Cordell Hull
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Secretary of State (1933-1944) · United States
On the regime page: Roosevelt administration
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“I have washed my hands of it and it is now in the hands of you and Knox — the Army and the Navy.”
The day after the State Department delivered its reply to Japan's proposals, Stimson telephoned Hull to learn the outcome of the talks and recorded Hull's answer in his diary. The entry was read into the record of the 1945-46 Joint Congressional Committee on the Pearl Harbor attack.
Remark by telephone to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, 27 November 1941, as recorded in Stimson's diary (entry of Thursday, 27 November 1941), printed in Pearl Harbor Attack: Hearings before the Joint Committee, 79th Cong., Part 11, pp. 5434-5435 Source
“I must say that in all my conversations with you (the Japanese Ambassador) during the last nine months I have never uttered one word of untruth. This is borne out absolutely by the record. In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.”
Hull received the Japanese ambassadors in the afternoon of 7 December 1941 and read the Japanese government's reply document, which they handed him. He spoke these words to them when he had finished reading it.
Memorandum of conversation by Joseph W. Ballantine, 7 December 1941, Foreign Relations of the United States: Japan, 1931-1941, vol. II, doc. 419, p. 787 Source
“As the provisions of the four-nation declaration are carried into effect, there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests.”
Hull reported to both houses on the October 1943 Moscow Conference and the Four-Nation Declaration signed there by the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China.
Address by Secretary of State Cordell Hull to a joint session of Congress on the Moscow Conference, 18 November 1943, Congressional Record, vol. 89, pt. 7 (House proceedings, 18 November 1943; address begins p. 9677); also Department of State Bulletin, 20 November 1943, p. 341 Source