Senator FERGUSON. Well, the war was over.

Senator HUMPHREY. Of course, the war was over, but the agreements that were written and perfected would have provided for free access and would have provided

THESE AGREEMENTS CREATED THE COLD WAR

Senator FERGUSON. And I contend, Senator, that what was done in these various places created the cold war.

Senator HUMPHREY. No, it did not.

Senator FERGUSON. No one could have made a more perfect foundation for a cold war than was made under these agreements.

Senator HUMPHREY. And I say, Senator, that agreements or no agreements the cold war was inevitable. It came about not because of President Truman or President Roosevelt, but because of Stalin, because of the Soviet, and the sooner we get to admit it, the better. The fact is that the agreements provided a means of working on the problems but when you have one partner that refuses to work out the problems then you get into this kind of a hassle.

Senator FERGUSON. The difficulty is that what has been going on since those agreements up until the present administration has been trying either to avoid them or not bring them up and to treat them as a way of appeasement.

Senator HUMPHREY. I disagree with that thoroughly. He said these agreements are not secret and

Senator FULBRIGHT. We all agree that you two do not agree.

WHICH AGREEMENTS REQUIRE SENATE OR CONGRESSIONAL ACTION?

Senator HUMPHREY. Now, the question I want to ask the Secretary is this: In view of these comments about the agreements, which of these agreements or parts thereof do you think would require senatorial or congressional action? I think we ought to know about this. We have been just talking about it in the loose language of Senators. I want to know which part of these agreements you think should or ought to require Senate action or congressional action. I think we ought to have that for the record. I want to find out.

Senator KNOWLAND. Maybe we ought to have the private papers of President Roosevelt, to know what he meant when he said that some of it would require Senate action.

Senator HUMPHREY. Well, I am sorry that we cannot bring Roosevelt back to this conference table. It would be a very happy occasion for me. But we cannot do it and I don't intend to have him brought back in spirit under very, I might say, difficult circumstances.

I would like to go along with President Eisenhower and his resolution. I am perfectly willing to see that campaign called off, gentlemen, and I think perhaps we have been debating about this long enough and

WAS THERE A SELL OUT?

Senator FERGUSON. Well, I think if you had debates among the people here in America who will not be satisfied with those agree ments it will not take long until the people back behind the Curtain will understand the proposition just like the people here at home understand it and

Senator HUMPHREY. Well, Senator, I think the people behind the Iron Curtain have been told again and again by certain people of the Congress that they have been sold out, when I do not see any sellout.

Senator FERGUSON. Well, I do.

Senator HUMPHREY. I see them as being victims of a vicious tyranny, and I say that we have had no part in that tyranny. And I say that if you want to get a resolution out of here which will do what the President wants, now, give him freedom of action, namely, to assure the peoples that stand in enslavement that we stand behind them in their hope of freedom and self-determination, the thing for us to do is to reconcile as many differences as we can. And I think that Senator Hickenlooper's suggestion may be very fruitful.

Senator FERGUSON. And I say, as I have read it now-and I will read it very carefully, too-it would look to me that they could claim that the division or separation of the peoples was done for the benefit of the people east of the line, and therefore, that agreement would be colored."

Senator HUMPHREY. Well, I will debate with you for 2 months on the Curzon Line. It has a history of three centuries. It started out with the first Polish division or partition. There have been three of those.

Senator FERGUSON. But that is not a reason for us to approve it.

HOW SHALL THE COMMITTEE PROCEED?

The CHAIRMAN. Gentlemen, just a moment. The Secretary has other appointments that he would like to make. Now, I would like to have some suggestion as to when we might meet again. Should we go over to the regular meeting next Tuesday? Would you like to have the Secretary to give study to the various suggestions made here? The problem is in our laps and we want to find the solution. In the meanwhile some may have something that they might want to discuss with the Secretary or his office and if that is so, I suggest that that be done either by telephone or to this office, and we will get them down there. We have had several suggestions that might be worth while, but we have got to consider the other House and we have got to consider our Democratic brethren, all of whom are solid for this provision-one is not-and we have got to consider the several suggestions made by this side of the table.

Anyway, we want to thank the Secretary for provoking a darn good argument, anyway.

Senator HUMPHREY. Mr. Chairman, as part of my comments I would like to include a passage from Newsweek of February 19, 1945.

[The passage referred to is as follows:]

Despite the fact that the conference was held at a place of Stalin's choice, the decisions reached did not reflect any domination of the meeting by the Soviet Premier. Instead, on the whole, they showed compromise on almost all issues from Poland to the principle of unconditional surrender. And if any one of the Big Three might be said to have made more impression on the results than the other two, that man was the President.

The CHAIRMAN. We will stand adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 4:30 p.m., the committee adjourned.]

72-194-77-vol. V-14

MINUTES

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1953

UNITED STATES SENATE,
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS,

Washington, D.C. The subcommittee on Overseas Information met at 2 p.m. in the committee room.

