Henry l stimson, p.2
Henry L. Stimson, page 2
Notes
1 The others who attended were General Carl Spaatz, Commanding General of the Army Air Forces; Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall; former Secretary of War Robert Patterson; Assistant Secretary of State Robert Lovett; General Courtney Hodges, Commanding General of the First Army; Major General Alexander Surles; former Stimson assistant Harvey Bundy; Colonel W. H. Kyle, Stimson’s military aide, 1944–45; Major General Norman Kirk; Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell; George Harrison, Stimson’s representative on the Interim Committee for the development and use of the atomic bomb; Major General Frank McCoy; Arthur Page, special consultant to the secretary of war; Goldthwaite Dorr, special assistant to the secretary of war; Allen T. Klots, law partner; and McGeorge Bundy, coauthor of Stimson’s memoirs and future national security advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
2 The 1947 National Security Act combined the positions of secretary of war and secretary of the navy as the secretary of defense.
3 Richard Current, Secretary Stimson: A Study in Statecraft (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 120.
4 Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), 157.
5 Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 28.
6 Kai Bird, The Color of Truth (New York: Simon & Schuster,1998), 23.
Chronology
1867
September 21 Henry Lewis Stimson is born in New York City.
1893
January 1 Stimson is made a partner at Root & Clarke.
July 6 Stimson marries Mabel Wellington White of New Haven.
July 12 Frederick Jackson Turner presents his “frontier thesis” at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.
1898
April 20 December 10 The United States declares war on Spain. The United States and Spain sign the Treaty of Paris.
1899
September 6 Secretary of State John Hay sends the first Open Door note requesting all powers to respect the principle of equal trade opportunity in China.
1900
July 3 Secretary of State Hay issues the second Open Door note calling for the preservation of China’s independence.
1903
November 18 The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty is signed, authorizing the United States to build the Panama Canal.
1904
December 6 The Roosevelt Corollary is added to the Monroe Doctrine.
1906
January 11 Stimson is named the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
1911
May 13 Stimson is named secretary of war.
1917
April 6 The United States declares war on Germany.
November 15 The Bolsheviks seize power in Russia.
1918
January 8 President Woodrow Wilson announces his Fourteen Points.
November 11 Germany agrees to an armistice.
1919
January 12 The Paris Peace Conference convenes.
June 28 The Treaty of Versailles is signed.
1920
March 19 For the final time the U.S. Senate refuses to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.
1921
November 12 The Washington Naval Conference convenes.
1922
October 28 The Fascists march on Rome, and Mussolini takes power in Italy.
1924
April 24 The Dawes Plan is published.
1927
May 4 The Peace of Tipitapa is negotiated by Stimson.
1928
March 2 Stimson becomes governor general of the Philippines.
1929
January 15 The U.S. Senate ratifies the Kellogg-Briand Pact signed by the United States and France on August 7, 1928, outlawing war.
January 30 Stimson is named secretary of state.
1930
April 22 The London Naval Treaty is signed.
June 17 President Herbert Hoover signs the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act.
1931
June 20 Hoover announces a debt moratorium on all intergovernmental debts.
September 18 The Japanese destroy part of the South Manchurian railroad at Mukden.
December 2 General Maximiliano Hernández MartÍnez overthrows Salvadorean President Arturo Araujo.
1932
January 2 The Japanese Army takes Chinchow in Manchuria.
January 7 The Stimson Doctrine of nonrecognition of Japan’s conquest of Manchuria is announced.
1933
January 30 Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany.
March 4 Franklin D. Roosevelt is inaugurated as President.
1935
August 31 President Roosevelt signs the first Neutrality Act.
October 3 Italy invades Ethiopia.
1936
March 7 German forces enter the demilitarized Rhineland.
July 17 The Spanish Civil War begins.
1937
October 5 President Roosevelt delivers his “Quarantine Speech” in Chicago.
1938
March 13 Austria is absorbed into the Third Reich.
September 30 The Munich agreement cedes Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Germany.
1939
September 1 Germany invades Poland.
September 3 Great Britain and France declare war on Germany.
1940
June 19 Stimson is named secretary of war.
June 22 France surrenders.
September 3 The Destroyers for Bases deal is announced.
September 16 The Selective Service Act is signed.
1941
March 11 The Lend-Lease Act is signed.
June 22 Germany invades the Soviet Union.
July 24 Japan occupies southern Indo-China.
July 26 The United States announces a complete embargo of trade with Japan.
August 12 President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agree to the Atlantic Charter.
December 7 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor.
1942
February 19 Orders are issued for the internment of Japanese Americans.
November 8 Operation TORCH, the Allied invasion of North Africa, begins.
1943
July 10 The Allied invasion of Sicily begins.
