ARMY: Secretary of War

No U.S. Secretary of War in 75 years has faced such a situation as Henry Lewis Stimson faced last week. He had 1,500,000 soldiers under arms and many of them wanted to go home at a time when he was sure that they were desperately needed.

When the House of Representatives by a one-vote margin told draftees and guardsmen that they would have to serve 18 months longer than they expected, dissatisfaction in the ranks was bound to reach its worst. In that crisis Henry Stimson proved he lacked neither energy nor courage.

The night after the service-extension bill was passed he went on the air to broadcast a message to the Army:

“I realize that this [the extension bill] means sacrifice on your part. . . . The world is today facing a situation which is more dangerous to its general peace than any situation which has existed during all the years of recorded history. . . . Today these three Axis nations, Germany, Japan and Italy, openly announce their intention of going further with their conquest of the world. . . . Our own hemisphere, thinly populated, rich beyond all other continents in natural resources, is an inevitable ultimate target for these marauder nations.”

Man of Logic. If these reasonable words did not bring soldiers to toss their hats in air and give a rousing cheer, no one had cause to be surprised. For the quality of Henry Stimson is to persuade rather than to rouse. His lack of success at rabble-rousing was demonstrated 31 years ago, in 1910, when Theodore Roosevelt, just returned from Africa, picked Henry Stimson, the crack U.S. Attorney in New York City, to run for Governor of New York. Banking heavily on Henry Stimson’s record as buster of the sugar trust, successful prosecutor of the famed market manipulator, Charles W. Morse, T. R. called on New York to rally behind young “Harry” Stimson. He might as well have referred publicly to Charles Evans Hughes as “Spike.” On the stump high-collared Henry Stimson spoke as he did in the courtroom. His argument was well-reasoned, factual, clear. When the time came to tear into Tammany mugs he politely “begged to differ with them.” The result was inevitable: a Democratic landslide.

The incidental effect of that landslide was significant. It launched the political career of a young Harvardman who was to learn how to appeal to crowds: in it Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won a seat in the State Legislature.

Today if the rank & file of the Army is to be roused to a patriotic fervor. Franklin Roosevelt rather than Henry Stimson will have to do the rousing. But good morale is composed of many things besides fervor, and in all these things Henry Stimson is effectively busy.

Work Done. Besides the conviction that danger to the U.S. is real, one thing that will help to restore Army morale is more equipment. Another thing is better officers. Henry Stimson is making progress on both fronts. The equipment is being built, incompetent officers are being weeded out. And the consensus of high Army officers is that, as administrator and director of the greatest peacetime expansion of the Army, Henry Stimson has been a cracking good Secretary of War.

After his defeat for Governor of New York in 1910, President Taft made Stimson his War Secretary. In the War Department still hangs the portrait of Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War (1911-1913). A year ago when Henry Stimson sat down at the same felt-covered desk that he occupied 30 years ago, young officers looked at that portrait and winced. There is an immense difference between being Secretary of War and Secretary of a War. An old man of 73 was called to take that far harder assignment, and a year ago all that the old new Secretary had in his cupboard to start with was red tape and the skeleton of an army.

Last week the strength of the Army was 1,545,400 officers and men. In a year it had grown more than fivefold. In its growth there had been mistakes, some unavoidable, some forced by a wavering Congress, some plain results of stupidity. But as of last week the Army was well-housed. From the beginning it had been well-fed. For its training—far from complete and still hampered by shortages of equipment—it is getting more practical field exercises than any U.S. Army ever had before. Its physical condition is superb. Some of its divisions are readier for combat service than any sent to Europe in 1917.

When credit is being handed out for this tremendous basic achievement, the Secretary of War will get a great slice.

That is not the sort of achievement which could have been expected under the political Secretaries who preceded Stimson—men like Weeks, Good, Hurley, Dern, Woodring. Most of the political department heads either meddled witlessly or let the Army run itself while they busied themselves with other things.

