that conference until the Control Commission, the ICC .C-rnternational Control Commissio~, verifies that there has been a cease-fire. We cannot talk while we' re being militarily pressured."

And so we would wait every day up in Oslo during the NATO Conference up there to have this word come in. It never came. We went down to Geneva, and the day for the opening came. Rusk refused to go. We sat in that damned hotel room for ten days. It never did come. Rusk used to use the expression, "What's the situation on the ground?" And the British would chew their tongues, and the French would get impatient, and Sihanouk was getting madder by the minute because we would not attend the Conference.

The facts of the case are that finally they manuf'actured what looked like a face-saving formula.. Somebody said, "It's substantially stopped," or something of that nature. So Rusk went in and that's where we were begun to be had.

O'BRIEN: Well, what does MacmilJ.an--you were in that meeting of MacmiJJ.an and Kennedy. Did you get any ins igb.t

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in to what the--or anything that you remember out of that particular meeting with Prime Minister Macmillan and President Kennedy, their views towards the situation?

STEEVES: I don't remember anything so far as exact quotes or exact policy posi t ions , but I do remember terribly well the overall opinion that I came out of the meeting with. And that was that although there were plenty of platitudinous things sai d about standing with us in our joint problems in Asia and partners in Southeast Asia and all the rest of it, whenever you tried to pin Ms.cmillan down as to how many people he would send in to support a SEATO force or anything of that nature, he never would commit himself. I came away from the meetings with a very f irm conviction that the British never would support a SEATO type action in South­ east Asia.

O'BRIEN: Well, what about your contacts with Secretary Rusk on all this, going on here, during the time that you were briefing him, when he was Secretary- des ignate? You mentioned, here, that he h3d evolved on China policy to a rather hard view. How about on Laos? Any indication of what he's thinking?

( STEEVES: Yes. He would have followed a hard line on Laos or a harder line than we came out with, if he had not been overruled by Kennedy.

O'BRIEN: Did you see any evidence of that overruling, when and how?

STEEVES: Yes, I did. I remember it very definitely. Harriman paid a visit to Laos. There ~re three telegrams in the Department in Ms.rch or April of 1961 in which he says we have no alternative but to back our friends to the hilt, meaning the rightists. He went to Geneva and as the person who was going to take over the talks, sitting there as a member or as the chairman of the American team-designate, and saw Rusk eventua~ crumble before the French and the Btitish on thi s business of the harder line in the conference and every­ thing else.

Harriman got on the plane and came back to Washington. He went to see Kennedy. And when he came back, we saw this change in Harriman. He had his orders--no matter what Rusk said or anybody else--he had his orders to come out with an I agreement. And I could see this so plainly. This is when, I among ourselves, we coined the expression "Cave with Ave." l e

I I I =---...,...--- - ..... ---..------·-~- -- r-,-.- -38-

This became so apparent that I said to him one day, "Averell,"--or "Governor," we always called him--"I just cannot understand your attitude on these things." He said, "Listen, don't be a damn fool." He said, "You know darn good and well that the President is never going to commi t any forces to Laos . And he has told me so. We're going to come out of this with some kind of an agreement. As good as we can, we're going to get an agreement. "Now," he said, "put that in your pipe and smoke it."

O'BRIEN: And he could be very abrupt that way?

STEEVES: He could be very abrupt about it.

O'BRIEN: Did you see any real conflict between him and Rusk, at this point?

STEEVES: Rusk almost, on the Laos business, finally turned into kind of the figurehead of the Department and did not interfere. When I finally came back from Geneva I, again, was sent back to Paris with, presumably, a cleared paper that said beyond a certain point we will not go in order to get an agreement . One of those points was that the ICC, as the investigating body, must have a carte blanche opportunity to go anywhere they want to investigate anything. The communists said they wouldn't allow it. We said, "We're going to stick on that." I got that into the paper; I went back to Paris; I sat down as head of the American delegation to get this thing firmed, and I succeeded, even over Harriman's objection.

