Stimson was disarming Nicaragua by buying up rifles from the rebels. Rather than intervene in national conflicts, the administration often found itself helping to arm or disarm one side or the other in a conflict. That seemed an acceptable proxy. Lawyering or brokering was also the great skill of Coolidge’s secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, a skill Kellogg had begun to amass all the way back in the days when he had read the law and prosecuted great antitrust cases. One reason Coolidge liked Kellogg was that Kellogg was the old-fashioned kind of lawyer, like himself and Sargent and Lincoln:
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