Remembering Harold Stassen

[L.P. Farnsworth]

STASSEN: Well, we were, you see, I was, for President Eisenhower, what was called his director of foreign operations. At that time, all foreign assistance, all defense assistance, all educational assistance, all operations of a foreign nature, were under my special organization, called Foreign Operation Administration, and Dulles was Secretary of State, so we were very often together. As a matter of fact, we traveled many countries together.
LAMB: What kind of a guy was Secretary of State Dulles?
STASSEN: Well, brilliant, unique -- his family had been in foreign policy, you know, from Lansing way back and so forth, his uncle -- so he was, but also very strong opinions.
LAMB: You two had differences?
STASSEN: Very different policies, that's right. Matter of fact, for President Eisenhower to decide that he would have a summit and would propose his "Open Skies" to the Soviet Union, he had to overrule Secretary Dulles, and that was a very tense thing. So, while I worked very much with Secretary Dulles and appreciated his brilliance, there were clashes. There were difficult issues, but always, I respected him, but when he, when President Eisenhower appointed me as the head of the special studies, to work out the policies of America in the nuclear weapons age, in the space age, at that time, I, as secretary, somebody in the media said, "What should we call his new assignment" about me, and somebody in the media said, "Should we call him a secretary for peace," and Eisenhower said, "Well, that would be a good label," and then Secretary Dulles didn't like that label at all. He said, "That's wrong to have that kind of a label." And it was in his own memoirs, in the library....
LAMB: Here's the cover of your book on President Eisenhower. Who's the gentleman he's talking to?
STASSEN: That's Chairman Bulganin of the Soviet Union. See, Stalin died three months into Eisenhower's administration, in March of 1953, and then there were a number of changes in the leadership of the Soviet Union, and then Bulganin and Khrushchev came up to the fore, and at that time Eisenhower decided it would be good to have a summit, and Senator Walter George and all the controversy, should you or should you not have a summit. And that was the first peacetime summit. Senator Walter George, the Democrat of Georgia, was a great leader in the Senate, and his advice to Eisenhower that he should meet him was very crucial and it was very substantial in line with what I had been urging in the National Security Council, as it shows in the minutes and so forth.So then Eisenhower decided, and he, in fact, at one meeting said to Secretary Dulles, "I'm going to instruct you to prepare for a summit." And he very rarely used that kind of language. That's Senator George right in the middle of that photograph in the book, and that's Lyndon Johnson, who of course then was a Senate leader and later became President....
LAMB: Back to what you said earlier about "Open Skies." You write a lot about that in this book.
STASSEN: General Jimmy Doolittle should get the major credit for that. You see, when the President asked me to work on this special assignment -- what do we do in the space atomic age for policy? I pulled together the best people I could think of and one of them of course was General Jimmy Doolittle. Another one was Ed Teller, the father of the H-bomb and Doctor Ernest Lawrence, the head of the -- Nobel prize winning physicist, and Harold Motin, the head of Brookings Institute. I called that kind of a group together to study, and Jimmy Doolittle spoke up about the importance of opening up so that nations would not fear a surprise attack. He said, "That's a crucial thing." So that became a very important part. There, that shows him first during the war, talking to General Eisenhower, and then it shows him talking to President Eisenhower. Of course, he's the one who lead the famous bomber raid over Tokyo, when he took off from the carriers and then flew over Tokyo to give them a scare and give America a psychological lift, and landed over in mainland China, in order to then come back -- that's Jimmy Doolittle.
LAMB: Let's go back to that time again. This was early in the first Eisenhower term?
STASSEN: That's right. Well, the appointment, yes, it's in the middle of the term. You see, at the beginning of the term, I was Director of Foreign Operations, that would be in January, beginning right away in January of '53, and then in March of '55, is when President Eisenhower to take on, in effect, the additional duty of leading studies about the nuclear age and about arms limitation and all that sort of thing.
LAMB: And what was Jimmy Doolittle doing then?
STASSEN: Jimmy Doolittle was then a retired Air Force General, and he came back to Washington, he did for various things, but he came back to sit in on those studies, along with about 20 very outstanding people that we pulled together to think ahead, think what the space age meant, think what nuclear weapons meant, and what policies we ought to have and how we ought to relate to other countries.
LAMB: In '55, how many people in the world had the bomb?
