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Henry Stimson, the
owner of Woodley from 1929-1946, was a statesman admired on both sides
of the aisle. During the Hoover administration he was the Secretary of
State that pushed isolationist Hoover towards preparedness, and during
the Roosevelt/Truman administrations, he served as Secretary of War presiding
over, among other matters, the development of the atomic bomb. When Stimson
and his wife Mabel bought Woodley in 1929, they added cloakrooms (now
offices) on either side of the portico. On December 7, 1941, Stimson was
sitting at lunch in the Woodley dining room (in what is now the Middle
School Library), when the phone rang. It was President Roosevelt who asked
“in a rather excited voice, ‘Have you heard the news?’”
That news was, of course, that Pearl Harbor had just been bombed.
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