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- Part of Dean Acheson Papers, Princeton Seminars Files
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OCR Page 1 of 23DGA -- Reel I
7/1/53
There are one or two other episodes I think which throw
nom e light on the relationships between me and the President before I
went into the State Dept. for the last time.
One of these has to do with the revival--II think it was at the end
of 45 or the beginning of 46--of the practice of diplomatic dinners.
Those had been given up during the war, and it was thought by Stanley
Woodward, who was then Chief of Protocol, that it would be a good idea
to revive them. Accordingly a dinner was set up toward the end of 45
or so metime in January, 146. Mr. Byrnes was at that time in New York;
I think there was a meeting of the UN or a conference of foreign
ministers going on, and I was therefore acting in his place. We gave
dx inadequate attention to this, as we discovered later, and we found
that the diplomatic corps was so large that by the time you asked the
Chief of Mission and one or two senior officers of each one together
with their wives you had nuch too many people for one dinner. I think
that came to something like 200, or whatever it was. So two dinners
were to be given, and Stanley decided that the best way to do this was
to go through the diplomatic list, starting with A, and take every other
country for the first dinner and then the even-mumbered countries t he
next time. In that way, there was no choice; nobody would fed
not
offended. This brought about a situation which we were/mmawere of at
Ambassador
the time, by having of the Soviet Union
together with the Ministers of the Baltic countries. The alphabet
played DK a very bad prank on everybody! Nobody realized this until
about 5 o' clock, the dinner taking place at 7:30, the Sovict Ambassador
was
had secretary call up and say that he was ill and/in New York and
could not come to the dinner. Whether anybody else came or not, I do
I don't know, but that threw everything into confusion
and all the places had to be changed around. Some hours went by before
Relations
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