Editorial Note
For background information on this subject, see Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation. The following excerpts from this publication (pp. 374–375) summarize the situation at the outset of the pre-Yalta negotiations:
“It will be recalled that when the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals1 were published, October 9, 1944, not only the voting question but several other questions bad been left ‘open’ and that a full United Nations Conference was contemplated as soon as agreement had been reached on certain of these questions among the governments that had taken part in the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations. . . .
. . . work on the six open questions began promptly after October 9, . . .
The superior committee [in the Department of State] was composed of Acting Secretary Stettinius, presiding, and Messrs. Hackworth, Dunn, Pasvolsky, and Wilson, with the executive assistance of G. Hayden Raynor . . . Mr. Stettinius was able to report in the first meeting of this committee on November 1, 1944, that the President’s general plan was to cover all the open items requiring decision in a conference with Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin but that arrangements for such a conference were not completed. . . .”
- The Dumbarton Oaks conversations on the organization of international security took place in Washington between August 21 and October 7, 1944. For the text of the resulting Proposals for the Establishment of a General International Organization, dated October 7, 1944, see Department of State Bulletin, October 8, 1944, vol. xi, pp. 368–374; or Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, pp. 611–619.↩