Editorial Note
President Roosevelt and his principal military advisers conferred at the White House on June 17, 1942. No official record of the discussion at this meeting has been found, but Stimson, in his diary entry for June 17, describes the meeting as follows:
“The President called a meeting of his old War Cabinet; Marshall, Arnold and myself from the Army, and King and Knox from the Navy. We met at two o’clock at the White House. The President sprung on us a proposition which worried me very much. It looked as if he was going to jump the traces over all that we have been doing in regard to Bolero and to imperil really our strategy of the whole situation. He wants to take up the case of Gymnast again, thinking that he can bring additional pressure to save Russia. The only hope I have about it all is that I think he may be doing it in his foxy way to forestall trouble that is now on the ocean coming towards us in the shape of a new British visitor. But he met with a rather robust opposition for the Gymnast proposition. Marshall had a paper already prepared against it for he had a premonition of what was coming. I spoke very vigorously against it. King wobbled around in a way that made me rather sick with him. He is firm and brave outside of the White House but as soon as he gets in the presence of the President he crumbles up. But a few words of cross examination on my part put him in a rather indefensible position. Altogether it was a disappointing afternoon. The President asked us to get to work on this proposition and see whether it could be done. The two obstacles he said were the question of the lack of shipping and the question of whether we could give adequate air power cover for a landing. Of course those are the problems but the trouble is we all know how difficult they are and, to bring in a new difficult and dangerous proposition instead of lending all your strength to Bolero is in my opinion a very foolish thing.”
For a summary of the paper which Marshall presumably took with him to this meeting, see Matloff and Snell, p. 236.