|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
[Notices and Restrictions | List of Subjects Discussed]
NOTICE Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview. RESTRICTIONS Opened April, 1977
[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | List of Subjects Discussed]
Oral History Interview with
October 29, 1973 by Richard D. McKinzie
MCKINZIE: Professor Blaisdell, how did you happen to come into Government service? It's particularly interesting because you began your career in the academic world. BLAISDELL: Well, I came into Government service in 1936 as an assistant to M. L. Wilson, who was at that time Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. So, my first four years in Government service were in the Department
of Agriculture, and then I had a short period between '40 and '41 when I was employed by the Temporary National Economic Committee, which was a new-type joint committee of the two houses of Congress and the executive branch of the Government -- various Government departments -- as an economic analyst. And then from '41 to '51 I was in the State Department. From '51 to '53 I was in the Foreign Service as a Foreign Service reserve officer, and then in '53 I was separated from my position, which at that time was deputy chief of the State Department's permanent delegation at the International Organizations in Geneva, Switzerland. Well, that's a very brief summary of my career. It runs from 1936 to 1953, about 17 years, you see, of Government service.
MCKINZIE: Could I ask you what prompted you to enter Government service in 1936, after you already had very distinguished teaching positions? BLAISDELL: I will be glad to. I mentioned that I went to Washington as Mr. Wilson's assistant in the Department of Agriculture. I had met Mr. Wilson in Washington a year or so before when I was visiting. While I was in Washington I lived in the same house with Mr. Wilson and Rex [Rexford] Tugwell and one or two other New Dealers of those days, most of whom were in the Department of Agriculture. Frederick C. Howe was another one who lived in that house at that time. This was a group of New Dealers who had been called into Washington fairly early, and instead of
having separate digs they pooled their resources and rented a house in Georgetown and lived there. They had a cook, and everybody was taken care of that way. I was lucky enough to be invited to live with them when I was in Washington in the summer of 1935 maybe for a month. I lived there with that group and I became well-acquainted with Mr. Wilson at the time. At that time Mr. Wilson had not become Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. He was then head of what was called the Subsistence Homesteads Division in the Department of the Interior under Harold Ickes, who was Secretary of the Interior at the time. I'll have to get into Mr. Wilson's philosophy I think to explain this connection between him and the Subsistence Homestead project. Mr. Wilson was an agricultural
economist from the University of Montana in Bozeman who had done substantial work in the field of the economics of large-scale wheat farming. He went out there as a county agent in the dry farming area and his first assignment as a county agent was in one of those counties in southern Montana which later was divided up into four counties. So you can get some idea of the scale on which he was operating. As a matter of fact, he had made a trip to the Soviet Union earlier to advise them on their large-scale wheat program there. They were developing winter wheat at that time for use in their northern areas. Mr. Wilson was familiar with winter wheat in Montana, and up into Canada, of course, it was the same situation.
But, he came to FDR's attention in the summer of '32 at the time of the campaign by proposing to FDR what was later called the Domestic Allotment Program, a program for stabilizing farm income by guaranteeing prices on certain farm exports, e.g. wheat, of that part of the total crop consumed domestically. I think this has been documented. I know of at least one master's thesis or doctor's thesis has been done on this, on the contribution of M. L. Wilson to the domestic feature of the original AAA. So, he became acquainted with Raymond Moley, who was one of the orginal braintrusters, and with Rexford Tugwell at the same time. As it happened, I had known both Moley and Tugwell at Columbia because
I had taught at Columbia. I got my degree there in 1929, and I taught from 1928 to 1930 in Columbia College. Raymond Moley at that time was a professor of government at Barnard College, and Rex Tugwell was a professor of economics in Columbia. Rex Tugwell had an office on the floor in Hamilton Hall immediately below mine, and I used to call on him and he used to ask me to come in from time to time. He was in the economics department and I was in the government department, and even in those days inter-penetration of government and economics was very much involved in the teaching that was going on at Columbia. The two departments of government and economics along with the two departments of philosophy and history were involved in what we called
the contemporary civilization program, that was a general survey course including all four disciplines and not involved in any one. All of us had to participate in the teaching of it. I had to teach philosophy and history and economics as well as government and the people in the other departments had to teach government as well, and this is the way we tried to work it. Well, Rex Tugwell and his group was involved in this contemporary civilization program. MCKINZIE: It's now fashionable to call it an interdisciplinary approach. BLAISDELL: Yes, that's right. That was the way it was called. Anyhow, I knew them, I can't
say I knew them well, but I went to Washington in 1935 and lived in the same house with Rex Tugwell and one or two others, including my brother Tom. When I went to Washington in 1936 I already had known Rex Tugwell, and M. L. Wilson was very much promoted with FDR by Rex Tugwell. Rex Tugwell at that time was Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. He later became Under Secretary of Agriculture when M. L. Wilson was simultaneously Assistant Secretary and when I was with Mr. Wilson. This is a long way around to get to the connection between working at a job in industry and having a subsistence homestead at someplace where you could raise a few vegetables and have a cow and have an acre of
land, with a horse maybe, in order to combine your wages as an industrial employee with a subsistence from your own crop. Mr. Wilson, as I came to know later, went back to the old Mormon idea which was so important in the Mormon settlements Of the inter-mountain area in the West where the Mormon towns always had enough land on each of the lots so the settler could have a cow or could raise a garden and could get his subsistence that way rather than being completely dependent on any other job that he might have had. I didn't think Mr. Wilson ever put it in exactly those direct terms, but I can see this was the philosophical background out of which the idea of the subsistence homesteads came. And this was authorized in, I forget what legislation it was, but
I think it was one of the original Public Works authorizations and appropriations and it was put in the Department of the Interior, and Mr. Wilson came to Washington to head that up, I may be incorrect in that, but in any event he was head of the program. MCKINZIE: Did you, as a man who just had met M. L. Wilson, subscribe to this idea of independence insofar as the industrial worker was concerned, the idea of raising part of his own food? BLAISDELL: Yes, I think that I could say that this did appeal to me as something to try out. I had no idea, nobody had any idea, whether it was a viable way of dealing with unemployment or of providing for additional real income to the industrial worker in
normal times, so-called. But anyhow it did appeal to me, and this I think was one of the things that made me receptive to his idea that I come to Washington as his assistant, you see. This was in 1936. I had taught at Williams College from 1930 to 1934 and I went to the University of Wisconsin in 1935 as a visiting professor there. And then I got a grant of money from what was then called the Elmhurst Fund to start this job which later eventuated in the TNEC monograph, Economic Power and Political Pressures, Monograph 26 of the TNEC series. I started my research there at the University of Wisconsin in 1935 and '36. And then in the summer of '36 I went to Washington as M. L. Wilson's assistant, and I was there for four years, almost exactly, from '36 to 1940.
MCKINZIE: Had you anticipated being there that long when you went, because it did amount in a sense to a rather large career decision, didn't it? BLAISDELL: That's right. Well, I was so pleased to be involved in the New Deal in any way, and particularly in the office of the Secretary of Agriculture where M. L. Wilson was Assistant Secretary that I jumped at the chance, because this seemed to me as a professor of political science an unusual opportunity to get into the actual operations of government, particularly in an area and at a time when innovations were being tried in many, many fields -- this subsistence homestead idea, the whole idea of the AAA and all the other New Deal features. Mr. Wilson was a very attractive and
pleasing personality and he was a very unassuming man, but a very widely read man, and an authority on Abraham Lincoln. His middle name, incidentally, was Milburn Lincoln Wilson. He had been named Lincoln by his parents, apparently, because of their great admiration and then this prompted Mr. Wilson to become an authority on Lincoln, and this is one of the things that I absorbed from M. L. Wilson when I was working with him all the time. A very pleasing personality, as I say, but to some people too deliberate. You could never tell what was going on in Mr. Wilson's mind because he rarely just ad libbed. He rarely volunteered anything unless in answer to a question or when he was exchanging ideas with somebody whom he knew was
sympathetic with those ideas. He just didn't spark things off spontaneously. Well, as Assistant to Mr. Wilson, I did a great variety of things. He was a great believer in this idea of what he called economic democracy, recognizing and putting in the hand of the individual some control over his own destiny so far as his employment was concerned. I think this is another thing that was involved in the subsistence homestead idea. Here was a kind of activity, economic activity, where the man was his own boss, so to speak, and he made all these decisions. They weren't dependent on somebody else for a decision. Anyhow, this idea of economic democracy was not original with M. L. Wilson either in industry or in agriculture.
MCKINZIE: It has pretty much gone by the boards, as it turns out. BLAISDELL: Yes, mores the pity. But in those days this was a very active thing and he tried to promote this from his position as Assistant Secretary and then Under Secretary of Agriculture. When Rex Tugwell left the under-secretaryship to become governor of Puerto Rico, Mr. Wilson was moved in to the under-secretaryship and I just went along with him for that period. He did this in a great variety of ways. He promoted the writing and circulation among the extension people of a series of pamphlets on public issues as a means of educating people to a better understanding of the conditions in which they were working and doing their job, you see. He promoted a series of lectures in the Department of Agriculture
graduate school, which was a program of adult education which was well established even at that time, but which Mr. Wilson added greatly to. And he got experts in public administration and history and various other fields to come to Washington to lecture to the graduate school there. He promoted conferences with anybody who would listen to him, particularly bureau chiefs who had to listen to him (if they were under his supervision). He would bring in these ideas that he had about economic democracy. I was involved in that very much with him. I won't say he relied on me, but I did a whole lot of the donkey work for preparation of these things and some of the early writing and things of that kind -- I helped him out on that. We went on many field trips together.
