BOOKS OF THE DAY
Civis Romanus
On Active Service in Peace and War. By Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy. (Hutchinson. 25s.)
WHEN in 1945 Mr. Stimson retired from the office of Secretary of War, he was seen off at the Washington airport by the leading generals of the great and victorious army he had been so largely instrumental in creating. Of course any Secretary taking leave of his staff would have gone out with official honours, but it was much more than a duty of formal leave-taking that animated the generals. It was something more like the emotion that Haig revealed when he left his despatches at Haldane's house on the day of the victory parade in 1919. It was a tribute from the most competent judges to one who had deserved well of the republic.
When Mr. Stimson retired he was seventy-eight. It was nearly forty years since he had first held office under Theodore Roosevelt ; he had followed up his tenure of the important post of District Attorney of New York by serving Taft as Secretary of War, Coolidge as Governor-General of the Philippines, Hoover as Secretary of State, and had taken time off in the First World War to serve as a combatant officer with his usual courage and distinction. He was seventy-three when in the dark summer of 1940 he was, to his surprise, called up from the White House and asked to take over the War Department. It was a bold nomination and a bold acceptance. But Mr. Stimson never shirked, and when, complete victory won, he left the Department, he must have been conscious that he had good claims to have been the greatest holder of the office. A man with such a record could produce valuable memoirs and Mr. Stimson has done so.
And he has done so by a characteristic modification of the usual device whereby an old, distinguished and perhaps rather tired public servant prepares his memoirs for publication. Here there is no ques- tion of a ghost or ghosts coyly hidden behind an acknowledgement in the preface. Mr. Stimson called in a brilliant young historian, a member of that American imitation of All Souls, the Society of Fellows at Harvard, and gave him access to his papers, to his diary, to his counsel. We have so to speak Stimson on Stimson, for if Mr. Bundy wrote the narrative, he has quoted lavishly from the diaries and he has, a fascinating variation, given Mr. Stimson's present (i.e. 1947) judgement on what Secretary of State Stimson thought in 1931. So we can see Mr. Stimson accepting the fact that he was taken in by the pacific professions and conduct of MM. Laval and Mussolini. We can note his refusal to alter, for the better, the opinion he formed of Lord Simon's foreign policy. We can see (which is of even more interest) his failure to re-think some of the commonplaces of enlightened thought in 1931. One would like to ask, for instance, what territorial claims made by the German Government in 1931 Mr. Stimson thinks valid and, had they been met, likely to have saved the peace ? The candour of the narrative is such that one is never tempted to
suspect that Mr. Stinison either exaggerates the successes he achieved as Secretary of State or the turpitude of rulers who made his and other efforts sterile. It is, indeed, a winning aspect of this narrative that Mr. Stimson is more ready to stress the errors of American policy than those of Britain or France. And it is certainly merely an oversight that the disastrous effect of the Smoot-Hawley tariff on Europe and on the moral and political position of the United States in 1931 is not given the weight that, for example, the then American ambassador to Paris, Walter Edge, has given it in his memoirs.
It is of course with the return of Mr. Stimson to high office that the narrative quickens and the dramatic interest increases. None of this quickening is due to artificial heightening or the use of lavish colouring. It lies in the nature of Mr. Stimson's job. He replaced a Kansas politician, an isolationist, content to let routine rule the Department and on the worst of terms with his assistant secretary (the present Secretary of Defence, Mr. Johnson). The army had long been starved, and too many officers were terrified of asking Congress for money or anything else that might call attention to the military establishment. Although Congress reluctantly accepted the need for conscription in 1940 to fill the empty ranks, the measure was profoundly unpopular, and in 1941 the newly raised army was only saved from disbandment by one vote. (How that vote was secured may be read in the vivacious autobiography of the late Sol Bloom.) As a Republican, Stimson was suspect to many Democratic politicians like the late Senator Walsh ; as a Republican who had joined a Democratic administration during a presidential election, he was suspect to even more Republican politicians like Senator Taft. But in addition to his own abilities and character, Mr. Stimson had two great assets, the constant support of the President and the services of General Marshall whom President Roosevelt had made chief of staff as one way of repairing the damage done by Mr. Stimson's predecessor.
Roosevelt gave generous support to his new Secretary, but as 1940 passed into 1941 Mr. Stimson became more and more critical of the apparent hesitations ofothe President. It was clear to Mr. Stimson by the late summer of 1941 that, as Dr. Conant of Harvard said then, the United States had " to put up or shut up "—and the American people seemed resolved to do neither. Pearl Harbour solved that problem. Never was a tactical success more dearly bought than the Japanese victory. And the political folly of the decision is so evident today, that it is no wonder that the unrecon- structed isolationists, victims of the devil theory of history, see in Roosevelt's temporising policy the most diabolical cunning. If it was, the fact was concealed from Mr. Stimson.
With Pearl Harbour the worst of Mr. Stimson's worries were over. As he had foreseen, the problem of morale in the army ceased to be important as soon as the drafted men knew what they were drafted for. Business and labour both rallied to the national call as they had not done in the period of phoney peace between June, 1940, and December, 1941. There were great decisions to be made ; the decision to concentrate on the European theatre, the choice of General Eisenhower rather than General Marshall as Supreme Commander, a fair amount of inter-allied bickering. But the main job had been done, the worst risks parried, and Tokyo and Berlin learned what it means to provoke the American people to a fight to a finish. In that fight no American played a more useful and disinterested part than Mr. Stimson, the culmination of a life of public service that had begun many years before when the rising young New York
lawyer enlisted in the National Guard. D. W. BROGAN.
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