HEROES: The Short Adventure

When Henry Lewis Stimson was 60, he sailed off to become the governor general of the Philippines. Cal Coolidge was President and the year was 1928. Stimson mellowly described the trip as “a last short adventure before old age.”

The short adventure lasted nearly two decades of U.S. peace, depression and total war, for the best years of Henry Stimson’s life were still ahead of him. He was to become first Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State, then—at 72—Franklin Roosevelt’s gruff, wise and trusted wartime Secretary of War. Only last week did the long voyage come to an end. At 83, Elder Statesman Henry Stimson died of a heart attack at Highhold, his rolling, 123-acre estate on Long Island.

The messages of condolence and tribute—from President Truman, from generals and ministers and old soldiers—spoke mostly of Stimson’s latter-day achievements. But that was primarily because Henry Stimson had outlived those who knew his beginnings in public life, back in the days of Teddy Roosevelt. It was Teddy who had picked the 38-year-old Stimson out of a prosperous Manhattan law practice and made him a trust-busting U.S. attorney for southern New York.

Four years later, when T.R. ran Stimson for governor of New York, his candidate was defeated in the same Democratic landslide that installed a 28-year-old freshman politician named Franklin Roosevelt in the New York legislature. The Democrats ruined Stimson’s unemotional campaign by dubbing him “the icicle,” and never again did he run for office.

The Mantle. But he was always ready to serve. William Howard Taft, the second of six Presidents who called upon him, in 1911 made him Secretary of War. Then came Wilson and World War I. Out of office, Henry Stimson at 49 decided to become a soldier himself, trained at Plattsburg (which he had helped set up), went overseas as an artillery lieutenant colonel to command a battalion on the Western Front and win a promotion to full colonel.

Somewhere in the next years—when Coolidge and Hoover gave him high position—the mantle of elder statesman began to settle imperceptibly around Henry Stimson’s lean shoulders. He shared and symbolized the nation’s ideals and hopes (“the only deadly sin I know is cynicism,” he once wrote). Always above petty intrigues, he was by then broader than politics, and wiser than the current clichés.

As Secretary of State under Hoover, he sternly warned that the unchecked Japanese invasion of Manchuria (in 1931) held the threat of a new war. When Manchuria led to Ethiopia and Ethiopia to the Rhineland and war in Europe, Franklin Roosevelt urged the old man to forget his Republican leanings and become his Secretary of War. Elder Statesman Stimson went back to Washington.

The Republicans, in the midst of the 1940 campaign, were outraged. Stimson quietly faced the murmuring resentment of his old friends, convinced that the war he had long foreseen was soon to come.

The Decisions. He was old and he looked feeble, and gossip spread that he couldn’t handle his work. His aides knew better: the spare, grey-thatched, droop-mustached old man was a stern and shrewd martinet, who could lay about him with a shaking crooked finger and a devastating logic. George Catlett Marshall, who inspired some of the same kind of respect, jumped when Stimson beckoned.

There were 200,000 men in the Army when Stimson took over; there were 8,000,000 when he left, and victory had been won. From the beginning, he saw unwaveringly that the real battle must first be won in Europe. So strongly was he bent on early U.S. invasion of the European continent that he once irascibly proposed that the U.S. move its war to the Pacific if Churchill delayed the invasion any longer. In 1945, Henry Stimson wrestled with a deeper problem. Should the U.S. drop the atom bomb on Japan? It should, he advised Harry Truman, in order “to end the war in victory with the least possible cost of [American] lives.” His judgment in this would long be argued, on the grounds that Japan was already near to collapse.

On his 78th birthday, the old man walked stiffly through a gauntlet of saluting generals at the Washington airport, to wind up his long, long adventure. At Highhold he and his wife relaxed into country life, his impatient cantankerousness mellowed into a kind of gentleness.

Last week Stimson, crippled with arthritis, was helped into a car so that he could enjoy the fine weather. Suddenly he doubled forward in pain. He was dead soon after they got him home and lowered him gently to a living-room couch.

It was then, when it was finished, that the U.S. could best see the shape of his greatness. It stood like a high column, reaching up through half a century, each year mortared tightly to the next by integrity, wisdom and selflessness.