He was responsible for a number of the bureaus in the department, particularly the Forest Service, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, and Animal Industry. There were many of these bureaus that he was responsible for as Assistant Secretary and then Under Secretary. I could remember the tension that used to prevail in the Department when Secretary Wallace was away and Mr. Wilson as the responsible officer in Washington signed the crop report. The crop report was an estimate by the Department of the production of grains and cereals for the forthcoming year, and this was very important for all farmers and all dealers. This was fast-breaking news and it was timed right down to the last second, so that at 4 o'clock on a Friday afternoon when Mr. Wilson signed
the crop report all the newspaper reporters would get the copy and then dash to their telephones, you see, to get it into the wire services. Well, this was just one of the little dramatic things. Another one was that when Henry Wallace would hold a press conference as Secretary of Agriculture, he invited M. L. Wilson and me and others to come in as observers, not to take part, but as observers. This too was also a very interesting procedure. MCKINZIE: Did you have any sense of the relationship between M. L. Wilson and Secretary Wallace? BLAISDELL: Oh, yes, very definitely. They were really very sympathetic people. Henry Wallace had a great admiration for M. L. Wilson and
this was reciprocated. Henry Wallace, I think, made his reputation as a plant breeder or geneticist, as much as anything, if not more than anything else. Mr. Wilson was not a plant breeder or a geneticist at all, but he had great respect for Mr. Wallace's scientific proclivities. And Mr. Wallace, on the other hand, had great respect for Mr. Wilson's economic ideas as they worked out in the domestic allotment plan and the AAA and things of that kind. MCKINZIE: How does one go from those very basic and domestic concerns to involvement with the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies? What is the transition, how did that come about? BLAISDELL: Yes, well, let's see, back in 1935 I guess it was, I had written a pamphlet
called "The Farmer's Stake in World Peace." This was for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which at that time was headed by James T. Shotwell, a professor of history at Columbia University. I had done this largely because a man with whom I have been associated ever since, Clark M. Eichelberger, was trying to promote the same kind of adult education among the farmers and the rural people and in the Midwest generally, that Mr. Wilson was trying to promote among the constituency of the Department of Agriculture. So, when I came into the Department of Agriculture I had just written this pamphlet. As a matter of fact, it had gone into its second printing the first year I was in the Department of Agriculture. So, one of my parallel activities in those
years from 1936 on -- and this carries on right to the present time as a matter of fact -- was my association with Clark Eichelberger and the various organizational activities that he was involved in one way or another to get the United States to accept what he thought was its fair share of maintaining the peace. This he saw through some kind of a world-wide organization, comparable to the League of Nations from the First World War and, of course, anticipating the United Nations after World War II. One of the organizational efforts that he made was in 1939, just at the time of the outbreak of war, setting up the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. It was known at that time as the William Allen White Committee. He was an Emporia, Kansas editor and a well-known Republican figure, and Mr. Eichelberger and
one or two others who were involved in this were able to persuade Mr. White to become the titular head of it; that's what it was because he never was a very active person organizationally, or anything of that kind. He lent his name to it and his prestige; and I was involved in that in Washington. The short space of time after I left the Department of Agriculture in 1940 in June, until I went with the Department of State in late December 1941, all of that time I spent in my activities for the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. A Washington office was established. Livingston Hartler and I ran it. We tried to get out a weekly bulletin for the various chapters. The big job we did was in the Lend-Lease Act in 1941, being a sort of information office for the various local chapters over the country
on the progress of the lend-lease act and various other things, the relationship between the United States and Britain particularly, but the other allies as well. MCKINZIE: You must have had a good feel for the temper of the American people by the time of Pearl Harbor? BLAISDELL: That's right. By that time, December 1941, I was in the Department of State, although not in the division I spent most of my time with. I first went into the Department of State in June of '41 as an assistant to Lynn Edminster, who at that time was one of the assistants of Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, and who had been with the Tariff Commission as an economist before that.
The Lend-Lease Act had been passed in March of '41. In setting up an office to administer it, the Department of State was drawn in by the White House and the person designated by the White House to play some kind of a role in the determination of the needs of foreign countries for American supplies and ammunitions was Oscar Cox, a lawyer in the Treasury Department. The munitions end of this, of course, was handled almost entirely by the War Department. But on civilian supplies and raw materials, the State Department was involved. Mr. Edminister's office was designated by the Secretary of State to be the focal point in those early days for working out the proper procedures and the proper angles of the assistance that the United States could lend to the other countries, particularly Britain at that time.
This involved me, because Mr. Edminster brought me in to be his liaison with Oscar Cox on all of the interdepartmental committees that were centralized under Oscar Cox. This is one of the cases where they used an innocuous name to veil a very important significant, strategic operation. They called it the Office of Lend-lease Reports; this was like the Manhattan Project a little later on. The idea was to us a completely innocuous title to cover up something of much greater significance. Oscar Cox headed up the Office of Lend-lease Reports. His office was the contact between all the purchasing agents of the British Government and the other governments in this country for supplies under the lend-lease program. MCKINZIE: Did you apply, or were you contacted
to come in as a result of your work with the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies? BLAISDELL: I don't think that figured very largely, I just don't know, although I had known Lynn Edminster earlier, when I was in the Department of Agriculture. He and I and others sat on interdepartmental programs that had been set up under the reciprocal trade agreements program in 1933. One of the procedures was the setting up of these various interdepartmental committees to hold hearings on the effect of tariff reductions on domestic industry and domestic activities. Edminster and I had sat together on a number of those committees so he knew of me that way. He probably knew, at the same time, that I had been identified with the Committee to Defend America.
I didn't get into the news very often, once or twice I did. I remember a meeting had been scheduled at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington at which somebody was to debate with Norman Thomas on whether, and if so how much more, aid we ought to give to Britain at this stage in the war. This was in 1940 or early '41 -- before the Lend-Lease Act was passed. Anyhow, at the last moment the man whom they had gotten to debate Norman Thomas couldn't come so they ran me in to debate Norman Thomas on this subject and, well, I felt that high, because Norman Thomas is a formidable debater. He was a very fine public speaker, of course, and a very fine looking man on the platform, a tremendous platform manner. Here I was trying to uphold the idea that we ought to give more aid to Britain and he was saying in America's interest we ought not to give any more aid to Britain, you see.
