There is no joy to be had from retirement except by some kind of productive work. Otherwise, you degenerate into talking to everybody about your pains and pills and income tax.
—HERBERT HOOVER
Herbert Hoover lived until the age of ninety. But history remembers him for just four years of his life, from 1929 until 1933, when the Great Depression began on his watch. He never fully recovered his old place in American life after that. But when he was asked how, in his eighties, he’d dealt with his critics, he had a simple reply: “I outlived the bastards.”1
Herbert Hoover was once a hero. He was known as the Great Humanitarian for leading famine relief in Europe during and after World War I. He kept tens of millions of people from starving to death in Europe and Russia. As secretary of commerce, he spearheaded relief efforts after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. He may have saved more lives than any candidate for president in history.2
Because of that, he was seen as above partisan politics. True, he grew up in West Branch, Iowa, a town that he said had one Democratic resident.3 But few knew much about his politics other than that his Stanford roommate claimed Hoover voted for William McKinley in 1896.4 Yet he’d worked for Woodrow Wilson and attended the Paris Peace Conference as a member of the Democrat’s delegation. In 1920, the Democratic Party courted him as a candidate for the White House. In March of that year, he even won the New Hampshire Democratic primary.5 Franklin Roosevelt remarked at the time: “[Hoover] is certainly a wonder and I wish we could make him President of the United States. There could not be a better one.”6
But Hoover was a Republican. He ran as such in 1928 with the slogan “Who but Hoover?” Sixty percent of the voters said they didn’t want anyone else. He won 444 electoral votes. The Republican domination of the White House continued.7
That all changed with the Great Depression. No one viewed the Republican Party, or Herbert Hoover, the same way after. Tens of millions of Americans were out of work. Thousands of banks closed. Gross national product shrank by a third in four years.8 When the American economy collapsed, Hoover’s good name went down with it.
The presidency was the only job he ever had in which Herbert Hoover ever failed. It was also the most important job of his life.
The American people blamed Hoover for the economic collapse. Words like “Hoovervilles” and “Hoovercarts” became part of the lexicon. Later he said, “I am the only person of distinction who’s ever had a depression named after him.”9
His defeat in 1932 was a foregone conclusion three years before voting started. But he wanted to recover what had been lost. He wanted to get the American economy back on track. He wanted to recover his good name and reputation. He yearned for his old role in American life, and maybe even his old position in the White House. More than anything, he wanted to be of service.
He couldn’t recover personally as long as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. The two men had different values and paths to success, which made it difficult for them to relate to each other. But those divergent paths grew into a very personal hatred for one another. The Republican Party also turned on Hoover, wanting nothing to do with the man who’d lost them the White House.10 The American people didn’t stop blaming him for their misery. While other presidents had left office unpopular in the past, Herbert Hoover was in self-imposed exile from politics, since neither party wanted anything to do with him, and there didn’t seem to be any path back.
Exile lasted for twelve years. He campaigned against the New Deal. He tried to run for president again. He fought to keep America out of World War II, even as he warned the American people about the evils of Adolf Hitler and all the suffering that came with his reign. He grew more conservative and more concerned about the spread of fascism and communism.11 But given that the Roosevelt administration had no interest in engaging him and his own party feared any association would be politically immolating, Hoover had no effective platform or public mandate to share what he heard and to advocate for what he believed was the right course of action to avoid war. These were his years of endless frustration.
But Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945 gave Hoover a chance at resurrection. The new president, Harry Truman, was hardly a Roosevelt disciple, and he had the most difficult hand dealt to him of any commander in chief since Abraham Lincoln. Truman needed Hoover’s help after a world war, and he asked him to lead global relief efforts. Then Hoover helped Truman reorganize the executive branch, work that continued under President Eisenhower. Back in public life, Hoover reconciled John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon after the bitter 1960 election. All the while, he worked, authoring dozens of books and leading countless charities and nonprofits, including the Boys & Girls Club of America and the Hoover War Library at Stanford University.
At thirty-one years long, Hoover’s post-presidency was the longest yet. It was also the most productive. He never permanently recovered his good name. But he did recover some of his old place in public life, and the ability to serve others. He reminded the world why he was once known as the Great Humanitarian. He was a public servant again. At the end of his life, that’s what mattered to him.
Hoover knew what his four years in the White House had cost him. When he left the White House, he commented bitterly, “Democracy is a harsh employer.”12
Life had never been easy for Herbert Hoover. Born in 1874 in West Branch, Iowa, he grew up in a poor Quaker household that had an ethos of “stern but kindly discipline.” His father was a blacksmith. Young Bert, as he was then called, once stepped on a red-hot iron, leaving a mark that he dubbed the “brand of Iowa” and a scar that stayed with him, a constant reminder of where he came from.13
Tragedy struck his family when both his parents died before his ninth birthday, making him an orphan. Bert then left the Midwest for Oregon, where he lived with an aunt and uncle.
Even then, it was clear that young Hoover was bright and that he worked hard. He’d overcome adversity, and he was intensely curious. He entered Stanford University when it first opened its doors to students as a member of the “pioneer” class. There he met Lou Henry, the school’s only female geology student, in a lab, and the two fell in love. They married in 1899, and with their degrees in hand set off to China, where they experienced the Boxer Rebellion firsthand. Their service-minded nature kicked in as Lou Henry tended to the wounded in the American compound while Hoover built barricades during a monthlong siege. They survived in the end at the final encampment of foreigners narrowly escaping the rebellion. Free from physical threats, they went all over Europe and made their way to Siberia. They had the kinds of adventures that few couples experienced in those days, and it deepened their love for each other.14
Theirs was a romantic life, filled with success. By 1914, Hoover was a self-made millionaire who’d built his fortune through engineering and mining ventures around the world.15 But then the world was at war. Woodrow Wilson called on Hoover to help mobilize the country and conserve food. This put Hoover on what he later called the “slippery slope of public life.”16
Hoover served his country as the chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, feeding 11 million civilians.17 President Wilson then appointed him as America’s first director of the U.S. Food Administration, where he led food conservation at home and helped feed a further 83 million people, including 10 million Russians after the Bolshevik Revolution.18 For that work, he became known as the Great Humanitarian, and had earned a reputation that transcended geographies and put him above partisanship. He then served as secretary of commerce under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, a position in which he helped more than seven hundred thousand Americans displaced by the Great Mississippi Flood in 1927, many of them Black people living in poverty and segregation in the Jim Crow South.19
He was popular, but he had detractors. Calvin Coolidge thought Hoover was too progressive, and said that the man “has offered unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.!”20 But Silent Cal was an accidental president who got the office after the death of his boss. Herbert Hoover seemed destined for the presidency. When Coolidge opted not to run in 1928, the secretary of commerce practically waltzed to the Republican Party’s nomination and then to the White House.21
His winning campaign message was optimistic: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land,” he proclaimed at the Republican convention.22 Seven months into his presidency, those words would ring hollow.
Poverty was coming for America. On October 28, 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 13 percent in one day. The day after, it fell again, this time by 12 percent. The stock market didn’t recover its losses until 1954. Meanwhile, more than 1,350 banks suspended operation the next year. In a matter of months, 4 million Americans were out of work.23
The Great Depression was on. Hoover was an engineer, and he wanted to fix what ailed the economy. To create jobs, he ordered new construction projects and accelerated progress on what would become the “Hoover Dam.”24 To protect manufacturers and labor, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff into law.25 To aid the recovery, he created new agencies like the President’s Emergency Committee for Employment and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
These actions had good intentions, but some may have made matters worse. More than one thousand economists wrote an open letter to President Hoover asking him to veto the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, but he refused.26 Whatever the effects of his policies, Hoover’s approach to the onset of the Great Depression was not laissez-faire, free-market orthodoxy. The New York Times commented, “No one in [Hoover’s] place could have done more.”27 But Hoover’s initiatives didn’t work; they were too little, too late. Americans blamed Hoover, and the worse the situation grew, the faster they forgot why they had elected him in 1928.
Taking potshots at Hoover became a national pastime. When Babe Ruth signed a two-year, $160,000 contract with the New York Yankees in 1930, he became the highest-paid player in the world.28 At that moment, 4.5 million Americans were out of work.29 A reporter asked if that seemed fair—after all, Ruth was now making more than the president. “Why not?” Ruth retorted, having hit forty-nine home runs and batted .359 that season. “I had a better year than he did.”30 When Hoover attended the World Series, the crowd booed the president.31
In the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt carried all but six states and won the Electoral College, 472–59, the Democratic Party’s largest victory yet.32 FDR headed to the White House to the tune of his campaign song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,”33 and Time magazine labeled Hoover “President Reject.”34
Press secretary Theodore Joslin had the unfortunate task of telling the president he’d lost. When he called Hoover at his home in Palo Alto early on election night, just after 6:30 p.m. local time, he reported that Hoover “took [the news] without flinching.”35 A less sympathetic biographer declared that Hoover was left “mute.” On the way to bed, the president shook his aides’ hands and told them, “Goodnight, my friends, that’s that!”36
The campaign had been vicious, and personal. A Democratic campaign operative named Charles Michelson assaulted not just Hoover’s policies, but the man himself. As one contemporary writer documented, “Michelson more than any other person was responsible for creating the Depression image of the Hoover administration which plagued the Republican Party for years afterward.” It was Michelson who invented the neologism “Hooverville.”37 The president knew what Michelson was up to. He nicknamed an ugly blue dragon on a Ming vase in his office “Charlie.”38
Hoover was a loathed lame duck. But Roosevelt wasn’t going to take office until March 4, 1933, Inauguration Day. With the passage of the Twentieth Amendment, this would be the final four-month-long presidential transition in American history. And it was the worst transfer of power in American history until January 2021.
