611.5831/209
Memorandum by the Assistant Chief of the Division of Western European Affairs (Hickerson)
Mr. Wijkman telephoned me at 1:15 today to say that the Legation had just received an instruction from Stockholm transmitting an official list of the Swedish desiderata in the forthcoming trade agreement negotiations. Mr. Wijkman said that this official list was “practically identical” with the list which he had informally furnished us,22 adding that the only real points of divergence were in some of the descriptions of products. He said that they were writing up this official list for presentation to us and that Mr. Boström would bring it in to Mr. Sayre “in the next day or so”.
Mr. Wijkman said that Mr. Boström had cabled the substance of his recent conversation with Mr. Sayre to Stockholm, stressing the fact that we feel that the general provisions of the agreement will cause no difficulty since the two countries hold similar views on them. He said that the Swedish Foreign Office had replied expressing its gratitude of our attitude in this matter and stating that in the circumstances [Page 730] they saw no reasons why the general provisions could not be completed within a few days. I replied that I had no doubt that agreement could be reached on the general provisions a very short time after we started intensive consideration of them, adding that as we had several times stated before, agreement on the lists of desiderata is, in our view, the nub of the problem.
- List handed by Mr. Wijkman to the Chief of the Division of Western European Affairs, November 24, not printed.↩