It seems as if everybody in the country was getting impatient to get his or her particular soldier out of the Army and to upset the carefully arranged system of points for retirement which we had arranged with the approval of the Army itself.

As Secretary of State (1929–1933) under Republican President Herbert Hoover he articulated the Stimson Doctrine which announced American opposition to Japanese expansion in Asia. Roosevelt. During World War II he took charge of raising and training 13 million soldiers and airmen supervised the spending of a third of the nation's GDP on the Army and the Air Forces helped formulate military strategy and took personal control of building and using the atomic bomb.