Office of the Historian

800.24/1414: Telegram

The Secretary of State to President Roosevelt 15

[Washington,] December 2, 1943.

Lord Halifax has been pressing the Department insistently for the past month to send “one or more high American officials” to London to discuss “current questions in the Middle East and problems that may arise after the war.”

After careful consideration of the implications and long-range aspects of this matter, I have come to the conclusion that under the circumstances

1.
Since the British have requested such a meeting the conversations should be held in Washington and not in London, and
2.
Such conversations should not be undertaken until the British have advised us of the specific questions they wish to discuss and of their viewpoint with respect to these questions in so far as it may be possible to formulate their attitude at this time.

Lord Halifax has been informed that for various reasons including a suitable British staff now in Washington we consider it preferable to hold the proposed discussions in Washington but has expressed strong reluctance so to inform the Foreign Office.

I am reporting this to you in the thought that you might wish to have this information in mind in case Churchill should raise the matter with you.

[
Hull
]
  1. Addressed to President Roosevelt at Cairo, Egypt, where the President had arrived to attend the Second Cairo Conference with British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill and Turkish President Ismet Inönü; for correspondence regarding this Conference, see Foreign Relations, The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943.↩