196 Foreign Relations, 1958-1960, Volume IX



be present during the April Foreign Ministers' meeting and that on the
other hand it only placed the French in an embarrassing position since
they would have to make known their objections to Spaak's presence.
    Reverting to the procedure, Ambassador Alphand said that the
French Government hoped this method of operation would not be ap-
plied by us in the future. He then said that insofar as this particular pro-
posal was concerned, it was acceptable to the French except for the
Spaak problem. The Secretary inquired if the French were planning to
make known their opposition directly to Spaak, to which Ambassador
Alphand replied in the affirmative. The Secretary said that in this gen-
eral connection we had felt it desirable to proceed as we had because in
the past there had been certain difficulties in making progress. The Sec-
retary referred to the fact that when we had hoped that the French
would be willing to take the initiative in approaching the Germans with
regard to the abolition of the Steering Group, the French had been un-
willing to help and had left us to bear the brunt of this operation, even
though we had already taken the lead with the Germans on previous
difficult occasions.
    The Secretary said that we had included Mr. Spaak in order to solve
the problem of NATO consultation which we considered was an impor-
tant one. He said he thought the inclusion of Spaak would take care of
this problem and that we did not see readily any alternative possibility.
Ambassador Alphand then referred to the East-West relations commit-
tee meeting in Paris2 and the fact that the NATO observer thereon did
not make reports directly to the NATO Council. The Secretary pointed
out that it was agreed there would be reports to NATO only on the basis
of the agreement of the three. Ambassador Alphand repeated that the
US suggestion for the presence of a NATO representative at the April
meeting had not been accepted by his Government.
    After repeating again that the French Government hoped this pro-
cedure could be avoided in the future, Ambassador Alphand said that
another problem at the April meeting was the need for certain tripartite
discussions. He said he realized that the US proposal was designed to
do at the ministerial level what is now being done in the preparatory
committees. Nevertheless, he thought that a problem was posed be-
cause provision was not made for tripartite consultation and we were
already engaged in tripartite discussions on much more important sub-
jects. The Secretary agreed that our objective was simply to lift the level
of the committees now meeting and to have them meet at the Ministerial
level.



2See Document 112.