Present: Chairman Hickenlooper, Senators Wiley, Knowland, Mundt, Green, and Fulbright.

No transcript record of this meeting was kept. However, staff stenographers kept a summary.

The matter of a hearing was discussed and it was decided to have them begin at an early date.

The meeting was adjourned at 4:50 p.m.

NOMINATIONS (BOHLEN)

[Editor's note: The nomination of Charles E. Bohlen to be Ambassador to the Soviet Union was referred to the Committee on February 27, 1953, and became an immediate subject of controversy, in part because of certain allegations of moral turpitude made against the nominee, but mainly because of the role he was presumed to have played at some of the wartime political conferences, themselves a matter of great controversy at this time. (See note, p. 167, above.) The nomination was considered in executive session on March 2 and 18. On the latter date, the Committee voted 15-0 to report the nomination favorably to the Senate. Allegations were made, however, that the FBI files contained information that if known would disqualify the nominee from service, and an informal subcommittee of Senators Taft and Sparkman was appointed to examine this evidence. The two Senators were refused access to the "raw" data in the files but were able to examine a summary thereof on March 24. The next day they informed the Committee that they were satisfied that nothing contained in the file should be allowed to stand in the way of the Bohlen appointment. Consent to the nomination was given by the full Senate on March 27.

The executive hearings on this nomination were published in 1953 with certain excisions. The chief of these, as marked in the committee's March 2 transcript copy, are reprinted below. Page references are to the printed hearing. In order to locate the excised matter exactly in the text, the last line or short phrase preceding the point of excision in the 1953 print is reprinted here.]

MONDAY, MARCH 2, 1953

UNITED STATES SENATE, COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, Washington, D.C.

The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:40 a.m. in the Foreign Relations Committee room, U.S. Capitol Building, Senator Alexander Wiley (chairman) presiding.

Present: Senators Wiley (chairman), Smith of New Jersey, Hickenlooper, Taft, Tobey, Ferguson, Knowland, George, Green, Sparkman, Gillette, Humphrey, and Mansfield.

Also present: Dr. Wilcox, Dr. Kalijarvi, Mr. Marcy, Mr. Holt, and Mr. Cahn of the committee staff.

[6]

Mr. BOHLEN. *** And certain things might occur in the world where it would be of very vital importance to get some word to Stalin. I might illustrate that in expressing my belief that had we known, through intelligence or other sources, about the impending attack in Korea, that it is quite possible that an American Ambassador, going to Stalin and telling him to watch out very carefully what he was doing and not to count on any hope that this country would not respond to it, you might easily have averted that. I will not say for certain, but I am merely citing that as an illustration, that it does offer you in case of need the possibility of getting to the top, where all the power is concentrated.

I certainly have no illusions that the influence of an American Ambassador in there is going to change anything very fundamentally.

You have no contacts in the normal sense with Soviet officials or the Government. You have no means whatsoever of having access to the people of Russia or to make any speech or statement-you do not make speeches there, in the first place; you have no possibility of getting the American viewpoint into the Soviet press before the Soviet people.

[9]

Mr. BOHLEN. ** Of course, back at the time before that, at the first Moscow conference, and at Teheran, there had been some indication from Stalin that they were prepared to at the proper time, as he put it, to enter the war in the Pacific.

Senator SMITH. I assume there must have been some preliminary conversations leading up to and preceding Yalta.

One more question, and then I will desist: I would like to get your impression of Mr. Stalin's attitude at that time in his conversations. Did he seem friendly or was he a traitor, or what was he? Did it seem at that time that we were really dealing with an ally with which we were trying to solve something, or were we trying to induce him as an outsider to come in?

Mr. BOHLEN. That, of course, Senator, is a very hard question to

answer.

Senator SMITH. I realize that.

Mr. BOHLEN. Because it involves the ability to penetrate the mind of Stalin which I wished we possessed to a greater extent than we do. Senator SMITH. I just wished you could give it to us.

Mr. BOHLEN. My opinion of this is this, sir, and it is only my opinion-there has been a certain amount of evidence since then

The CHAIRMAN. A little louder, please.

Mr. BOHLEN. There has been a certain amount of information since then which rather tends to support that.

I think that Stalin was trying to obtain for himself two things: First of all, to recover the territories which Russia had lost to Japan. I think he had a very strong feeling that he wanted to recover things that Russia, as a result of the defeat in the war, had lost. He has a strong streak of that in him, and he wants everything that was ever Russian and, of course, he wants more, but he wants that in great detail.

The other was that I think he fully expected that the ruler of China would be Chiang Kai-shek, and that he was reacquiring certain positions in Manchuria, which Russia had had earlier before the RussoJapanese War.

I find it very difficult to believe that if he had envisaged at that time the conquest of China by communism that he would have made these agreements.

In fact, as soon as the Communists did take over China, he proceeded to revise and undo these agreements.

Second, as I think we know, the Soviet armies looted Manchuria when they went out of there. I have forgotten what the figure is, but