An
extraordinary weekend meeting took place May 10-11, 1952, at Princeton
University, New Jersey. Radio Free Europe president C.D. Jackson moderated a
high-level meeting of persons from CIA, State Department, Radio Free Asia,
Radio Free Europe, the National Committee for a Free Europe, and others.
Jackson had apparently called for the meeting out of
frustration with the Truman administration for failing to give RFE a guidance
policy for its broadcasts. C.D. Jackson begin the meeting with:
You
Washington men are in Princeton; we New Yorkers are in Princeton; the
occasionally mysterious CIA people are here; the also occasionally mysterious
State Department people are here; Admiral Miller, who is President of NCFE, and
Bob Lang, head of Radio Free Europe, are just back from Europe. But everyone is
off home field. And the reason for that was that I desperately hope that
although all of us are here representing some kind of organization, at the same
time I hope that the atmosphere will be such that people can say things to each
other, and about someone else, and even their own organizations, with complete
frankness and without any defense mechanisms being set up or hurty feelings quivering
on the table. This is, I hope, a group of individual professionals of good
will, interested and concerned with this problem.
Each
participant had been given a packet of four discussion documents to be reviewed
before the meeting:
1.
Memorandum from
NCFE's Lewis Galantiere
2.
1952 William
(Bill) Griffith: RFE Memorandum on Czechoslovakia
3.
Copy of magazine Economist editorial, April 26, 1952,
‘Containment Plus’
4.
Copy of April 16,
1952, newspaper column by Joseph and Stewart Alsop.
C.D.
Jackson explained the problem to be discussed:
I
don’t know how many times in the last 18 months, but certainly close to ten
times, our guys have gone to Washington and in their very friendly and helpful
talks with, say, the Central European Desk in the State Department, have said, ‘Look,
tell us what you want us to do’. And those guys quite honestly said, ‘We can’t
tell you what to do. Go ahead and do you want you want to do. We will tell you
if you are getting into trouble.’
This
is a U.S.A. long-term “think session”, and if it is long-term, and a political
warfare will can be developed, the how-to and the coordinating, and all the
other implementery things can follow reasonably smoothly. So I pitch it to you:
do all of you really want to do it? And
if you do, it can be done.
We created
one or more salient – into the hearts and minds of our friends behind the Iron
Curtain, into the fears and mistrust of Communist officials behind the Curtain,
and possibly created a frown on Uncle Joe’s brow. Well, then these salients
have been created, and we look around for who was to close up on the flanks –
the U.S. or the West – there was no one there.
It
comes to this – that arising not merely of the operation of RFE, but out of our
posture with respect to German, Eastern Europe, and Russia itself, it is felt
that a gap exists in the understanding of the nature of the American objectives
and that this gap contributes to apathy and weakens the dynamism of any effort
to see that part of the world move without war toward a shape, which is in the American
interest.
Adolphe
Berle, director of NCFE’s Mid-European Study Center reiterated RFE’s
frustration and need for specific, concrete policy guidance:
Something
must happen – either we tell them to go home, or start composing music, or drop
out of the picture, or we suggest a goal for the U.S. or West. Without that, I
don’t see how the boys in Munich can make noises and increasingly make trouble
there without getting themselves hated for their pains. We can no longer take
ad hoc action. All this has to go
somewhere, and we must have a hypothesis. It must be flexible, but we must be
able at least to have some picture of the eventual result we expect to do. That
is not a “statement of objectives.”
Enough ideas have been stated, be we ought to have a blue-print,
flexible, of what we expect to do.
Allen
Dulles , CIA Deputy Director, Plans, commented, “As I said before, you have got
to have a few martyrs. Some people have to get killed. I don’t want a bloody
battle but I would like to see things started.
I think we have got to take a few risks. We have got to move on with
caution and foresight.”
C. D. Jackson, concluded, “I hope that you will agree that
in pulling it off, political warfare, or whatever you want to call it – which
deals with the minds of men everywhere (the only thing we can get at in many
places) – may be the way in which we can pull the neatest trick of this
century.”
