Letter from McGeorge Bundy to Dean Achesion

HARVARD UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT LITTAUER CENTER M-22 CAMBRIDGE 38, MASSACHUSETTS May 14, 1953 S. Dean G. Acheson, Esquire "ANTONAL Union Trust Building, N.W. ARCHIVES AND Washington D. C. RECORDS U.S AND s SERVICE" Dear Dean: It seems to me, on the whole, that the best way to try to reach some useful conclusions about the problem as you set it out would be, as you suggest, for you to face up to the need for a preliminary meeting with a few of the people whom you think might be really helpful. The number of possible ways of working on this kind of undertaking is very large, and your letter makes it clear that there are a number of variables which could only be weighed after you have had a chance to talk them over in a fairly serious and consecutive fashion. I wonder if it wouldn't be useful, therefore, for you to draw a list of four or five people whom you would find particularly helpful in such a preliminary discussion. These might not be at all the same persons as those wi th whom you would want to go on working. Just as an example, it seems to me that Whit Griswold might be a mos t helpful person to have at a first meeting, while his grinding job might well keep him away from regular sessions later. This initial meeting might properly include one or two people who would share your direct knowledge of government from the inside during recent years -- somebody like Butch Fisher or Paul Nitze -- as well as friends with a sense of what is important and unfamiliar to outsiders. Just as a suggestion, it seems to me that a meeting in which you and one or two colleagues of this kind were joined by Oppenheimer, Griswold and MacLeish, might well lead on to a program of action. It seems to me not impossible that something of this kind could be arranged in the next month, and I think it might be helpful to you to have a general idea of what you plan to do before summer scatters the people you might want to reach. But I suppose serious and regular meetings might have to wait for the autumn -- although, of course, one possibility would be to have a single long session of a week or so in one of the cooler parts of the country during July or August. On the matter of substance, I wonder whe ther it is necessary to make a sharp choice be tween the chronological and episodic approaches. It seems to me that a preliminary meeting might well serve to sharpen six or eight major matters which, when fully explored, each one in a session of its own, will provide a sufficient body of material to do the substance of what would be necessary in preparing a chronological record. I quite agree with your feeling that an authoritative historical account can hardly be prepared by men who are out off from many of the most important documentary materials. What can be done is some thing a little more specialized -- namely, the account preparation of ah record which will provide what the documents so seldom do, a genuine effort to record freshly the true S ubs tance of purpose and feeling