740.00/548: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Chargé in the United Kingdom (Johnson)
76. Your 94, January 24, 9 p.m. For your confidential information, I am quoting herewith from my memorandum of an oral conversation with the British Chargé d’Affaires, on January 27, 1939, on the subject.
I said I had requested him to call in relation to the recent elaborate note of January 24, 193915 “received from his Government, in which many of the rumors and reports as to circumstances and conditions of [Page 7] a nature calculated to be the forerunner of a possible military outbreak in Europe were set forth. I said that my Government for a substantial period of time had been visualizing as possibilities such developments as more or less detailed and recited by the British Government in its note; that this Government had accordingly contemplated the possibilities of these developments, both in the utterances of its high officials and in the formulation of its program for national defense and security and its policies pertaining to the promotion and preservation of peace; that this Government was now from week to week steadily and earnestly pursuing and carrying forward its entire program; that I did not deem it necessary or desirable to single out any particular phase or phases of this program and discuss them in this connection; that to undertake to do so would probably result in misinterpretation or distortion by outsiders or critics or commentators. I repeated these statements in order that the Chargé d’Affaires should be able to grasp them in an accurate manner. He said then that he assumed the President would not send any message to the Prime Minister in this connection. I replied in the negative. I added that, of course, the Chargé d’Affaires would, as he doubtless had heretofore, continue to observe the nature of all phases of the program of this Government and the progress being made in carrying each forward, and that naturally he could easily acquire up-to-date and detailed information from members of Congress and others as to the progress of such program or any part of it.”
- See supra.↩