Henry L. Stimson

Stimson was born in 1867 in Manhattan, New York City, the son of Lewis Atterbury Stimson, a prominent surgeon, and his wife, the former Candace Thurber Wheeler. When he was nine, his mother died of kidney failure, and he was then sent to boarding school.

He spent summers with his grandmother Candace Wheeler at her Catskills country house and played with his uncle Dunham Wheeler, who was almost the same age, in "the Armory", which was their nickname for one corner of a large room in the house. Roaming the Catskill Mountains, he grew to love the outdoors and would become an avid sportsman.

He was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he gained a lifelong interest in religion and a close relationship with the school. He later donated Woodley, his Washington, D.C. estate, to the school in his will. The property is now the Maret School. He was an honorary lifetime member of Theodore Roosevelt's Boone and Crockett Club, North America's first wildlife conservation organization. He was a Phillips trustee from 1905 to 1947 and served as president of the board from 1935 to 1945.

He then attended Yale College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He joined Skull and Bones, a secret society that afforded many contacts for the rest of his life. He graduated in 1888, and attended Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 1890. He joined the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Root and Clark in 1891, and became a partner in 1893. Elihu Root, a future Secretary of War and Secretary of State, became a major influence on and role model for Stimson.

Stimson developed a close relationship with Alfred Lee Loomis, his first cousin twenty years his junior, and "became the father that Loomis never had. Loomis became the son that Stimson could not have, because he was sterile."

In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Stimson U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where Stimson made a distinguished record prosecuting antitrust cases. He served from 1937 to 1939 as president of the New York City Bar Association, where a medal honoring his service as a U.S. attorney is still awarded in his honor.

Stimson was defeated as the Republican candidate for governor of New York in 1910.

He joined the Council on Foreign Relations at its inception and was described by The New York Times as "the group's quintessential member".

In July 1893, Stimson married the former Mabel Wellington White, a great-great-granddaughter of one of the Founding Fathers, Roger Sherman, and the sister of Elizabeth Selden Rogers. An adult case of mumps had left Stimson infertile, and they had no children.