I did get into the newspapers because of that debate, but I came off very poorly, a very poor second. Well, through this, Edminster and others in the State Department may have known of my former work. I'm sure they did, because Clark Eichelberger was known in the State Department. He was known by the Secretary of State. He was known by various of the assistants that Cordell Hull had in his immediate office. MCKINZIE: Are you speaking of Leo Pasvolsky? BLAISDELL: Leo Pasvolsky, particularly, yes. So, in answer to your question, I would guess that Edminster and the others probably did know that I was involved in the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and that was one of the reasons that they were
willing to have me come in, if not anxious to have me come into the Department. In any event, I found myself in a rather interesting position as Edminster's deputy and liaison with Oscar Cox and his Office of Lend-Lease Reports. As I said earlier, that was the focal point with the people whom the British were sending over here, not on the military end but on the civilian end for all the supplies and equipment that the British needed in their war effort, you see. So, I found myself involved in a mushrooming bureaucratic operation where we were devising forms and applications and estimating needs and things of this kind in order to pass on these requests that were being submitted. This got to be such a job, as a matter
of fact, that the Secretary set up a division in the State Department to handle it, the Division of Defense Materials. Tom [Thomas K.] Finletter from New York, who later became Secretary of the Air Force under Harry Truman, was the head of this Division of Defense Materials. I was transferred from Edminster's office to the Division of Defense Materials as an assistant bureau chief at that time. Acheson, who was Assistant Secretary at that time, brought Finletter down from New York, he brought Charles Bunn from the University of Wisconsin down on this operation. This was the beginning of this recruitment of a lot of people from academia and from the law offices and civilian activities into the State Department and then other branches of the Government for this civilian effort. Early on,
before we got into the war at the time of Pearl Harbor, I was in the Division of Defense Materials, but not very long, Pasvolsky was then recruiting his Division of Political Studies and his Division of Economic Studies, and there was a third division that was being set up there that was going to deal with all of these colonial areas, or dependent areas I think the euphemism was. Anyhow, my work had been noticed by one of Pasvolsky's assistants, Harley Notter, who was scheduled to be the chief of this Division of Political Studies. Harley Notter was from Stanford University, or had done his work out at Stanford University, earned his degree there. When Pasvolsky brought him into the Department I just don't know, but it wasn't very long before this time I'm speaking of. Anyhow, he asked me to come
in, to be transferred from Defense Materials to the Division of Political Studies and I was transferred in January of '42, I think. I was still in Edminster's office at the time of Pearl Harbor. I can remember his coming in the day after Pearl Harbor and he had been talking with some of the people in the Secretary's office about the extent of destruction at the attack, and his saying that it was so much worse than had been let out publicly at the time. But of course, immediately after they just didn't know how extensive the destruction was, all these ships that had been sunk at their moorings there at Pearl Harbor. Anyhow, I remember that very distinctly the morning afterwards. It was a Monday morning, the 7th of December of '41 was a Sunday, and the 8th the next day was a Monday morning and when we came
in to work -- I remember this very, very vividly. Well, it was January, I think, of '42 that I was transferred over to the Division of Political Studies. I don't know what they called me, I was an economic analyst with TNEC. The Civil Service descriptions I had to become familiar with because later on I became Assistant Chief and Acting Chief of this Division of Political Studies, you see. But at this time I wasn't. MCKINZIE: But at this time this new work you were involved in was not aired very much publicly, was it? BLAISDELL: No, it wasn't. I don't know when it became publicly known. You're familiar, of course, with Harley Notter's work on
postwar planning. Anyhow he's got all of these dates and details in that. I just can't say when it became generally known. I can remember this, Harley Notter was a very soft-spoken person. It wasn't until 1945 that I began to have my hearing difficulty, but even before then I had difficulty hearing Harley Notter and Leo Pasvolsky when I was sitting with them in a meeting. I don't know how wide-spread this was among the bureaucracy in Washington, but anything that had to do with the war was spoken of in subdued terms, very low, you didn't raise your voice, you didn't speak clearly, you sort of mumbled in your beard, with the result that anybody like me who was beginning to have a hearing problem, found it to be a very great handicap. Later on my hearing
became very much worse, but that's another story. Harley Notter asked me if I wouldn't come over to the Division of Political Studies and I was delighted with this prospect because this got me into the area that I had done my doctor's degree work in, public law and government, and because of my work with the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. My general orientation was in international organization and international relations at that time, along with American Government. So, I was delighted to accept this offer to go into the Division of Political Studies. I didn't know what they wanted me to do and I don't think they did because they were feeling their way along. This
thing had just been approved by Cordell Hull and FDR, because Hull and Pasvolsky had been in a huddle with FDR on the setting up of this postwar planning operation. At Hull's suggestion, I think, FDR agreed to putting Pasvolsky in charge of the whole thing. He was a special assistant to Hull at the time and had Hull's confidence and this gave him a position in the Department and among the other departments that meant that he could exercise some influence in the way this planning was developing from the beginning. MCKINZIE: May I ask you how you felt at that time about the prospects for the future, because if you look at the people who came in it was quite an amazing group. Clark Eichelberger was there, Clarence Streit was brought in as a consultant from
time to time. Eleanor Dulles was involved in some of the economic things and you can go down the list of a really spectacular group of minds. BLAISDELL: That's right. MCKINZIE: At that time did you really think that there was a possibility, after the war, assuming that the right side won, that there could be some different kind of international setup, one which might modify some ideas about sovereignty or involved more integration of economics? How optimistic could one get in 1942 about what was going to happen when the fighting was over? Did you allow yourself that kind of optimism? BLAISDELL: Well, these were very glum, grim days in early '42 obviously, and that's when we
started this operation. I think that I can say that so far as I was concerned, I felt that there was an even chance that we could set up an international organization, not obviously identical to the League of Nations, but some kind of a league rather than a world government to deal with this question of international security which would make it possible for the peaceful settlement of disputes, rather than resort to a war to settle disputes. I can't say that I had really studied this very closely. I never studied diplomatic history particularly, as a field of history. I was more interested in comparative government than I was in history or diplomatic history as a field of specialization. This was one of my major emphases at Columbia when I did my work there. My graduate work was
comparative European governments, you see, along with international organization and international relations. I had my major in international law and relations and my minor was in European governments, so this was the orientation that I had at that time. Looking back on it, you mentioned Clarence Streit as a consultant at this time. I can remember being rather favorably impressed with Clarence Streit and with Ely Culbertson, who was another one. I don't think he was ever brought in as a consultant to the Department, I may be wrong about that, but anyhow, his idea, worked out from the mind of a bridge player, was considered by the Division of Political Studies when we were looking at all of these ideas which were being sent out by individuals, by groups, by organizations, by
governments for organizing the postwar world. Ely Culbertson's idea -- I remember studying that at some length at some time, and the logical consistency of it impressed me. I mean this is the result of a bridge player's mind. He has to know where all the cards are and you can give a weight to every card, and this is what Culbertson did. He used this ability that he had -- he put it over into a field, of course, which was totally different from playing bridge -- but nevertheless it had a certain appeal because of its logical consistency. I think many of the people who were adherents of the idea of world organization like Streit were appealed to. Many of the people who were brought
in to Pasvolsky's groups I had known of, many of them I hadn't known of. I had known of Pasvolsky because of his connection with the Brookings Institution. I hadn't known of Harley Notter; I hadn't known of David Harris, who was another one of the people whom Pasvolsky brought in, he was also from Stanford, and he headed up the Division of Historical Studies which was a parallel division with Political Studies; and I hadn't known Ben Gerig -- well, I had known of him -- he was an old friend of Clark Eichelberger from the League of Nations days and Ben Gerig was one of the Americans in the League Secretariat for a short time, but I had known of him. Well, there were a lot of criticism. I'm sure you're aware of the criticism that was leveled at the Department, at FDR and
Cordell Hull for setting up this postwar planning group. People just couldn't figure how in the middle of the war, where everything was going against us, we could be planning the postwar period. When it became known after the Dumbarton Oaks conversations that we were thinking of something along the line of the League of Nations, well, this was just another evidence that we had lost our senses, that we just hadn't any idea of the real world. There were not changes of anything in the postwar world. Well, Drew Pearson and various people like that, were very critical, the predecessors of Jack Anderson today. MCKINZIE: What was your perception of the way that it was being received at the White House? I read some of those plans proposing schemes for reconstruction of areas after the war.
What kind of feeling did you have about the White House belief in your work, or was there any? BLAISDELL: Well, I think that so far as the proposals which became the UN Charter are concerned, I think my feeling was at the time, and I think this was fairly generally shared, that Leo Pasvolsky was pretty much writing his own ticket, that Hull was philosophically disposed to this whole idea, but that he wasn't particularly interested in it. International cooperation was a shibboleth of Cordell Hull I think. I don't think he really understood, or was very much interested in what this really involved, in terms of American sovereignty or American independence, and I think FDR was so absorbed with winning the war that he was
glad to have somebody give attention to this postwar period, but as long as it was under Cordell Hull, and then after Hull left it was Ed Stettinius, well, that was all right. He was going to have dealings with Stalin, he was going to have to deal with Churchill, he was dealing with them, all the time in the middle of the war on war problems. And he knew that there was going to be problems that he was going to have to deal with them in the postwar period, But in those early days, I think the idea of international cooperation was one of these things that was just sort of accepted uncritically. I think there was a whole school of historical persuasion that if we had been in the League of Nations that the League would have worked. It wouldn't have fizzled out as it did in 1939, so that this idea of another world organization,
not a world government as Streit was talking about where we would, so to speak, give up sovereignty or sub-sovereignty, which is a paradox, or it's a contradiction in terms, I think. Anyway, there was quite a lot going for it in those days, but it wasn't very critical. It wasn't very serious. MCKINZIE: Might I interrupt with a question? There are some people who say the political people, the political planners, did not talk enough to the economic planners -- that you had on the one hand the people who were concerned about setting up the structure for something which eventually became the United Nations, based very much on the model of the League, and that you had on the other hand the economic integrationists very much like Will Clayton who took over as Assistant
Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, and that the people who were setting up the political dimensions of the UN didn't have much dialogue with the economic people. Is that a fair criticism? BLAISDELL: I really can't answer that; if I were to answer it I would say that it's true to a point. Pasvolsky was an economist before he was an international and political planner. He got into international political planning because of his friendship and the confidence that Cordell Hull had in him, and the fact that he was a very persuasive debater, particularly in small groups. He was a very articulate person. He rarely if ever was at loss for a word or a phrase to present his ideas in the most favorable light. He always gave me the impression that