Hoover’s problems started with Congress, which was quick to abandon the outgoing president. A member of his own party, Republican congressman Louis McFadden, introduced a resolution of impeachment in the House of Representatives, denouncing Hoover for everything from his handling of war debts to his use of force against the Bonus Army in the summer of 1932. Hoover was spared the humiliation of a vote when the House tabled the motion.39
His problems continued with the media, whose attacks quickly escalated. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst unleashed a series of broadsides declaring that, after such a defeat, Hoover should resign.40 A few columnists suggested that he should appoint Roosevelt to a position in the presidential succession, and then he should resign so that the president-elect could get the job earlier. Hoover dismissed such schemes as “silly.”41
He wanted to do as much as he could in his last four months. But he felt powerless. He tried to call on Roosevelt for help, publicly asking him to work together to address the country’s economic challenges. But the president-elect had little incentive to do so.42
The two men knew each other from their time in Paris in 1919, but Hoover and Roosevelt could hardly have been more different. FDR was an East Coast patrician and the cousin of a former president. Hoover was an orphan from Iowa. Roosevelt was a politician. Hoover was a businessman and his first elected office was the White House. Ideologically, they were getting further and further apart.
Hoover invited Roosevelt to the White House during the transition, and the president-elect said he would “cooperate… in every appropriate way, subject, of course, to the requirement of my present duties as governor of [New York].”43 But Joslin told Hoover not to trust Roosevelt, who had a reputation for backroom deals in Albany.44
They sat down on November 22, and Hoover was shocked at Roosevelt’s physical condition. As assistant secretary of the navy, the six-foot-two, 188-pound Roosevelt had once been described as a “twentieth-century Apollo,” and that was the man that Hoover had met many years ago.45 But the president-elect had been diagnosed with polio in 1921, at the age of thirty-nine. Most Americans knew that Roosevelt was living with a disability, but he’d hidden his infirmity well. He wore a cape to cover his crutches, had his pants tailored long to cover his leg braces, and had those braces painted black so that the steel would not shine in photographs or in the sun.46 He was helped by a willing press corps that refrained from publishing pictures that would have revealed the extent of his paralysis. Shocked by what he saw in their meeting, and bitter over his defeat, Hoover told Joslin that it was clear that Roosevelt was “both physically and mentally unable to discharge the duties of the office he must so soon assume.”47
The meeting didn’t go well for either party. Hoover spent the first hour lecturing Roosevelt, including about the economy and European countries’ debts from World War I. They spoke for ten minutes alone. After the encounter FDR was even less interested in working together.48 He found Hoover patronizing, out of touch, and pushy. He was happy to let Hoover own the Great Depression, and he would come in to lead the recovery.
President-elect Roosevelt could do as he pleased, and he chose not to help Hoover. He told the Republican, “It would be unwise for me to accept an apparent joint responsibility with you.”49 Hoover released a statement: “Governor Roosevelt apparently does not assent to my suggestion for cooperative action. I will respect his wishes.”50
This was petulant, but Hoover was exasperated. Roosevelt also had a habit of speaking out of both sides of his mouth. While the president-elect publicly stated that the Constitution did not give him the authority to take action, privately he wielded his influence freely, coordinating with allies in Congress to block Hoover’s agenda.51
Hoover was isolated, with few allies in or out of his administration, save his family. On January 5, 1933, Calvin Coolidge died at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, creating a dark and melancholy vacancy for Hoover, who would soon be the only living former president, and very much alone.52 Two weeks later, Roosevelt stopped in Washington on his way to Warm Springs, Georgia. Once again, he refused to cooperate.53
While Hoover scrambled and the country was in a Depression, the president-elect continued on to Miami to celebrate his win with his Harvard pals and friends like Vincent Astor, whose heated pool in Rhinebeck, New York, Roosevelt used for physical therapy.54 The party arrived in Miami on February 15, and Roosevelt—though campaign season was long over—stopped in front of a cheering crowd at Bayfront Park near downtown. He wanted to give a short speech from the backseat of his green Buick.55
The president-elect was charismatic, and the press snapped hundreds of pictures of him, with light bulbs flashing and popping like pistols. Seeing the huge crowd, Columbia professor and Roosevelt aide Raymond Moley started to get nervous. This was an uncertain time, and the prospect of political violence was very real.56
Moley was right to be nervous. The mayor of Chicago, Tony Cermak, walked over to shake Roosevelt’s hand. As he did so, a bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara opened fire on the Buick. “Too many people are starving!” Zangara cried out as the sparks leapt from his .32 caliber double-action revolver.57
In total, Zangara fired five shots from thirty-five feet away. When the smoke cleared, he’d missed his primary target. Instead, he wounded multiple bystanders and hit Mayor Cermak. As the mayor struggled through the cars, heading toward Roosevelt’s Buick, a small, dark red spot grew slowly on his chest until it covered his shirt.58 When he made it to the Buick, the president-elect and his driver raced toward Jackson Memorial Hospital, with Roosevelt feeling his bleeding companion’s neck for a pulse as his heartbeat slowly faded and he coughed up blood.59
All the while, Roosevelt remained calm. He visited Cermak’s hospital bed, and the mayor reportedly told him, “I’m glad it was me instead of you.”60 Cermak died three weeks later. Those words were carved on his tombstone.
At the time, presidential assassinations were more common than they are today. Hoover was seven years old when James Garfield was assassinated.61 He was twenty-six when William McKinley was gunned down. That a politician would be killed in 1933 was widely expected, and Joslin commented that “the marvel is that this was the first attempted assassination” of the Depression. He was surprised that Hoover was not the target.62 But Roosevelt’s survival made him even more popular than he was before.
The worst crisis at the end of the Hoover presidency was a series of bank failures that swept the nation. In 1929, there were twenty-four thousand banks operating in the United States. Four years later, ten thousand had closed and their deposits evaporated.63 Hoover called the banking system “the weakest link” in the American economy. It looked like that link was about to break.64
This crisis demanded a response, but at first Hoover wanted the banks to stay open and for the market to determine which ones survived before he came around to the idea of a “banking moratorium.” Roosevelt wanted them all closed, in what he called instead a “banking holiday.” Under the plan, depositors would not be allowed to withdraw their funds, and the hope was that the economic panic would dissipate before the banks reopened. But the American public wasn’t waiting for Washington to figure it out—ordinary citizens were going to the remaining banks and exchanging dollars for gold, draining the Federal Reserve.65
The president made one humiliating, last-ditch appeal for Roosevelt’s help. After Michigan shuttered its banks and other states followed suit, Hoover called on Roosevelt to support closing the banks. “You are the only one,” the president told the president-elect, “who can stave off disaster.”66
Hoover was still the president, with legal authorities, but he hesitated without the support of his successor. Roosevelt had nothing to gain from rescuing Hoover. He once again refused. Adding insult to injury, he didn’t acknowledge Hoover’s message for nearly two weeks.67
The last three weeks of the Hoover administration saw more chaos, both domestically and abroad. Adolf Hitler took power in Germany after the Reichstag Fire on February 27, 1933. Japan had already invaded Manchuria and was about to leave the League of Nations.68 But Americans were focused on matters closer to home, and Hoover—unable to end the crisis—blamed Roosevelt, theorizing through the escalating banking disaster, “The public is filled with fear and apprehension over the policies of the new administration…. The people are acting in self-protection before March 4.”69
The public didn’t share Hoover’s assessment. They’d chosen Roosevelt to be the next president, and the country was, as historian David Kennedy has written, “numb and nearly broken, anxiously awaiting deliverance.”70 Hoover vowed to fight and to keep working “until 10:49 AM March fourth, when I leave for the Capitol. We must try everything, not once, but a dozen times.” He made one last request for Roosevelt to call a special session of Congress to solve the banking crisis as soon as he took office. The president-elect wouldn’t budge.71
Inauguration Day was as dramatic as any since the Civil War. With the economy collapsed, more than a hundred thousand spectators gathered to cheer Roosevelt and say good riddance to Hoover. The crowd witnessed the president and president-elect riding in the same car, an open convertible, despite the dangers, to the Capitol. They shared a blanket to stay warm, but after the terrible transition, there was no love lost between them. While Roosevelt waved his silk hat at the crowd, neither he nor Hoover looked at one another. Hoover’s expression was set in a grim stare. He had been awake late into the night working until the very end, as he’d promised.72
When they got to the Capitol, Hoover signed a few last-minute documents while he still could. Meanwhile, Roosevelt prepared to deliver his inaugural address. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes was nearby, preparing to administer the oath of office.73
Four months after his election, Roosevelt walked thirty-five yards on the steps of the East Portico of the Capitol, supported by his steel leg braces and the arm of his son James. He delivered his inaugural address at the podium and spoke solemnly and clearly. Onlookers who might have been worried about his disability were impressed by his strength. In what felt like a “beleaguered capital in wartime,” Roosevelt looked every bit the commander in chief, and victory finally seemed possible.74
The press described Roosevelt’s address as a “Jacksonian speech,” laced with criticisms of Herbert Hoover, and the crowd loved it.75 “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the president declared to a cheering crowd. The famous line communicated confidence that the public hadn’t heard yet from Herbert Hoover, a sense that they had the power to end the Depression. But whatever Roosevelt’s rhetoric, Hoover remained very much afraid. The Depression was far from over, and he feared what Roosevelt might do.
The former president’s long train of humiliations was only beginning. Even before he took his oath, the Marine Band had played “Hail to the Chief” for Roosevelt, rather than for Hoover. The Secret Service did not escort Hoover out of Washington, though his staff had requested the customary guard and there were real threats on his life. Instead of the Secret Service, railroad police officers joined Hoover on his way to New York. There, he was met by the chief of police.76
President Roosevelt wasted no time. He declared the “banking holiday,” closing every bank in the United States, including the Federal Reserve, for a four-day period, beginning at 1:00 a.m. on March 6.77 That period was extended, and the banks reopened in stages, according to terms set in the new Emergency Banking Act.78 Disappointed, Hoover issued a statement that FDR’s action should “receive the wholehearted support and co-operation of every citizen.”79 But few people were listening to Herbert Hoover anymore.
