Roosevelt Papers: Telegram (paraphrase)
The Secretary of State to the President1
urgent
Urgent and secret for the President from Sec State.
Yesterday was the first opportunity to discuss the meeting place between Heads of Governments. Just as I was starting the discussion with Molotov he spoke of and referred to the correspondence between [Page 35] you and Mr. Stalin within recent days on the subject. He proceeded to repeat Stalin’s attitude which seemed nearly adamant with respect to any other place except Teheran. I offered every conceivable reason in support of Beirut in particular.2 Unless there are further new developments, I fear that Stalin will continue immovable on the question. Apart from his insistence about the facilities for keeping in close contact with his armies which Teheran will afford, the suggestion is made that all three nations have troops and embassies at Teheran and that the flight from the Mediterranean coast from such point as Alexandria for example would be the same as a flight from Cairo and that this would avoid an ocean voyage by you as far as Beirut or Alexandria or other neighboring point.
I shall continue to press this matter from every possible angle as the conference goes on. If you have any further suggestions they will be welcomed.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
- Sent by the United States Naval Attach, Moscow, via Navy channels.↩
- No record has been found of any directive from Roosevelt to Hull to support Beirut as the place of the proposed conference of the Heads of Government. Presumably Hull had been told that Beirut was the “port in the Eastern Mediterranean” to which Roosevelt referred in his telegram of October 14, 1943, to Stalin.↩