Henry L. Stimson

Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of State (1929)

Henry Lewis Stimson (born September 21, 1867 in New York City , † October 20, 1950 in Huntington , New York ) was an American politician . He was u. a. Minister of War ( Secretary of War ) and foreign minister ( Secretary of State ) of the United States.

Life

Stimson graduated in 1888, the Yale University , where he the fraternity Skull and Bones belonged. During this time he met Mabel Wellington White, whom he married years later. After studying law at Harvard University , he worked in a law firm from 1891 , where he became a partner in 1893.

In 1906, Stimson was appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York . In 1910 he ran in the election for governor of New York as a candidate for the Republican Party , but lost to the Democrat John Alden Dix . In 1911 he became Secretary of War under US President William Howard Taft . He held this position until 1913; from 1940 to 1945 he held this office again.

politics

In 1922 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Nicaragua , where he managed to end the civil war and initiate elections. From 1927 to 1929 Stimson represented the interests of the United States as the governor of the Philippines . From 1929 to 1933 he was Foreign Minister under Herbert Hoover . During this time he established the Hoover-Stimson Doctrine and implemented a South America policy that was based on less interference in the internal affairs of the states there. From 1940 to 1945, Stimson was again Secretary of War. In this role he successfully campaigned against the Morgenthau Plan , which he viewed as a "crime against civilization".

In November 1941, ten days before the attack on Pearl Harbor , he wrote in his diary the much-discussed remark that, in view of the threat of hostile clashes with Japan , he had discussed with President Roosevelt how to get the Japanese to fire the first shot without them suspend US to great dangers ( [Roosevelt] Brought up the event did we are likely to be attacked perhaps next Monday ... and the question was what we shoulderstand Thurs. The question that how we shoulderstand maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves ).

At the urging of Stimson, in 1945 the old Japanese imperial city of Kyoto , where he once spent his honeymoon and whose importance as the cultural center of Japan he knew, was removed from the list of targets for the atomic bombs . Instead, Nagasaki was added to the list.

Honors

The submarine USS Henry L. Stimson was named after Stimson . The Stimson Memorial Chapel in Bonn also bears his name.

literature

• William Kamann: Henry L. Stimson. In: Edward S. Mihalkanin (Ed.): American Statesmen: Secretaries of State from John Jay to Colin Powell . Greenwood Publishing 2004, ISBN 978-0-313-30828-4 , pp. 491-497.
• David F. Schmitz: Henry L. Stimson: The First Wise Man. Rowman & Littlefield, Wilmington 2000, ISBN 978-1-4616-3728-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Photocopy of HL Stimson's diary of November 25, 1941, available at Yale and other universities; published as a book in 1976: The Politics of Integrity: The Diaries of Henry L. Stimson, 1931 to 1945 . McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-038410-X .
2. ↑ Bruce Cumings: Parallax Visions. Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations . Duke University Press, Durham 1999, ISBN 0-8223-2276-5 , p. 47.
3. ^ Greg Mitchell: Atomic cover-up: Two US Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made . Sinclair Books, New York 2011, ISBN 978-1-468-12740-9 , Nagasaki chapter .

Web links

Commons : Henry Lewis Stimson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about Henry L. Stimson in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Henry L. Stimson in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• The Henry L. Stimson Center (English)
• Henry L. Stimson in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)
• Morgenthau plan in the information on political education