I met at 12:00 today with Roosevelt, Churchill, Eden and the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. We took up the question of the Lend-Lease Agreement for Phase II. The President read the thing through very carefully, and the only suggestion he made was that where it read, “Naturally no articles obtained on Lend-Lease or identical thereto would be exported,” he included the words, “or sold.” Lord Cherwell said that they do sell all of their Lend-Lease; that is, all of the nonmilitary Lend-Lease, and the President then added the words also “for profit.”
Churchill was quite emotional about this agreement, and at one time he had tears in his eyes. When the thing was finally signed, he told the President how grateful he was, thanked him most effusively, and said that this was something they were doing for both countries.
Then Churchill, turning to Lord Cherwell and myself, said, “Where are the minutes on this matter of the Ruhr?” and according to our agreement we said that we didn’t have them. The reason we didn’t have them was because I felt, when I read the minutes which Lord Cherwell had written, that it presented much too weak a case, and I thought that we could get Churchill to go much further. He seemed quite put out that we didn’t have the minutes of the previous meeting, and the President said that the reason we didn’t have them was because Henry interspersed the previous discussion with too many dirty stories, and that sort of broke the ice. So Churchill broke in and said, “Well, I’ll restate it,” which he did, and he did it very forcefully and very clearly. Then he suggested that Lord Cherwell and I withdraw and try to do a job on dictating it, which we did. It only took us a few minutes, and we came back up to the room where they were meeting and just calmly walked in. When Churchill read our very short memorandum, he said, “No, this isn’t what I want.” Then he started to talk and dictate to us, and I said, “I don’t know what the rules of the game are, but is there any reason why we can’t have a stenographer present? Then you could dictate directly to her.” He said, “By all means,” and Cherwell went out and got Churchill’s secretary, and she came in and he began to dictate. He dictated the memorandum, which finally stood just the way he dictated it. He dictates extremely well because he is accustomed to doing it when he is writing his books.
While Churchill was dictating, he used the memorandum which I had dictated as a sort of a text.
Roosevelt’s important contribution, while Churchill was dictating, was that when he got talking about the metallurgical, chemical and electric industries, Roosevelt had him insert the very important words “in Germany.” What Roosevelt meant was – because it came up later – that he didn’t have in mind just the Ruhr and the Saar, but he had in mind entire Germany, and that the matter we were talking about, namely, the ease with which metallurgical, chemical and electrical industries in Germany can be converted from peace to war, does not only apply to the Ruhr and the Saar, but the whole of Germany, which of course is terribly important.
When Churchill got through, Eden seemed quite shocked at what he heard, and he turned to Churchill and said, “You can’t do this. After all, you and I publicly have said quite the opposite. Furthermore, we have a lot of things in the work[s] in London which are quite different.” Then Churchill and Eden seemed to have quite a bit of argument about it. Roosevelt took no part in it, and I took a small part and kept throwing things in. Churchill’s main argument was what this meant in the way of trade; they would get the export trade of Germany. So Eden said, “How do you know what it is or where it is?” and Churchill answered him quite testily, “Well, we will get it where-ever it is.” I was quite amazed and shocked at Eden’s attitude; in fact, it was so different from the way he talked when we were in London. Finally Churchill said, “Now I hope, Anthony, you’re not going to do anything about this with the War Cabinet if you see a chance to present it.” Then he said this, “After all, the future of my people is at stake, and when I have to choose between my people and the German people, I am going to choose my people.” Churchill got quite nasty with Eden, and I understand from the President that all the rest of the day Eden was not at all helpful. The President was quite disappointed.
According to Cadogan, Roosevelt and Churchill had discussed the question of voting in the Security Council of the proposed world organization at midday on September 15 and again in the middle of the afternoon. Stettinius’ memorandum of his conversation with Cadogan on September 16 records:
Roosevelt, however, sent a message to Stettinius stating that neither Churchill nor he was inclined to approve the compromise voting formula which Stettinius had transmitted to Quebec.
Roosevelt and Churchill initialed two separate papers on lend-lease: (1) the summary of their discussion on September 14, and (2) a shorter paper on the establishment of a committee to deal with lend-lease questions.