anything he said was a sort of a sharing of a secret that he had from Cordell Hull, or from FDR, or someone even more remotely connected with the White House or the top planners on the thing, that Pasvolsky was privy to this and he was sharing with us in a sort of gentlemanly, rather charitable way what we might need in our business, but not necessarily we'd need in our business. Let me just reminisce a little more. I forget when it was, it was in '43 I would guess, but the State Department, the War Department and the Navy Department set up a State, War and Navy Coordinating Committee. This was called "swink," SWNCC, and I was designated as the executive secretary of SWNCC, This brought me into contact with the War and the Navy Departments as well as the State Department, the political people and
other people in the State Department that I hadn't been in touch with before. This was, to use this not very descriptive term at a "higher level" than the work that I was doing in the Division of Political Affairs. As I remember the composition of SWNCC was at the Assistant Secretary level -- Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Assistant Secretary of the Army, Assistant Secretary of State or their deputies. It might mean a deputy assistant, or it might be somebody that would be named deputy for that purpose, and here I was the executive secretary of this thing. At these meetings they were talking about things that we were doing in the Division of Political and Historical Studies because they were talking about military government and the setting up of government in captured and
liberated territories. This was the whole purpose of the operation. Phil Mosley was in the Division of Historical Studies in the State Department but he also even then was being drawn into the postwar planning on the disposition of territories, and he wrote many of the papers on that. This was heady stuff for me. This is where I first came to know the group in the War Department, the War Plans Division and the general staff that became so famous later on -- Dean Rusk particularly. Dean Rusk was not in this group immediately, because he was in the China-Burma-India theater at that time, but there were 3 or 4 or a half a dozen other military and naval officers in the War Department and in the Navy Department whom I was thrown in touch with at that time that I had continuous contact with later on, right up through the San
Francisco Conference, and into the period after the UN was set up in New York and in London and Paris, because this was a group from what later became the DOD, the Department of Defense in 1947. The War Department and the Navy Department and the Air Force through the Army -- through the War Department in those days -- were involved in our "grand strategy" under the United Nations as it was supposed to be worked out by the military staff committee of the UN Charter. And the Military Staff Committee I think was one of the things that Leo Pasvolsky thought was an innovation. In international organization there had been no corresponding committee in the League of Nations to plan international security and the contributions of the various members, particularly the permanent members of the Security Council, to this enforcement of international decisions and the organization of security to
prevent the outbreak of hostilities, you see. MCKINZIE: Did you have the feeling that the people from the War Department who attended understood the implications of all of that, of what they were talking about? BLAISDELL: Better than those of us in the State Department, I think they did. I really think they did, I'm not saying that this meant that they were more devoted to that idea and seeing it worked out than we were, but I think they understood the implications from a security point of view, an international and national security point of view better than we in the State Department did. MCKINZIE: Did you find them obstructionist? BLIASDELL: On the contrary, they were very helpful. I'm perfectly willing to say it,
because I'm downgrading myself in saying it, I think they were better prepared from the point of view of education and experience to deal in this matter than we were at the State Department. I have a great respect for those people. I can give you the names of three or four or half a dozen of them. As I say, Dean Rusk was the outstanding person because I worked with him in the Department afterwards, you see. But there were three or four others there that were just as keen as whips. They could have occupied posts in the State Department just as well as they could corresponding posts in the Navy Department or the War Department. From the point of view of their experience and their knowledgeability and their understanding of international forces and the things that the United States was going to
have to deal with in the postwar world, people of superior mentality, a very interesting group that was gotten together. Now I don't know who it was in the War Department that did that. This was when George Marshall was chief of staff and when he or his people had to make the choices for the plans division for the postwar period, or even for the war period. These people were dealing with Operation Overlord at the time that they were dealing with us in the State Department about postwar planning. I found this out in London when I was there in the summer of '45 after VE Day and before VJ Day, when I was there with Ed Stettinius and then later with Adlai Steven-son representing the United States at the sessions of the executive committee of the preparatory commission of the United Nations, which operated from the end of the San Francisco
Conference until the beginning of the first assembly in January '46. MCKINZIE: The same people who were meeting with you were at the same time meeting in preparation for Operation Overlord? BLAISDELL: Yes, maybe put this way it overstates the case, but these people that I was dealing with in SWNCC were drawn from the same division or organizational entity or unit in the War and Navy Departments as the generals of the War Department general staff, you see. In the general staff, the plans division was the crux of the whole war planning efforts under Marshall as chief of staff and through Leahy in the White House and FDR as the Commander in Chief. Perhaps I'm magnifying unduly my own importance in the scheme of things. Looking back
on it I fear this may be the case. However, at the time the inner logic of the postwar planning operation really left us no alternative. You see, the Division of International Security Affairs, one of the three postwar planning divisions, had been assigned by the powers that be the responsibility of drafting the United States' positions and postwar treaty language for the structure for maintaining postwar international peace and security through the United Nations, a wartime alliance. I was a technical expert in this division, later as assistant division chief and sometime acting division chief. The studies we were preparing embodied the ideas of the United States on the structure of the postwar intergovernmental organization having the responsibility of maintaining international peace and security. These were major parts of what would later
become the United States Proposals to the Dumbarton Oaks discussions (1944), the Yalta Conference and the San Francisco Conference (1945) and ultimately the Charter of the United Nations. In contrast to those parts of the Charter covering the pacific settlement of disputes (Chapter VI) we were dealing with disputes and situations that might involve the use of military force -- action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression (Chapter VII). We were theorizing all the time, of course. But in our theorizing we needed the ideas, concepts, and perceptions of the professionally trained soldiers in the plans division of the General Staff of the War Department. MCKINZIE: Did you or anyone from the War or Navy Department have a real fear at that time of
some sort of difficulty with any one of the major powers in the postwar period? That is to say, had anybody anticipated a problem with the Soviet Union or with China or with Great Britain as being a kind of natural postwar antagonist? I mean, how you plan depends upon whom you're planning for, in a sense. BLAISDELL: Yes, I think I had some of those fears. I won't say that they were anywhere near as great as some of my colleagues. We changed the name of the Division of Political Studies and set up a new Division of International Security Affairs, this was also under Leo Pasvolsky. I was made an assistant chief of that division; for a time Joe Johnston was away, or before he came in, I was acting chief. This was at the time when we would try to deliver lend-lease
ammunition and munitions, supplies, to the Soviet Union, The fact that I had been in the Office of Lend-Lease Reports, or rather was the State Department liaison with the Office of Lend-Lease Reports, meant that I knew these people who were operating the lend-lease program under Oscar Cox, right up through the war, and I would see these people from time to time. I can remember the names of one or two of them, but they were of general officer rank, you see, in the Army, and Admiral rank in the Navy. They gave us top people when they put this whole thing together. And I can remember from talking to them just casually, them saying, "We're going to have to fight the Soviet Union." This was when they wanted to bomb Central Europe from British bases or from the Azores
and land in the Soviet Union without having to make a round trip. I mean they could carry enough fuel for a one-way trip, provided they could get landing rights from the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union wouldn't let them do it. And this was in the interest of the Soviet Union. At least as we saw it, but not as they saw it. If the Soviet Union allowed us landing rights there for our bombers this would mean that we would have something to throw back at them later on as evidence of cooperation which they did not want to bring forward, you see. Now this was the way it was being interpreted by my colleagues and opposite numbers in the War Department and the Navy Department. Later on, I was in New York assigned to the U.S, representative office there to the UN and I was in daily touch with the people
seconded from the War Department and Navy Department for work on the Military Staff Committee. Going down in the elevator one day with General Ridgeway we got to talking about this (this was after the war of course, this would be in '47 I guess) "Which would you rather fight, the Nazis or the Soviets?" And he said, "I'd rather fight the Soviets because I don't think the Nazis are the threat to the United States that the Soviets will be." MCKINZIE: But even in SWNCC, in those early meetings where you were trying to work out some basis for a proposal, there was some uneasiness or some feeling that there might be postwar difficulties? That's what I'm trying to get at.
BLAISDELL: Yes, I think so, I think there was that. And it came out in a very real way, because (I may be wrong), but my memory of the contribution of SWNCC was -- I forget the number of this document but there was their particular document that we worked on and which was finally approved and became the Bible for the organization of the postwar organization of the captured and liberated territories. And this, of course, was where the Navy and the Army were going to have to do the administration. The military government, or in the case of liberated territories like Austria they were going to have to set up a new government, and this got all involved, you see, in this battlefield confusion between the Soviets and the Allies. The Soviets coming from the East and the Allies from the West and meeting in Central Europe there, in Germany and in the Rhineland and in Austria. How were
we going to get along with the Soviets, where we in SWNCC proposed the setting up of an inter-allied, including the Soviet, you see, military administration? MCKINZIE: Let me play the devil's advocate on another topic but on the subject of postwar planning. It might be possible to argue that the people who were in the Division of Political Studies had a kind of vision of what it would be like after the war, that if you could at least use Will Clayton's exposition of that, there was going to be a period of about 2 years in which reconstruction would take place, and at the end of those two years, because of reduction of trade barriers and refinements in the international monetary exchange system, there would be a kind of upward spiral of international trade and world prosperity, culminating in integration of economies
as economies had never been integrated before. And it is possible to argue that that was the postwar vision, and that the whole thing was badly botched. Where? BLAISDELL: Well, I only realized later on the place of Will Clayton in this kind of thinking for the postwar period. I did come to know that Will Clayton was one of the signers of the original declaration of Atlantic Unity. And he was one of the key people in setting up that whole thing and in supporting it financially, and in staffing it and seeing that it was an ongoing affair. I have a friend who has been the executive director of that from the beginning, the Declaration of Atlantic Unity, Walden Moore. And Will Clayton was one, as I say, of the original sponsors of it. This reflected Will Clayton's general
ideas, I think, that there was a basis of unity in the Atlantic powers which would be recognized and built upon more immediately than any additional or parallel basis that might be on a larger, global scale. In other words, we would have in the North Atlantic basin a regional approach to international cooperation which could be built on later through the United Nations, or in a variation of the United Nations. Now, this was one of the alternatives because there were people who thought that regionalism was the answer to these questions rather than universalism. The United Nations represented universalism. While it did, ultimately, give a bow to regionalism in Chapter VIII of the Charter, this was going to be a subsidiary or a secondary form of organization to the world wide global form represented in the United Nations.
