500.A15a3/1220
Memorandum by the Secretary of State
The Italian Ambassador came to say that he had reported what took place between him and me when he brought me Signor Grandi’s answer to my first conversation with him (de Martino), and that Signor Grandi said that Italy had proposed concessions and proposed a holiday and had received no answer. What more could she do? I then said that since I had sent my first message to Signor Grandi we had been making progress with France; that Mr. Gibson had had conferences in Paris with Monsieur Tardieu which made me more hopeful than I was a week ago; that Mr. Gibson was going to Rome to have conferences with Signor Grandi, and I hoped that the Ambassador would say to Mr. Grandi that I trusted that Grandi would hear him with sympathy and with the attention which I thought the importance of the situation demanded. I said that I regarded the situation as extremely important and hopeful. He said he would report that to Grandi.
I told him that I had been troubled by Signor Mussolini’s speech67 but had been encouraged by the fact that the French press and the French Government had seemed to take it temperately. He said, “Why that speech was made in the American way,” and that he had been congratulated by Americans on the fact that Mussolini brought out the facts into the light of public opinion and that that was the only way they could be settled. He said, too, that the speech was most pacific, that Mussolini said that Italy would attack no one. I then asked him, laughing, whether I was to understand from him that when in Italy a man shook his fist at another he intended to blow a kiss to that other. If that was so, that was not the American method of speech to which he alluded. He laughed but made no reply. When we parted, I went back to Gibson’s visit to Grandi and renewed my injunction that he should tell Grandi that I regarded that as a most important visit and that the situation was hopeful and I prayed that Grandi would give it most careful attention.
He read me something which he said came from German newspaper sources, suggesting that if America would reduce the interest on the French debt, France would reduce her navy. I told him I had heard nothing of that sort and could not discuss it.
He referred to the French contention that France was compelled to defend herself on two seas, whereas Italy only on one, and he handed me a memorandum which had been prepared in answer to [Page 162] that subject, which is annexed hereto as “A”. I glanced over it and told him of course I did not want to get into a discussion of naval strategy with him, but from my hasty examination of it it would seem to me that France would answer that this memorandum was based upon the assumption that France was fighting only Italy alone, whereas the French would say that they were compelled to face the very strong possibility that they might be fighting with two enemies at the same time. He replied that that was the same with Italy, but we would not discuss naval strategy at this meeting.
I recalled to him my speech of last June, in which I had said that the naval officer saw only one-half of the horizon of national defense and failed to see that portion of national defense which depended upon the cultivation of such moral defense as good will; that the statesman must see the whole horizon and that I hoped that France and Italy in their situation would not shut their eyes to this important one-half of the horizon and would not descend to the situation of the naval strategist. He said he agreed with me.
- Delivered at Rome on October 27.↩