September 3 The Allied invasion of Italy begins.
November 28 The first meeting of the Big Three, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, convenes in Teheran.
1944
June 6 The D-Day invasion of France, Operation OVERLORD, begins.
1945
February 4 The Big Three meet again at Yalta.
April 12 President Roosevelt dies, and Harry S. Truman succeeds to the presidency.
May 8 Germany surrenders.
July 16 The atomic bomb is tested successfully at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
July 17 The Potsdam Conference begins.
August 6 The atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.
August 8 Russia declares war on Japan.
August 9 An atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki.
August 14 Japan accepts the Allied terms of surrender.
September 21 Stimson retires as secretary of war on his seventy-eighth birthday.
1950
October 20 Henry Lewis Stimson dies at his Highhold estate on Long Island.
1
Preparation of a Policymaker
In January 1902, while in Washington with Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist, to attend the annual dinner of the Boone & Crockett Club, Henry L. Stimson went riding in Rock Creek Park. From across the creek Stimson was hailed by name by one of the four men who were walking along the other bank. He soon recognized the voice calling him as that of President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was laughing and asking him to swim across and join his group. When Stimson hesitated, Secretary of War Elihu Root, Stimson’s former law partner, called out: “The President of the United States directs Sergeant Stimson of Squadron A to cross the creek and come to his assistance by order of the Secretary of War.” Stimson immediately saluted, shouted, “Very good, sir,” and pointed his horse at the creek. Due to recent rains the water was high, and it was difficult to tell its depth as the creek was walled on both sides. The horse immediately lost its footing in the rapid current and plunged downstream, with both rider and horse often completely under water. Roosevelt was shouting for Stimson to go back, which was impossible due to the high wall and the rapid current. Finally, Stimson and his horse landed on the branches of a fallen tree.
Stimson dismounted and led the horse downstream to a break in the wall where they climbed the bank. He remounted, rode down to a bridge, crossed, rode up to Roosevelt and Root, and reported he was “ready for duty.” The president and Root, Stimson recalled, “looked like two small boys who had been caught stealing apples.” Roosevelt said he did not think the order would be obeyed: “I thought you could see that the bank on the other side was impossible.” Stimson replied, “Mr. President, when a soldier hears an order like that, it isn’t his business to see that it is impossible.” The president laughed and said it “was very nice of you to do it, now hurry home & drink all the whiskey you can.” Root simply added to this that he and the president “didn’t care a dam [sic] about Harry; but we were a good deal concerned about the horse!” That night at the Boone & Crockett Club dinner, Roosevelt, in his retelling of that day’s events, hailed Stimson as “young Lochinvar.”1
This incident captures much that is important for understanding Stimson and his role in the making of American foreign policy. At the age of thirty-four, Stimson was already a well-established Wall Street lawyer with connections to the most powerful men in the nation. Roosevelt and Root, along with his father, were the greatest influences on his life and understanding of the world. Stimson’s reply to the president was not after-the-fact bravado or hyperbole. He acted in the manner he believed was required of him and anyone else in that situation. Stimson held honor, duty, service, honesty, obedience to authority, and physical challenge as the highest of values. He had a patrician’s sense of the obligation of service by those who, as he saw it, were best able. This led him to accept the importance of public service by right-minded conservatives to reform the social order, protect property, and maintain progress. Stimson’s sense of the importance of duty and service is underscored by the fact that, when he began to keep a diary in 1909, this was the first event of his life that he recorded.
As a lawyer, Stimson had very clear views of right and wrong that he held to throughout his life, believing in certain absolutes and correct ways of conduct, guided by tradition, morality, and, most important, the law. As a Progressive Republican, or a “progressive conservative,” as he called himself,2 he saw a need for federal intervention in the domestic economy to regulate corporations and their behavior, and for United States intervention abroad to maintain order, protect business, and ensure the proper conduct of nations. Holding to the Social Darwinist and the essentialist racial attitudes that were common to people of his class and background in the early twentieth century, he believed in a hierarchy of peoples in terms of abilities and the superiority of whites and Western nations over the rest of the world. Stimson, therefore, distrusted mass politics, had concerns about too much democracy, and believed in a greater concentration of power in the executive branch of the government. He was comfortable only with those of his own class and attitudes, and those who accepted authority and followed clear lines of power.
