Monnet believed that French opinion would not rally to a man who was seen to be operating from British soil. He claimed to have shared his concerns about de Gaulle with the Foreign Office mandarins Alexander Cadogan and Robert Vansittart, and Spears. In August 1940, Monnet resigned as head of the Inter-Allied Commission and was sent to the United States by the British Government, as a member of the British Supply Council, to ask for rapid and massive increases in the flow of American weapons so Britain could turn the tide against Germany. Soon after his arrival in Washington, D.C., he became an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Convinced that America could serve as "the great arsenal of democracy", he persuaded the President to launch a massive arms production program, both as an economic stimulus and to supply the Allies with military resources. Unlike De Gaulle, Monnet was popular with the Americans and the English. A co-worker of his claims that sometimes he would help Churchill to write a message to Roosevelt and then on the next day help Roosevelt to compose the response. According to Edward R. Kantowicz, Monnet was impressed by the American organizational energy and saw cooperation with the new superpower as Europe's only chance to reorganize and recover itself. In 1941, Roosevelt, with Churchill's agreement, launched the Victory Program, which represented the involvement of the United States in the war effort. After the war, British economist John Maynard Keynes stated that Monnet, through his coordination work, had probably shortened World War II by a year. While in Washington, Monnet and his family lived in a comfortable house built in 1934 at 2415 Foxhall Road NW, which was later home to Adlai Stevenson III and James Baker. He worked from an office of the British Mission at the Willard Hotel. In 1943, Monnet became a member of the National Liberation Committee, De Gaulle's French government-in-exile, stationed in Algiers, being designated "Commissaire à l'Armement" (Minister of Armaments). During a meeting on 5 August of that year, Monnet declared to the Committee:  There will be no peace in Europe if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty... The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples the necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must constitute themselves into a federation... Following World War II, France was in severe need of reconstruction and completely dependent on coal from Germany's main remaining coal-mining areas, the Ruhr and the Saar.