Notter File, Box 168: Stettinius Diary
Memorandum by the Under Secretary of State (Stettinius)1
Conversations With Sir Alexander Cadogan
Cadogan called me right after midnight to say that while the Prime Minister had given him twenty-four hours of grace yesterday, in view of Eden’s arrival he now felt obligated to go to Quebec immediately and assumed that under the circumstances Mr. Hull could now have no objections. I told him that I felt that any decision he made now should be entirely his own. He said he did not think it would interfere too much with the Conversations inasmuch as little could probably be done in the next day or so in any event pending an evaluation by our respective Governments on the informal compromise formula on voting.2
Cadogan called me again at 10 o’clock in the morning saying he had just received a further telegram asking him to go there, and he was planning to leave later in the morning by special plane and that he would return tomorrow. …3
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Conversation With Mr. Hull
I called Mr. Hull early in the morning and told him of Cadogan’s midnight call about going to Quebec. Mr. Hull again said that he thought it was a mistake for Cadogan to go and for that conference to get into political matters but that he agreed that we would not make a further point of the matter.
[Page 47]… [Mr. Hull] said he had not heard from the President about going to Quebec and did not feel in any event that he should go. This comment was made after I had reminded him of the President’s promise to send for him or someone else in the Department if the conference went into political matters.4
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Conversation With Harry Hophins
Harry Hopkins called me just before 11:00 in the morning and I reported to him the recent development, particularly on the voting question. I also told him that Cadogan was going to Quebec this morning and that Eden was arriving there late this afternoon. I told him about our proposed press statement.5
He then told me it was expected that the Quebec conference would break up Monday [Friday?] night and that probably the Prime Minister and the President would go to Hyde Park Sunday night and that if Eden went probably Hull would be invited up.6 He told me he was not going to Quebec but would go to Hyde Park. …7
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- In the form of a daily record pertaining to Stettinius’ activities in Washing ton during the Dumbarton Oaks conversations. See ante, p. 22, fn. 1.↩
- See post, pp. 425, 426.↩
- Portions of the Stettinius record for September 14 not pertinent to this volume are printed in Foreign Relations, 1944, vol. i, pp. 809–812.↩
- See ante, p. 38.↩
- On September 14 Stettinius released a statement to the press indicating that Cadogan had been called to Quebec to see Churchill “on important matters not in any way connected with the talks at Dumbarton Oaks”. See Department of State Bulletin, vol. xi, September 17, 1944, p. 292. The British press spokesman at Quebec told correspondents there that Cadogan had come to discuss the Dumbarton Oaks conversations. See Notter File, Box 168, Stettinius Diary for September 16, 1944.↩
- Eden, however, declined Roosevelt’s invitation to go to Hyde Park (see Eden, p. 554), and Hull did not go either. On September 16 Stettinius discussed with Halifax and Cadogan in Washington the possibility that Stettinius and Cadogan might go to Hyde Park to discuss with Roosevelt and Churchill the question of voting in the Council of the proposed world organization, but when Stettinius telephoned Roosevelt on September 17 about the possibility of coming to Hyde Park for this purpose, the President discouraged him. See Notter File, Box 168, Stettinius Diary; Hull, p. 1702. For information as to which British and American officials were at Hyde Park during the Roosevelt–Churchill conversations there following the Second Quebec Conference, see post, p. 481.↩
- Stettinius informed Hull later in the day of the tentative arrangements mentioned in this paragraph. See Foreign Relations, 1944, vol. i, p. 811.↩