In spite of Washington whisperings about his age, principally on his own Republican side of Congress, Henry Lewis Stimson runs the Army. He probably lives closer to its high command than any Secretary since Newton D. Baker. Among Army men he is classed with the best Secretaries they have had in modern War Department history: Baker and Elihu Root.

Close to the Job. Typical of his operation was his decision when the shining new War Department building on Washington’s Virginia Avenue was opened two months ago. Its broad halls and stately offices were a beacon for any man who loves comfort and elegance. Many of the civilians in the department moved to the new building. But Henry Stimson hung on to his old office in the rabbit warren of the rambling Munitions building where most of the Army’s Washington soldiers work.

There, in a working day from 9 to 5, he consults, advises, orders. Three or four times a day he confers with the Army’s Chief of Staff, able General George Marshall. He simply steps through the door into the next room where hard-working George Marshall sits.

Stimson is on the job all the time. He knows everything that goes on in his department and in the course of a year has missed only three Cabinet meetings. His appointment book, meticulously kept, is like the schedule of a fast train, by the minute:

> “11:04, conference with Judge Advocate General reference court-martial cases;

> “12:10, conference with General A. D. Surles director of public relations;

> “12:42, received daily report on War Dept. staff matters from head of Statistical Div. General Staff;” etc.

Administrator. Henry Stimson has during his year in office himself picked the three men who are his chief civilian aides. One of them is earnest Robert Porter Patterson, onetime overseas infantry officer and D.S.C.-man, who left the Federal appellate bench to become Under Secretary, the Secretary’s right-hand man, who also handles Army buying. Another is Robert Abercrombie Lovett, wartime naval aviator, Assistant Secretary of War for Air who watches out for The Air Forces. The third is John Jay McCloy, Manhattan lawyer and A.E.F. artillery captain, who supervises Lend-Lease, Army publicity, personnel and many a miscellaneous job besides.

They are a sensible, hardworking, sometimes overserious staff, no New Deal crackpots. Secretary Stimson assigns them jobs, turns them loose to let them work in their own way, backs them up in emergencies, and holds them fully accountable for results. All his aides stand in considerable awe of him. For his anger is withering although as cold as his logic.

Said one of his subordinates: “After he gives you hell, you say to yourself, ‘If I could only behave with such logic and dignity when I get mad.’ ”

But the quality that makes his reproofs most impressive is his own character, which never stoops to injustice, a kind of unshakeable integrity that is so great it impresses itself on all those who work with him. (Said one: “Every time I see Henry L. Stimson I think I see God hovering over his left shoulder. And when he rises in righteous indignation he’s a holy terror.”)

Enemies on the Hill. Congressmen do not like to have God looking over anybody’s shoulders, and one of Henry Stimson’s weaknesses as Secretary of War is that the coldness of his logic and the strength of his character make too little allowance for practical politics.

Before Congressional committees he is decisive, clear, unbending, aloof. Impersonally courteous, he never descends to personalities, never lets his collar wilt when the questioning is hot, seldom raises his voice, but never wavers. The result is that Congress is often antagonistic. A few Congressmen have a grudging admiration for him. Many, particularly on the Republican side, dismiss him in angry words, usually adding that he is a doddering old so-and-so.

Republican distrust of him is based not only on the fact that he, a Republican, has joined the Cabinet of that man in the White House, but that he, like Wendell Willkie, has consistently backed the Administration’s foreign policy.

In the bitter days of early 1933, when Hoover left the White House, Stimson, then Secretary of State, was one of the members of the outgoing Cabinet who went to consult with the incoming President and Secretary of State. He remained on good terms with Cordell Hull thereafter. There was never any real break in U.S. foreign policy from Stimson’s regime to Hull’s regime, and it was ultimately Stimson’s support of Roosevelt’s foreign policy that drew him back into the Cabinet.