And there were one or two other points that we said were our last negotiating points. Harriman said, "You' re not going to come over here and tell me what I'm going to do as the delegation head." I said, "You can read English as well as I can, and there is the White House cleared paper that I've brought over here to be the position." And I said, "I guess when it comes to it, you obey the same President that I do." So he knuckled under at that particular conference, for those three or four days that we were talking in the Quai d'Orsay, with the British and the French and ourselves, but he went back to Geneva and went right back to the same game that he was at before and gave in on everything.

O'BRIEN: Well, I take it now that you're developing some friction with Harriman at this point?

STEEVES: Oh, terrifically so. I le~ Geneva over the fact that Harriman was sure that he could never get my , complete willing support in carrying out the type /

~~ ... - -- -. - -· ...... -39-

of policy that he wanted to. This was wrong because I would have taken orders like anybody else. If they'd told me to cave, I'd go ahead and cave. But what I was trying to find out is whether or not this was a studied position that the President had finally come to, or whether it was a kind of private agreement between him and Harriman that they would work this out and give it the facade of getting somewhere with­ out sanctif'ying it in a proper state paper. O'BRIEN: At this point, LWalter P;J Mcconaughy has become STEEVES: Mcconaughy had become Assistant Secretary. O'BRIEN: How is he lining up in this?

STEEVES: He's lining up, of course, to kind of go along with Harriman because he feels he has to.

O'BRIEN: So, in a sense, it isn't the Department versus the White House, except in the sense of the State Department is beginning to

STEEVES: I'll tell you something else that happened during ( that period, too. And that is that the most stalwart soldier that we had in Southeast Asia, in terms of holding the line in Laos, was Alex Johnson, the ambassador to Bangkok. I used to go out and see him, and boy, he was inflating me. He used to stand up to those fellows on these SEATO things and see to it that we would hold up to our commitments. "We cannot have friends in Thailand or anywhere if we knuckle under" and on and"' B6 forth·. ·'.· .

The last visit that I made to Bangkok was the day that we got the message out there, when Alex was there, that he was coming back as deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs instead of coming back as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, and Walter Mcconaughy was coming in. I remember saying to Alex, "Alex, you know, you have come to the kingdom, really, for such a time as this. With your ideas, I hope that you can keep those fellows from caving all the time." "Oh, have no doubt about that." By Jove, he wasn't back here a week before Alex was making concessions all over the place and was telling me that Harriman was really the apostle of everything we ought to believe in at that particular time.

Three years later, when Harriman was Under Secretary, he asked me to come up to have lunch with him, when I was back from Afghanistan one day. We were then up to our neck in Vietnam. And Harriman, standing over by the window, said to -40- ( me, "Well, John, you know, you must get a certain amount of comfort out of the fact of knowing that you were right. " He' s a very good fri end of mine to this day. Always. He came to my farewell the other day in the Department.

O'BRIEN: Oh, he di d?

STEEVE S: Yeah. Very, very cordi al. He writes me very ni ce letters and all t he rest of it, but we were bitter enemies on this parti cular poli cy.

O' BRIEN : What do ~ou remember about the Russian delegate there, LGeorgi M;J Pushkin? STEEVES: Pushkin was a completely doctri naire puppet. He would do nothing except kind of repeat the words that he'd gotten in the last instructions or maybe from one of the fellows on hi s delegation, as far as that's concerned. Very austere and very pompous and difficult to deal with. And even Harriman used to get mad with him. He used to say, "Pushkin, let me tell you something. You' re nothing but a l i ttle punk. " He said, "Remember you're talking to a fellow who used to deal with the great {Josef] stalin. ( Do you think I'm afraid of you?" I've heard Harriman tell Pushkin that.

O'BRIEN : Is that right?