The 1932 election was the first of four that Roosevelt won. He would go on to lead the United States through the Great Depression and World War II. Meanwhile, Herbert Hoover was a pariah in self-imposed exile for as long as Roosevelt was president. He was not welcome in Washington. During those twelve years, he returned to the capital twice. Once, he rode in on a midnight train for a quick breakfast at 9:00 a.m., and he left the city immediately after. The second time, Roosevelt was out of town. They never saw each other again.80
Hoover began his post-presidency in New York City, but he might as well have been on Elba. He did not know if he’d recover his old place in American life, or if the American economy would make it. He agonized over both, and the emotional anxiety only became more pronounced after he left office. During his time in the White House, he’d become increasingly isolated, shouldering a burden that no one else understood. He may have developed what Fiona Lee, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, would describe as a “subjective sense of distinctiveness from others,” a sense that he was removed from those around him. In other words, it’s lonely at the top, and this makes the fall that much more painful.81 For Hoover, now more loathed than any of his predecessors since Andrew Johnson, the isolation was terrible.
The former president took walks around the city, greeting surprised pedestrians with an awkward hello. He reengaged with humanitarian organizations, many of which were focused on aid to children. But he didn’t want to stay in Manhattan. He left New York on March 16 on an afternoon train, with no fanfare.82
Five days later, he arrived home in Palo Alto, back to his “own gadgets and gardens,” in a place as familiar and comforting to him as Monticello was to Jefferson. But unlike Jefferson, Hoover, with the rest of his life ahead of him, had no idea what would come next. And he was a political pariah.83
When he arrived in California, he told a gaggle of reporters that he was “entitled to a long, long rest.”84 But he was uneasy, and he spent many hours in his Buick driving on California highways, thinking about the country’s troubles and what he could do.85 These drives were not meditative. He stewed over his thoughts and worked his mind into overdrive. These weren’t reflections about the past, either, but rather musings over the present and the future. In isolation, he began to form a narrative of what was going on that was a blend of truth, opinion, and his own feelings about Roosevelt. He didn’t regret his policies as president, but he did regret that he hadn’t been a more effective communicator.
Though he may have been far away from the halls of power, the American people hadn’t forgotten their feelings about Herbert Hoover. His name remained synonymous with the Depression. Many psychologists explained that the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” one of the most popular of 1933, was an allegory about Hoover.86 The early textbooks and histories of the Depression were being written, and they portrayed him as a villain, responsible for all of capitalism’s excesses.
Hoover wanted to tell his side of the story, to correct the record, and to speak out against his successor. He believed that the public’s view was all wrong. The Depression had started not in America, but in the economic chaos of post–World War I Europe. The U.S. Federal Reserve had made matters worse, he claimed.87 Nearly a century later, historians are still debating, with few of them siding with Hoover.
He could not believe that he was being portrayed as a villain. The American people, it seemed, had forgotten his good works. In one day, he had lost the presidency, his name, and his record before the White House. Now he wasn’t the Great Humanitarian. He was “the associate and tool of Wall Street and organized wealth,” quite an evolution from once being a Quaker orphan in Iowa.88
The American people hadn’t forgotten the Hoover administration, and neither had the Roosevelt White House. Anyone associated with him had a target on their back. Hoover’s former treasury secretary, the aging tycoon Andrew Mellon, was under FBI investigation.89 When the FBI failed to prove any wrongdoing, Roosevelt’s lieutenants turned to the IRS to indict the former treasury secretary on tax charges. This was political. “The Roosevelt administration made me go after Andy Mellon,” reported Tax Commissioner Elmer Irey. But a grand jury in Pittsburg cleared Mellon.90 That wasn’t the end of it, however. Hoover’s tax returns were being audited, and he even suspected Roosevelt’s aides were opening his mail. He wrote a postscript in one letter with a cheeky message: “If the gentleman who opens this letter could please transmit a copy of it to the President I should be greatly obliged.”91
Herbert Hoover had few friends in Washington, but he at least had the company of Lou Henry and their two sons, who were relieved to be away from politics. Herbert Jr. described the presidency as “the worst thing that ever happened to the family.”92 Now the couple could eat breakfast together and listen to the radio in peace, with no responsibilities. Hoover felt that “for the first time in long memory, neither Mrs. Hoover nor I had to get up in the morning at the summons of a human or mechanical alarm clock with its shock into reality.”93
They lived in what was known as the Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover House—no more creative name was given to the sprawling property that looked like blocks stacked on top of each other. Perched on San Juan Hill, it overlooks the Stanford campus, where they met. Lou Henry designed it, and Hoover used his engineering skills to ensure that it was fireproof. His study on the second floor had a view of the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. It was home.94
The one other good fortune that Hoover had was money. He’d entered public service after a successful career as a self-made businessman. He was proud of the fact that he’d earned his wealth. And he pointed out that his “net assets even at their top were never one-half the inherited fortune of Mr. Roosevelt.”95 When he was offered a position giving a weekly radio address, to be sponsored by the Old Guard Tobacco Company at $3,000 per appearance, he turned it down, thinking former presidents shouldn’t sell their services like that.96
He didn’t have a position, but he did want to do something. One of his secretaries once remarked that “[t]he Chief’s idea of a vacation is to work eight hours a day instead of sixteen.”97 But in those early days, his schedule was usually blank.
He began to fill it with work on charitable and nonprofit organizations, what he called “benevolent institutions.” He served as the chairman of the Boy’s Club of America, which saw 1.5 million young men pass through during his tenure. He sponsored educational organizations and humanitarian work in Europe, usually with a focus on children. He built up the Hoover War Library, founded in 1919, which would later become the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace and a leading think tank and archive at Stanford University.98
While Hoover settled into California, Roosevelt was hard at work in Washington. Even once settled into the White House, the president was not yet done pummeling Hoover’s reputation. Roosevelt continuously invoked the bogeyman of his predecessor in public speeches, leading Hoover to start thinking more about politics. During Roosevelt’s first one hundred days, Hoover read the paper and learned about new government programs the president was launching on everything from financial reform, to employment, to rural infrastructure.99 Roosevelt pulled the United States off the gold standard in April, and he launched a program requiring Americans to sell most of the gold in their possession to the government at a price that was set by the president and his aides.100 That November, Roosevelt recognized Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Prohibition was repealed by the end of the year.101
Roosevelt continued to enjoy widespread support. As president, he had the biggest platform in the world, and 54 million people—out of an estimated 82 million American adults—tuned into his “Fireside Chats,” broadcast on the radio across the country. These chats made many Americans feel like they had a personal relationship with Roosevelt. Few, if any, had ever felt such a connection with President Hoover.102
Herbert Hoover didn’t want to remain in exile. More than any former president before him, save perhaps John Quincy Adams, he opposed his successor’s administration, both in terms of policy and personality. He saw the New Deal as not just a matter of policy disagreement, but as an attempt to break with American tradition, and with what Hoover believed made America exceptional. Roosevelt had told the country the only thing it had to fear was fear itself, but Hoover was very much afraid of Roosevelt.
Hoover wanted to speak out against the New Deal, but he was committed to a year of silence, during which time he would determine what he wanted to say and how to use his voice. He began writing and studied political thought, fearing that Roosevelt’s programs were doing away with “American Individualism” and ushering in socialism. He began to develop a thesis that would launch his postpresidential political crusade, arguing that “the freedom of men’s minds and spirits… born with the Renaissance… reinforced with the Reformation, [and]… brought to reality by the American revolution” was at stake.103 With the New Deal, he claimed, “we are engaged in creating regimented men, not free men, both in spirit and in economic life.”104
Hoover had once been closer to the progressive wing of the Republican Party—beloved by Democrats and Republicans alike. His conservative predecessors, Harding and Coolidge, saw him as a figure to their left. Now he was growing more conservative. He spoke of the American founding and of the virtues of free-market capitalism, while decrying “collectivism.” If Americans’ way of life was to change, it should be through a gradual process of reformation, not Rooseveltian revolution. As his arguments persisted, the more he came to use the word “conservative” to describe his ideology.105
With every new Roosevelt program, Hoover grew more alarmed. He decided to break his silence. “Here’s what I am going to do,” he told Joslin. “I’m going to lay off for six or eight months and then I’m going to start in raising hell…. I’ve caught a lot of it in the last four years; now I’m going to give a lot of it. I’m going to talk and write and do any damn thing I want to do.”106
Despite the fact that he’d lost his reelection by a historic margin, he predicted confidently, “When the American people realize some ten years hence that it was on November 8, 1932, that they surrendered the freedom… they will, I hope, recollect that I at least tried to save them.”107 It was a moment of self-righteousness, but it also showed no introspection. Hoover began to rally surrogates to assault the New Deal.108 Raymond Clapper, a notable Washington Post columnist and Hoover ally, visited the former president in Palo Alto in July 1934. The outside world might have thought that Hoover would live out his days in quiet retirement, but Clapper found that Hoover was spending his time thinking about his next step.109
That next step came on September 28, 1934, when Hoover’s book The Challenge to Liberty hit the shelves. The challenge, he believed, was the New Deal. He laid out a polemic against Roosevelt. Many of his closest associates had advised him not to write the book. The New Deal was popular, and they feared the book would make him seem partisan and petty. Even Robert Taft, a rising conservative star, a Hoover protégé, and William Howard Taft’s son, called The Challenge to Liberty “extreme.”110
Hoover didn’t pay much heed to such criticisms. He wondered if the book would be his “last shot at public service,” and he wanted to say his piece.111 “For the first time in two generations,” he warned, “the American people are faced with the primary issue of humanity and all government—the issue of human liberty.”112
It was no wonder that Taft worried that the book was extreme. The critics thought so, too. The book was not well received, and one critic claimed that Hoover believed in “freedom for the few and bondage for the many.”113 Despite such reviews, The Challenge to Liberty was a bestseller. By March 1935, it sold more than one hundred thousand copies, thanks in large part to a deal with the Book of the Month Club.114
The former president was now one of the New Deal’s most outspoken critics. The press speculated that Hoover might be interested in more than selling books, and might still have political aspirations. This suited Roosevelt fine, who preferred having Hoover as a foil. The Republican Party wasn’t eager to see Hoover reenter politics, however.115
In the 1934 midterm, Hoover didn’t campaign for Republican candidates.116 The Democrats made a killing at the ballot box, and now there were only twenty-five Republicans left in the Senate, making for a veto-proof Democratic supermajority for Roosevelt.117 If the first two years of the Roosevelt presidency worried Hoover, the next two would make him despair. Roosevelt pushed a slew of new programs, including the Banking Act and the Social Security Act. This was such a sweeping set of proposals that it’s since been called the Second New Deal.118
Roosevelt’s programs grew in scope and ambition, and Hoover’s attacks grew in volume and invective. He believed that Social Security had merits, but that its financing was destined to fail.119 More than that, he told an audience at Stanford University, “the first of social securities is freedom,” and Roosevelt’s programs constituted what he later described as a “New Deal Apocalypse.”120
To make his case, Hoover toured the country. He spoke before a crowd of ten thousand in Philadelphia, warning that President Roosevelt “recently in addressing the youth of our nation advised them ‘to dream dreams and see visions.’ I have advised them to wake up.”121 Though they weren’t as concerned, even some Democrats objected to Roosevelt’s actions. They worried that the president was running roughshod over the Constitution. Al Smith, the Democrat from New York who ran against Hoover in 1928, asked, “In the name of Heaven, where is the independence of Congress?”122
There were critics to Roosevelt’s left as well. Upton Sinclair, the muckraking journalist, believed the New Deal didn’t go far enough. He proclaimed, “the Communist road… happens to be the only road that leads to the new world.” He won the Democratic nomination for governor in Hoover’s home state of California, though he lost with less than 40 percent of the vote.123 Meanwhile, other left-wing populists like Father Coughlin and Louisiana governor Huey Long were ready to challenge Roosevelt directly. Long would have run against Roosevelt in 1936 had he not been felled by an assassin’s bullet in Baton Rouge.124
More confident in his political ideology, Herbert Hoover had developed a postpresidential voice. He was waging what he called a “crusade against collectivism.” But while speeches and articles provided a path back into the public conversation, he hadn’t recovered his place in American life. For that, he’d need to get back into public service.