Republican Internationalist. This is something that Republican isolationists have never understood. Henry Stimson belongs to the now almost forgotten tradition of Republican internationalists in which John Hay, Elihu Root, William Howard Taft and Charles Evans Hughes were his predecessors. A large part of his career was in the service of that tradition.

As Secretary of War 30 years ago he followed Root by seven years (and incidentally completed the reorganization of the Army which Root had begun). In World War I, he made up his mind that it was necessary to fight Germany long before Woodrow Wilson, and characteristically put his conviction into action by joining the Army. He served in France as commander of a battalion of Field Artillery, still holds a brigadier’s commission in the Inactive Reserve and can still talk to field soldiers in their own idiom.

In 1927 he left his profitable private law practice when Calvin Coolidge sent him to Nicaragua to straighten out a tangle that Marine occupation had never quite unraveled. Stimson’s remedy: an election supervised by the Marines. In a few weeks politeness was restored (as the Marines have it).

Later that year Coolidge sent him to the Philippines as Governor General to succeed his old friend General Leonard Wood, who had been his Chief of Staff. In Manila he studied the islands (was frank in saying that the Philippines should never be independent, equally frank in saying that exploitation of the islands by commercial and banking interests must cease).

Full of the Philippine problem, of Japan and the Far East relations of the U.S.. he was called home by Herbert Hoover to be Secretary of State. From the State Department, he came time after time on to the international stage as a vigorous man of peace in a day when a great war was already brewing. He headed the U.S. delegation to the London Naval Conference and was chairman of another disarmament conference committee that went to Geneva two years later, had its plans knocked into a cocked hat when Germany withdrew. Between times he suggested U.S. collaboration with Britain to stop Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. (But appeasement-minded Sir John Simon icily ignored it.) He proclaimed again & again that the U.S. would recognize no territorial gains based on conquest. At every turn in his career for 30 years Henry Stimson’s attention was focused on the international scene. He not only got around, meeting Mussolini, Laval, the Sultan of Sulu and many another world character, he also consistently stuck to the view that the U.S. could not merely look inwardly to its own security, that it could not long remain safe in a world where aggressors were allowed to roam free.

30 Years Afterward. Next month Henry Stimson will be 74; but any suggestion that he is in any way senile is completely refuted by those who know him, and drives ranking Army officers to profane denial. His daily program of physical activity would be strenuous for a man 25 years younger. In twelve months he has made eleven field inspections of the Army, but his activities in Washington are equally strenuous.

Up at 6 a.m., he goes walking before breakfast, is sometimes dictating to his secretary by 7:30, gets in an hour of work before he goes to the office. He leaves the Munitions building usually around 4:30, never later than 5, goes home to Woodley—the $800,000 estate that he bought when he became Secretary of State in 1929. There the program until dinner is a strenuous hour of deck tennis, often followed by bowling, swimming and sometimes riding, at which as an old cavalryman he excels. Said one of the younger guests of this program: “Next morning when I tried to get out of bed I fell over myself, I was that sore.”

Evenings at dinner the Stimsons usually have guests. The Presbyterian Secretary of War, quietly but firmly pious, says grace. As a man must, who rises at 6, he turns in by n 130. Before midnight Woodley drops into darkness.

Man at War. The U.S. Army is not at war, but its Secretary is. Believing that the U.S. will some day have to fight Hitler, he is quite consciously trying to win its battles beforehand. Faced with the intricate problems of Lend-Lease aid to the Allies, he is daily called upon to balance the question of whether the U.S. will be safer if 50 new bombers are reserved for the Army against fighting to come, or sent to Britain, Chungking, Egypt or Singapore to bomb potential enemies today.

In making such decisions his background in world affairs is important. For today the U.S. Secretary of War has to be in part an international statesman or he cannot do his job. His Army trains at home in peace, but under the job that was handed him when the Lend-Lease Act was passed he is fighting a war on the battlefields of Europe.