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OCR Page 1 of 217/9/53 - Wire V - p.1
DA. All right. One last thing that ought to be mentioned about Schumann was that he not
a
only had what I thought was, still think, was great vision at the time when it was extremely
difficult in France to have vision about Europé, and did extraordinary work in leadership
in
Europe,
but
he
had
to
do
it
almost
alone,
because
the
Foreign
Office
was
very
badly
split
-
they had in it those able people who como up through the - what do they call it? - inspecteur
HERVE Alphand
de (finance: Evé Alphon, Coup de Mour de Or, Paradis) some others - and they were all split
up:
Paradis was against this sort of thing: Alphon wes for it, whether from conviction or
because of internal Foreign Office political reasons, I don't know; but Maurice Schumann was
around, and we never knew what he was doing. And the Foreign Office was an extremely
difficult place in which to operate, and I think Schumann had to be very careful who knew
about what he was thinking about before he was ready to act, and had a hard time getting
help on things he was doing. All of which made his performance even more Impressive. Do
we want to talk about those two men any more, or shall we get on with AND
SERVICE"
Q. Those comments were very revealing, or helpful, and we can go on.
DA. The first problem that we all came to as we approached this meeting in April, 1949,
was the tremendous complexity involved in the problems in regard to Germany, and of the
papers which had been worked out in London in regard to them. This work had been going on
for over two years. There were people who were extreme experts on a small sub-division of
one small problem, and these fellows had spent their life for the last two years on this
minute portion of a problem. They were full of knowledge about it - they had fought with
their French and British colleagues, they were passionately entrenched in attitudes. And
there were reams and reans of paper, so that you never could get at what the main issues
were. I am sure neither Bevin nor Schumann hed the faintest idea of these papers. It took
me a long time in digging through these matters to find out, first of all, what it is that
we wanted the foreign ministers to decide. They must have had two hundred. questions which
they wanted to put up to the foreign ministers. You couldn' possibly have ever put them
up. or understood what they were. You couldn't get at what was the central difficulty here.
I think the occupation statute itself, the draft statute, was over 50 pages long, almost
all of which was reserved: there would be a section written by the Anericans, that would
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