The next chance to challenge Roosevelt came in 1936. Hoover understood that he would not have a clear path to the Republican nomination. His preferred candidate was former Illinois governor Frank Lowden. But Lowden, at one time a front-runner for the 1920 Republican nomination, was now seventy-three years old. Lowden had no chance, and Hoover had no successor.125 He was still the leader of the Republican Party, even if the majority didn’t want him.
That Hoover could have been the Republican nominee that year was not impossible. Roosevelt’s vice president, John Nance Garner, believed “Hoover couldn’t win, but he would carry more states than anyone else [the Republicans] can put up.”126 Perhaps hoping for a rematch and another chance to defeat Hoover, Roosevelt made a bet with his aides that his former rival would get the Republican nomination.127
But Hoover didn’t have a chance and he grossly underestimated how toxic he had become even within his own Republican Party, which blamed him for the Great Depression and the crushing defeat in 1932. The few supporters he had were disorganized and confused as to why their champion wasn’t trying to get the nomination.128 Early polling in February showed a mere 4 percent in favor of Hoover on the low end, and 17 percent on the high end.129 When the time for the convention came, a few supporters chanted, “We want four more years of Hoover.”130 But the convention managers worked to give him a speaking slot when the radio audience would be at its lowest so as to marginalize the only living former Republican president.131
In 1936, the Republican party nominated Kansas governor Alfred Landon. On the campaign trail, however, Roosevelt ignored his actual opponent, and instead attacked Hoover by name. Hoover was better known than the GOP nominee, and a much easier scapegoat.132 That November, Landon lost by even more than Hoover had four years prior, carrying only Vermont and Maine, and losing even his home state of Pennsylvania to Roosevelt in a blowout.
Roosevelt had proven that he was in the White House to stay. But Hoover’s resolve to fight back grew stronger. Landon, he believed, had lost because he had tried to “out–New Deal the New Deal.”133 The conservative Hoover believed voters wanted a true alternative to Roosevelt. He also believed that Roosevelt’s personal attacks against him were uncalled for, and he resented having to relive the character assaults from four years prior. He wanted to recover his good name.
Hoover did not attend Roosevelt’s second inauguration in 1937. Roosevelt acknowledged that America had not yet recovered from the Depression, and that “millions of families [were still] trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.”134 But the results gave him a mandate to lead. An emboldened Roosevelt decided to make his most aggressive move yet, against the Supreme Court.135
A few members of the old Taft majority were still on the bench. They acted as a legal bulwark against New Deal excesses. They’d overturned National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and Justices George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, Willis Van Devanter, and James McReynolds earned the nickname the “four horsemen,” forming a bloc against the White House.136
Furious at the check the Court was providing, Roosevelt told his friend, New Deal advisor and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, “Very confidentially, I may give you an awful shock in about two weeks.” The president made good on his word in February. He introduced the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill, which would have allowed him to pack the Court with up to six new justices.137
There was a political firestorm. The outraged Hoover phoned Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg, who said after that it was clear that the former president was “eager to jump into the fray.”138 Hoover was on the side of the majority of the American people on the matter of court packing. Even Frankfurter’s wife, Marion, told her husband, “I hate the whole bill so thoroughly…. I can’t bear to have you accused of being in any way responsible for it.”139
Hoover spoke out, and in a speech in Chicago, he declared, “Hands off the Supreme Court!”140 Roosevelt responded in March, defending his proposal by saying that America’s government was a “three horse team,” with each horse representing one branch. “Two of the horses are pulling in unison today,” the president said. “The third is not.”141 But Congress disagreed. The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously recommended that the judicial reform bill be rejected. The committee’s statement, Hoover said, was “a great American historical document.”142
That wasn’t the end of it, however. Justice Van Devanter, a Taft appointee, soon announced that he would be retiring. That gave Roosevelt the chance to nominate his replacement. Meanwhile, Justice Owen Roberts, a Hoover appointee, started to side with the more liberal justices. This was a move that historians have since dubbed “the switch in time that saved nine.”143
With a more compliant Supreme Court and Democratic majorities, Roosevelt’s power had few checks. If the Democrats did well in the 1938 midterms, Hoover feared the Republican Party would be done for.144 To Hoover’s relief, the Democrats stumbled in 1938. Roosevelt’s court-packing plan had been unpopular. A deep recession in 1937 bled over into 1938, lowering the nation’s GDP by 10 percent and costing millions more Americans their jobs.145 Unemployment, already high at 15.1 percent, rose to 20 percent.146 When the stock market crashed again in October 1938, Adolf Berle, a Columbia professor and former member of Roosevelt’s brain trust, called the disaster a repeat of 1929. The New Deal hadn’t yet ended the Depression, and things could always get worse.
The Democrats lost seventy-two seats in the House and eight in the Senate in the midterms.147 Sensing an opening, Hoover began to sketch out a more affirmative vision, rather than only criticizing the Roosevelt administration. “American young men and women should have the right to plan, to live their own lives with the limitation that they shall not injure their neighbors,” he said.148 There was some life left in the Grand Old Party. Hoover wanted to bring it back.
The United States was not the only country experiencing the Great Depression. It was a global phenomenon with global consequences. Terrible economic conditions in Weimar Germany contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler. It was clear that war was coming for Europe. Hoover turned his gaze across the Atlantic, and he set sail for Europe in 1938, crossing on an ocean liner called the Washington. When he arrived, he got something he’d been missing for a decade: a hero’s welcome.
In Europe, Hoover was beloved. Streets were named for him in Brussels and Prague, tributes to his work during and after World War I. During this trip, he visited fifteen countries and met with twenty-two heads of state and the leading lights on the continent. Europeans didn’t blame Herbert Hoover for the Depression. Most blamed the Treaty of Versailles.149
It was a momentous journey. On February 16, he was given the title “Friend of the Belgian People” by King Leopold.150 After a stop in Estonia, he crossed the Gulf of Finland and landed in Helsinki, where he was greeted as a “special favorite of the Finnish nation.”151 He met the Finnish foreign minister, who’d read Hoover’s 1922 book, American Individualism. Were he the sitting president of the United States, he hardly could have asked for a warmer welcome.
In Europe, he was still the Great Humanitarian. While he was there, he thought about trying to run for president again in 1940, believing that this mission would leave him “better equipped for continued battle against New Deal collectivism.” More than that, he wanted to understand what was happening on the continent, and he asked his hosts in Belgium when they thought war would come. “Who knows?” they said. “Perhaps a year, perhaps two years, perhaps never.”152
He was about to get a better idea than most what was coming for Europe. On March 7, Hoover entered Germany. This was first time he’d crossed its border since the end of World War I. He made his way to Berlin on a brand-new highway built by the fascist government.153 He didn’t know it, but the Anschluss was five days away. He was about to meet Adolf Hitler.
