When Kennedy came to visit me, he stayed for a full hour and exclaimed on leaving: ‘Just give me a chance to cope with all these visits and formalities and I’ll come and see you. We can spend a couple of hours together discussing all the questions I’m interested in. I like you. You know your business. None of the diplomats here in London have talked to me in such plain, human language. I value that. I’m not really a diplomat. I like to have real conversations.’

Today I visited Kennedy in his new office on Grosvenor Square. It’s a four-storey office-type building which houses not just the US embassy, but also all its affiliates: the air and naval attachés, commercial and agricultural counsellors, and others. The entire staff of the embassy, including service personnel, totals 170 employees. Not bad!

Kennedy was roaring with laughter again and, by the by, told me a very interesting thing.

‘Tell me something,’ he exclaimed. ‘All the Brits keep assuring me that, according to the most reliable sources, a profound domestic crisis has taken over your country (which is why trips to the USSR have lately become so complicated for foreigners) and that your army is falling to pieces and is unfit for serious military operations. So, the Brits claim, you would not be able to help Czechoslovakia if it were attacked by Germany, even if you wished to. They are saying the same to the French and asking them: in these circumstances, is it worth you running risks by following to the letter your agreement with Czechoslovakia?’

I ridiculed the English insinuations and clarified the true state of affairs to Kennedy.

Kennedy informed Roosevelt that Maisky, who gave him a long explanation of the trials, ‘look[ed] scared to death himself’. He gained the impression that ‘if the telephone had rung and said “Come back to Russia”, he would have died right on my hands’, to which the president responded: ‘Poor old Russian Ambassador! I hope he will not die of fright if he is sent for’; reproduced in A. Smith (ed.), Hostage to Fortune: The letters of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York, 2001), pp. 242–3; and E. Roosevelt (ed.), F.D.R. His personal letters, 1928–1945, II (New York, 1950), p. 769.

He thanked me and confessed that he knew virtually nothing about the USSR. He hoped that one day he would visit our country.

So that’s what the English are like! Chamberlain wants to tear France away from its eastern allies and to that end he is exploiting our recent trials. That won’t work.