In October 1947, just more than two years after the Japanese Empire officially surrendered to the Allies and the most destructive conflict in human history finally ended, the veteran American statesman Henry L. Stimson published an article in Foreign Affairs.1 As the flagship journal of the elite Council on Foreign Relations, it was a natural forum for someone such as Stimson, a former secretary of state and (twice) secretary of war with over four decades of experience at the highest levels of American government, to share some of their ideas.2 In his piece, entitled “The Challenge to Americans,” Stimson outlined what he felt were the opportunities and struggles the United States faced in the aftermath of World War II.3 He opened with a declaration: Americans faced “a challenging opportunity, perhaps the greatest ever offered to a single nation. It is nothing less than a chance to use our full strength for the peace and freedom of the world.”

This chapter examines Henry Stimson’s career and his rise to the pinnacle of the US government until his resignation as secretary of state in March 1933. It analyzes his background, the formation of his political views, and the creation of his foreign policy ideas as a committed member of the Republican Party. Specifically, it explores his tortuous relationship with the American empire and how he became an unbridled internationalist.

This chapter examines how the War Department approached planning for the postwar world. It specifically focuses on the future of Soviet-American relations and how that relationship impacted preparations for the defeat and eventual occupation of the Axis powers. The War Department often adopted ambiguous and confusing stances toward the Soviet Union when it came to postwar planning issues. Stimson, his senior advisers, and Marshall primarily felt a durable postwar peace required a cooperative Washington–Moscow relationship while Army planners and mid-level War Department officials expressed strong concerns about Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe and what that meant for the future. Given Army planners’ central role in the strategic planning and policy process, these divisions helped blur and muddle Washington’s broader Russia policy and helped reinforce American hawks’ views that the future Soviet–American relationship would be dominated by conflict and superpower rivalry. The hawks’ increasingly strong beliefs made confrontational US policies more likely and helped construct the foundations for the pugnacious atmosphere in the developing superpower relationship and the Cold War.

This chapter examines the War Department’s role in the formation of US policy toward the European war and the growing crisis in the Pacific between the Fall of France in June 1940 and the Pearl Harbor attacks in December 1941. This chapter argues that the War Department played a pivotal role in shaping American policy and actions in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, but in different ways. In the Atlantic, the War Department was a primary impetus within the Roosevelt administration for increasingly interventionist policies. It consistently pushed President Roosevelt to act and influenced the politics of his decision-making at several crucial junctures. The War Department provided the crucial nexus between the executive branch, Congress, and outside pressure groups as the US moved toward war. In the Pacific, the War Department pressed for a firm stand against Japan but helped muddle Far Eastern policy by working to undermine the State Department’s more cautious stance. This bureaucratic warfare made it difficult to foster consensus around US deterrence actions and contributed to worsening relations between Washington and Tokyo, setting the stage for the Pacific War.

Traditional accounts of the Allied grand strategic debates during World War II stress the divergence between the American and British approaches to waging war against the Axis. In these interpretations, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs were the primary shapers of grand strategy and policy. However, this chapter argues these studies have focused too much on certain figures and have relatively marginalized others who played crucial roles in shaping these debates. One of those comparatively overlooked figures was Henry Stimson, who was a vital player on the American side in influencing the politics of US strategy and pushing it toward launching a cross-Channel invasion of France. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were often internally divided over how to win the war and struggled to influence policy accordingly. The lack of focused political coordination between the War Department and the JCS made it difficult to convince Roosevelt to open a second front in Western Europe, which opened the door to following the British Mediterranean strategy for defeating Germany, starting with the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa.

This chapter examines Stimson’s first months back at the War Department following the Fall of France in June 1940 and how its position within Washington shifted from the margins to the center of US policymaking. It examines the dysfunction and turbulence at the War Department in the years prior to Stimson’s arrival and the specific reforms Stimson made to mitigate this upheaval and ensure the Army was in the rooms where policymaking happened. By focusing on these changes and their application during those intial months, this chapter argues that the War Department turned into a crucial buraucratic, political, and policy operator because Stimson and his inner circle overhauled its organizational structure, fashioned concrete policy objectives, and deliberately worked to influence domestic politics and policymaking. By consciously performing as a political actor, the War Department gained leverage over its bureucratic rivals at the Navy and State Departments and became a consequential policymaking nexus inside the Roosevelt administration and within the US government.