MCKINZIE: May I interject here and ask you if you are aware of the criticism sometimes made that the United States really wanted a universalist approach, except for itself -- in the case of the Western Hemisphere where it did pursue a policy or regionalism. BLAISDELL: Yes, we had to. In early 1945 just before the San Francisco Conference (there was a conference in Mexico City) to iron this thing out, this whole western hemispheric regionalism to make it so that it could be accommodated in the embryonic United Nations Charter. MCKINZIE: Would you care to say anything more about how this idea that there was this kind of hope, or expectation, that recovery would occur within a couple of years? It didn't, of course, occur within a couple of years, and might I ask you to analyze why it didn't, what
was wrong, was the perception of the extent of destruction inappropriate, why wasn't there recovery within two years? Why weren't European nations willing to reduce their trade barriers as Clayton would have them do it. In short, there was something wrong with either the vision or the implementation of vision at the end of the war, and I'd be very interested in your analysis of what happened. BLAISDELL: I think our planners (maybe this is the economic planners, or the monetary planners), just failed to realize the extent of destruction and the extent to which Western Europe would be dependent on the United States for capital goods. In other words, I don't know whether it would have been organizationally possible, or whether there was any agency in the United
States Government, even in wartime, that could have been harmonized with the thinking of the Division of Political Studies to bring in this economic and financial element. Now, ostensibly this was being done through Leo Pasvolsky as special assistant to the Secretary of State, who himself was an economist. Through him all of the postwar economic and social planning had to be filtered, at least within the State Department. But in fact Leo was only one of a large number of people who were involved, people like Treasury secretary Morgenthau of the old-line departments, with operating as well as planning responsibilities, and like Donald Nelson of the War Production Board and Leslie Groves in the Manhattan District Project with operational responsibilities only. Parenthetically, my brother Tom, who was in
WPB at the time, reminded me of the intense competition for raw materials within the government at this time, citing from his experience one of the really basic decisions, should priority be given to the development of the bomb or to the crying need for shipping? As one examines Leo's assignment, and remembering that we in PS and ES were working under him, and tries to reconstruct mentally the wartime organization of the United States government for prosecuting the war and for postwar planning, and not forgetting the struggle over reconversion of the American economy after the war, he may get some idea of the intense competition among people and the wartime bureaucracy and ideas as to postwar reconstruction in Europe. At the risk of sounding doctrinaire my criticism is -- if it is a criticism -- that the
Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Leahy, didn't have a staff in the White House that could really plan grand strategy in the sense that Edward Meade Earl uses that term. Meade, incidentally in compiling this work Makers of Modern Strategy, Earl gives a definition of grand strategy, and it's in that sense that I use this term. Grand strategy, not only in the conventional military sense but in the overall political military sense that is total war. The chief of staff to FDR, Admiral Leahy, did not have in the White House a staff who could be looking at the thing in terms of grand strategy including postwar reconstruction, Leahy didn't have any staff, It was enough for him to absorb the heat from the service departments which otherwise would have been directed to the Commander-in-Chief. Obviously he had to have
a staff to do it. Harry Hopkins was his alter ego on a great many of these things, and this was because of a close, very personal relationship that they had and the fact that Harry Hopkins had been a superb administrator at WPA back in the prewar days, a person who could get things done. This is what FDR wanted, or the kind of person he needed in running a war. But, just talking off the top of my head, and I've studied this later on, when I offered courses in my work at City College and later other places in "making of defense policy," the fact that there was no general staff of the United States for the Commander-in-Chief, for the President as Commander-in-Chief, and we combined in our head of State the chief executive and the Commander-in-Chief, which means that if you're going
to have a general staff for the chief executive you have to have an executive office of the President, which is what we have now. This is the general staff for the chief executive, just as the way the War Department had a general staff with its plans division and its operations division and everything else, intelligence and the thing that Somervell was at during the war, Procurement, and all those things. Well, if there was any weakness in our postwar organization, looking back on it with the benefit of hindsight now and what's happened since, I would say that here was a weakness. But FDR thought that he was taking care of this in Harry Hopkins and in Leahy, in setting up the Foreign Economic Administration with Milo Perkins, who was an assistant of Henry Wallace back in the
Agriculture days. I can think of two simple reasons why organization for ground strategy was never achieved -- one, we never had to mobilize more than about fifty percent of our manpower and resources, and two, FDR's manner of operations. He preferred ad hoc and flexible administrative arrangements to an organization that embodied all the features of good administrative procedures.
Second Oral Memoir with Donald C. Blaisdell, Laurel, Maryland, June 27, 1975, By Richard D. McKinzie, Harry S. Truman Library. MCKINZIE: Professor Blaisdell, in 1946 and '47 you attended many of the meetings in Lake Success? BLAISDELL: That's right. I was still in the Division of Political Studies in 1946 and then in 1947 they changed the organizational pattern of the Department. This was when [Edward R,, Jr.] Stettinius came in as Secretary. They set up the Bureau of United Nations Affairs at that time, and that bureau was composed of three divisions -- of Political Studies, Economic Studies, and Dependent Area Affairs. I was in the Division of Political Studies, and then was transferred to the Division of International Security Affairs, and I was in that. I had
been made an assistant chief in that division. I was still based in Washington, but I spent a good deal of time in New York because the headquarters of the U.N. had been transferred to Lake Success in '46 and in '47 they were still at Lake Success. The Assembly met in the old Convention Hall of the 1939 World's Fair and the Security Council in various places there, Hunter College, at one time, in the Bronx. Well, my job was a sort of a combination of preparing positions and papers for the United States at the meetings of the United Nations organs, particularly in the field of International Security Affairs, and then going up to New York and helping the delegation up there negotiating these positions. So, I had two hats. One was in
Washington and one was in New York. I was an adviser to the delegation in New York, which was even at that time a permanent mission. At the instigation of the Department of State and the White House, the Congress enacted in 1945 the United Nations Participation Act, which provided for representation of the United States at the various organs of the U.N. It also provided for a U.S. mission to the United Nations, and this was established in New York and it's been there ever since, of course. More particularly, my work had to do with the Military Staff Committee and the Security Council and those parts of the Charter, particularly Article 43, which envisaged military -- naval and air forces -- made available to the United Nations by the members for seeing that Security Council decisions in the field of security were carried
out and enforced; enforcement action, so-called. The Military Staff Committee was provided for by the Charter and it was made up of representatives of the five permanent members of the Security Council, namely the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China. The Military Staff Committee got underway so far as its meetings were concerned, right at the beginning. I was involved in that very heavily. The State Department worked with the National Military Establishment. The positions of the United States in the Military Staff Committee were a combination of military and political considerations and it soon became clear that we had one idea, a concept of the role of the United Nations in the maintenance of international peace
and security through the Security Council and the Military Staff Committee, and the Soviet Union had a diametrically opposite concept of what the United Nations should do in this respect. It was a foreshadowing of the Cold War, this clear split in the Military Staff Committee with the Soviet Union on one side and the other four members on the other. It was not that the other four members saw eye to eye, but it was always a pretty clear split between them and the Soviet Union. It was primarily over this question of what kind and how many military, naval and air forces ought to be made available to the U.N.; where they would be based; how they would be commanded; how they would be supplied; how they would be paid; all of these questions -- logistical and others that come in the maintenance of a military force.
