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.

(202)

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 posi tions 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

it is in the neighborhood of several billion dollars, and I think Mr. William Pawley, who was our representative for reparations out there, estimated that the Soviets took out of Manchuria and took back into the Soviet Union that amount.

I think he would have hardly done that had he anticipated that China was going to become Communist.

There has recently been some evidence to support that in a book that has been recently published, a biography of Tito, in which they describe their conversations with Stalin during the war before the break, and in one of them Stalin is directly quoted as having said that he had advised the Chinese Communists to make their peace with Chiang Kai-shek, and to disband their army; that the Chinese Communists had taken another course than Stalin had indicated, and it had proved to be more right than he was.

But in answer to your question, I believe that is more or less what was in Stalin's mind at the time; that he did not anticipate as of that moment in the foreseeable future that China was going to become Communist. That is a pure opinion. It is very difficult to back it up, but I think his whole actions become more intelligible in that light than in the other.

Senator SMITH. You do not believe that back in Borodin's days 20 or 25 years ago, that the first steps were made toward communizing China?

Mr. BOHLEN. I do, indeed, sir, but I think that is a constant process. I think that Stalin's estimate of the prospects of its success from his point of view in 1945 was not what happened in the subsequent years.

[12]

Mr. BOHLEN. I would agree with you 100 percent that containment is an unfortunate word.

Senator HICKENLOOPER. In stopping the advance sufficiently—
Mr. BOHLEN. Oh, sir; I do not think it is.

Then you come down to the means that are open to you short of war as to what you can do to bring about a recession or a retraction of Soviet power.

Now, we have been engaged in many activities which, within the limits of the possible, are designed to help achieve that, and I think we do have to recognize though that in these police states the opportunities are not, perhaps, as great as Mr. Burnham thinks. He considers the opportunity for nonmilitary action is, perhaps, greater than I would consider it. I believe there is going to be and this is going to take a process rather than action from the outside. I do not believe that propaganda, broadcasts, leaflets or other things, are going to produce action inside those countries. I think it is an essential part of our foreign policy, but I do not think we can expect rather quick and speedy action from them. There are no limitations I have known that have been placed on what you do in those fields except the limits of what you can do effectively.

Senator HICKENLOOPER. In reading this book of his, he makes it perfectly clear that countermeasures are not only not easy, but they

present the supreme difficulties of accomplishment; but I mean that they are very difficult to do because of the very things that you mentioned, I mean, the difficulty of penetration, the difficulty of getting in, and so on.

But his argument is that we nevertheless should emphasize the effort, emphasize the effort, of penetration.

Mr. BOHLEN. I would see nothing wrong with that. In fact, my understanding is that that is, in a sense, what we have been trying to do with a variety of measures, some of them open, most of them clandestine.

Senator HICKENLOOPER. He advances this idea, which is not new at all-a great many people have discussed it and advanced it beforethat we have too much of a tendency in our policy in this country to consider that this is a Russian and a Russian Government operation, that is, the Russian Government, as a unity, as an independent sovereign, a certain prescribed government, whereas he argues that we have missed too often the boat in our thinking that it is not neces sarily a matter of a sovereign government such as Russia operating here, that Communism is a world-wide fomentation directed from Moscow, and not necessarily in and of Moscow. It is a far more penetrating ooze than merely a sovereign state attempting to break its borders or something of that kind.

It is like a virus that jumps over continents and border lines without recognizing the border lines, and you will find it breaks out in various places and his criticism is that our policy has accepted too much the fact that it is solely and only a Russian nationalistic operation.

Mr. BOHLEN. I would not say, sir, that that has ever been the opinion of anybody who has ever had any experience in the field, because I think the first things you learn about the Soviet Union are precisely its dual nature, which makes it the menace that it is, that is to say, the same group of men, on the one hand, in control a great country with great resources, human and all that, and are at the same time the general staff of a world conspiracy, and in the evolution of this whole matter, this same group of men who run the Soviet Union have virtually total obedience and control over fifth columnists in other countries all over the world. That is what has happened in the course of 34 years.

Originally, Communism was something much more international, based upon an accepted ideology and doctrine. It has become more and more to be an instrument of the men who sit in the Kremlin— Senator HICKENLOOPER. They furnish the backbone of the support. Mr. BOHLEN. They furnish the backbone, and it is that dual nature that really makes this problem such a frightful one for us to deal with.

[14]

Senator HICKENLOOPER. Colonel Considine. He met Mr. Stettinius on a cruiser just outside of Malta. Mr. Stettinius was on his way from Malta to the Yalta conference. That testimony is on the record.

Now, just one other question: What do you think your opportunities will be for any personal conferences with Mr. Stalin in view of the experiences of some of our Ambassadors in the past?