Letter from Ambassador Lewis Douglas to Secretary of State Dean Acheson

File you 236 THE FOREIGN SERVICE THING THE UNEIT. is OF AMERICA AND AMERICAN EMBASSY LONDON August 15, 1949. PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL My dear Dean: This is a purely personal note to express -- at least tentatively and very briefly -- my estimate of and my hopes for the coming meeting in Washington. Bevin will head the British group and will be their principal spokesman. The British will come, I think, in very much the following attitude of mind: (a) They will be rather desperate, for they will see no way of arresting completel the decline in their reserves. (b) They will be smarting from the public criticism wi th which they have been so generously lashed by the press in the United States, and will be disposed to respond, at least by implicitly attempting to impose the blame for theApredicament on us. (c) They will probably, unfortunately, look to us to provide the answers. (d) It is likely that they will be distrustful of the continuity of our present policy and suspicious of what we Americans are disposed to call "a system of free enterprise." (e) They will realize that wi thin their party there is a considerable element, though not by any manner of means the majority, which will press them to take an increasingly strong anti-American attitude. (f) In the back of their minds there will be the specter of 131. To sum this all up, they will, I fear, be sensitive, very suspicious and perhaps unreceptive. The Honorable The Secretary of State, Washington 25, D. C.