STEEVES: But I'll tell you, the fellow that was the wisest and the ablest man on their delegation was the Ambassador to Great Britain who died a few years afterwards. Oh, I can't recall his name. It was an easy name, too; it wasn't a Russ i an sounding name. /jiote by interviewee: It was (Aleksandr A.) Soldatov.7 Anyway, he and I used to go out for dinner together at night and talk at great lengths about problems in both countries and then get on to the Laos business and try to find some meeting ground and all the rest of it. I just can't think of his name. O'BRIEN: I'm afraid I don't know either. The Russians have a high degree of interest right now in the Laotian thing, at this point, in 1961. They· sort of vacillated, as I understand, from time to time. What explains that? Did you get any insight into that at all from your contacts with the Russians?

STEEVES: The Russians saw at that time, undoubtedly, that they were h~ading for a conflict with China, already were into it, in fact.

O'BRIEN: Did you get any solid indications of that? -41-

STEEVES: Yes. Lack of cordiality in the Conference; sometimes completely different viewpoints expressed even though ~Interruptio!i!

O'BRIEN: There is very definite conflict there between the Russians and the Chinese?

STEEVES: Very much so.

O'BRIEN: Well, Harriman handles that delegation, in a rather rough kind of way. As I understand it, a good many people were detailed back to Washington, and Sullivan-­ was it William Sullivan--becomes the head of the . , . STEEVES: Yes, Bill Sullivan. Because of Bill Sullivan's great ability and his powers of quick action, articulate capabilities--written and oral--I asked for Bill Sullivan to come over to be my deputy. I was the deputy to Harriman and he was to be my deputy to help me in keeping these conference papers flowing and things of that nature. Bill Sullivan was actually stronger. in some of his views and, in writing some of the speeches for me at the Geneva conference, put into them stronger language than I would have thought of using. But as soon as he found out that Harriman had these qualms and was beginning to--incidentally, he's the author of the "Cave with Ave."

O'BRIEN: Is that right? /JaughteiJ

STEEVES: Bill, I must say this, did a little bit of the opportunistic stunt of playing the Harriman game, which eventually landed him where he is today. He.' s still a very able, fine fellow. And who is to say that's the right way to do it or the wrong way to do it? How far do you go in councils in holding to a policy that you strongly believe in rather than doing the expedient thing of figuring out how to accomplish what you know your superior wants? When do you stop doing one and start another? This is a big question that is difficult to decide.

O'BRIEN: That's something, I think, every Foreign Service officer has to face. STEEVES: I don't fault Bill Sullivan for it. I just state it as fact. I don't fault Alex Johnson for it, but state it as S: fact. ~ feeling is that in view of the predicament we've got ourselves into in South Vietnam with thirty-eight thousand Americans dead, with our policy being questioned all aver the world, and all the rest of it

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BEGIN TAPE II SIDE I

STEEVES: Okay, we were talking about the point, where a person who feels strongly about a policy--how far you go in the inner counci ls in holding to that even though it makes you terribly unpopular. But this undoubtedly caused the dispersement of several of us. It was a very lovely outcome, as far as I was concerned, going out as ambassador to Afghanistan. I loved it. But it got me out of the Southeast Asia scene, and I'm pretty much convinced that that's the reason I went there rather than somewhere where I'd be more closely involved in it. I'm sure that that is one of the reasons that Jeff Parsons went to Sweden. I'm sure that it was compliance with that viewpoint that brought Alex Johnson to what he rose to, and that Harriman was put in temporarily as Assistant Secretary of State in FE [""Bureau of Far Eastern Affairi/ to carry out these types of policies.

O'BRIEN: Well, there was also some opposition, as I under­ stand it, from other people in the delegation in Geneva, people like Chester Cooper and Joseph Sisco. Do you recall ( STEEVES: Joe Sisco not very much. Joe, you see, came over as--I asked for him, too. But he was only there for a matter of a few days, and it was kind of conference procedures. He was an expert on this conference procedure business, and he was only there just for a few days and he turned around and went home again.