When he arrived in Europe, Hoover hadn’t planned on meeting Hitler. He had what he described as “long since formed a great prejudice against the whole Nazi faith.”154 He even declined an honorary degree from the University of Berlin, protesting the regime.155 But Hitler invited him, and Hoover agreed to meet at the German Chancellery. He was accompanied by Hugh Wilson, America’s ambassador to Germany, who earlier had complimented Hitler as a man who “pulled his people from moral and economic despair” into a “state of pride.”156 The two men walked together to meet the Führer under a marble archway carved with the initials “AH.”157
Hoover had expected the meeting to last twenty minutes, but it went on for more than an hour.158 He went in under the impression that Hitler was not the real power in Germany, and instead that he was controlled by “some group of unknown geniuses.” But though he saw that Hitler was “a great deal of an exhibitionist” with “strange hair,” he noticed that he was “forceful, highly intelligent, and had a remarkably accurate memory.” Hitler, Hoover saw, was “the boss himself.”159
Hitler was not subtle. He said that democracy was doomed to failure, and Hoover disagreed. The Führer exploded, and Hoover observed that Hitler “seemed to have trigger spots in his mind which set him off when touched like a man in furious anger.” He left the meeting disturbed, and the New York Times ran a story reporting, “Hoover Blunt to Hitler on Nazism; Says Progress Demands Liberty.”160
Hoover didn’t know what Hitler was planning, but he had no illusions about the man he’d just met. Most of the world had up to that point ignored Hitler’s repression of German Jews. But Hoover saw what was happening in Germany. He was an early Zionist who had supported the Balfour Declaration, which called for a national homeland for the Jewish people in what would become Mandatory Palestine.161 He went on to denounce the Nazis’ “concentration camps, persecutions of Jews, political trials, and bombing of civilian populations.”162
After the meeting with Hitler, Hoover headed to Carinhall, Field Marshal Hermann Göring’s hunting lodge, which had been designed by the same architect who’d planned Berlin’s 1936 Olympic stadium.163 Göring knew of Hoover’s dislike for Roosevelt, and pushed to see if he could exploit American political division, beginning the meeting by thanking Hoover for his relief work in Germany two decades prior and then criticizing Roosevelt.
Despite his differences with the president, Hoover didn’t engage. He told Göring that, as an American, he wasn’t going to denounce his own government while traveling abroad. The Nazi leader then grew more aggressive, vowing that the Third Reich would never find itself in such a vulnerable position as had been the case after Germany’s defeat in World War I. He laughed and pointed at a map of Czechoslovakia. “What does the shape of that country remind you of?” he asked. Before Hoover could respond, Göring answered his own question: “That is a spearhead. It is a spearhead plunged into the German body.” Hoover later made a note about the meeting at Carinhall. Göring, he observed, was “far more agreeable than Hitler; probably had a clever mind.” But he was “utterly ruthless, utterly selfish and probably utterly cruel.”164
When he left Europe, Hoover was more worried than when he had arrived. The continent’s democracies were weak, and their leaders inexperienced. Meanwhile, Germany’s leaders were strong, terrifying, filled with vengeful fantasies of a greater Germany, and preparing for war. He worried about the absence of checks on their growing power. The leaders from the First World War were long gone. Hoover believed that Winston Churchill, one of the last remaining leaders from the previous era, was “no real exception” to the dearth of European leadership. His friend, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, agreed, telling Hoover, “Something, somewhere, had gone out of [Europe]. The last war wiped out its best manhood. No new man of great consequence had come up.”165
The former president was wrong about Churchill. But he had a clearer idea of the dangerous situation in Europe than almost any other American. Roosevelt had never traveled to the continent as president—indeed, most of his international trips up to that point were fishing expeditions to the Bahamas or Newfoundland. Hoover’s insights could have been valuable, but neither the White House nor the State Department requested a briefing. He didn’t offer one.
Had he met with Roosevelt, Hoover would have articulated his theory of the case. Already, FDR was bringing the United States closer to its European allies, and slowly in the direction of intervention. As repugnant as Hoover found Hitler, he would have advocated against American military intervention. He didn’t want the United States to get involved militarily, and joined the leading anti-interventionist group, the America First Committee, which included the now-infamous Charles Lindbergh, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright and future president Gerald Ford.166 John F. Kennedy, then an undergraduate at Harvard, sent the committee a $100 check.167
But Hoover wasn’t an isolationist. He was a humanitarian who remembered the carnage of World War I. Before he was president, he spent more time abroad than any of his predecessors. He was an internationalist who believed that America could be a powerful force for good in the world. But the United States did not need to get involved in wars. It was “surrounded by a great moat” of the Atlantic and Pacific.168 America’s proper role was to remain a beacon of democracy and lead the recovery once the war was over.
Hitler had made it clear that he wanted Lebensraum, more land and living space for Germans and for Germany. Hoover believed that meant that the war would happen in Eastern Europe, sparing America’s democratic allies France and the United Kingdom, as the Soviet Union was where the open land was. For that reason, Hoover believed that Germany “had no desire for war with the democracies; they saw no profit in it.”169 War would come, but it would see the fascists and the communists destroy each other.
Hoover was right about Hitler’s push for Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine. But he didn’t anticipate that Poland would fight as it did. And he didn’t see that the United Kingdom and France would join the fight as they would, with Hitler marching west thanks to a free hand in the east due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a short-lived nonaggression pact with Joseph Stalin.170 Reflecting later on his visit’s terrible timing, “I of course did not then know that Hitler had already determined upon his barbarous invasion of Austria to take place a few days later. He certainly did not confide in me.”171
War was coming for Europe. Hoover didn’t want Roosevelt to lead America into it. With the 1938 midterms behind them, the Republicans looked like they might have a chance in 1940. The freshmen Republican senators included Ohioan Robert Taft, the son of former president William Howard Taft and a rising star. His nickname was “Mr. Republican.” And with a new generation coming to power, the Grand Old Party might have some life in it yet.172
Hoover took credit for the GOP’s newfound relevance. The Quaker allowed himself a moment of uncharacteristic vanity, telling a friend, “I am getting an enormous amount of mail insisting that I carried the [1938] election.” But, he remarked, “I haven’t seen any account of that in the newspapers.”173
Back from Europe and thinking this might be his moment, Hoover contemplated his most serious potential run for a nonconsecutive term yet. Foreign policy was on the ballot, and he had both experience and international standing. Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland, and Great Britain had declared war on Germany. Imperial Japan was marching through Asia. “We can make war,” the noninterventionist Hoover warned, “but we do not and cannot make peace in Europe.”174
He did not want to throw his hat into the ring unless he was asked. That strategy may have been appropriate for 1936, but it was a miscalculation now. A small group of supporters called the Republican Circles tried to lay the groundwork for a Hoover run, with some support in the West.175 But there was no grassroots movement. Alfred Landon, the failed Republican nominee of 1936, said the idea of either of them running would be like “two undertakers fighting over the corpse” of the Republican Party.176
Hoover intended to fight, and positioned himself as a leader of the noninterventionist camp. In February 1939, he spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations, telling the audience that waging war would require the United States to transform itself “into practically a Fascist state.”177 With most Americans wanting to avoid another war in Europe, the Los Angeles Times described Hoover’s remarks as “the most illuminating and penetrating analysis of our mis-called foreign policy yet made by anyone.”178 The former president made his case in columns with titles like “Shall We Send Our Youth to War?” which reminded readers of the terrible toll of World War I.179
For the first time since 1928, the American people sided with Hoover. Even after Hitler invaded Poland, 48 percent held that the United States should not get involved. That number climbed to 71 percent after Poland surrendered.180
Even if Hoover shared that sentiment against military involvement, he saw the suffering in Europe and favored humanitarian relief. He helped establish the Polish Relief Commission to feed Polish children under German occupation. When the Soviet Union, an empire with 170 million people, invaded Finland, a nation of 4 million, on November 30, 1939, he raised nearly $4 million. He sent food, medicines, and other supplies to the besieged Finns.181
To the world’s surprise, Finland fought bravely and made the Soviets pay a heavy price for every inch of Finnish soil. When the 105-day assault was done, Helsinki’s losses would stand at twenty-five thousand, while Moscow’s were closer to two hundred thousand, and many more Soviets succumbed to frostbite.182 Soviet propaganda had called the invasion a humanitarian intervention. In response, the plucky Finns dubbed the bombs being dropped on their cities “Molotov’s breadbaskets,” after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. They then christened their new weapon of choice, the “Molotov cocktail.”183
While the West did not send troops or weapons, Hoover’s humanitarian work did not go unnoticed. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt advised her husband to explore whether he could work with Hoover on relief, but both men were mutually suspicious and neither wanted it. Hoover refused to interact with Roosevelt through an intermediary. He worried that FDR would use him for political advantage in the 1940 election.184 President Roosevelt decried the Soviet’s “dreadful rape of Finland,” but he did not want to work with his defeated rival.185
Hoover’s humanitarian work also got in the way of his political ambitions. Finland had taken his attention away from the race for the Republican nomination. Any momentum for his candidacy was fading. Other candidates were gaining steam.
With the Winter War in Finland over, Hoover closed his relief mission and hired a pollster.186 But it was too late for him. Candidates like Robert Taft, Thomas Dewey, and the dark horse Wendell Wilkie were on the ascent. Hoover’s only hope was a deadlocked convention that would make him the compromise candidate, or the candidate of last resort.187
The Republican convention commenced in June. It was the first convention ever broadcast on television.188 When it began, the former president languished at 2 percent in the polls. But with a national audience watching, he hoped a speech at the convention would improve his standing. With the right message, he might be drafted as the nominee.189
But there was one big problem with this plan. When he rose to speak, no one knew what he was saying. His microphone malfunctioned. The audience shouted, “We can’t hear you! Louder!” Hoover’s presidential hopes went out with an inaudible whimper.190
He was stunned by what had happened, and believed his opponents, possibly a mechanic under orders of a Wilkie staffer, sabotaged his microphone.191 Whatever the case, Hoover received just seventeen votes on the first ballot, the lowest of any contender.192 Indiana businessman Wendell Wilkie and Senator Robert Taft battled it out. Wilkie, the more interventionist candidate, won on the sixth ballot. The New York Times called this outcome “one of the greatest upsets in the history of the convention system in America.”193
Wilkie was an odd pick for the Republicans. He’d never held elected office. He’d never worked in government. And he’d never served in the military. Not only that, as a younger man, he was a socialist who voted for William Jennings Bryan. He’d only recently become a Republican. A Republican leader commented of the Wilkie nomination, “I don’t mind the Church converting a whore, but I don’t like her to lead the choir on the first night.”194
It wasn’t clear what role, if any, Hoover could play. He wanted Roosevelt to lose. But he also worried that Wilkie was an interventionist. However, Wilkie told reporters that he wanted Hoover to campaign for him, and the former president did give a few major addresses. Hoover even encouraged Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes to resign from the bench and campaign for Wilkie in hope that such a prominent Republican voice could help deny FDR a third term. Hughes declined the request and Hoover came to regret making it.195
Another Roosevelt victory wasn’t guaranteed. His vice president, John Nance Garner, thought his boss wasn’t going to run, and attempted to secure the nomination himself. The fact that Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term caused alarm in many circles. Grover Cleveland’s widow, Frances, now in her seventies, told her children not to vote for Roosevelt in 1940. She remined them, “Your father never approved of a third term.” Four years later, when they asked why they were now allowed to vote for Roosevelt, she responded, “Your father never said anything about a fourth.”196
When all the votes were tallied, Roosevelt won a third term. Hoover was disappointed, but he didn’t despair. The results in 1940 were closer than they’d been in either 1936 or 1932. Wilkie was a liberal Republican. The increasingly conservative Hoover believed that his defeat was further evidence that voters wanted a real contrast with Roosevelt.197
Herbert Hoover turned sixty-seven years old in 1941. He knew he wasn’t going to be president again. It may have been a relief. He would not seek public office again. Instead, he’d focus on advocating his ideas through writing what would become a six-volume memoir, speaking, and working to correct what he saw as mistakes in the historical record about his presidency.198 Meanwhile, the Battle of Britain was fought throughout the 1940 campaign season. And though Britain had survived this onslaught, it couldn’t hold on for much longer without American intervention. Hoover wanted to be heard, but he also yearned to serve.
