HENRY L. STIMSON

Hokitika Guardian, 3 May 1930, Page 2

HENRY L. STIMSON

AMERICA’S SECRETARY OF STATE.

.WORK AT THE CONFERENCE

A DYNAMIC PERSONALITY. v

( LONDON, March 19. Henry Lewis. Stimson, chief of the American delegation at the Naval Conference, happens to be one of those strange combinations of a man seeding diversion from the boredom of having too much money and an idealist who lias the urge to do something for his fellow men. The' chief ideal which caused .Mr Stimson to become Secretary of State was to lift AngloAmerican friendship out of the rut in which Coolidge and Kellogg had run it.

Here in London all of his daylight hours and much of his night has been concentrated upon that ideal. In the morning he calls a meeting of the American delegation at the Ritz. His office is barely warm, and his colleagues who have not learned either to wear English “woollies” or get accustomed to the English climate fidget nervously. At noon, he lunches with Ramsay MacDonald, at No. 10, Downing Street, and at 4 p.m., he takes Senator Joe Robinson from Arkansas --a State whose inhabitants hardly know the difference 'between a mud scow and a battleship—to the Houes of Commons to confer once again with Mr MacDonald. Rack at the Ritz in the evening, Mr Stimson is grimlipped, with a strained look around his eyes.

Ho runs away occasionally to his country place in Hertfordshire where there are English hunters and English hounds very much like those on his estate near Now York. But there are also English fireplaces instead 'of central heating, it can. be very cold. Sometimes at four in the morning he wakes and begins working once more on the problems of his Naval Conference. Once, to escape from them, his young military aide, Eugene Regnier, took him to a night club. But most of the guests were from Detroit .and Kansas City, and the place seemed steeped in an atmosphere of AngloAmericanism. It was a dismal evening. FIRST OFFICIAL POST.

Rather a roundabout chain of events brough Henry Lewis Stimson to London. Three years ago lie began to get bored with rolling up easy money as the law partner of Eliliu Root, and simultaneously Calvin Coolitlge began to get bored with Frank B. Kellogg’s policy of guerilla warfare in Nicaragua, and looked around for a personal pacifier. The late William H. Taft and Mr Root, the two godfathers who have played the major roles in Henry Lewis Stimson’s life'recommended-him to Coolidge, and Stiriison,; “haying the entire strength rUtiitefl St£tjs Army and Navy behind -JiinU together with some diplomatic ‘ability of his own, was reasonably successful.

About the time he returned'.'Coolidge needed a new Governor-General for the Philippines, .He appointed Stimson. It was in Manila that Stimson made his first real dent upon the public mind since he left Taft’s quickly forgotten Cabinet as Secretary of War. ./ '• -.

He found in Manila, the Cavalry Cabinet which . Fad pretty veil . run the Philippines' undet ' tfi& lEt'e"''Leon-' ard Wood, still in the saddle, together with an American community which considered it rank heresy to be seen socially with any brownskinned native, even the President of the Philippine Senate. Stimson the Cavalry Cabinet to obscure and uninteresting military posts in the United States, and proceeded to shock the American community unmercifully by. inviting Filipinos to his dinner table regardless of the colour of their skin, their degree ■of education, or the number of their wives. But that/was not' ail. The American community also had to get used to sejpnig Mrs Stimson dancing with Filipfho politicos,..arid the army and navy fbotbaijl teams,' for the first time in years, ‘playing Filipino elevens at the risk/of being' defeated' fay a coloured race.. • '' ?;'-. : .. i