But I'll tell you the people that were opposed to the Harriman viewpoint. Certainly, Haydn Williams to the place where Harriman told me never to bring him into the office again-­ he wouldn't talk to him. ["°"Charles T;J Chuck Cross, who was on the staff, felt very strongly about it, but being a relatively minor subordinate at that time, he naturally did what he was told. f.William A;J Bill Crawford, who was our Soviet advisor, was very convinced of the type of reasoning that led me to the feeling that I had at that time. The rest of them were more just working staff people that contributed if they could. Chet Cooper was, of course, the CIA representative, and he stuck pretty objectively to his role of being the intelligence gatherer, his contact points in Geneva, keeping his own Agency informed, and that type of thing; .

O'BRIEN: Now, did you leave Geneva before the Kennedy­ ffiikita s.J Khrushchev talks STEEVES: Nope . -43'- I

O'BRIEN: or af'ter?

STEEVES· Nope, I was there. And Averell Harriman was livid. He said, "Can you imagine this young Presi dent, that I have supported, being so callous and so unwise as to go to talk to Khrushchev without ever aski ng me what I thought or counsel. " "Why," he sai d, "There he's got {Charles E., JrJ Chip Bohlen and {Llewellyn EJ Tonnny Thompson, a couple of stripling office boys i n comparison with me, and he takes them along for advisors and doesn't even ask me how he ought to handle Khrushchev." He was as wild as could be. He just darned near used hi s own personal prerogati ve in downing tools and going to Vi enna to be on the s i de; but then he thought better of it and di dn't go.

O'BRIEN: Oh. Well, now how do these play into the talks at Geneva? It was an understanding, as I understand, about Laos.

STEEVES: If there was, it only was a further development of the line that Kennedy had already decided to follow. It is, you play tough on Berlin--this is where he made hi s very tough expression about Berlin. Khrushchev said ( to him, "If you don't get your people out of Berlin, there's going to be war." And Kennedy said in response, "Well, then it i s going to be a very cold winter because we are not getting out. You understand that."

And I think that there were issues on which he was very adamant, but on the matter of Laos, the impression that we got was that if we would go along with Souvanna Phouma. and i f we would go along with the neutralization of I.aos, that they wanted no trouble; they didn't want any more involvement in that part of the world, and they would be glad to get their fingers out of it, provided we would not press our position; and that it merely was a strengthening of the position that Kennedy had already taken and transmitted to Averell Harriman. I actually flew up to Paris to get on the return plane to ride with those fellows back to London to get a quick fill-in from Bohlen and Thompson and [Walt w;J Rostow and the aides that were on the plane and then caught a night plane back from London and was back in Geneva in time for the next morning session.

O'BRIEN: And they were telling you this?

ffi'EEVES· They were telling me a.11 this. . .I- O'BRIEN: This information?

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STEEVES: Yeah.

O'BRIEN: Well, taking some of the other nations there that were present in Geneva, what, in a sense, is Sihanouk in Cambodia up to?

STEEVES: Sihanouk, at this point, has made up his mind that we are going to seek an accommodation, and therefore, he wants to push us into making an accommodati on as rapidly as possible and to include him in it--a neutralization of Cambodia. And yet he wanted the United States to continue to keep itself commi tted to some degree in the area, also, to work as a balance against the connrrunists. This was his game.

He also wanted to increase his personal prestige, and that i s the reason that he proposed and we finally accepted, you know, that he was to be the host of the conference; he was to be the convener, which he did. But he o~ showed up for the opening session and paid very l i ttle attention to it beyond that. And the man that he left in charge of it--whose names skips rrrir mind right now, Kip or something of that nature--was not a very effective member. He spoke very little and contributed nothing to our assistance, certainly.

O'BRIEN: Well, how about the North Vietnamese?

STEEVES: The North Vietnamese were arrogant, recalcitrant, never admitted during the entire con:ference that they ever bad a solitary North Vietnamese in Laos, never did admit it. This was one of the really hard-boiled speeches that I made at one time in which I told them that it was just beyond comprehension how anybody could sit there and blandly and blatantly lie like they were when they knew the truth as well as we did and so did the rest of the world, whether they admitted it or not. That was the speech that Harriman got mad about. But anyway, they were pretty belligerent. The Chinese, likewise, very much so.