As the 1940 election approached, Hoover’s energy, work ethic, and desire to serve the public intensified. A big part of this was his hope that, if Wendell Wilkie won, he could move to Washington and take a position in the new administration. Instead, after the Republican’s defeat, Hoover took his crusade north of the capital to Manhattan. He and Lou Henry settled into the four-bedroom suite 31-A at the Waldorf Astoria. With a view overlooking Park Avenue, the orphan from Iowa had neighbors like Cole Porter and the Shah of Iran.199 He paid for the company—$32,000 a year in rent. But despite the lavish setting, these were years of frustration for Hoover.
While the United States was neutral, the world was at war. Witnessing the destruction in Europe and Asia, Hoover wanted to lead a new humanitarian mission to help those living under Nazi occupation. But America was on the sidelines, and he desperately asked a friend, “Can you believe the spiritual leadership of America has so lost its bearings as to be opposed even to an effort to help those who lie in the ditch?”200
He blamed Roosevelt, telling Secretary of State Cordell Hull, “I know tens of millions of Americans would also be shocked…. History will never justify the government of the United States siding with the starvation for these millions.”201 The Roosevelt administration aided Britain militarily through the Lend-Lease Act, but the humanitarian mission Hoover wanted didn’t happen.
What Hoover feared most was that the United States would have to fight Germany and Japan.202 That fear was soon realized, not due to any policy of the Roosevelt administration, but by Japan’s decision to launch a surprise attack against the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. When the smoke cleared, 2,403 Americans were dead. The U.S. Pacific fleet was crippled. America would soon be at war on two continents.203
The attack on Pearl Harbor took Washington by surprise. Hoover didn’t hear about it for hours. He and Lou Henry were in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, having lunch with friends. As the Japanese fighters left behind their smoldering targets, Mr. and Mrs. Hoover were headed home for New York. Enjoying himself, he’d asked her not to turn on the radio. It was such “a peaceful and happy weekend,” he later recalled.204
When they returned to Manhattan, the quiet was over. They were greeted by a gaggle of reporters at the Waldorf. Cameras flashed and the journalists asked the former president a slew of questions for which he was unprepared. “What do you think of the war?” one asked. “What war?” Hoover replied, not knowing that the USS Arizona lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.205 When he learned what had happened, he issued a statement in support of the president. He concluded, “We will have victory.”206
The anti-interventionist cause died at Pearl Harbor. But the America First crowd’s words lived on. Hoover had already turned in the manuscript for his next book, America’s First Crusade, before Pearl Harbor. The book examined the history of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, making the case against military intervention. Two months earlier, the argument might have been well received. Now the message landed with a thud.207 The New York Times critic wrote scathingly, “From our only living ex-president we might well expect in this grim hour some words that would help awaken the country to the gravity of its danger… and that would bind us closer to our democratic Allies. We have instead a volume that will make judicious friends of Mr. Hoover grieve.”208
The book’s timing could not have been worse. But once the United States was at war, Hoover wanted victory, and to be of service. Bernard Baruch, a Roosevelt appointee, was tasked with leading the office of war mobilization. He advised the president that Hoover had assisted with mobilizations during World War I. He said that enlisting a prominent Republican could be a powerful show of unity.209 But Roosevelt would not budge. When Baruch presented his idea, the commander in chief snapped at him, “I’m not Jesus Christ. I’m not raising Hoover from the dead.” That was the end of the discussion.210 Hoover might have been able to do some good. But Roosevelt had no interest in putting politics aside, even then.
Millions of Americans were fighting on three continents. Hoover watched on the sidelines in horror. He saw the combat losses, as well as the untold millions of civilian men, women, and children who were dying or suffering in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The Great Humanitarian had no role to play. He despaired and wrote to a friend, “I am convinced that you and I are not going to be allowed to take any part in this war whatever.”211
Where he could, he contributed. He wrote articles and worked on his memoirs. With the assistance of Hugh Gibson, a former Charles Evans Hughes clerk, he drafted The Problems of a Lasting Peace, a work of applied history that examined what it would take to prevent a new war after the defeat of Germany and Japan. He supported humanitarian works where he could.212
His life changed on a chilly January day in 1944 when Lou Henry returned home late to the Waldorf Astoria after a concert featuring harpist Mildred Dilling. That evening, Mrs. Hoover’s husband found her on the floor of their suite, barely registering a faint pulse. She had collapsed and died of a heart attack on January 7.213 In a rare communication, Franklin Roosevelt sent his predecessor a message: “To you and all who mourn with you the passing of a devoted wife and Mother, I offer the assurance of heartfelt sympathy in which Mrs. Roosevelt joins me.”214
This was the end of a forty-four-year marriage. Even after she passed, Hoover learned something new about the woman he’d met in a geology lab back at Stanford.215 After her funeral he sorted through Mrs. Hoover’s belongings and found a drawer filled with checks written out to her, totaling several thousand dollars. Over the years, she’d lent friends money. Whenever they’d tried to pay her back, she’d accepted their checks so as not to embarrass them. But she didn’t cash them. She turned her loans into gifts.216
There was an election ten months away, and Hoover, still mourning, issued a statement that he was not seeking the nomination. He did not plan to advise any candidates.217 His life as a politician was over. He did speak at the Republican convention a few weeks after the D-Day invasion,218 but his remarks were less partisan, and he reminded the audience that “millions of sons of both Republicans and Democrats are fighting and dying side by side…. They want to be free Americans again.”219
The governor of New York, Thomas Dewey, was the Republican nominee that year. Dewey, fearing any public association with the former president, asked Hoover not to campaign for him, and his team didn’t even allow Hoover’s sons to take a photo with the Republican nominee at the convention.220 Hoover had been out of office for twelve years, but he was still a political liability. When he dedicated a memorial in Charleston, West Virginia, and received a twenty-one-gun salute, one man commented, “By gum, they missed him.”221
Dewey’s assessment was cruel, but correct. Roosevelt loved invoking Hoover’s name, and still spoke as if he were running against his rival from 1932. In his own acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, Roosevelt spoke about Hooverism, and when Hoover read the president’s remarks, the former president commented, “Apparently I was still as important as in 1932, 1936 and 1940.”222
Roosevelt’s playbook worked in the last three elections, and it worked a fourth time. Hoover gave two friends sealed envelopes with his prediction about what would happen in November: “This election is lost. It could have been won.”223 It was the closest yet for Roosevelt, but Dewey won just under 46 percent of the vote, not enough to carry the day.
Once again, the public did not know how sick the president was, and he was rarely photographed. He had new heart ailments and bronchitis. He was sixty-three years old and dying. A few months before the election, he had to be carried into Bethesda Naval Hospital, where a doctor examined him and heard fluid building up in his lungs. The doctor recommended bed rest, but a Roosevelt aide ignored the suggestion, “due to the exigencies and demands on the president.”224 The ailing president’s inauguration did not take place at the East Portico of the Capitol, in public view, but was rather a private, “homey little ceremony on the back porch of the White House,” in which he gave a five-minute address, the shortest since George Washington.225 He knew he was dying, but he’d run again to finish what he started, telling his son James, “I don’t dare shake the faith of the people that’s why I ran again…. The People elected me their leader and I can’t quit in the middle of the war.”226
Hoover knew the president was not well, even if the White House hid the extent of his condition. He wrote to his friend Felix Morley, the president of Haverford College, that he hoped Roosevelt “would live long enough to reap where he had sown.”227 That wish did not come true. Roosevelt suffered a stroke and died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, at 3:35 p.m.
Herbert Hoover was seventy years old, and when he heard the news, he issued a short statement: “Whatever differences there may have been, they end in the regrets of death.”228 There was sadness, but also relief that he’d outlived Roosevelt. He didn’t know what would come next, but he believed that Roosevelt’s passing would be “a severe blow to the collectivists—for a while.”229 He anticipated that his life might be about to be very different from what it had been for the last twelve years. “Now that there has been a change in Washington,” he told his sister, “I may be on the move often.”230
Harry Truman never expected to be president. When he had the number two job, he referred to himself as a “political eunuch.” Now that the top position was his, however, he reported that he “felt as though the moon and the stars and all the planets fell on me last night when I got the news. I have the most terribly responsible job any man ever had.”231
Roosevelt also never prepared Truman to be president. “I hardly know Truman,” Roosevelt had told an aide, just before adding him to the ticket. “He has been over here a few times, but made no particular impression on me.”232 With Roosevelt’s death, a parochial politician from Missouri with no national name recognition was now tasked with winning the Second World War and picking up the pieces when the fighting was done. There was only one man on earth who could empathize about what Truman was getting into—Herbert Hoover.
