Stimson and Hull: A Study in Contrasts

by JAMES H. POWERS

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HENRY L. STIMSON’S biography discloses from beginning to end that he has held fast to faith in mankind and in the democratic spirit since his undergraduate days at Yale.

Despite its 698 closely packed pages, On Active Service (Harper, $5.00) is by no means a full biography. Indeed, only in an incomplete sense can the book be classed as a. biography at all. “The prelude, covering Mr. Stimson’s early life from 1867 to his thirty-eighth year (when he first, took public office), is autobiographical. So is the afterword which closes the volume. In the rest of the book McGeorge Bundy serves sometimes as biographer and sometimes as amanuensis, distilling the results of the conferences and discussions which accompanied the writing.

Mr. Stimson’s diaries are drawn upon not only for firsthand quotation, but equally to permit their author to re-evaluate earlier impressions and to add correctives. As a result, On Active Service presents a running commentary by Mr. Stirnson the retired elder statesman on Mr. Stirnson the public servant, over a period exceeding half a century. Mr. Bundy’s feat in harmonizing this material is beyond praise.

The major portion of On Active Service is concerned with the Second World War and its origins, particularly Mr. Stimson’s role from 1940 down to his resignation six years later. During that period of clashing arms and reverberating controversies the veteran administrator displayed a healthy knack for keeping his head clear and his prodigious task firmly in hand.

Mr. Stirnson reveals the full range of his abilities in his handling of the War Department during the crisis. That he was happy there is evident. His earlier experience in that post had begun just as the modernization of our land defenses was getting started, more than a quarter of a century earlier. To the immense problems of 1940 and after, he brought vast and tested capacity, a broad understanding of military matters, and a personal devotion to the Army which established a spirit of teamwork rarely known previously in the Department. It was this spirit that made his association with General Marshall, Chief of Staff, the effective partnership it proved again and again. Perhaps it is also the explanation of Mr. Stimson’s warm championship of “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell. In few pages of this volume is the retired Secretary of War sharper in his criticism of Executive attitudes, both in the White House and at Chungking, than in his discussion of Stilwell’s case — that grotesque tragicomedy of abilities stranded on the reefs ol political intrigue and bureaucratic blindness.

Drawing on his experience under Hoover in the State Department, when the deteriorating world situation had schooled him in the grim side of world affairs, Mr. Stirnson brought valuable judgment to bear in the shaping of the nation s war policies. Long before either President Roosevelt or Secretary of State Hull perceived the imprudence of their course regarding the Free French and General Charles de Gaulle, the Secretary of War pointed out the lack of realism in a policy which was to embitter Franco-American relations even after the Normandy invasion forced its abandonment.

Supported by General Marshall, whom he appraises as the greatest American soldier of modern limes, Mr. Stimson also fought the persistent attempts of Winston Churchill to transform the main Allied effort from an Atlantic assault upon the European continent to a Alediterranean adventure. The story of that tussle is one of the fascinating revelations in the book. The conflict began in December, 1941, when both Stimson and the Chiefs of Staff recognized “the North Atlantic as our principal theatre of operations.” It reached a climax when the Secretary and the Chief of Staff proposed “to turn our backs on them [the British] and take up the war with Japan.” This proposal produced a major crisis in the relations between Mr. Stimson and his chief; and the episode was closed only in the winter of 1943-1944 when F.D.R. ceased wavering, when Churchill was balked in his final effort to have his way, and when Stalin at Teheran insisted upon a clear-cut decision to open a major front in the West.

Mr. Stimson’s orderly soul was outraged by the loose procedures of the Roosevelt regime — he says F.D.R. was the worst administrator he ever knew in his life — yet he appraises the President as the greatest war leader the nation has ever had — and probably few will dissent. Although the War Secretary’s judgment of those who worked closely with him was good, he had difficulty in evaluating people at a distance. He was astounded, for example, when the true character of Pierre Laval was revealed at Vichy — t hough any veteran foreign correspondent could have enlightened him on that point at least a decade earlier; and the circumstances attending t he infamous Hoare-Laval deal should have given him pause. Marshal Petain’s shameful role likewise astonished him — though a cursory reading of the memoirs of Lloyd George and Clemenceau might have provided him with a clue to the Marshal’s character.

