741.6111/52/7
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Under Secretary of State (Welles)
The British Ambassador called to see me at my request.
I told the Ambassador that I had spent about an hour and a half with the President yesterday afternoon and that during that time the President had studied in the fullest detail all of the information which Lord Halifax had given me concerning the British-Soviet conversations resulting from Mr. Eden’s visit last December to Moscow. I said that the President had likewise read very carefully the telegrams to Lord Halifax from Mr. Eden which the former had left with me.
I said that the President had asked me to say to Lord Halifax that after careful study of these documents and all of the information which Lord Halifax had given me, only one word had come into the President’s mind and that was the word “provincial”.
After Lord Halifax had recovered, I went on to say that the President had asked me further to state that in his judgment the fundamental question, namely, a secret agreement guaranteeing the Soviet Union the reestablishment of its 1941 frontiers was not a matter which could be discussed at this time. The President felt that this was a question which could only be settled upon the termination of the war.
The President felt, moreover, that the Soviet Union was legitimately entitled to obtain full and legitimate security at the termination of the war. Security for the Soviet Union would necessarily depend upon the determination of many problems which were now contingent. The President wished to remind the British Government that the Atlantic Charter clearly called for the disarmament of Germany. The proposed nature of the security which should rightly be accorded to the Soviet Union would depend upon the type of Germany which would be established at the end of the war.
The President further desired me to say that he himself would discuss this matter directly with Stalin.
Lord Halifax then commenced by reiterating many of the same arguments which he had advanced in our preceding conversation. [Page 522] He emphasized particularly his own belief that the Baltic States had not been successful in their form of self-government as demonstrated during the past twenty years. He reminded me that up to 1919 the Baltic States had for over a hundred years formed a part of Imperial Russia.
To this I replied that I did not see that that had very much to do with the matter under discussion. The Baltic States had in fact been independent and self-governing republics; it was unquestionably true that the vast majority of the peoples of those three nations did not desire domination, direct or indirect, by the Soviet Union; and the basic principles enunciated in the Atlantic Charter would be violated if either Great Britain or the United States secretly agreed now to turn these peoples over to Russian domination.
Lord Halifax then said that his statement might seem cynical, but that weighing the two in the balance, he did not feel that the enjoyment of self-government by the Baltic peoples could be compared in importance to the assurances that the Soviet Union would loyally continue until the end of the war, and even more important perhaps, he thought, cooperation with the United States and Great Britain after the end of the war. He said he did not think my point of view was realistic.
I said that I wondered if it would not prove that I was far more realistic than he. I said that history clearly showed that peoples would fight indefinitely for ideals and for principles and for the attainment of liberty. I did not think that peoples fought indefinitely for loot or for conquest. If he meant, as he intimated, that the Russian people would undertake an imperialistic war upon the termination of the present war, I felt that that was far less likely than that the peoples of the Baltic States, of Finland, of Poland, and of the other central European nations bordering upon the Soviet Union would struggle in one form or another within the measure of their capacity for the reestablishment of their independence if they were now or later at the end of the war turned over with the acquiescence of Great Britain and the United States for domination by the Soviets.
But above and beyond this, I said, could he possibly maintain that the two chiefs of state, the President and Mr. Churchill, who stood in the eyes of millions of people now suffering throughput the world as the one hope of ultimate victory and as the one assurance that the freedom and the security for which they were fighting would eventually be attained by them, could secretly and in some devious fashion now utterly contravene the most sacred principles of all set forth in the Atlantic Charter, namely, the right of peoples to obtain their liberty and to maintain their independence by free determination. I said I feared Lord Halifax did not realize that if the American people [Page 523] knew that the British Government was proposing a secret agreement of this character, the most serious crisis in the relations between the United States and Great Britain which could possibly occur would undoubtedly take place. The American people would regard such an agreement as a shameful violation of one of the chief Objectives for which they believed they were fighting.
Lord Halifax said that he quite agreed that the desirable and agreeable procedure would be to maintain unimpaired in any negotiation which might be undertaken before the end of the war the principles which I had mentioned, but that he was very definitely fearful that the Soviet Union would again believe that it was being deceived by the Government of Great Britain and that it would be unable to comprehend why what seemed to Stalin to be a perfectly just and natural request should be either ignored or rejected by the British Government.
I said that was a question still to be determined.
Lord Halifax then expressed the fear that if the President now undertook to discuss this matter directly with Stalin, Mr. Eden would be left in a very embarrassing position. He asked where, in fact, this decision of the President would leave Mr. Eden.
I replied that it seemed to me Mr. Eden would be left exactly where he had been. He had informed Stalin that before giving a reply the British Government desired to consult the Government of the United States. The President of the United States had thereupon informed the British Government that he himself desired to discuss these wishes directly with Stalin. Therefore, were the Soviet Government now to insist that the British Government give an immediate reply, Mr. Eden could quite truthfully and logically state that in as much as the United States had been consulted with the knowledge and approval of the Soviet Government, the President of the United States desired to communicate directly with Stalin concerning the problems involved.
Lord Halifax then inquired whether the President would inform the British Government of his conversations with Stalin. I said that as Lord Halifax knew, the President had already indicated he desired to have a conference with Lord Halifax, Admiral Standley and myself before Admiral Standley’s departure for Moscow and the President would undoubtedly discuss the questions involved fully with Lord Halifax at that time. Lord Halifax then asked if the President would not delay taking up the matter through Ambassador Litvinov until he himself had had an opportunity of communicating further with Mr. Eden. I replied that unfortunately the President was ill with a cold and that consequently I was quite sure that he would not be having any conversations with Ambassador Litvinov until some time next week.
[Page 524]Lord Halifax discussed at some length the issues inherent in the Munich agreement of 193844 and the effect upon public opinion of that agreement. His view seemed to have changed very little, if at all, from that which he expressed in the House of Lords immediately after the Munich agreement had been published.
- Signed on September 29, 1938, between Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy; for text, see Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, series D, vol. ii, p. 1014. For correspondence concerning the German-Czechoslovak crisis, see Foreign Relations, 1938, vol. i, pp. 483 ff.↩