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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.