The Indians, under Krishna Menon, telling us there was nothing to worry about the Chinese--just people that were trying to find their national entity and to get along in the world, and why were we always so suspicious of the communists and so on and so forth. Krishna Menon was reminded of that several years later when he was the Minister of Defense when the Chinese invaded the place.

The Canadians were terrible. They had the Canadian ambassador, who was a vacillator and a personal friend of Chen Yi, the Chinese communist. /jote by interviewee : This Canadian was -45- .

Chester RonningJ He used to go out in the evening and be entertained by him despite the fact that he was in on the quadripartite talks, the British, the French, and ourselves, and the Canadians. We always had the feeling that he was playing footsi e with the Chinese on the other side and was ,.f no help whatsoever. The Burmese were no help. They were a vaci llati ng crowd and di d nothing to support us.

O'BRIEN: This is the Ne Win government now, isn't i t? Or is it sti ll.

STEEVES: No, it was still the other. O'BRIEN: u Nu?

STEEVES: Yes, U Nu. U Nu was still in.

O'BRIEN: Still in. STEEVES: /Jrun.eiJ Barrington was the man who was there. The Poles played a very interesting role. The Polish Ambassador here now was the head of the delegation.

O'BRIEN: Oh, is that right? STEEVES: He's been a very good friend of mine ever since. I was over at his house for dinner here a few months ago. /JerziJ Michalowsky. But they--in the evening, at dinner and around drinks--would invite us out, and we would invite them out. And they would tell you how mischievous that they thought that the Russians were being, and you couldn't rea~ trust these Chinese and all the rest of it. But we never fell much for it because they would come back into the meeting the next day and be the staunchest supporters of the communist line that you could ever see. Very clear. The fellow that was their legal expert--had his degree from Columbia--was a very, very astute, fine fellow and extremely friendly af'ter the meetings were over; but during the meetings, he was as doctrinaire as anybody could be.

The Thais, of course, were mad during the Whole conference. They thought they were being led to the slaughter, and they would keep threatening to Wa.lk out about every day. We had . JI a hell of a time keeping them there. O'BRIEN: Did you have any contacts with Thanat Kobman?

STEEVES: Oh, yes.

O'BRIEN: at that point? -46-

STEEVES: Yes. I thi nk that it was my personal relationship with Thanat Kohman that was the only thing t hat persuaded him to stay or to keep a delegate there of any importance--he brought down the ambassador fro~ Berlin when he lef't--because he felt that he was being undercut, and there was no parti cular point in Tha i land participating.

O'BRIEN: Well, Rusk had been out that March to the SEATO meeti ng in Bangkok, as I understand?

STEEVES: Yes.

O'BRIEN: Now, di d he make any attempts to, at that :point, assure the Thais of our continued support f or them?

STEEVES: Yes. Is that the meet ing at which the so-called agreement was made--or they were promised t hat we would make an agreement with them that was

O'BRIEN: The Rusk-Thanat?

STEEVES: The Rusk-Thanat.

O'BRIEN: I was thinking of that. I can't remember whether ( that was 1961 or 1 62.

STEEVES: It would be an interesti ng point to investi gate whether that is it because, whichever point it was, whether it was that one or the one later, I was there. And so I've had a great interest in all the discussi on about it recently.

O'BRIEN: You were in Bangkok?

STEEVES: Oh, yes. I've had a great interest in thi s dis­ cussi on that's going on now as to whether or not this i s to be made public or whatnot because I remember the conversation that went on around the room; that in order to get the Thais to go along with our policy in Laos, that we had to give them the assurance that we did. O'BRIEN: I was wondering that, too, in reading some of these recent. It seems to me in some of the things that I've done and read that some kind of an understanding was arrived at in--and I can't rem.ember whether it was 1962 or 1961.

STEEVES: There' s no question about it. I would have to read the document itself' in order to refresh my mind of what is in it, but there's no question at all about !

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what its intent is, and that is to guarantee the Thais that we would not forsake them.