Hoover was skeptical of Truman. He was a political unknown, and Hoover assessed him to be a “dual personality,” with both “amiability and goodwill” and “little ideological conviction.”233 But it was a positive development for Hoover that Truman was not Roosevelt, and that the two had never been close. In fact, Truman had only served as vice president for eighty-two days. He’d never had a single one-on-one meeting with his boss.234 That daylight made Truman’s new responsibilities much more difficult, but it was welcome news to Hoover.
His old foe was dead, but Hoover didn’t expect to return to Washington. He’d sold his home at 2300 S Street NW, where he’d lived when he’d served as commerce secretary.235 Nevertheless, Hoover sent President Truman a note: “All Americans will wish you strength for your gigantic task…. You have the right to call for any service in aid of the country.”236 He had opened the door, and Truman made the call. With the battle against Japan still raging, Truman understood that he needed to prepare for peace before the war was over. Hoover could help.
Europe lay in ruins. Much of East Asia was destroyed. It was clear that the recovery would be a daunting task and that global famine was a real possibility. Meanwhile, the United States was protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and it was one of the few countries in the world that had a food surplus.237
Truman was from Missouri, an agricultural state, and he had served as an artillery officer during World War I. Like so many Americans, he remembered how Hoover had led famine relief in the aftermath of the First World War, and what he had done on the home front to enlist the help of everyday Americans.238 With that history in mind, the president asked Secretary of War Henry Stimson to phone Hoover and ask him to come to Washington. Though Hoover had been waiting for such a call for twelve years, he said no. He needed the president to ask.239
Hoover’s insistence could be seen as standing on ceremony, or even vanity or childishness. It certainly didn’t reflect Quaker values of humility. But there was more to it. Truman had inherited Roosevelt’s staff, and like their old boss, they despised Hoover.240 Hoover was wary of any contact from a Democratic administration. For twelve years, he’d been the White House’s punching bag, and he was skeptical that was going to change so quickly. He didn’t want to be humiliated, and he believed that he was owed the courtesy of direct contact as the only living former president.
He soon learned that Truman was not Roosevelt, and that this new president didn’t have hostility toward him. They had a great deal in common. They’d both grown up in Midwestern farming communities. They’d both seen the devastation of World War I, Hoover in his relief work and Truman as a young artillery officer. They’d both lived in FDR’s shadow. Neither enjoyed that experience.241
On May 24, Truman drafted a note to his only living predecessor:242 “If you should be in Washington I would be most happy to talk over the European food situation with you. Also it would be a pleasure to me to become acquainted with you.”243 The note was simple, direct, and from the president. It was what Hoover needed. He accepted the invitation and returned to the White House on May 28, 1945, for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933.244
Though it was the same building, the world was different. The Nazis had surrendered to the Allies. Now the job in Europe was what one American general called the “logistics of peace,”245 a subject that Truman and Hoover spoke about for nearly an hour. Though they’d never met, and the conversation was all business, it went well. The former president came prepared and made recommendations about how to prioritize food aid to Europe.246
Both Truman and Hoover saw the outlines of the coming of the Cold War, and it was clear that Europe would be divided between the democratic West and the communist East. If the United States got the recovery wrong, the Soviet Union would take advantage. “Bare subsistence meant hunger,” Hoover warned Truman, “and hunger meant communism.”247
After the meeting, Truman described his encounter with Hoover as “most pleasant and satisfactory.” Hoover followed up with an eighteen-page memo summarizing his ideas, but he didn’t expect much follow-up, and he believed that Truman “was simply endeavoring to establish a feeling of good will in the country.” What he’d missed was how valuable the meeting was for Truman, who later recalled, “[Hoover] helped me to review the world food-distribution problem, which he knew from one end to the other.”248
Before he could focus on winning the peace, Truman had to win the war in the Pacific. Victory came faster than many had expected, after August 6, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. After that, Stalin declared war on Japan on August 8. The day after, a second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered on August 15. World War II concluded with Allied victory, and General Yoshijiro Umezu and Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu of imperial Japan signed the document, making their capitulation official on September 2, all within the first five months of the Truman presidency.249
Herbert Hoover had prayed for the war to end, but not like this. He wanted total military victory, but when he saw the use of nuclear weapons, he was horrified, writing that the “indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.” He warned of a world that saw the proliferation of the bomb: “If it comes into general use, we may see all civilization destroyed.”250
No matter how it ended, the war was over, and the postwar world was coming into view. In February 1946, Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson called Hoover to tell him that the president wanted to make him the honorary chairman of the new Famine Emergency Committee. Truman followed up, promising Hoover that this would not be a sinecure—there was real work to do, and Hoover could lead it.251
The seventy-two-year-old Hoover traveled to Washington. He was coming off of a fishing trip, and he looked “tanned and fit” when he met with Truman on March 1, with the energy and hope of a younger man on a new assignment.252 There was a group of outside experts who advised that food crises in Europe and Asia could lead to more than a million deaths if America did not take action. To Truman, this was “the most important meeting we had held in the White House since I had become president.”253
If Hoover was going to take the job, he wanted to be empowered, not subject to vetoes from agencies like the State Department. He wanted a line to Truman, and Truman was ready to give Hoover the lead, telling him, “You know more about feeding nations and people than anybody in the world.”254
It’s what Hoover wanted to hear, both because he knew he could deliver and because it coddled a badly bruised ego. Two weeks later, with the president’s mandate in hand, he boarded the “Faithful Cow,” a U.S. Army C-54 transport plane, headed for Europe. For the next fifty-seven days, he traveled the world, traversing thirty-five thousand miles and twenty-two countries on three continents. His goal was to understand the needs and to rally support for famine relief, both at home and abroad. He gave speeches, hosted press briefings, and met with seven kings and thirty-nine prime ministers. Some of the people he met along the way were the children or grandchildren of people he’d helped feed during World War I.255 A quarter of a century after he’d earned the nickname the Great Humanitarian, Hoover emerged from his exile and returned to the work he loved.
The conditions on the ground varied from country to country. Much of Western and Northern Europe, including Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden, was well on the way to recovery. But the situation elsewhere was more dire, and infant mortality rates ranged from twenty per one thousand in central Europe, to as high as fifty per one thousand in the east.256 Hungry men lined up for blocks in Paris, waiting for beans and gruel. When Hoover witnessed a food riot in Italy, he persuaded the pope to make an address urging Catholics to restore calm.257 In Germany, he visited the chancellery, the site of his meeting with the Führer eight years prior, which now was bombed to smithereens, and which Hoover called “as ersatz as Hitler himself.”258
He was seeing a Europe that most Americans did not know, and he wanted the American people to understand why their support was needed, and in their interest. On Good Friday, President Truman gave a radio address explaining that “America cannot remain healthy and happy in the same world where millions of human beings are starving.”259 Hoover followed up with a speech from Cairo, after having persuaded Egypt to export three hundred thousand tons of grain to needy countries. In his radio address, Hoover was specific, noting the exact number of calories being consumed in different parts of the world, and outlining which countries, including the United States, had the capacity to meet the demand.260
None of this was new to Hoover. During World War I, Americans had answered Hoover’s calls for “Meatless Mondays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays,” in order to have a surplus to ship to Europe. But the public was less receptive in 1946. Now Hoover was not the trusted messenger he once was, and after fifteen years of the Depression and war, they were not as willing to make sacrifices.261
In need of more public support, the president asked Hoover to come home and speak directly to the American people, to rally support.262 But Hoover was full of humanitarian zealotry and didn’t want to cut his mission short. He believed that the task of seeing what was happening in Asia was as important as Europe.263 With Truman’s permission, he continued to India, where he met with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.264 When he visited China, then engaged in a civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists, he sat down with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and General George Marshall. He closed the Asian portion of his trip in Korea and Japan, where he met with General Douglas MacArthur, who had served Hoover as the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, and who—under Hoover’s direction—had forced the Bonus Army out of its camps in Washington.265
The world after the war would look very different if the relief mission failed. As Hoover told Marshall, “It is useless to build a democracy over a cesspool of poverty, starvation and its consequent breeding of hate and antagonisms.”266 He continued home to San Francisco, and then to the White House to tell Truman what he’d seen of the post–World War II world.267
When Hoover entered the Oval Office, he had a better understanding of what was happening on the ground around the world than the commander in chief, or any of his top advisors. Truman had only traveled outside of the United States once as president, for the Potsdam Conference in May.268 His predecessor’s firsthand accounts were all the more important. As he later recalled, “Mr. Hoover’s report outlined a country-by-country, month-by-month minimum program,” which was “invaluable… in planning the measures that had to be taken for the months ahead.”269
Hoover’s report made it clear that the United States could not prevent global famine alone. With that in mind, Hoover boarded a plane bound for Argentina, another one of the few countries with a food surplus.270 He touched down in Buenos Aires on June 6, forty-eight hours after dictator Juan Perón had taken power. The president had sent Hoover to Argentina, but the State Department wanted him nowhere near what could easily become a diplomatic crisis due to an unfavorable new government. True to his word, Truman vetoed Foggy Bottom’s objections and endorsed Hoover’s visit.271
The State Department tried to sabotage Hoover’s mission. He may have been a former president and the emissary of the current president, but the U.S. ambassador did not meet him at the airport, instead dispatching a low-level staffer in what must have been the highlight of the lucky young foreign service officer’s career. When Hoover asked the ambassador for help arranging a meeting with Perón, he was told it could take a few days to set up and might not even be possible. Frustrated but undaunted, Hoover instead called Mexico’s ambassador to Argentina, who arranged the meeting with Perón in twenty minutes.272