Mr. Stimson’s austere narrative reveals a man of great abilities and high principles when his problems involve bold decision and broad aim. He is less happy when they concern that primary force, public opinion. In his only foray directly into politics — the contest for the governorship of New York —he ran unwillingly and suffered defeat. Every important government post he filled — and he filled them all with distinction — was proffered him either by Presidents or by powerful friends intimately aware of his unusual qualities. His first Federal assignment in New York came from Theodore Roosevelt. Taft brought him into the War Department for his initial tour of duty there. Coolidge sent him to Nicaragua and later to the Philippines as Governor General. Hoover brought him back to become Secretary of State. F.D.R. pressed him back into the War Department to perform his last and greatest service to the nation.

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STIMSON’S meager political contact with the electorate, which is in marked contrast with the experience of Cordell Hull, whose massive Memoirs (Macmillan, $10.50) belong beside Stimson’s story, explains why Stimson repeatedly shows an impatience with public opinion, why he emphasizes insistently his preference for strong leadership in government through the Executive. It underlies his vigorously argued contention that the authority of the Executive should be enlarged and the power of the Legislative branch to curb Executive actions should be curtailed. It suggests the reason for his first serious disagreement with F.D.R., during the months before this nation entered the great war. Air. Stimson believed that if the President had taken a strong public stand the public would have swung strongly behind him.

Unfortunately, his analysis of the American public’s attitude in 1939-1941 does not jibe with the facts. A likelier result would have been a bitter cleavage — the worst possible preparation for Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt appreciated the necessity of not getting too far ahead of his public. Mr. Stimson weighed this lightly. The complexity of public opinion, the range and variety of its movements, the terrible impact of its anger, escaped him. He had never experienced any of them. He did not understand them.

Awareness of such realities saturates the story of Mr. Hull’s progress from the obscurity of the foothills of the Cum her lands to an illustrious place beside Mr. Stimson in the history of the past forty years. Mr. Hull began studying people as soon as he was out of childhood. At fifteen he was rafting logs down to Nashville in a manner reminiscent of Lincoln. He squandered his scant earnings on books, which he read by the light of tallow candles in the family cabin. A politician at twenty, he became a member of the Tennessee legislature one month after his twenty-first birthday. He scoured the county from end to end, talking to people, visiting the informed that he might pick their minds bare, analyzing court procedures — a gangling, youthful observer clad in a hickory shirt and jeans. He rode circuit as a judge all over the state, meeting people, exploring their opinions, weighing their oddities, testing their information. No office save the last one he occupied came to him as an appointment from above. He fought bitter campaigns, mapped battles with rival political oligarchs, read law, pored over reports, and outgeneraled — by invoking a fabulous political skill — those who obstructed his aims.

The first paragraph of Mr. Hull’s Memoirs begins with a lean prose reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe: “I was born October 2, 1871, in Overton County, Tennessee, on the ridge between the Wolf and Obed rivers, among the foothills of the Cumberland mountains. A small log cabin rented by my father was my birthplace. This, somewhat enlarged by a lean-to, fronted immediately on the dirt road. From the porch behind it, planks led to another log cabin containing the kitchen-dining room. There was no porch then on the front of the house. Whether there were glass windows J do not remember; but at that time many of the neighboring cabins lacked them. They had holes in the walls for windows, and shutters to keep out the weather.”

