Hopkins Papers: Telegram

The President’s Special Assistant (Hopkins) to the President1

secret

Personal and secret to the President from Harry L. Hopkins.

I have been thinking a good deal about the forthcoming conference. It seems to me it would have been to your advantage to have gone most anywhere to meet Uncle Joe and Churchill together but, in the light of Uncle Joe’s message,2 it seems to me that you have nothing to gain by going to see Churchill. The world will, I believe, construe a conference in England or Europe between you and Churchill alone as a political meeting with Russia out in the cold.

I assume that there are important matters which you might well want to take up with Churchill soon but I think it would be far better to have Churchill come to you rather than have you go to him at this particular time and I am inclined to believe that the sooner the conference could be held the better.

Obviously Uncle Joe wants the next meeting with you after Germany has collapsed.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Harry
  1. Sent to Roosevelt in Hawaii. See ante, p. 10, fn. 1.
  2. The reference is to Stalin’s negative reply of July 22, 1944, to Roosevelt’s message of July 17 concerning a possible tripartite meeting. See Foreign Relations, The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945, p. 4.