STASSEN: Well, just the Soviet Union and us, at that time. The British were just beginning to get toward it.
LAMB: What was the attitude in the world, what was the feeling you had during those years?
STASSEN: Well, you see, in that early period, that is from '50 -- in '50 is when the Korean War was going on and the Chinese Communists came down with great strength across the Yalu, and in hundreds of thousands of them, the Chinese Communist Armies, backed by the Soviet Union military supply, and hit the MacArthur forces and drove them back in the middle of Korea, in the middle of that war, and then from that time on, there was great tension, great concern, that's the period of time, Brian, when school teachers were teaching their children how to get under desks if there was an air alarm, and things like that. A great amount of tension in the world. That was '52, and it was in the middle of that period, you see, when Eisenhower said, "Well, if I'm elected President, I will go to Korea." And then they'd try to question him, "Well then, what will you do?" He said, "I'll go and find out what I ought to do, then I'll tell you about it."...
LAMB: Back to the "Open Skies" again. How long did it take to develop that policy and were there several different camps that were for and against the idea?
STASSEN: Yes. Of course the President gave me the assignment to study these questions in March of '55, and in flying -- you see, his request that I do it came to me way over in Pakistan -- and so flying back, I thought of this matter, pulling together the best people I could think of to really get at this subject, and we then met in early May and May 26 of '55 we made a very extensive, what we called progress report to the President at the National Security Council, which at that time was held very much top secret. Then out of that he began to decide, so it was then, in July of 1955, in other words, it was just four months after my appointment, when he made the "Open Skies" his proposal.... Really, I find the historians are beginning, as they get into these secret files, to lift their appraisal. They tended to say, well when he got such marvelous results, he was just lucky. That tended to be the media reaction, but actually they now learn that he had real policies, and of course, in handling crisis situations, nobody had his kind of a record.
First of all, bringing the Korean War to a close in six months, that they hadn't been able to close, and then from that time on, Brian, just think of it, a series of crises, the number of times he showed force, but never a single American soldier being killed or killing anybody else. In other words, this matter -- then he enunciated a very important thing. He said, "At the end of a war, if you're a complete victor, you can impose an unconditional surrender." He said, "You never can expect that in a negotiation without war, that you can have an unconditional surrender -- it's just not realistic, because if you're gonna get a settlement diplomatically, you've got to work on it and have in mind that each side's gotta be flexible."
LAMB: If he were here today and in the presidency, would he do what George Bush has done, over in the Middle East?
STASSEN: He'd do some of it, and of course, this question, that naturally brings the question between the day we're preparing this show and when it shows by, but the key thing that he would be emphasizing, from the early stages, he said, he would say in effect, that President Bush did a brilliant job of getting our force in place to stop any threat of aggression without going in shooting. He always said, "Try to get in position without shooting." But then he would put people to work immediately to work out the kind of flexibility, the kind of compromises, that would resolve it then, and let history work out competition and not start shooting. You have to have in mind that, you know, he went through things like when people were saying, "You must force the unification of Germany, you've got to go in there with force, and unless you force that unification, there's gonna be a terrible war out of the division of Germany." And he'd say, "The history, the forces of history have to decide that one." Or they, sometimes they would were saying, "Well, you've just got to fight Communist China sometime, it's better we start bombing them now while we're strong, so you gotta let us go in and bomb them." And he'd say, "No, let the forces of history and competition between forces" -- like in Korea, when some wanted to drive north with all our weapons and so on, and he studied that, but he said, "No, let the systems compete, you've gotta go through history, we don't want to start expanding the shooting."...
Booknotes

[L.P. Farnsworth]

I ran across this on BookNotes while looking for something else, but I had thought he was dead by 1990, so I read it and thought it might be an interesting read for those who wonder how and who foreign policy influences come from, and Stassen was a major player behind U.S. 'Internationalism' after WW II. The reason for this second post, and the cramped condition of the first, is a 10,000 character limit, about half of what I'm normally used to on discussion boards, so my editing job isn't very good ...