These steps were but prelude to Government Section’s most extraordinary week. On February 4, Whitney convened his staff and informed them, according to the secret minutes of the meeting, that “in the next week the Government Section will sit as a Constitutional Convention. General MacArthur has entrusted the Government Section with the historically significant task of drafting a new Constitution for the Japanese people.” It would be based on three principles that MacArthur had declared essential. As jotted down in a memo Whitney brought to the meeting, they were as follows: