Henry L. Stimson: The First Wise Man by David F. Schmitz. Scholarly Resources Books (http:// www.scholarly.com), 104 Greenhill Avenue, Wilmington, Delaware 19805-1897, 2001, 222 pages, $60.00 (hardcover), $19.95 (softcover).

To the extent he is remembered at all, Henry L. Stimson (1867–1950) probably is most often recalled for declaring that "gentlemen do not read each other’s mail," a sniffy observation which accompanied his 1930 directive to close the US State Department’s cryptography office (aka "the Black Chamber"). That unfortunate and undeserved obscurity has been happily diminished by David F. Schmitz’s excellent new biography Henry L. Stimson: The First Wise Man.

A generation unfamiliar with Stimson might be surprised to learn that this successful New York attorney-turned-public-servant held senior appointments under nearly every president from Theodore Roosevelt to Harry S. Truman. A lifelong Republican, Stimson served as secretary of state (1929–33) for one president (Herbert Hoover) and secretary of war for three others, two of them Democrats (William H. Taft [1911–13]; Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman [1940–45]). Along the way, he fought as an artillery officer in World War I and held appointments as a presidential envoy to revolution-plagued Nicaragua (1927) and as governor-general of the Philippines (1927–29). Even a partial list of his accomplishments constitutes an impressive resume: reforming the War Department on the eve of World War I; inaugurating what later became known as the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America; guiding US mobilization for World War II; helping to shape wartime strategy; overseeing development of the atomic bomb; and influencing the formulation of postwar military and foreign policy.

Making extensive use of Stimson’s personal papers and diaries, Schmitz offers a judicious, insightful, and sometimes provocative study of a remarkable public figure. He makes two major arguments: (1) that Stimson played a major role in America’s transition from traditional imperialism and isolationism to internationalism and world leadership and (2) that Stimson—for good or ill—personified certain key strengths and weaknesses in twentieth-century American foreign policy. Few would dispute the first point. As noted above, over a period of some 40 years, Stimson ably served no fewer than six pre-sidents in positions of great trust and responsibility.

Schmitz’s second assertion explains the subtitle of his book. Drawing on an earlier study of post–World War II foreign-policy makers (Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986]), Schmitz depicts Stimson as "the first wise man"—that is, as the progenitor of the line of imposing figures who shaped US foreign policy in the 1950s and beyond while shuttling between corporate board rooms, Ivy League faculty clubs, and senior, nonelective posts in the national-security establishment. According to Schmitz, both Stimson and his successors (basically the same group collectively and memorably referred to by David Halberstam as "the best and the brightest") shared a number of important characteristics: high intelligence, impressive dedication to public service, a somewhat narrow worldview, and the unswerving assurance they were always right. In Stimson’s case, those tendencies were reinforced by a strong sense of noblesse oblige and, as was common among privileged men of his day, a no-less-strong belief in the inherent superiority of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant males. To his credit, Stimson also possessed a sense of the limits of American power, a trait not always exhibited by the policy makers who followed him.

There is much to be said for examining major historical episodes through the medium of biography. By humanizing the past, biographies can help inspire us to learn more about events that otherwise might appear hopelessly dull and irrelevant. Of course, biography is not without its dangers, chief among them the inflation of the subject’s relative importance and exaggeration of his or her personal virtues or flaws. David Schmitz avoids those pitfalls with perhaps two exceptions. To describe Stimson as the architect of American victory in World War II appears excessive (pp. 172, 196). On the other hand, without direct evidence to corroborate such a claim, it seems unfair to attribute Stimson’s leading role in the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans purely to prejudice against "nonwhite people and all non-European cultures" (pp. xv, 146).

But these are minor and isolated lapses in an otherwise balanced account that manages to be both learned and fast moving. This is a wise book about a wise and important man.

Dr. James R. W. Titus
Maxwell AFB, Alabama