The Colonel

...The assertion that Stimson was some kind of pioneer New Frontiersman—a Herald Tribune Republican whose faith has been betrayed in our Bush/Reaganitetimes—is wholly unpersuasive, thoroughly predictable, and patently wrong...

...policies...

...Modern readers will appreciate the sixty-year-old debates on the efficacy of embargos and the varied definitions of American interest...

...The arrangements negotiated under the thorn tree at Tipitapa—boycotted, of course, by Augusto Sandino—were characteristic of Stimson...

...24.95 Philip Terzian 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 practice combined Wilsonian idealism with Rooseveltian action, and his indignation over Japanese perfidy was characteristically deep...

...Just as the great mercantile enterprises of the Gilded Age had looked to young Stimson for protection and advice, so his countrymen sought old Stimson's guidance in their violent transition to superpower status...

...As secretary of state, Root commended his younger partner to Theodore Roosevelt, who appointed Stimson U.S...

...His childless marriage to a woman of slightly less exalted social rank distressed his father, but it was a successful, possibly even blissful, match that lasted half a century...

...Stimsonism in THE COLONEL: THE LIFE AND WARS OF HENRY STIMSON, 1867-1950 Godfrey Hodgson/Alfred A. Knopf/402 pp...

...Once Elihu Root was brought into the McKinley Administration in 1899 to organize the bureaucratic chaos in the War Department after the victory over Spain, Stimson's star was destined to rise...

...it was his obligation to assume responsibility...

...T he next time David S. Broder or I R. W. Apple, Jr., or George E Will, or any other of our politico-j ournalistic luminaries speculates in print about George Bush's "vision thing," it would be worthwhile to refer him to this volume...

...the impersonal diaries, devoid of reflections on the arts or the flesh...

...He settled into the practice of corporate law in 1890s Manhattan, rode to hounds in the country, and, as he slowly descended into early middle age, came under the inevitable influence of Elihu Root, senior partner in his firm, and Theodore Roosevelt, the great white chief of his governing tribe...

...Stimson's mother died when he was eight years old, and his father, a banker who switched careers to medicine to diagnose and treat his ailing spouse, left his orphaned children in the care of their grandparents while he threw himself obsessively into his medical work...

...The echoes of those comfortable Anglo-American chats sound heavily in these pages...

...he was also concerned about the Republican National Convention opening in Philadelphia...

...Stimson, who had known FDR socially and kept in friendly contact throughout the New Deal, was the best-known Republican interventionist in America...

...The two were destined to clash: Hoover portly, phlegmatic, cynical, deliberate, slow to anger, with a memory for slights...

...There he assembled an elite brigade of younger lawyers, Felix Frankfurter among them, establishing a pattern often duplicated since...

...Those who expect our President's ideology to be revealed in Cuomoesque orations or keynote addresses or soaring declarations need look no further than the scouting manual of the gentleman squire: duty, fidelity, noblesse oblige, impecPhilip Terzian is editor of the editorial pages at the Providence Journal...

...It is entirely possible that Stimson's marriage influenced his public behavior, or vice versa, but Hodgson's speculations are obvious and simplistic, and his only living witnesses knew Stimson in old age, when History had already wrapped him like a shroud...

...In the summer of 1940, when France capitulated and Dunkirk fell, Justice Felix Frankfurter swung into action...

...Franklin Roosevelt had been.anxious to convey some message to Britain and Hitler with symbolic appointments in his peacetime cabinet...

...Presumably, his actions offended Latin tempers, but they did appeal to Yankee sentiment, and Coolidge of Vermont rewarded Stimson of New York with a proconsular plum: governor-general of the Philippines...

...Born in New York City two years after the end of the Civil War, Stimson died three months after the outbreak of fighting in Korea: from General Sherman to Dr...

...But reticence is not always a means of concealing things, and orphans sometimes avoid psychic wounds...

...No American statesman better understood military necessity, principled action, the need to arrive at a timely consensus...

...This was, as he saw it, the dread responsibility for which he had been trained...

...Yet it must be said that the process by which he defined the nuclear problem—the disconcerting meeting of human morality and national obligation—was exactly the kind of service that Stimson rendered best, and holds up rather well...

...The United States should not merely record its disapproval, he believed, but punish the transgressor...

...His judgment of Stimson's character is slightly less deferential than Morison's...

...Out of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) came the Stimson Doctrine, the notion of withholding diplomatic recognition on grounds of principle...

...Henry Stimsonwas a sensitive, austere boy, inflexibly Victorian, a model student and devoted alumnus of the Phillips Academy (Andover), Yale College, and Harvard Law School...

