Office of the Historian

Roosevelt Papers: Telegram

The President to the Secretary of State1

secret
priority
[Hyde Park?] 2 November 1943.

Personal and secret from the President to Secretary Hull.

I am sorry that your departure is again delayed but I figure that by going straight through you can get to an Atlantic coast harbor by the 13th. Even though the changes at this end are difficult, I will wait for you until the 14th.

If, however, you get held up by unexpected weather, I think you had better wait for me in Cairo and later join me for a day or two in neighborhood of Algiers.

[Page 62]

Please let me know as I am keeping Churchill waiting to tell him final plans.

The Generalissimo will be in neighborhood of Cairo by the 25th.

If you have time before leaving Moscow, you might ask the Marshal if he would consider flying from Teheran to Basra for even one day,2 and we would hope Molotov and a military group could be with us longer.

All the papers here, with the usual small exceptions, are most enthusiastic about your results.

Warmest regards.

Roosevelt
  1. Sent to the United States Naval Attaché, Moscow, via the White House Map Room and Navy channels. About an hour after this telegram had been sent, a paraphrase thereof was also sent, via Army channels, to the Persian Gulf Service Command, Tehran, and to the United States Army Forces in the Middle East, Cairo, for delivery to Hull if he had left Moscow and had reached Tehran or Cairo. The message was delivered to Hull at Tehran on November 3, 1943.↩
  2. On November 1, 1943, Roosevelt had written a personal letter to Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada in which, with reference to the forthcoming Roosevelt-Churchill meeting, he said: “I still hope that we can see ‘Uncle Joe’. Apparently, however, my constitutional problems weigh lightly with him, though I have tried a dozen times to explain to him that while my Congress is in session I must be in a position to receive bills, act on them, and get them back to the Congress physically within ten days.” F. D. R., His Personal Letters, 1928–1945, edited by Elliott Roosevelt (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), vol. ii, p. 1462. See also ibid., p. 1468, for a letter of November 8, 1943, to Mountbatten concerning the coming Conference.↩