O'BRIEN: Well, actually, what they are talking about now is the SEATO defense plan, isn't it, more than any­ thing else?

STEEVES: No, it's the Thai bi lateral.

O'BRIEN: It's the Thai bi lateral?

STEEVES: Yes . It is extra to the SEATO commitment. This was very much of a sticking point, you see, with Thanat Kohman. He said, "Anything that's got a SEATO label on it, I won't accept because all that happens is that the British and the French make it inoperative." And so that's the reason that it was a two-way agreement between our­ selves and the Thais.

O'BRIEN: Well, do you suppose that was a part of the Rusk­ Thanat agreement that you were a part of?

STEEVES: Yeah, I think so.

( O'BRIEN: Now , who was negoti ating this? Was it the military, the Thai military and the U.S. military, or was the Department doing the negotiating?

S'I'EEVES: r{y" understanding has always been--and this is one part of it I don't understand in the present thing that's being written in the press. They talk about it as being in the possession of the military and all the rest of it, but for one thing, we don't do that, have the military make agreements with each other. And what I think it is, is an exchange of the Rusk-Thanat letters is all it was, a letter of intent or assurance.

O'BRIEN: Well, my understanding was that it was a defense plan which might. I'm sure it was probably a bilateral thing, but.

STEEVES: Well, probably growing out of the letter. They then said, "Well, we'll get our military staffs together and write up a plan, or something of that nature."

O'BRIEN: What do you recall of that meeting in Bangkok with Secretary Rusk and the contacts with the Thais and.

STEEVES: What do I recall about it? Well, I recall that the largest issue before the Thais and ourselves was

..--..---~ ...------•--.:"'.-. -48-

this very issue: "What confidence can we have that the security pact means anything to us when we see what's happening in Laos, and what is likely to happen in Vietnam, and this fellow, Sihanouk, is unreliable." Of course Thanat hated him. And in those days, we still were believing that you've got to be caref'ul and not walk out of Southeast Asia altogether. The last friends we had that we could rely upon were the Thais, and so it got us down to talking seriously with them about firm stands and all of the rest of it, and it took that type of assurance. The reason I remember it so well is because I remember Rusk coming to three or four of us that were in the American delegation and saying he wondered whether or not this would do it or not, and he certainly thought that we owed it to the Thais to go this far; and we all agreed.

O'BRIEN: And the Department is basically supporting him on this?

STEEVES: Oh, yes, sure.

O'BRIEN: On this position in the Far East?

STEEVES: In the atmosphere of that time, certainly. The ( same aura of fear was all through the area. These damn communists meant business, and they were going to go straight through Southeast Asia or anywhere else that it took to gain hegemony over Asia, and they had to be stopped somewhere.

O'BRIEN: Well, now you changed ambassadors in Thailand about this point, when Kenneth Young comes in.

STEEVES: Yes.

O'BRIEN: What kind of a person is Kenneth Young?

STEEVES: Ken Young is an ambitious, mercurial, not terribly bright--buzzes around like a fly on a hot griddle, always wants his fingers into other things than what he's doing. I had to call Ken Young in and say, "Listen, Ken, you've come back into government again now in order to accept, under the Democrats, this ambassadorship to Bangkok; and yet you're hanging around here because you know Vice President Johnson is going out to Southeast Asia on a trip, and you want to go along with him rather than go to your post. Now, make up your mind: Are you going out as ambassador, or are you going to fiddle around with things of this nature just for prestigious reasons?" Well, he still wanted to go along on the trip, a.nd he said that::.he' d :pretty -I ------.. '"=--"'" -- --~ ...... ,... - - ... --- .....,.. ,..' ' -49-

.... ,•

much promised Vice President Johnson that he was going. He went.

Then he wanted to have some kind of an understanding whereby he was a kind of a regional ambassador where he would have the responsibility of coordinating what was go i ng on in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia; that it would only be natural for a person in the field to do that. And we resisted and said, "Heavens no, you can't do that. We don't have such things as regional ambassadors." But then he always wanted to travel. He was always doing something else. And then, of course, before very long, be blew up and came out anyway. But, quite obviously, I don't have a very h igh opinion of Ken's ability. He is not sound, he is not constant, he's not terribly knowledgeable.

