741.61/985
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Acting Secretary of State
The British Ambassador called to see me this evening at my request.
I told the Ambassador that the President had asked me to let him know that the President saw no useful purpose to be served by his seeing the Ambassador again with regard to the Soviet negotiations. The President had asked me to say to Lord Halifax that he had already fully expressed his views to the Ambassador regarding this negotiation and that he had nothing to add.
I said, however, that the President had asked me to lay before the Ambassador the following considerations. I said the present draft treaty, as it had been read to me by Lord Halifax, contained nothing in the nature of any safeguard for the peoples of the Baltic republics. I said that if some stipulation could be inserted in the provisions of this treaty in the nature of an agreement for the reciprocal exchange of populations in the regions adjoining the frontiers which Russia wished to reestablish, it at least would make it possible for the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Finns who desired not to be returned to Soviet domination to have the right to leave those territories with their properties and belongings. I said that a stipulation of this character would not only be far more nearly in accord with the spirit of the Atlantic Charter, but would in my judgment, make it far easier for American public opinion to attempt to tolerate the transaction involved in the proposed treaty.
[Page 539]The Ambassador immediately said that he would at once make every effort to persuade Mr. Eden and the British War Cabinet to get a modification of this character introduced. He said he would inform me as soon as he had a reply.