Stimson, Henry L.

Stimson, Henry L. (1867–1950),US Republican lawyer and statesman who from 1940 to 1945 served as Roosevelt's, and then Truman's, secretary of war, a position he had first held from 1911 to 1913.

Stimson fought as a lt-colonel in the field artillery in France in 1917 and between the wars served as governor-general of the Philippines and then secretary of state in President Herbert Hoover's cabinet. Though his name was attached to the doctrine of non-interference when Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, throughout the 1930s he was an ardent opponent of fascism and was against neutrality as a policy to avoid war. In June 1940 Roosevelt appointed him secretary of war and Stimson immediately began to give order and direction to a department which needed both. He quickly surrounded himself with a group of able aides, established a good working relationship with the army's chief of staff, General Marshall, and gave increasing independence to the Army Air Forces. He was also an early backer of radar-equipped aircraft to hunt U-boats—though he could not get the navy to collaborate in the methods he espoused—and some avow that his greatest contribution was to persuade the military to acquaint itself with the flow of new scientific ideas and their application.

One of Stimson's first decisions after the USA entered the war, and one of his hardest, was to evacuate all Japanese-Americans from the Californian coastline. He was a strong advocate for the earliest possible landing on continental Europe and argued his case in this and other matters with frankness and persistence. In his diaries he frequently condemned Roosevelt's ‘topsy-turvy’ system of administration—it was he who said that conferring with the president was ‘very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room’—but Roosevelt said he could trust him with anything, which he often did.

As the war progressed, Stimson, to his annoyance, was increasingly bypassed by Roosevelt on questions of strategy, tactics, and operations, as the president chose to confer with Marshall direct on these matters. From its earliest days Stimson bore the responsibility for the development of the atomic bomb: in 1943 he negotiated with Churchill in London on total exchange of information and ideas about nuclear energy, and in 1945 chaired the interim committee which advised Truman on the use of the atomic bomb.

To many Stimson was stern, reserved, and forbidding. But he was a man of high principle—it was he who between the wars, opposed the breaking of codes, saying that gentlemen did not read other people's mail—and of rocklike determination. He also possessed a strong humanity: the removal of Japanese-Americans from the west coast disturbed him greatly and he called the Morgenthau Plan ‘a crime against civilization itself’.

Bibliography

Hodgson, G. , The Colonel (New York, 1990).
Stimson, H. L., and and Bundy, M. , On Active Service in Peace and War (New York, 1948).