O'BRIEN: How did be get along with the Thais once be got out there?

STEEVES: Terrible, terrible. They didn't like him at all.

O'BRIEN: Well, we've skipped over a lot of things on Laos on a kind of a broad range of ideas. Is there any­ thing that, you know, that we've sort of stirred up that you recall that, really, you feel is important at this point or could be important?

gr'EEVES: No. There's a lot of the rest of it, of course, that you could get into in much greater depth. You could do a lot of conjecturing about what would have happened if we had done so a.nd so, which is kind of profitless.

When I came back from Afghanistan again--althougb not in a policy position, but came back as the Director General of the Foreign Service (I naturally continued to be interested in policy affairs)--I developed a very profound admiration for Rusk. I have said in public and private that I think that history will speak of him as one of the wisest, most courageous, most logical, and certainly one of the most articulate secretaries of state that we ever had. Anybody that ever backed into Rusk, including Senator LJ. Willi~ Fulbright, really knew they'd backed into a buzz saw. There were no chinks whatsoever in Rusk's line of reasoning. Now, the whole premise might have been wrong, you've got to make allowance for that, the whole policy structure that he was working on. We may hever have made up our minds on a policy. We probably should have ma.de up our minds whether or not we were going to follow the Walter Lippmann line or something of tha.t nature, that South­ J east Asia was not important to us, then you never ought to -50- -.'

have gotten into it. Well, that, of course, starts you off on an entirely different basi s, But once you agree tba.t it is, that communi sm i s a danger and that you do have to do somethi ng about it; that aggressi on i s a danger today, the same as it was when it was committed by a {f..do~ Hitler or a L_Hidek~ Tojo or anybody else, it's just a di fferent time and a different place, under different circumstances, but it's still all in principle the same; then you get yourself very rapidly around to the Rusk position.

O'BRIEN: Do you see a shi f't here in these admini strations between a European ori entation to an Asian ori entati on, . or at least more knowledgeable people on As i a, from the Eisenhower Administration to the Kennedy Admini strati on?

STEEVES: The Ei senhower Admini stration was not very knowledgeable about As i a, The Kennedy Administra­ tion thought they were going to be, they talked a lot about an Asian emphas i s, but it wasn't very long until he was beating his track to Europe and was knuckling under to the "Europe firsters." We never have gotten very far in really implementing a feeling of Asian importance. Japan, yes; but , kind of beyond that, no. l O'BRIEN: Well, let's carry that on through two more administra­ tions, Johnson and on up into, well, Henry Kissinger's role. Do you think that' s a continuing kind of conclusion?

STEEVES: That's a continuing kind of conclusion. I think you've got a reflection of the same thing again right now. You'll get people all hot and bothered over anythi ng that happens in Europe, but in Asia, let's get ourselves out of it somehow.

O'BRIEN: How did people like yourself and Assistant Secretary Parsons and people at that level react, for example, to Rusk coming into the Department af'ter he had published that article saying the President makes foreign poli cy and apparently defines his role as an administrator of the State Department, rather than as a real force in foreign policy making? Or was there an awareness of that view?

STEEVES: There wasn't because Rusk was an unknown to us as a Secretary of state. He was cordially received, and he wasn't there very long before we were impressed with the man's stature and the fact that he did know something about foreign policy. When it came to doctrines of that nature, -51-

we were not too impressionable to begin with. It didn't mean an awf'ul lot to us.

I, from a different incarnation, had another reason to be a little bit skeptical of Rusk. I always remember two things about him. In one I learned to admi re him; and in the other one, I was a little bit skeptical.of him. Rusk was the person that was the voice and kind of the i nstrument that gave us such a hard time with the Arabs when I was in the Near East over the Palestine issue. And feeling as I did about that, I was a little bit uncomfortable about Rusk's role in that. The one in which I remembered him favorably was his efforts on the Korean business. He was very stalwart on that.

