Definitely a man of this calibre needs to be introduced....
Henry Lewis Stimson (September 21, 1867 – October 20, 1950)
He is best known as the civilian Secretary of War during World War II, chosen for his aggressive stance against Nazi Germany, with responsibility for the Army and Air Force. He managed the drafting and training of 12 million soldiers and airmen, the purchase and transportation to battlefields of 30 percent of the nation's industrial output, and the building and decision to use the atomic bomb.
In 1929 he shut down MI-8, the State Department's cryptanalytic office, saying, "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail." (He later reversed this attitude.)
Ten days before Pearl Harbor, he entered in his diary the famous and much-argued statement - that he had met with President Roosevelt to discuss the evidence of impending hostilities with Japan, and the question was "how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."
By 1945, Stimson was receiving more direct information about World War II than any other U.S. official. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall reported directly to Stimson, and as a member of the "Committee of Three" with Sec. of the Navy James Forrestal and Under Sec. of State Joseph Grew, Stimson also received information directly from the Sec. of the Navy. Grew provided Stimson with the State Department's diplomatic information on the war.
Stimson was the major decision-maker on the atomic bomb, with direct supervision over General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. Both Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman followed his advice on every aspect of the bomb, and Stimson overruled the military when needed (for example, by taking the cultural center Kyoto off the target list).
Stimson strongly opposed the Morgenthau Plan however. Stimson insisted to Roosevelt that ten European countries, including Russia, depended upon Germany's export-import trade and production of raw materials and that it was inconceivable that this "gift of nature," populated by peoples of "energy, vigor, and progressiveness," could be turned into a "ghost territory" or "dust heap." What he most feared, however, was that too low a subsistence-level economy would turn the anger of the German people against the Allies and thereby "obscure the guilt of the Nazis and the viciousness of their doctrines and their acts." Stimson pressed similar arguments on President Harry S. Truman in the spring of 1945.
Stimson, a lawyer, insisted (against the initial wishes of both Roosevelt and Churchill) on proper judicial proceedings against leading war criminals. He and the War Department drafted the first proposals for an International Tribunal, which soon received backing from the incoming president Truman. Stimson's plan eventually led to the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46.
http://www.doug-long.com/hstimson.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_L._Stimson
Henry L. Stimson
