Everything about Stuart Symington totally explained
William Stuart Symington (
June 26,
1901 –
December 14,
1988) was a businessman and
political figure from
Missouri. He served as the first
Secretary of the Air Force (from 1947 until 1950) and was a
Democratic United States Senator from Missouri (from 1953 until 1976.)
Emerson Electric President
Symington was born in
Amherst, Massachusetts and grew up in
Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from
Yale University in 1923. At Yale he was a member of
Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and the
Elihu senior society and served on the board of the
Yale Daily News. During
World War I, Symington enlisted in the
United States Army and was commissioned a
Second Lieutenant at age 17.
In 1923, Symington went to work for an uncle in the shops of the Symington Company of
Rochester, New York, manufacturers of malleable iron products. Two years later he formed Eastern Clay Products, Inc., but in 1927 returned to the Symington Company as executive assistant to the president.
Symington resigned in 1930 to become president of the Colonial Radio Corporation. In January 1935, he accepted the presidency of Rustless Iron and Steel Corporation, manufactures of stainless steel, but remained director of Colonial Radio Corporation.
When Rustless Iron and Steel Corporation was sold to the American Rolling Mill Company in 1937, Symington resigned and in 1938, accepted the presidency of
Emerson Electric Company in
St. Louis, Missouri. During World War II he transformed the company into the world's largest builder of airplane
gun turrets.
First Secretary of the Air Force
He resigned Emerson in 1945 to join the administration of fellow Missourian
Harry S. Truman.
His first positions were chairman of the
Surplus Property Board (1945), administrator of the
Property Administration (1945–1946) and Assistant
Secretary of War for Air (1946–1947).
On
September 18,
1947, the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force was created and Symington became the first Secretary. Symington had a stormy term as he moved to give the
United States Air Force (which previously had been part of the Army) respect. He had numerous public battles with
United States Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. During his tenure there was a major debate and investigation into production of the
Convair B-36 Bomber, which was the last of the piston powered bombers at the beginning of the jet age. Symington and others were eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. Major accomplishments included the
Berlin Airlift and championing the
United States Air Force Academy. Symington resigned in 1950 to protest lack of funding for the Air Force after the Soviets detonated their first
atomic bomb. He remained in the administration as chairman of
National Security Resources Board (1950–1951) and
Reconstruction Finance Corporation Administrator (1951–1952).
U.S. Senator and candidate for President
At the urging of his father-in-law
James Wolcott Wadsworth, Jr., a former
Republican (GOP)
Speaker of the
New York Assembly and a GOP U.S. Senator from New York who had also been a
rancher in
Texas from 1911-1914, Symington ran in 1952 as a
Democrat for the U.S. Senate from Missouri.
He was elected in the
1952, a national Republican year, and re-elected in
1958,
1964 and
1970, three heavily Democratic years, but didn't seek a fifth term. He resigned on
December 27,
1976, four days before the end of his final term so that his Republican successor,
John C. Danforth, would gain a
seniority advantage in the Senate.
Symington was an especially prominent opponent of
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, to the vexation of the latter, who nicknamed him "Sanctimonious Stu." Symington took a lead role in condemning McCarthy during the
Army-McCarthy Hearings, capitalizing upon his prominence and expertise as a former Secretary of the Air Force.
Symington ran in the
1960 presidential election and won the backing of former President
Harry S. Truman, but eventually lost the nomination to Senator
John F. Kennedy. Symington, unlike Kennedy or LBJ, refused to speak to segregated audiences in the South, and this hurt his chances. He was considered Kennedy's first choice for
Vice President, but was dropped in favor of Texas Senator
Lyndon B. Johnson in the politically tight race. He advised President Kennedy as a member of
ExComm during the October 1962
Cuban Missile Crisis.
During Symington's tenure in the Senate, he was known as an advocate for a strong national defense. He was also a strong supporter of the Air Force Academy and, in fact, helped establish it. Symington was also committed to constituent services, answering letters from Missouri citizens both important, trivial, and sometimes even zany. As an example, Symington once formally requested a report from military sources regarding the possible existence of subterranean superhumans, which one of his constituents had become concerned about after reading a fiction book and mistaking it for non-fiction. This and Symington's other Senatorial correspondence and papers were donated to the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection (on the
University of Missouri campus) in 2002, and are now available to the general public.
In 1958, Symington accused the
RAND Corporation of
defeatism for studying how the
United States might
strategically surrender to an enemy power. This lead to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or
surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the US had demanded
unconditional surrender of
its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to US interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender might have been.
His son
James W. Symington served in the
U.S. House from Missouri's Second
Congressional District from 1969 to 1977. His cousin
Fife Symington was
Governor of Arizona from 1991 to 1997. His grandson Stuart Symington, of the same name, is in the
U.S. State Department and is currently serving as the U.S. Ambassador to
Djibouti.
He died in
New Canaan, Connecticut, and is buried in a crypt in
Washington National Cathedral.
The Annie Lee Moss case
On
March 9,
1954, Mrs.
Annie Lee Moss went before Sen.
Joseph McCarthy and his committee under the accusation that she was a communist spy. Evidence supporting this claim was supposedly given by an undercover FBI agent that couldn't be cross-examined by Mrs. Moss or her counsel. As it became increasingly clear that a horrible mistake had been made, Sen. Symington proclaimed before the packed audience that he believed she wasn't a communist and had never been, receiving thunderous applause from those present. However, in September 1958, records of the Communist Party were released and proved Mrs. Moss was in fact a member of the Communist Party.
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