O'BRIEN: Did you have much contact with him back then?

STEEVES : Back in those days?

O'BRIEN: Yeah.

STEEVES: No.

O'BRIEN: Not at all? ( STEEVES: I just barely knew him.

O'BRIEN: Well, there's another thing here, too, that intrigues me about the Far East. It seems to me that it really is a very, very dangerous place in terms of a career service officer. You've gone through, really, two kinds of purges in the State Department: first of all, the ~oseph R;J McCarthy period; and then what you experienced and Jeff Parsons experienced, in a sense, is a kind of purge, too.

STEEVES: Yes, that's right.

O'BRIEN: How do you fit this in in this problem that yoµ're talking about it as achieving a kind of consistency and stableness in policy towards it?

STEEVES: I guess I fit this in--and this is kind of an opinion that I'm expressing for kind of the first time now, and on further examination it might not be valid-­ but I kind of think that it points up the fact that you better not take Asia too seriously in our world relationships and get too strongly opinionated about it because it's likely to get in the road of our European policy and that'll be the end of you in terms of being a high political voice in the Department.

This, of course, changes occasionally. We got a terrific

~: • ' '* .. -52'-

India conscience for a while. But then we got our fingers burnt on that. We got this novice {Jobn Kenne!h7 Galbraith out there that thought we ought to go check with {JS.waharlal~ Nehru before we went to the bathroom, only to be thoroughly disillusioned with Nehru when he pulled the Goa stunt. And we got pretty thoroughly disillusioned with Galbraith, as well, turning his back on his friends and all the rest of it.

But again, rising in the f:"ChesteiJ Bowles period--you may differ with Bowles but you are impressed by the terrific importance that he has made India be to us--then we get dis­ illusioned with the capriciousness of Pakistan. Moving to the other side, you get afraid when you see people vacillate and deteriorate like the stalwartness of the Philippines. Then you get your hopes raised again when things change in Indonesia. So I guess there's a little bit of a reason why folks feel that Asia is such an amorphous, difficult, inconstant and changing area to pin yourself down to a logical, long-term policy. You kind of play it by ear. And those of us that say, "You take your stand in Asia against forces that are going to be very inimical to our interests, and by God, you better do it and do it with constancy and keep your friends with you," are likely to find the sledding a little bit hard. ( O'BRIEN: Well, how about people like yourself in the Department that are involved in policy-ma.king in the late fi:f'ties, how much does things like--well, apparently Secretary Robertson, the experience in China with Marshall really, in a sense, formulates a lot of his ideas. How about Korea and places like Geneva in 1954, how do these things--plus the, you know, the element of the McCarthy purges as well, within the Depart­ ment--how does this affect, in your way of thinking, the formula­ tion of policy and the people that were making policy in the late fi:f'ties and the early sixties?

STEEVES: You mean how did they work into the policy formulation process, or what came out of those that

O'BRIEN: How were people affected in their thinking about-­ like yourself and [A.ssistan"if Secretary Parsons or Robertson, even Secretary Rusk.

STEEVES: Well, I would say that if a person is of that frame of mind, and some of them are whose names you've mentioned, when you get into Asian af'fairs deep enough and learn the people and see at firsthand the forces that can be cut loose in a place like Asia, it's pretty hard for you to keep from coming to the conclusion that it means an aw:f'ul lot to our future, and therefore, you do get very deeply involved

,r in it. If you take the more relaxed view that you are merely ·53-- an instrument of an administration or something of that nature, and you discover that you don't get very far without being an Eastern European specialist or a cooperator in the ".Europe first" type of arrangement, that's what you do in order to gain a place in the policy sun.

O'BRIEN: Well, we've covered a number of things here, and we haven't, in my way of thinking, really completed this. And I know you're leaving for Californi a and all. I have two thoughts in mind:

STEEVES: Right.

O'BRIEN: I think it's very good.

STEEVES: I'd be delighted.

O'BRIEN: Well, I really appreciate this. This is a very candid, frank

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