...Next, he presided for two years over William Howard Taft's War Department, and, when conflict finally came for the United States in 1917, he spent several happy months as an aging artilleryman in France...

...But in their differences over Manchuria, Stimson and Hoover were a vision of the future: interventionism, isolationism...

...Moreover, he is a Briton, and what he might regard as an outsider's insights are often a stranger's misperceptions...

...Indeed, Colonel Stimson seldom enunciated what might pass today for a constitutional creed or a declaration of political principle...

...the temper...

...I should imagine that even Godfrey Hodgson's sensibilities have evolved in the course of decades, and most of the offenders in this volume were born when slavery was still extant...

...Bundles for Britain, America First...

...The colonel, who ran only once for elective office, did not necessarily pursue such prestige...

...But so what...

...the rigid adherence to his gentleman's code...

...For in Colonel Stimson we find the American equivalent of the aristocratic principle: Of those to whom much has been given, much is expected, and so on...

...The Harding years found him practicing law, but in 1927, when Calvin Coolidge sought a mediator for Nicaragua's insurgency, he recruited Stimson...

...but, by virtue of their age and the demands of global warfare, they were destined to ratify, not initiate, U.S...

...and he expected his gaudy players to observe those same standards...

...This particular tradition in our national political life did not begin with Henry Stimson, but for two generations of American foreign policy he personified it...

...the apparent sterility, possibly caused by mumps...

...His was a sharp, constricted vision of an imperfect world in dangerous times, and an adolescent nation in need of guidance and some fundamental precepts...

...By the time Stimson presided over the decision to use the atomic bomb against the Japanese, he was 78 years old, weary, distracted, and very nearly worn out...

...the nervous quirks and ailments...

...attorney for the Southern District of New York...

...No one can dispute that Elihu Root held views about Asians that no modern American statesman would utter even in private...

...the lifelong need for strenuous physical exercise...

...meanwhile, his view of Stimson's policies and opinions is very nearly identical to Current's...

...Godfrey Hodgson is a journalist, not a historian, and as far as I can tell, he has added nearly nothing to the substance of these earlier volumes...

...He breaks new ground only in reminding us constantly that Stimson and his mentors (Root, Taft, Leonard Wood) had politically incorrect ideas on race...

...Four years after Stimson's death, Richard N. Current issued a hostile study (Secretary Stimson), and in 1960, Elting E. Morison, editor of Theodore Roosevelt's letters, published an authorized life (Thrmoil and Tradition...

...Neither the Great Society nor the Century of the Common Man would have meant much to this Skull and Bonester...

...T owards the end of his life, Stimson wrote a third-person autobiography (On Active Service in Peace and War) with the help of young McGeorge Bundy, the son of a longtime aide...

...cable manners, sword at the ready...

...The distance of decades gives Hodgson the freedom to psychoanalyze his dead subject...

...And Stimson's rationale for the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942 seems largely unconvincing fifty years later...

...Thus, on the basis of status and merit—and on that basis alone—he was Herbert Hoover's choice as secretary of state...

...Stimson in the War Department, and Frank Knox in the Navy Department, were more than mere figureheads...

...Stimson gaunt, impetuous, instinctive, idealistic, quick to react but swift to forgive...

...It is perhaps not coincidental that Hodgson has formed many of his conclusions on the basis of conversations with such contemporary nabobs as the Bundy brothers (McGeorge and William) and the late Kingman Brewster...

...But Hoover, deep in the Depression and perceiving that his influence in Japanese-occupied north China was not likely to be great, saw little point in belaboring the issue...

...The elopement of Stimson and Roosevelt, engineered by Frankfurter, outraged the Republicans but impressed the Europeans: it was, during a congressionally mandated neutrality, the best means Roosevelt had to take sides and prepare America to fight...

...Although the British journalist Godfrey Hodgson's long-awaited life of Henry Stimson is infinitely less than any hopeful peruser has a right to expect, it does answer a question that has plagued the city of Washington for the past few years...

...Stimson, to be sure, is eligible for some sessions on the couch: the motherless boy with the cold, distant father...

...T o the career-minded among us, Stimson's life has a rare narrative grandeur...

...Our populist, democratic ideals prevent us from thinking comfortably in these terms, but there it is...

...Oppenheimer in one lifetime...

...Establishing his authority by plain strength of will, he was both cunning and wise, rigorous and deferential, scrupulous and candid...

...Such burdens were unwelcome, but always assumed—and the model of service that was Henry Stimson's life still serves as the ideal forty years after his death...

...No doubt the Colonel's famous speech to George Bush's graduating class at Andover—the one in which he said that he didn't pity the boys but envied them, since Providence had deposited them at a moment in time (1940) that gave them the responsibility of choosing between good and evil for the world—had the intended effect...