Stimson never questioned the need for a greater United States involvement in the world. He was a nationalist who accepted the notion of the “White Man’s Burden.” His understanding of the U.S. role in the world was shaped by his relationships with Roosevelt and Root and their positive views of expansion and war as the paths to national greatness. He was, as his membership in the Boone & Crockett Club attests, an avid outdoorsman and member of numerous elite clubs. These formed his circle of friends, confirmed his attitudes, and represented the people he thought should be in charge of the nation. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Stimson believed in the virtue of struggle and war and the positive influence of expansion. Just as the nation had been shaped by the frontier and the conquest of the continent, it needed to challenge itself in the international arena. This, Stimson concluded, would serve both the interests of the United States and the rest of the world. A dominant role for the United States in the world would bring stability and a more peaceful international system that would, in turn, be more receptive to American ideas and economic interests. Stimson placed a good deal of faith in treaties and the great powers’ cooperation to maintain international law. Social order abroad, not reform, was the primary goal. To succeed, the United States had to build up its economic and military strength and expand American “national interests.”
Thus, service to the nation, military preparedness, and United States leadership in the world became central components of Stimson’s worldview and guided him in all of his various positions. Stimson believed in the universal application of American values, laws, and institutions. If led by the right group of men, the future of the nation and the world would assuredly be better. Never questioning these precepts, or seeing his ideas as those of a particular class and those endorsing the status quo, Stimson was convinced that other people needed exposure to Americans and their ways, and to follow American training and leadership. Those wise enough to understand this would develop and advance, while those who resisted would have to be controlled. The challenge was to make sure that the right men, and for Stimson the public world was the world of men, were in charge.
Andover, Yale, and the Law
Born on September 21, 1867, in New York City, Stimson was raised in a world of privilege and service. His ancestors arrived in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. Stimson described them as “sturdy, middle-class people, religious, thrifty, energetic, and long-lived,” attributes he would ascribe to himself. After service in the Revolutionary War, a George Stimson moved to upstate New York, where he was the first settler of the town of Windham. George Stimson’s grandson moved to New York City, where he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and became the senior partner of Henry C. Stimson & Sons of 8 Wall Street. Stimson’s father, Lewis, joined his father’s firm after service in the Civil War. He prospered during the rapid postwar expansion of New York’s financial power, met Candace Wheeler, and followed her to Europe and married her in the American embassy in Paris in November 1866. Lewis Stimson was well enough off that when his wife’s health began to fail he could sell his business and take the family to Europe in 1871.
He began the study of medicine in both Zurich and Paris in order to try to understand his wife’s illness. Upon their return to the United States in 1873, he completed his medical degree at Bellevue Hospital Medical College, subsequently becoming a professor of surgery in the New York University Medical College and the Cornell Medical College from its founding, and an attending surgeon at Presbyterian, Bellevue, and New York hospitals. From his father, young Henry obtained his sense of obligation to serve and the idea that there was more to life than the earning of money.
Stimson’s mother died in 1875. Lewis Stimson did not believe he could raise his children alone properly and, therefore, sent Henry and his sister Candace to live with their grandparents on East 34th Street in New York, where they would be under the care of their Aunt Minnie. Stimson adored his grandparents and aunt as much as he loved his father and internalized their strict Victorian values and behavior. In 1880, when he was only thirteen, his father sent young Henry off to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he was the youngest student. His connection with Phillips Andover was to last his whole lifetime. He became a trustee in 1905 and served in that capacity until 1947. Stimson thrived on the strict rules, which were similar to those imposed by his aunt, the classical curriculum, and the sense of duty and obligation that were instilled in the students. He found great companionship and what he saw as a “new world of democracy” with boys from throughout the United States, all drawn, he said, “by the desire to get the teaching given by a school which was known to have represented for over a hundred years the ideals of character and education believed in by the founders of our country.”3
Stimson graduated from Andover in 1883, but owing to his early start was a year too young to begin at Yale. He spent the interim period being tutored in New York and Andover, and enrolled at Yale in the fall of 1884. Again, at Yale, he claimed to have found a “potent democratic class spirit” that produced what he saw as the superior attributes of so many of its graduates and his colleagues, and that provided them the right to rule. He was tapped for the select senior society Skull and Bones. Upon graduation in 1888, he went on to Harvard Law School where he studied for two years. Stimson returned to New York in 1890 and lived with his father and sister, who had returned to run her father’s household, while he established himself as a lawyer. He was admitted to the New York Bar in 1891, the same year he joined the Wall Street firm of Root & Clarke as a clerk. On January 1, 1893, he became a partner in the firm. With his position secure, Stimson was finally ready to move out of his father’s house, and, on July 6, 1893, he married Mabel Wellington White of New Haven, whom he had met while a student at Yale. They had waited, in a demonstration of their Victorian values, until Henry had established his career and financial independence before wedding. Theirs was a happy marriage that lasted fifty-three years, and they remained devoted to each other until Stimson’s death in 1950. The couple, however, was unable to have children and so gave their energies to Stimson’s career. In part to make up for the lack of offspring, Stimson surrounded himself with bright, energetic young proteges throughout his career who became part of the Stimson household.4