This chapter examines how US officials responded to their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to shape Anglo-American grand strategy during 1942 by changing their approach to these debates in 1943. It argues that War Department civilian and military officials led this effort by overhauling US strategic planning processes and forcefully criticizing British strategy and policy as antithetical to American political objectives. Army planners tactically used their position within the US foreign policy process to craft a hostile narrative about British military aims to shape how their superiors approached US–UK strategy formation and to prioritize their own conceptions of America’s geopolitical ambitions. These efforts hardened US officials’ determination to advance Washington’s wartime goals above London’s and helped forge a strong level of political coordination between the War Department and the JCS for ensuring this occurred. The result was that American defense officials were able to convince President Roosevelt to back their strategic views and to shun Britain’s Mediterranean approach for defeating Germany.

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.

It is difficult to overstate the horrors unleashed by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. While it has been challenging over the decades to determine the precise number of casualties, it is probably safe to say the number is in the hundreds of thousands.1 Those who were not instantly obliterated in the attacks had to face exposure to the blasts, extreme heat, nuclear fallout, radiation poisoning, and the complete and utter destruction of their cities. Some survivors experienced life-threatening health problems stemming from these weapons months, years, or even decades after the bombings, including organ failure, transgenerational genetic damage, and multiple types of cancer. Journalists such as John Hersey and Charles H. Loeb helped reveal these devastations to millions of people who could hardly fathom them.2 Stimson himself was badly shaken by the reports he received in the bombings’ aftermath. He told members of the Ausable Club in upstate New York days after the nuclear strikes that the war had “compelled” America “to invent and unleash forces of terrific destructiveness.

Makers of history want historians to treat them favorably. Those who wield power often wish to influence the way in which history will view them. They are concerned about securing their place in history. This chapter explores how participants in the decision to use the bomb, provoked by criticism and worried about how historians would treat them, explained and justified their decision. The impact of John Hersey’s bestselling Hiroshima and other writing critical of the use of the bomb deeply troubled participants in the decision. They instigated Henry Stimson’s Harper’s 1947 article “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” which defended the decision as necessary to avoid an invasion, bring the war to an early end, and save American and Japanese lives. Despite its shortcomings, Stimson’s defense stood for two decades as the largely unchallenged interpretation of the use of the bomb and became the foundation of the “orthodox interpretation” which still remains a widely held view.

The American public is assumed to have overwhelmingly supported the use of atomic bombs on Japan, but this impression comes in part from a Gallup poll conducted just days after the bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The poll found that eighty-five percent of Americans were in favor of the bombs. Only ten percent disapproved, and five percent were unsure. Those figures might suggest a deep current of hatred toward Japan, the depths of which can only be hinted at by polling data. But it must be considered along with another Gallup poll taken in June 1945, barely two months prior to the nuclear strikes. In this survey Americans were asked if they supported the use of poison gas against the Japanese, if doing so would reduce American casualties. Forty percent said yes, but almost fifty percent said no. As horrible as poison gas undeniably is, a nuclear bomb is vastly worse. This suggests that most Americans simply had no concept of what an atom bomb meant. This chapter examines what Americans actually thought about the bomb.

After seemingly endless and bitter infighting over postwar policy, Roosevelt clearly needed his administration heads to come together. Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 would become the ultimate document to govern American occupation policy. Thanks to his relentless plotting, wrangling, and badgering, Morgenthau had succeeded in bending it to his will. The consequences would prove disastrous. This chapter tries to understand how Morgenthau succeeded in outmaneuvering the majority within FDR’s administration.

We have longed believe that after Pearl Harbor, Americans demanded the removal of Japanese Americans from the west coast and into concentration camps. This views stems largely from the racist sentiments expressed by some prominent politicians and media figures along with one oft-cited poll showing fifty-nine percent of Americans supporting internment. But a closer look at public opinion polls conducted in the months after Pearl Harbor but before the President’s interment order reveal remarkably low support for the policy. The letters that supposedly flooded into the White House calling for mass evacuations only swelled after the order on February 19, 1942. In other words, it was only after Japanese Americans were framed as dangerous that the general public approved of internment.Unfortunately for the roughly 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the west coast, they were about to become the victims of one of America’s worst cases of misplaced revenge. Tragically, this would be only the first of many vengeful acts America inflicted upon the innocent during and shortly after the war. And with each destructive deed, a majority of Americans insisted that this is not who we are. Why, then, did the politics of vengeance prevail?

The final chapter asks what became of the men and women who played vital parts in America’s struggles between vengeance and virtue. It asks whether any of these leaders regretted their actions, which actions, and why.