47.04.28A(1207w)
TO HENRY L. STIMSONApril 28, 1947
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. Secretary:Just received your telegram welcoming me home in your usual generous terms.1 I am sorry I brought so little bacon with me. The best that I could do largely consisted of not doing something that would have painful consequences, however innocent it might appear at the time.2
These conferences are a very tiring business and I have had a long ordeal because in some respects they do not differ much from my U.S. Chiefs of Staff meetings and the Combined Staff meetings, and certainly not much from those where I sat between the Communists and the Kuomintang Party in China.
I left Moscow at 9:00 o’clock, Friday morning [April 25], and reached Washington, via Berlin, Iceland and Stephenville, Newfoundland, Saturday morning, which seems a very short period to cover such a distance. An hour later, I was off to Pinehurst to spend Sunday with Mrs. Marshall. I found that I would have to return Sunday night to meet at the White House with the leaders from the Hill, so she and I flew into Washington last night, and I spent my evening in the President’s Upstairs’ Study with about twenty members of Congress. I had a meeting with the Cabinet today at luncheon, and this evening have to go on the air for thirty minutes.3 It is a tiresome, strenuous business with spring in the air and so many things I would like to do outdoors.
It will interest you to know that we have moved to that building which was constructed for the War Department, and I have the office that was intended for you. Quite a contrast with that in the old State, War and NavyBuilding!4
I hope Mrs. Stimson is well and that you are enjoying life pleasantly and philosophically.
You made two very important public statements, I thought, and beautifully expressed--the one on the Nuremberg trials and the other on the atomic bomb.5
I was thinking, in my struggles at Moscow and Berlin over the economic factors involved in the Conference that related to the Ruhr and to German economy generally, of your memorandum to the President regarding Mr. Morgenthau's plans for the Ruhr. I would like to have your permission to get it out of the War Department files and look it over. The correctness of your vision and judgment then is clearly evident in the struggles we are having today.6
I only have one painting in my new office and that is of you.
With my affectionate regards to Mrs. Stimson and you,Faithfully yours,
P.S.Mrs. Marshall flew up with me last night and we are located temporarily in the Rockefeller house out Foxhall Road, though she will be running down in the country to Leesburg every few days and I hope to weekend there.7
GCMRL/G. C. Marshall Papers (Secretary of State, General)
1. Stimson wrote: "Welcome home. You have handled a most difficult situation with courage, patience and intelligence." (Stimson to Marshall, Telegram, April 26, 1947, GCMRL/G. C. Marshall Papers [Secretary of State, Categorical, Commendations].)
2. President Truman wrote in his memoirs that Marshall returned "in a pessimistic mood. He had gone to Moscow with the hope that he could persuade the Russians that the United States was working for peace." (Truman, Memoirs, 2: 112.)
3. The White House had announced that five members of the Senate and seven members of the House of Representatives would be present at the April 27 evening meeting, along with Dean Acheson. (New York Times, April 27, 1947, p. 1.) In his diary, James Forrestal comments on Marshall's report at the Cabinet luncheon on April 28 concerning the Moscow meetings and the importance of creating a policy planning group in the State Department. (Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries [New York: Viking Press, 1951], pp. 266-68.)
4. The 1888 State, War, NavyBuilding at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, became the Department of State Building after the Navy Department moved out in 1919 and the War Department in 1938. The building was too small, however, to accommodate the department's wartime expansion: seventy-two hundred personnel in forty-seven buildings throughout the Washington area by late 1945. The New War Department Building, completed in 1941 at 21st Street and Virginia Avenue, NW, was allocated to the State Department in late 1946, but there was considerable debate "tearing the department apart for six months" over the wisdom of consolidating operations in New State. Early in Marshall's tenure, Dean Acheson put this problem before the secretary, who was not impressed by the objections to the move, and the transfer of units began at once. ("Relocation of the Department of State," Department of State Bulletin 19[November 30, 1947]: 1035–39; Acheson, Creation, pp. 213–14.)
5. See Stimson's "The Nuremberg Trial: Landmark in Law," Foreign Affairs 25 (January 1947): 179–89; and "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb," Harper's Magazine 194 (February 1947): 96–107.
6. "I am very happy over what you say of my opposition to the Morgenthau plan for Germany," Stimson replied. "You certainly have my permission to get copies of my memoranda out of the War Department files and look them over.... I was never more sure of my opinions on any subject than I was on that and I am very glad that the error of Morgenthau's views is becoming recognized by our present administration in Germany." (Stimson to Marshall, May 2, 1947, GCMRL/G. C. Marshall Papers [Pentagon Office, Selected].)
As US troops approached the German border in the late summer of 1944, President Roosevelt appointed a Cabinet Committee to prepare recommendations on occupation policies. At the committee's first meeting, on September 5, 1944, Stimson discovered that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau "wished to wreck completely the immense Ruhr-Saar [industrial] area of Germany and turn it into second-rate agricultural land regardless of all that that area meant not only to Germany but to the welfare of the entire European continent." Stimson was vigorously opposed to the destruction of German industry and immediately stated his position in a memorandum to his colleagues. Roosevelt, however, called Morgenthau to the Quebec Conference in mid-September, where the president and Winston Churchill approved the "Morgenthau Plan." Stimson then sent a memorandum to Roosevelt attacking this "crime against civilization itself." Roosevelt backed away from the plan shortly after returning from the Quebec Conference but Stimson was still battling against "clumsy economic vengeance in American policy toward Germany" in May 1945. By the time of the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, President Truman fully shared Stimson's views. (Stimson, On Active Service, pp. 568–83; quotes on pp. 570, 578, 582.)
7. Mr. and Mrs. Nelson A. Rockefeller owned the house at 2500 Foxhall Road, NW; Marshall stayed there for a few weeks after his return from Moscow. Mrs. Rockefeller had initially offered the house to the Marshalls in January 1947, but the secretary replied that it was "a little too large for me." (Marshall to Nelson Rockefeller, January 30, 1947, GCMRL/G. C. Marshall Papers [Secretary of State, Categorical, Congratulations].) Formerly assistant secretary of state for American republic affairs (1944–45), Rockefeller was living in his New York City apartment.
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