Henry L. Stimson

Biography

Henry Lewis Stimson was born in New York City in 1867, the son of a surgeon. He was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, graduated from Yale College in 1888 and Harvard Law School in 1890, and joined Elihu Root's Wall Street firm, becoming a partner in 1893. Root became his mentor and model.

Theodore Roosevelt made him U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1906, where he prosecuted antitrust cases. After losing the 1910 race for governor of New York as a Republican, he served William Howard Taft as Secretary of War from 1911 to 1913 and reorganised the army's departments. He backed military preparedness before 1917, served as an artillery officer in France and later became a reserve brigadier general.

In 1927 Calvin Coolidge sent him to negotiate an end to the civil war in Nicaragua and then made him governor-general of the Philippines. As Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State from 1929 to 1933 he closed the codebreaking Cipher Bureau, led the U.S. delegation to the London Naval Conference and answered Japan's seizure of Manchuria with the Stimson Doctrine, refusing to recognise territorial changes made by force.

In July 1940 Franklin Roosevelt brought him back as Secretary of War. Working with George C. Marshall, he oversaw the wartime expansion of the army, secured approval for the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast and supervised the Manhattan Project, keeping Kyoto off the atomic target list. He opposed the Morgenthau Plan and pressed for the trials that became Nuremberg. He retired in September 1945 and died at his estate in Huntington, New York, in 1950.