Some members of King's cabinet threatened to resign and bring down the government if the Zombies were not sent overseas. Of King's cabinet, James Lorimer Ilsley, C. D. Howe, Angus Lewis Macdonald, Colin W. G. Gibson, Thomas Crerar, and William Pate Mulock were all threatening resignation if King persisted with his current policies. On the morning of 22 November 1944, General John Carl Murchie told McNaughton that his policies had failed and hardly any Zombies were volunteering to "go active", which McNaughton recalled "was like a blow to the stomach". Later on 22 November 1944, McNaughton telephoned King to say, as he wrote in his diary, "The Headquarters staff here had all advised him that the voluntary system would not get the men...It was the most serious advice that could be tended". King added that at once "there came to mind the statement that I had made to Parliament in June about the action the government would necessarily take if we were agreed that the time had come when conscription was necessary". King chose to misrepresent McNaughton's statement as some sort of military "coup d'état", what in his own words was variously a "general's revolt", a "palace revolution" and "the surrender of civil government to the military". Morton wrote Murchie's statement about the failure of McNaughton's recruiting drive was "irrefutable", writing "It was no act of mutiny to tell the truth. Yet to King, the notion of a "general's revolt" was too useful to ignore. It fitted his view of the military. It superseded the mutiny that really mattered-the imminent resignation of the pro-conscription ministers. It would frighten the anti-conscriptists". King's Quebec lieutenant Louis St. Laurent chose to accept "this fiction" that King was being forced by the military against his will to send the Zombies overseas, but the Air minister Charles "Chubby" Power would not, resigning in protest at this violation of the government's promises to the people of Quebec.