Pretty early in the game it became clear that we weren't going to get anywhere on that, I wrote an article for what was then called Documents and State Papers (Volume I, Number 3, June 1948, Documents and State Papers, U.S. Department of State). I wrote an article on "Arms for the United Nations, Debate in the Security Council." And I had another paper on this, "Coordination of American Security Policy at the United Nations," International Organization Vol. II, No, 3, September, 1948, pp. 469-77. I tried to set out the different positions of the members of the Military Staff Committee on this whole thing. My impression is this -- that the Secretary of State, as the principal adviser of the President, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Department of Defense, and the
Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force probably knew what they were doing; but I have a feeling that there were some reservations -- maybe not reservations, but some limited perceptions of what the role of the United Nations was in this matter of maintaining international peace and security. The theory of the Charter was pretty clear. It was based on an assumption, implicit in the Charter, that the five permanent members of the Security Council would see eye-to-eye on political and security matters, and that if one of those five permanent members did not see eye-to-eye with the other four, he would not necessarily exercise his veto to stymie planning and any action that might be anticipated. But he would abstain, he would sit in a corner, so to speak, and let the
rest of them go ahead and do it. But, of course, that theory just did not work out. I mean, this was a completely naive assumption. I think at the time there were some justifications for holding that the theory could be made to work out. FDR and his advisors were always talking about the imperative, the necessity of cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States in the postwar period. Whether or not everybody at lower echelons accepted this, nevertheless they went along with it, and there was some feeling that maybe it was justified, Well, of course, it wasn't. This is why I say that the split in the Military Staff Committee which came about very early in the, game -- in 1946, '47 and ’48 -- anticipated the Cold War. It really indicated that it was going to be on a much
wider scale than in the Military Staff Committee of the United Nations. MCKINZIE: Did you feel that the U.S. military gave constructive help and that the U.S, military was not trying to guard its own prerogatives, so to speak? Was it willing itself to go along with what could have been a workable force? BLAISDELL: Well, I think my feeling is that the United States had a mental picture of what international security in the world was going to be, postwar, and we were ahead on that basis. This meant that the United States was going to have the biggest navy in the world. We were going to have the atomic bomb. We were going to have a small professional army, with the necessary air force for making it usable any place in the
world. This was a continuation of the strategy that we had followed in World War II where we were able to ultimately put our military forces any place in the world that we felt they needed to be for the security of the United States. I think we extended that into the postwar period and what we suggested the military forces of the United Nations should be, was a reflection of that, an extension of that. This is where we came in conflict with the Soviet Union. They didn't want that. They didn't want the United States able to put its military and air force anyplace in the world. There were certain areas that they felt were areas that ought to be under Soviet control. Well, one area in which the thing came to a head was that concerning the trust territory of the Pacific Islands--which included all of those islands in the Southwest Pacific which had been used as staging areas for our attack on Japan and the Japanese supply lines of World War II.
All of those were made a strategic trust territory under the United States. But the interesting thing is that the Soviet Union did not use its veto when that trust agreement came before the Security Council. It could have used its veto, withheld its approval, but it was made clear by the United States that whether or not the Security Council agreed to this the United States was going to go ahead and administer those territories. In other words, we took a "high" position on that; that it was essential for the security of the United States and we were just going to stay there, were going to use those islands as we saw fit. This was separate from the negotiations in the Military Staff Committee. However, one can see that if you're going to look for staging areas
anyplace in the world from which United Nations forces could operate, this got pretty deeply into the whole strategic philosophy of the United States itself. MCKINZIE: Didn't the atomic bomb enter into these discussions? BLAISDELL: Yes, it was in the background all the time. Simultaneously with these negotiations in the Military Staff Committee, the so-called [Bernard M,] Baruch Committee was holding its negotiations on international control of atomic energy. This was going on in New York, too. I was not involved very closely in that although I was on the margin. I was supposed to be attached to Mr. Baruch's office as an expert on procedure. I did that for some time, I worked with him and the American delegation
in those negotiations, but those things were held pretty tight in the State Department. We didn't have very much to do with them. MCKINZIE: Did you yourself have any feelings that if these negotiations on the Military Staff Committee didn't work out that it would leave the United Nations somewhat impotent? Or was that going to be that way anyhow since there was not cooperation between the major five powers? BLAISDELL: Well, I think one can say that by 1948 the position was pretty clear, we were not going to have any cooperation from the Soviet Union in the Military Staff Committee, at least cooperation as we understood it. Therefore, that was dead. Article 43 was a dead letter; and it's been a dead
letter ever since. There's been a lot of talk about it and the Military Staff Committee still meets regularly, and they go through the motions, but it's just a farce. MCKINZIE: At any time did you think there might be some hope? BLAISDELL: Yes, I did, I think the political people in the State Department thought we were ingenuous to have an idea of that kind; that we could get that degree of cooperation with the Soviet Union which is implicit in the idea that arms for the United Nations would actually become a reality. I remember chatting with people in the Division of Eastern European Affairs about it in '46 and '47. They just were scornful of
our ideas, They said, in effect, "You're just whistling in a wind. I mean this is never going to come to pass, why don't you accept the situation:" But we had our walking papers, our directions; we had to go ahead. We had been following this thing, in my own case from 1942 on, when I first went into the Department. It was just one of those things where there was a pretty clear philosophical split in the Department between the Bureau of United Nations Affairs (and then later the Office of United Nations Affairs) and the geographic divisions in the Department, MCKINZIE: Who would you consider to be the highest ranking advocate of your position? BLAISDELL: Why, I don't think it ever got beyond Joe Johnson, who was my chief in the Division
of International Security Affairs. And there's an interesting question: Was there anybody in the Pentagon from 1947 on, or even before, who really felt that this was a viable way of proceeding? I just can't say. I know that we have very cordial relationships with the group in the Pentagon, the War Department General Staff's Plans Division (where Dean Rusk was before he became -- before he came over to the Department and then went back to the Pentagon and then came over to the Department again as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs). We had very close cooperation with them and I think one could say that, on the surface at least, they were in harmony with our ideas about giving the United Nations some enforcement facilities. Just one more point on this Military Staff
Committee. I was called into the Secretary's office, when George Marshall was Secretary of State, by Carlisle Humelsine, who was his chief of staff when he was in the War Department, and then he came over to the State Department as head of the Secretariat in the State Department. I was supposed to go to the Secretary's office and brief him on this proposal of the United States for supplying military, naval and air forces to the United Nations. I had one chap who was working with me, an older man, Henry Abbott, whom I had gotten into the State Department. He was a submarine commander in World War I with the rank of captain, He had been a devotee of military and naval history and a very able chap that way, Well, the two of us tried to brief George Marshall. Now if you can think of a more bizarre thing to
do than that... He was well aware of the issue. It wasn't the first time I had come in contact with George Marshall. In 1948 I was the principal executive officer of the American delegation to the Assembly. I had literally sat under George Marshall there for days at a time, because it was my job to make up an agenda for the delegation meetings and see that the debate was adequate to the position recommended, that it was considered from all, points of view -= not only the technical points, but the political point of view =- and then to await his decision on what the next step was, Well, I had learned to have a great admiration fox George Marshall. As I say, this was a period of maybe ten or twelve weeks and delegation meetings were almost a daily occurrence.
I remember the story that my friend, sitting right there, told me a couple of weeks ago relating to George Marshall and told to him by John McCloy, Jack McCloy, who was an Assistant Secretary in the War Department at the time. He said that whenever George Marshall came into a room you could feel a presence that was unrivaled. Nobody could hold a candle to the aura of influence, respectability, competence, expertise, political sagacity, tact, acumen -- all of these things that went to make up the man -- as would George Marshall. I agree with that, As I sat under him, literally, for twelve weeks there in Paris in the fall of 1948. MCKINZIE: After the failure of the Military Staff Committee to come up with a solution, did you
get involved in the business of partition of Palestine and the ultimate failure of that? BLAISDELL: Yes, I was involved in that, though not very closely. I was neither a political officer in the sense that the State Department uses that term, namely an expert on the relations with a particular country or a group of countries in a geographical area, nor was I in a position of responsibility so far as the delegation was concerned. I was what they called a technician, I think. It was my job to learn about these things and if they ever came to the point of being recommended as a U.S. position in the United Nations to be familiar and cognizant with the procedural sides of getting a position accepted. Now, this meant working with the political people, obviously, but the so-called "substance"
of the thing was outside my purview. MCKINZIE: Did you find that you were dealing with very different kinds of people when you got involved with the Palestine question than you were when you were dealing with the Military Staff? BLAISDELL: I have thought about this a lot and I've read a good deal. I've read Harry Truman's Memoirs on this. I was pretty close to Philip Jessup who represented the United States in the Assembly at the time of the establishment of Israel in May, 1948 -- when the British gave up their responsibilities under the mandate, and the United Nations botched the opportunity to get their hands on Palestine, leaving a vacuum there which the Israelis filled with the establishment of Israel, and the defense of Israel from that moment on.
I was in Tunisia in January and February of this year, My wife's nephew is the American ambassador in Tunis now, Talcott Seelye. He is an Arabist, which is to say he is fluent in Arabic and has served in Amman and in Jedda and in Beirut and now Tunisia, He's made a study of that whole area, I picked up a book in his library by Philip Jessup which deals with this question of the handling of the Palestine question by the United Nations in 1947-'48. I knew that Phil Jessup was working on this, because he consulted me on one or two points that he thought I might be able to throw some light on, which I did. He cites me in his treatment of this matter. But I think the thing that came out in that exposition was the inadequacy of the State Department, as it was organized at that time, in dealing with a very highly emotional,
highly charged political matter. The Department functioned inadequately regarding the recognition of Israel, in the face of a Commander-in-Chief and President in the White House, who had a low opinion of many of the people in the State Department and who was under terrific pressure to throw the United States wholeheartedly back of Israel right from the beginning with the recognition. Phil Jessup's story of it just corroborates my memory of it, which was that we in New York in the Assembly and in the delegation were left literally with our hands -- I won't say tied -- but with nothing in our hands to work with. We never had a position which would stay put for more than a few minutes or a few hours, or a few days at the outside. Something would come from Washington, something would come from some other government, something would happen on the ground which
would negate our position from then on and just nullify it. We in New York felt helpless. MCKZNZIE: One of the criticisms of the delegation is that the delegation was subject to the entreaties of lobbyists who were, if one believes some of the accounts, permeating every social gathering and even some of the Cabinet meetings. BLAISDELL: Oh, that's true, no doubt of that. There was a tremendous amount of lobbying that went on when this thing was still pending. Let me put it this way: with no matter how much lobbying, with Harry Truman in the White House, and Harry Truman being the man he was, and acting on that well-known plaque that he had on his desk, "The Buck Stops Here," there was nothing more that we could have expected.
I mean, this is what we should have anticipated, but which we didn't. I think, looking back on it, that we had an inflated view of the importance of the State Department and of our professional position in foreign policy in a situation like this kind than was justified. If you'd had a weak President who let the Secretary of State make policy from day to day and never sent him a telegram or said, "You do it your way," that would have been one thing, but they didn't have a President like that. You had a very different man, a strong President with a growing confidence in his own ability to make these decisions. He was just finishing out his unexpired FDR term and hadn’t been reelected yet. But by that time Harry Truman had developed tremendous
self-confidence in the way he was able to handle these things. He wasn't going to be pushed around by the State Department or any experts, so-called over there. I think this was the situation. MCKINZIE: Professor Blaisdell, did you think it was a mistake on President Truman's part at the time? There were people in the State Department arguing that U.S. strategic interests were going to be jeopardized. There was going to be a problem with the Arabs over oil, there was a good possibility of increased Soviet influence in the area and maybe even loss of the strategic crossroads of the Eurasian Continent and there were some very strong arguments. Do you recall your own feelings about that?
BLAISDELL: Well, I think I reflected my position. I was certainly a low echelon, or at the most an intermediate echelon officer in the Department at that time, People at the head of the delegation like Warren Austin and Phil Jessup, who were representing us in the Assembly at the time, felt completely out of touch with the State Department and with the White House on this matter. I think I reflected that. I had a worm's eye view of it. In other words, I was looking at it from the point of view of one on the ground at Lake Success, and that was a very circumscribed view. I can remember talking to some of these lobbyists, the Jewish High Committee I believe it was. I can remember a number of them working night and day. As I say, I was a low level person so I didn't get an awful lot of this pressure, but people like Phil
Jessup were getting it all the time, and Warren Austin were getting it all the time. I'm afraid that a person in my position doesn't see these things in the big sense. We get our noses right down into the small part of the problem and we find that we can't look out to the horizon. I wish we could, and maybe we should, but it's very difficult to do it. I felt that same thing in Paris in 1948, later that same year, where the Palestine situation came up again as you know with the assassination of Bernadotte and the problem raised by that. I think there's something here that's a personal matter too. I mean by that, that if a persons unable to lift his eyes to the horizon and see the broader political and strategic implications of a thing like this, this reflects his background and his training and his education up to that moment and his
personality, his personal characteristics, whatever they are. If he sees it in those broader terms it puts him, maybe, in a position beyond the border line of what he should be dealing with as an officer. Other people should be handling those things. I remember Truman's story on James Forrestal in his Memoirs. Forrestal wrote him a memorandum bringing these things to him, the position of Arab oil and the Soviet Union. I won't say that Harry Truman was contemptuous of this, but that he felt that Forrestal was sort of acting out of turn, that he as President and Commander-in-Chief were the person to take these things into consideration. As part of the whole picture, whereas Forrestal was presuming to put pressure on the President and the Commander-in-Chief on matters that weren't within his purview.
MCKINZIE: In this same period, there was a good deal of dispute in the United Nations over Indian matters. BLAISDELL: I had sort of a marginal involvement in it. It wasn't even as much as on Palestine. We had our experts in the delegation on the so-called Kashmir matter between India and Pakistan. They took care of that. The preparation of any proposed delegation position would reflect the State Department, in turn, reflecting the White House, on this thing. We would get periodically instructions from the Department reflecting the Department and the White House. Sometimes these were not very clear; sometimes we had to sort them out and find out what weight to give to them. The people who dealt with those with other delegations were the so-called "experts" on that matter. I was not an expert on that matter
so I didn't have any primary responsibility for it. This all took place under the chief of the delegation, of course. And, anticipating, I think I came into the Kashmir thing at a much later date when I was in Geneva in 1952, when Frank Graham was the UN commissioner on the mediation. Frank Graham came through Geneva because he liked to use Geneva as a sort of a neutral ground for both India and Pakistan in talking about this thing. He would go to India and talk with both sides separately and then he'd come back to Geneva, and then he'd go back to India, and if there were anything that he thought promising he would try to get the permanent delegates in Geneva to deal with this, you see, which was not within their competence, but if their governments allowed it and wanted it, obviously it was a perfect place to do it.
That's one of the values of the permanent delegation there in Geneva you could use it for things on the margin of United Nations matters and it was neutral ground as I say. MCKINZIE: It had validity precisely because it was neutral ground? BLAISDELL: That's right. And there was a regional office of the U.N. in Geneva, of course, and the permanent delegation of the United States, along with those of 22 other countries, at that time, was useful if they wanted to make use of us, and this went for anything. And this was expanded tremendously, in 1955, when President Eisenhower came to Geneva for his summit there in Geneva. That was two years after I left but you can see that -- and even now, of course -- they're making more and more
use of it, But in those days in '51 to '53 when I was there, it was the unusual thing to use Geneva as a negotiating ground or even a ground for sounding out other governments about their positions as Frank Graham did on the Kashmir thing, MCKINZIE: Could you talk about the Paris sessions in 1948? BLAISDELL: It was in the fall of 1948. I had been brought into the Bureau of United Nations Affairs which had been set up under Dean Rusk. He took charge of United Nations Affairs in a way that nobody who preceded him was able to do. He was a person who had become used to dealing with matters in the large, He was in the China-Burma-India theater during the war, and then he came back to the Pentagon and was in this Plans Division of the War Department General Staff. He had
been a professor of government at Mills College in Oakland, California before he went into the Army by way of the National Guard in the 1940s, He was a Rhodes scholar, of course, and he'd had the unusual experience of being a representative of the United States. If I remember correctly he told me that he took the surrender from a detachment of Japanese in the China-Burma-India theater in 1945 at V-J Day. He was out here (Professor Blaisdell's home) on one Sunday, I remember, with his family. We were walking down in the stream bed below the road toward the river. This was before the reservoir was built and that property belonged to us. He said, "This reminds me of some of the terrain we went over in the CBI theater." He told me that he took the surrender from some Japanese unit or
units there in the CBI theater. He was a person who was well aware of the strategic and political, as well as the other factors, involved in the United Nations matters. He briefed himself and got on top of that job very, very quickly. I was in his office as his assistant and all the preparation for that meeting was centralized in his office under me. On his recommendation I became the principal executive officer of the delegation at that time. This meant that the summer of 1948 was spent in the preparation of American positions on all of the things that were on the agenda, you see. MCKINZIE: How did you go about that? BLAISDELL: We would get the agenda from the United Nations of course, from the Secretary General. Many of the items had been before previous sessions of the Assembly; American positions
had been well-known and so we had a lot of historical materials to go back to. This had to be updated and we used the political people and the experts on the subject matter in the Bureau of United Nations Affairs for doing that. We would have inter-bureau committees that would deal with these things and somebody would be designated to prepare a draft paper on a position and then this would be prepared and it would come back to this committee, and then it would go up through a hierarchy of ever higher committees until it got to the Secretary or the Secretary's office. Then it would come back to the Bureau of United Nations Affairs, either approved or approved with amendments, or with a request to redo the thing. Here was another thing that I learned about from George Marshall. Dean Rusk had
been a staff officer and I learned a lot from him on what a staff officer should be and what staff work was. When George Marshall became Secretary of State he set up a secretariat and he brought over Carlisle Humelsine, as I said, to head it up. This, in a sense, was his immediate "cabinet" to do for him as Secretary of State what his chief of staff did for him in the War Department, as a personal aide, not the chief of the general staff as an institution. This office, under Carlisle Humelsine, was doing what the staff officer would do and his aide would see that all of these things that were done that should be done. And I can remember him saying that such and such was a good staff officer because he saw that all the staff work that should be done was done, before it came up to him as Secretary of State.
