This chapter examines the crucial seven-year period between Stimson’s resignation as secretary of state in March 1933 and his return to the War Department in June 1940. Although Stimson did not anticipate he would ever return to Washington to serve in the federal government, some of his most important public service occurred when he was a private citizen in this period. Particularly, this chapter advances two critical arguments. The first is that Stimson had both a much wider definition of national security than most of his contemporaries did and came to those conclusions before nearly any other American leader or opinion maker. The second argument is that attempting to neatly define Stimson’s internationalism is difficult. Stimson borrowed ideas from the legalistic, moralistic, and New Deal-style categories of internationalism and repackaged them into his own fusion that called for US leadership to manage the world.