When itdp'ry Lewis Stimson finally, arrived at the State 'Depaftment.. one month after iHpoyer -Administration had assiili^^,office, .he created nearly as riiucs/ , '4bnsterhation as he had in Ma‘Mia;f/fHe did this by immediately over the status quo. His nrst -attack, was upon international “namby-pambyism.” Having suddenly discovered that' the State Department was acting as the social arbiter of Washington, he ruled that for any of his men to assist a Washington hostess .at seating her senators and ambassadors would be a capital offence. And having heard that the State .Department was ruled by a'clique of career diplomats, Stimson'decided not to trust any/of .them. Instead of the system set up by Mr Kellogg of gathering his career diplomats around him and letting them argue a question until they had ironed out a policy, Stimson merely sent for tliem, issued orders, and sent them out. They became glorifi :d office Iboys. A MAN* OF QUICK DECISION. In much of his handling of foreign policy Stimson . was so many laps ahead of the career diplomats who surrounded him that they could not see him for the dust. His decision to admit the dread Count and Countess Ivarolyi, whom the irascible. Kellogg had barred for so many years, came like a thunderbolt of revolution. Stimson offended % the female flag-wavers of Washington by .giving a passport to Dorothy Dtzer, woman pacifist, without an oath to defend the country. He waived previous official objections to the Soviet trans-Pacific

flyers visiting Washington, and lie even ordered an investigation of the Fascist League of North America-—a move which caused Mussolini’s abandonment of that organisation. Coincident with this total disrespect for the traditions and precedents which a generation of Toryism had set up in the State Department, Mr Stimson occasionally lapsed into baffling periods of indecision, even ineptitude. These would not have been so glaring had it not been for a naturalnborn instinct which Mr Stimson seems to possess for arousing the antagonism of the Press at exactly the wrong; timer—an instinct which unfortunately lias not been restrained at London. This seems to be the result of an-in-grained distrust of the Press, and is probably a. hang-over from the days when he was Theodore Roosevelt’s candidate for Governor of New York. Young and inexperienced scion of a wealthy and aristocratic New York family, the Press picked up the name which Roosevelt gave him—“ Our Harry”—and used it with such consistent maliciousness that few Republicans have been more badly beaten. At London Mr Stimson spends several’ hundred dollars daily to have long summaries of what the Press is saying about bis negotiations cabled to him from all parts of the United States, Tokyo, Rome and Paris, meanwhile doing nothing to guide the Press regarding the general trend of those! negotiations. Mr Stinigon reads, these dispatches meticulously,-and frets arid ‘.worries over any errors which; they contain and over any criticism; ■ they vent upon him. Unfortunately worry has. inot been the only disastrous effect of mismanaged Press relations. For when Arthur Sears Henning, representative of the hostile “Chicago Tribune” and the chief bete noir of the American delegation, asked whether the United States had pulled down its demands from twenty-one to eighteen 10,000ton cruisers, Mr Stimson allowed himself to ‘be stampeded into immediate publication of all the figures lie had proposed to Britain. iSo anxious was Mr Stimson to beat the “Tribune” to press that be issued his statement at eight in the evening, and before he coidd even inform the French, Japanese and Italians of his move. At nine o’clock, therefore, the irate M Tardieu came thundering in to see RariisaV’ MacDonald, demanding] to know.'What kind of alliances the Am glo-Saxon ,delegates had been cooking up. in secret. And'although Mr Mac--.Donald did his best to pacify him .with. . the sad 'story of Mr Stimson’s troubles' with his Press, .the conviction remained with M. Tardieu, as with the French public, that the Anglo-Ameri-can alliances, which, despite all denials, they suspected Air Hoover and Mr MacDonald of hatching at Rapidan, nov r had been firmly cemented. .Thus operates Henry Lewis Stimson, strange mixture of a man, who al*, though a son of New York’s Four Hundred, delights in turning topsylurvey the ••'social' aristocracy of- the State Department; who, although a former Secretary of War, insisted on getting into the thick of the lafe unpleasantness as a Second Lieutenant; who, - after being received by King George,.,hangs, bis plug-bat up in>. his ' hotel and walks out to see what’ Slicks ingham Palace really looks like to the hoi polloi; and who, while trying to attain the Anglo-American naval reduction., upon which he had set his heart, proposes that the United States shall/;;. build . the most, powerful and :: most modern dreadnought of them all—the Henry L. Stimson.