Now, in a way, this was a different concept of organizing and operating the State Department from anything that preceded it because this brought the military line of command into the thing in a way that it never had before. It was a civilian department obviously. We'd never had a man who had been chief of staff or general of the Army as Secretary of State. We had never had an organizational unit corresponding to the secretariat to see that all staff work was done before it came to the Secretary. Even the matter of the way that particular positions were presented to the Secretary for a decision this was completely reorganized and revolutionized when Marshall became Secretary, The way the thing came to him as Secretary for his decision had been disseminated throughout the Department and directions given that no matter should come to the Secretary's office except
according to this form -- with all of the necessary initials and staff work and coordinated positions already negotiated within the Department. So, when we got ready to make a position for the U.S. in the General Assembly here was George Marshall's secretariat and his office operating for that operation just as it would have been if he had been chief of the general staff of the Army. It was highly organized. It was assured that anything that went to the Secretary had had all of the Department people involved consulted with beforehand. Now, there is a question of how this thing was negotiated with other departments of the government, because there were other departments involved in United Nations matters. I don’t think this thing ever was really
very well worked out. No Cabinet department other than the Department of Defense had any staff organization comparable to what George Marshall introduced into the State Department. Every Cabinet officer has his own concept of how his department ought to be organized and how his own office ought to be organized, internally, and with respect with other departments, and with respect to the President. The Treasury, the Commerce Department, the Labor Department, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Interior, all of these departments in one way or another, I won't say on all matters, but a number of matters would have to be brought into the planning. I think the Defense Department had an advantage in this from the experience that they had had with the State Department in
the days immediately after World War II and during World War II, where they were in negotiation with the State Department on postwar matters, and they were used to this. I mean it was a familiar thing to them, just as it was for the State Department. But the other departments hadn't had this experience in dealing with this kind of thing in this way. And I think they all felt that maybe the Department of Defense had a sort of an inside track, to their disadvantage. The United States' delegation with some exceptions went to Paris in September 1948 on the SS America. George Marshall wasn't there, but Mrs. Roosevelt was there and most of the delegation were present on that ship. That was a working voyage, We had our position papers with us and we had to go over them and prepare ourselves and still
had some things to do with them. Paris in 1948 was a city just coming out of wartime restrictions. Just one little personal incident. Milk was still rationed in Paris in 1948, and yet I found that one could get all the yogurt he wanted, because there was no rationing on yogurt. Our headquarters were in the Hotel de Jena which had been the Gestapo headquarters under the German occupation during the war. The French Government made that hotel -- it was really an apartment house -- made it available to the American delegation. Everything had been taken out after the liberation -- all the furniture and everything else -- so it all had to be completely refurnished for office use. It was pretty difficult getting any systematic organization down there, but we did it. We were fairly lucky in that way because
we were fairly close to the Palais de Chaillot where all the meetings were being held -- the Security Council meetings along with a regular session of the General Assembly. There were special sessions of the Security Council held at the same time, because this was the time the Berlin blockade was on and there were negotiations. Philip Jessup was our representative in those debates. My job was principal executive officer. I had to find out whether there would be a delegation meeting the following day. I had to make up the agenda from what had been done at the last delegation meeting and what had transpired in the Assembly session and committees in the meantime; what had happened in other parts of Paris with the other delegation, so that there was an agenda in front of the head of the delegation, George Marshall,
every morning when we came in at 8:30. We had our delegation meeting at 8:30 and we had to be at the Palais de Chaillot at 10 o'clock for committee meetings and things of that kind. I was living at the time in two places. The delegation headquarters were at the Hotel Crillon, right on the Place de la Concorde, but my wife and daughter were with me in Paris and I got them accommodations at a little hotel up beyond the Elysées. So, one night I'd be at the Crillon and the next night I'd be up at the Hotel Avenida. I suppose two out of three nights I was at the Crillon, but the third night I'd be at the Hotel Avenida, Anyhow, it sort of made it hectic for me because I had to be at the Crillon because that was the delegation headquarters were. That's
where Mrs. Roosevelt was, where all of the principal members of the delegation Senator [Warren] Austin, George Marshall, when he was there. He wasn't there all of the time. When he was not there, John Foster Dulles was the head of the delegation. He expected to be the next Secretary of State. That photograph [pointing] was taken the day after the 1948 election when the General Assembly was just about to debate the Declaration of Human Rights, and that's Frederick Osborn there in the middle with George Marshall and myself, and this was before the session started, before the meeting started. There was a great deal of confusion, of course, because there were still bulletins coming in from the United States about the outcome of the election. Everybody was eager to know what the outcome was, obviously. It seemed
that Harry Truman had been reelected, but it wasn't sure. George Marshall was telling a story there. It seems that a bulletin had just come in, in which [Thomas] Dewey had conceded and Truman was reelected. This had been brought to John Foster Dulles and Dulles was in the dumps, of course, with this news because it meant his secretaryship was vanishing. And this had gotten to the group of us here, and George Marshall was saying, "Well, I'm in a different position from all the rest of you people." He said, "If Harry Truman hadn't been reelected, I'd still have my job as General of the Army." And so he was chuckling over that. Well, that was just one little incident. MCKINZIE: You mentioned that the Declaration of Human Rights was coming up for discussion and
that was accompanied by a U.N. convention on genocide which created some difficulty for the United States. BLAISDELL: The United States never signed the Genocide Convention. There’s a long constitutional dissertation that one could give on the reason, but it all got involved in this question of Federal versus States' rights over private rights. Could the Genocide Convention, on any obligations that the United States might undertake under that convention, deprive an American citizen of any rights that he was guaranteed by the United States Constitution, or by a State constitution or by the decisions of the courts thereafter. Senator [John] Bricker from Ohio and the American Bar Association felt that there was an area here which was in limbo. It hadn't been clarified.
There’d never been a Genocide Convention before. The United States had never signed an international convention of such far-reaching scope as the Genocide Convention and later the Human Rights Convention. Therefore, these questions were still pending. In the interest of protecting the rights of the United States and of American citizens, wouldn't it be better to make it certain that there was no question about this, that certain of these rights would be protected and would not be invaded by the convention itself? This was all involved with the question of discrimination on grounds of race. Many people were very much afraid that we would be surrendering the governmental authority and individual rights in that field to an international convention and to whatever enforcement arrangements were prepared for that.
At this same session of the Assembly, the Human Rights Declaration was adopted by the Assembly. There was a rather interesting episode in that connection, That came later on in the Assembly session. As a matter of fact, I think it was the last night of the last day; the 12th of December, 1948, when the Human Rights Declaration came up before the Assembly for adoption, I was sitting with Durward Sandifer and Mrs. Roosevelt in the delegation seats at that time. Mrs. Roosevelt made the statement on behalf of the United States urging adoption of the Human Rights Declaration and it was adopted. I think there were 46 votes for, no votes against, and three abstentions, One of the abstentions was Saudi Arabia, because it was alleged that there was still slavery permitted in Saudi Arabia at the time, and
the Saudi Arabian Government, in any event, didn't want to even adopt a declaration, let alone the convention and Genocide Convention. Well, that came out later in a film on Mrs. Roosevelt, which Mrs. Blaisdell and I went to see in New York not knowing that this film clip was going to be included. This was a documentary on Mrs. Roosevelt. It was about 1963 or '64, because it was after the -- or during the Kennedy period. I suddenly found myself on the screen with Mrs. Roosevelt and Durward Sandifer and I was so surprised. My wife just spoke out loud and said, "Why, there is you." MCKINZIE: In Paris in 1948 what did you have to do, if anything, with the negotiations on Berlin? BLAISDELL: I had nothing to do with that. The Security Council held one or two special meetings
in connection with that. The impasse between the United States and the Soviet Union was still talk at that time. It wasn't until later that the Soviet position gave a little bit. I had very little to do with it. It was pretty much in the hands of Phil Jessup and of the geographic desks (which would mean the Eastern European desk and the Soviet Union), and Dean Rusk as the Bureau of United Nations Affairs representative, and also principal adviser of the delegation. Of course, George Marshall was there, at least for part of it. Parenthetically, how that impasse was resolved came out in an article in The New Yorker Magazine some time later in 1953 or '54 how Stalin in one of. his speeches sent a message indicating a willingness to negotiate, how someone in the USG, whether in the Department, CIA, or where I don't know, but someone detected
Stalin's public statement as the chance to negotiate the end of the Berlin blockade; how Philip Jessup approached Jacob Malik in the delegates' lounge at the U.N. to determine whether the message was being read correctly, and, on ascertaining that it was, was authorized and did negotiate the end of the blockade. Marshall came back to this country before the session ended. Warren Austin took his place and when Austin was unable to function, John Foster Dulles became acting head of the delegation. I didn't have near the close relationships with Dulles that I had with Marshall or with Austin. MCKINZIE: Just a difference in style? BLAISDELL: Yes, a difference in style. Well, John Foster Dulles was a lawyer, a member of a very prominent New York law firm. He
had been a member of the United States delegation to the Assembly previously, He had been a Senator from New York for a short period of time, and he was a man of -- well, I won't say arrogance -- but he was a very self-confident person. We used to say as John Foster Dulles went around with his yellow legal pad, "There goes the State Department," because he didn't use the State Department very much, He was a lone wolf, and of course, this was encouraged by Eisenhower when he was President because this was the way he wanted him to work. MCKINZIE: This was the way he preferred to conduct the affairs of the delegation in 1948? BLAISDELL: Yes, that's right, Made it difficult for us who were trying to keep track of what was going on, of course.
MCKINZIE: We haven't really talked about the United Nations and the issue of reconstruction and development aid. In the course of these events from 1945 to this Paris meeting in 1948, were you involved in any of those State Department discussions about whether or not this aid should be unilateral or whether it should be through the auspices of the U.N. BLAISDELL: Not the Marshall plan as such, but when the so-called technical assistance program came along... Harry Truman made his Inaugural Address in January '49, and it was in that message to Congress that he made his four points, the fourth point of which was technical as |