The contrast, between such a debut into life and the comfortable circumstances attending Mr. Stimson ‘s progress from Andover to Yale to Harvard to a post in Elihu Root’s law firm is sharp. It is maintained throughout Mr. Hull’s narrative. Two men of such single-minded devotion to their country’s service could scarcely differ in their attitudes more widely than Mr. Stimson and Mr. Hull. The Tennessee mountaineer is a democrat as well as a Democrat, every moment. Jefferson, one of Mr. Hull’s lifelong heroes, provided him in youth with a grist of quotations for his “political bible” and left an enduring stamp on his whole life. To Stimson, Jefferson was an “unfortunate” person who originated nothing and gained fame solely through exploiting and popularizing other people’s ideas.

Mr. Stimson complains that people have found him “frosty.” No one ever fixed that adjective on Mr. Hull, though on occasion his Tennessee mountaineer’s temper crackled when roused. In his feud with Sumner Welles, which is set forth at length in the Memoirs, in his collision with Ramsay MacDonald when that British statesman sought to patronize him, in his crashing offensive against the strutting Raymond Moley at the London Economic Conference, as in his famous final meeting with the Japanese plenipotentiaries at the hour of Pearl Harbor, there is little suggestion of polar temperatures.

When Mr. Hull was convinced that sound policies were being set aside through intrigue, he withheld no punches. Thus he sets down his forthright judgment, apropos of the maneuverings that brought Argentina into the United Nations, that the action violated both his own and President Roosevelt’s wishes; and it “represented the most colossal injury done to the Pan American movement in all its history.”

The Memoirs convey to the reader a remarkable sense of intimacy. Mr. Stimson’s high seriousness never unbends; Mr. Hull is full of pointed, homely yarns to emphasize his argument. The one approaches his problems on the level of pure reason and logic; the other fetches them abruptly down to earth and speeds their solution with the flick of humor. There is a thread of homespun in the Tennesseean’s prose; an earthy idiom entirely absent from that of his wartime colleague — to whom, incidentally, he pays high and generous tribute. Isolationism, Hull remarks, would leave the United States as lonely in the international family as “a martin on a fodder pole.” Again, inveighing with force and barbed words against the multiplying irresponsibilities of the press, the ignorance of radio commentators, and the pontifical posing of too many columnists, he points up the problem these create for policy-makers by remarking that “a lie will gallop half way round the world while Truth is pulling its breeches on.”

A lifetime of experience of the delays and compromises of politics has given Mr. Hull a long view, and patience with those quirks of human nature which coldly exasperate the forthright and efficient Stimson. Both men share an indifference to the pursuit of wealth for its own sake; bot h set. public service at the highest level toward which a man and a citizen may aspire. Only one of them could remark, with honest conviction, that “the wealthy and more intelligent people” foregather in a single party — his own. To Mr. Stimson, F.D.R.’s drive on the Supreme Court seemed to outrage every idea basic to the Constitution and sound government. Mr. Hull merely thought that the President “went a bit too far.”

Those who enjoy high controversy will find plenty in Mr. Hull’s Memoirs. Like Mr. Stimson, he has a story to tell which involved many audacious moments in the history of the recent war, many a struggle in the realm of policy-making. The very length of Mr. Hull’s tenure in the Department of State makes his Memoirs important to history.

The sagacity of the old Tennesseean during the thirties does not diminish as he faces the troubled issues of our own day in a turbulent post-war world. It is of more than passing interest that both he and Mr. Stimson should have seen almost eye to eye on the Russian problem midway through the war as well as after it. Mr. Stimson, in a memorandum to the President after Hiroshima, warned that unless immediate and direct dealing with Russia on atomic questions were tried, without recourse to long negotiations through commissions, this nation’s future relationship with Russia would be poisoned for years. His story closes with an appeal for a return to sanity in this matter. Mr. Hull, apropos of Russian obstinacy, cites his experience as a young man handling a mule which refused to move. First he lost his temper and tried the lash. Still the mule refused to budge. Then he tried direct friendly persuasion. The mule, somewhat reluctantly, began to walk along with him. It was, he suggests, a problem of approaching the matter at the right end.