Editorial Note
The only record of this meeting which has been found is the following passage in Stimson’s Diary:
“At one o’clock I went over to the White House to lunch where there was a very cheerful party—the President, Churchill, Barney Baruch, [Page 1210] Harry Hopkins, Colonel Llewellin, British Resident Minister for Supply, and myself, with the naval aide of the Prime Minister and another younger Englishman who I think was in his party. Of course the surrender [of Italy] was talked over every which way, and the probable effects.
“Then we got on to post-war talk and there was a great deal of back and forth talk by the Prime Minister and myself on that subject. He had just made a speech up at Cambridge when he received a degree which took very much the position that I have been taking in regard to carrying on the association of Great Britain and the United States in the war into the immediate post-war period and doing it as informally as possible and without an attempt to build up by treaty a big organization like the League of Nations. I also broached to them the suggestion I had made at the meeting [with Hull and Secretary of the Navy Knox] in Hull’s office on Monday, namely that when we come to creating an association of all the allied powers it should start with an economic association to repair the ravages of war and to keep them from starvation and to do this by establishing stable money systems and preventing the rise of tariffs between the needy nations. The Prime Minister at first started to criticize the idea that we should become almoners of the other nations, but I made it clear to him that that was not my idea, but on the contrary that we should as far as possible confine ourselves to doing what was left undone among the several small successor states after the Great War in Central Europe and what was successfully accomplished by our thirteen post-Revolutionary states in 1787.” (Stimson Papers)