740.00119 Potsdam/6–645: Telegram
Mr. Harry L. Hopkins, Adviser to President Truman, to the President
262101. Tonight Harriman and I saw Stalin and Molotov.49 Stalin told us that he had cabled you relative to the pending meeting.50 He clearly indicated that he was anxious to meet you.
We outlined the gravity of the feeling in America at great length and expressed as forcibly as we could the viewpoint that you wished us to convey. The importance of the Polish business was put on the line specifically. Stalin listened with the utmost attention to our description of the present state of American public opinion and gave us the impression that the drift of events disturbed him also.51
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
- For the portion of this telegram here omitted, dealing with the establishment of the Allied Control Council for Germany, see vol. iii, p. 309.↩
- Foreign Commissar Molotov left the San Francisco Conference on May 8 and returned to Moscow. Regarding his departure, see vol. i, pp. 650–652.↩
- i.e., the Potsdam Conference. In a letter to Ambassador Harriman dated May 26 ( Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), vol. i, p. 85), Molotov explained that the message referred to was not from Marshal Stalin to President Truman but from Molotov to Mr. Joseph E. Davies, Special Representative of President Truman. For documentation regarding the physical arrangements for the Potsdam Conference, see ibid., pp. 85 ff.↩
- For the record of this conversation held at the Kremlin, May 26, at 8 p.m., see memorandum by Charles E. Bohlen, May 26, 1945, ibid., p. 24.↩