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great surprise to him after the election which was by some horrifying precarious small margin--actually, a shift of some 65,000 votes would have given it to Nixon--that Kennedy didn't offer him the job of Secretary of State. Well, he didn't.

And you had a feeling that he wouldn't.

Oh, I didn't think he was going to, but I think that Stevenson just couldn't imagine that there would be anybody else he would consider had the experience. Now, it's true that he'd had more experience in foreign countries and with heads of foreign governments than anybody else because he'd made numerous trips abroad and had been the candidate of the Democratic Party for President twice, and he was very well informed.

Well, I remember one day in November Bill Blair phoned me to urge Stevenson to take the job of Ambassador to the U.N. I realized that Bill was desperate or he wouldn't have called me up, because he seldom called me up to ask me to do anything like that, and he usually could get Stevenson to do anything that he thought was suitable himself.

Was this after the appointment of Rusk?

Yes, this was after the appointment of Rusk.

He told me that he was also going to ask Marietta Tree to urge him, to work on Stevenson, and I realized that Bill thought that Stevenson was so put out about it that he wasn't going to