The Argentine dictator didn’t impress Hoover. But his wife, Eva Perón, did. Mrs. Perón struck Hoover as “an intelligent woman and very cordial.” But her husband had the power, and Hoover worked to ingratiate himself at a formal dinner, where he was given the 196th spot out of 216 seats. Hoover didn’t mind the slight, writing that he would have “eat[en] even Argentine dirt if I could get the 1,600,000 tons” of grain that was needed. It worked, and Argentina agreed to export grain, in exchange for the United States unfreezing gold deposits.273
Hoover returned to Washington pleased. He proved that former presidents—even unpopular ones—can be effective public servants. He also set a precedent that would later be adopted by Jimmy Carter, of former presidents meeting with American foes in the name of humanitarianism. Countries with food surpluses, including Canada, Argentina, and Australia, exported to needy countries. The United States alone shipped over 6 million tons of grain overseas. “Yours was a real service for humanity,” Truman told Hoover. “Without your efforts… the suffering abroad would have been much greater.”274
Much of the world still suffered. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, large numbers of civilians were starving, and the post–World War II death toll from famine in Eastern-bloc countries like Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia may have exceeded 1 million lives.275 Meanwhile in China, the bloody civil war raged, and the communists under Mao used hunger as a weapon. In the city of Changchun alone, as many as 160,000 civilians starved to death during a five-month-long siege against the Nationalist-held city.276
Famine relief was also just one piece of the postwar reconstruction, and Hoover believed that the U.S. needed to help rebuild Europe so that it could be “a dam against Russian aggression.”277 Aid to Europe wasn’t just charity—it was an investment in security. Together with Senator Robert Taft, Hoover advocated for postwar reconstruction efforts. As Raymond Moley recalled, “It was Hoover’s report on his survey of the food situation in Europe for Truman, plus confidential information he gave Truman and Marshall, that formed the basis” for what became known as the Marshall Plan.278
Hoover could take some satisfaction in his work—the Great Humanitarian was not lost to the history books. No former president had ever acted as the global envoy for the White House, and he’d broken new ground, and done so in a bipartisan spirit. But the effort had taken a toll. He’d spent much of the winter in unheated hotels, shivering in bombed-out European cities.279 He was no longer the young man who’d traveled the world with Lou Henry. He’d flown through a blizzard over Newfoundland, which forced his pilot to make a speedy descent. The rapid change in air pressure burst Hoover’s eardrums, and he had to wear a hearing aid from then on.280
Truman and Hoover weren’t done with each other yet. The president called on Hoover to help reorganize a rapidly expanded executive branch, whose powers had expanded greatly, along with an ever-increasing number of agencies and executive branch personnel under Roosevelt.281 Recognizing the strain on the small White House staff even then, Roosevelt had convened a group of advisors called the Brownlow Committee, which summed up its findings clearly: “The president needs help.”282
Nearly a decade later, the president still needed help. Hoover was doubtful that the commission could be successful, but he obliged, telling reporters that this would be his last public service.283 But the work continued in one form or another until 1955. Their partnership was becoming a lasting friendship. They were one of the oddest couples in Washington, but Truman told a skeptical friend that, though Hoover may be “to the right of Louis the Fourteenth… he deserves to be treated with respect as an ex-President.”284
Truman even undid some of Roosevelt’s more excessive slights against Hoover. Early in his administration, Roosevelt’s interior secretary, Harold Ickes, had changed the Hoover Dam’s name to the Boulder Dam, despite the fact that Hoover had served as chairman of the Colorado River Commission and played a key role in the dam’s construction, which began during his administration in 1931, finished in 1935, and came online the following year. In a show of appreciation and respect, Truman restored its old name in April 1947.285 The president’s gesture didn’t go unnoticed. At the annual Gridiron Dinner, a high-profile event for Washington journalists, Hoover told the audience, “Amid the thousand crises which sweep upon us from abroad, [Truman] has… brought to the White House new impulses of good will toward men.” The president, also in attendance, scribbled a note to Hoover: “With esteem and keen appreciation to a great man.”286
Politics tested their friendship. When the Republicans won control of the House and Senate in 1946, it was clear that Truman couldn’t take his reelection in 1948 for granted.287 Hoover spoke at the Republican convention, but his remarks weren’t partisan, and Truman sent him a cable telling him that his speech “was the utterance of a statesman.”288 In public, however, Truman was still willing to go after the Democratic Party’s favorite bogeyman, and he repeatedly invoked the memory of “Hoover carts” in his stump speech, reminding his audience of the Great Depression and the former president’s role.289
This became a pattern, and Truman attacked Hoover on the campaign trail, describing him as “one engineer who really did a job of running things backward.”290 Hoover didn’t know what to make of these assaults, and came to think that Truman was a man who just couldn’t resist playing the politics. “One day I find Truman, a devoted public servant who really comes from the people,” he mused. “The next time I find him to be a Pendergast-machine politician who will do anything for a vote.”291
That Hoover’s name was still a partisan cudgel sixteen years after he left the White House, after a Great Depression and a world war and a major humanitarian effort, was a source of great sorrow and disappointment. But Truman was Hoover’s friend now, and besides, he thought the president wasn’t going to be reelected anyway. He had become less partisan in his old age, even though he had become more conservative. His skin had thickened, and even if at times old age offset that with a bit of crotchety snark, he seemed more able to roll with the punches.
Hoover wasn’t alone in that prediction. The Chicago Tribune preprinted its election coverage before the 1948 results were in, giving the story the infamous headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.” But Truman proved the naysayers wrong. Holding the Tribune aloft in unabashed triumph, he celebrated his 303 electoral votes to Thomas Dewey’s 189, while the Democrats retook the House and Senate.292
In victory Truman was ready to forget what he had done, and he wrote to Hoover as if he hadn’t bad-mouthed him on the campaign trail, telling him, “I believe we can really accomplish some good results.”293 Hoover confronted Truman about his campaign rhetoric, and the president apologized, making the excuse that he’d been reading from prepared scripts.294
Because he had been anticipating a Republican White House, the Hoover commission on reorganizing the executive branch had not yet released its first report. But with Truman back in for four more years, it published its findings that June, including 273 recommendations, 72 percent of which were implemented, including an aggregate of $7 billion worth of budget cuts and the creation of a new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the General Services Administration.295 This built on his postwar humanitarian work, which reminded the world of Hoover the Great Humanitarian, and the commission was now offering a reminder that he had been a successful business executive as well. Deep down, he hoped that by sandwiching his presidency in between great deeds, the world might forget about President Hoover and just remember Herbert Hoover.
Hoover had broken new ground for former presidents as public servants. Even though he was a Republican, he’d worked for a Democratic administration. Just as he hit his stride, Hoover found his ego once more tested with a chance to enter politics in 1949, when Senator Robert Wagner of New York retired and Governor Thomas Dewey offered to appoint him in Wagner’s place. The move would not have been unprecedented. Andrew Johnson had been elected to the Senate in his post-presidency. But Hoover turned it down, thinking it should go to a younger man, and John Foster Dulles got the seat, which he lost in the next election before becoming an influential secretary of state.296
Hoover was glad to be back in public service, but this didn’t mean he would become a desperate yes-man, either. He was prepared to say no, even to the president. During the Red Scare in the 1950s, Truman asked him to lead another bipartisan commission, this one tasked with looking into Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s allegations that there were communists at the State Department.297 Hoover, an anti-communist, declined to get involved, due to his worries about the civil rights implications and the politicization of the issue.298
The McCarthy hearings were important for another California Republican Quaker, a young congressman named Richard M. Nixon, who played a prominent role in the trial of Soviet spy Alger Hiss. In contrast to the bombastic and paranoid McCarthy, Nixon seemed serious and effective. The future president gained many admirers, including Hoover. When the guilty verdict against Hiss was announced, Hoover sent Nixon a telegram: “At last the stream of treason that has existed in our government has been exposed in a fashion all may believe.”299
With events like the Hiss trial and the vindication of Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, a communist defector and an editor at Time, the modern conservative movement was taking shape as both a force for anti-communism and resistance to the New Deal. For two decades, Hoover had played a role in midwifing the movement. But it still didn’t have a leader.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was not the conservatives’ first choice for president, or Hoover’s. The general’s victory in the 1952 election was bittersweet. Hoover had hoped for a Republican president for twenty years, but he’d wanted Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,”300 not the moderate Eisenhower. President Eisenhower would make peace with the New Deal. He also showed the Republicans how to compete and win.
During the 1952 primaries, Hoover had pushed hard for Taft. The Ohio senator entered the nomination contest with a strong chance, and he was aligned with Hoover on policy issues. Eisenhower entered the contest late, on June 4. And it soon became clear that Taft wouldn’t win the nomination, though Hoover scrambled with a group of GOP leaders in suite 31-A at the Waldorf to try for their second choice, General Douglas MacArthur, a neighbor in suite 37-A.301
Eisenhower was not a politician, but he had political cunning, defeating all comers and selecting the conservative Nixon as his running mate in order to gain support from Western delegates and to shore up his base among the anti-communist bloc. Hoover, used to being disappointed at Republican conventions, gritted his teeth and threw his support behind Eisenhower. He may not have liked Ike, but, “Being a Republican,” he stated, “I shall vote for the Republican ticket.”302
The 1952 election was a story of rising and falling political dynasties. Robert Taft, William Howard Taft’s son, failed to gain the Republican nomination. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had sponsored the bill for the Hoover Commission and managed Eisenhower’s campaign, lost his Massachusetts Senate seat to John F. Kennedy. Eisenhower’s opponent, Democrat Adlai Stevenson III, the grandson of Grover Cleveland’s vice president, went down to defeat. When the votes were in, American politics were remade.
Eisenhower won 55 percent of the popular vote and 442 votes in the Electoral College, making him the first Republican president since Hoover, and with a comfortable margin.303 Massachusetts congressman Joseph Martin, soon to be Speaker of the House, credited Hoover with making that victory possible. He argued that Hoover had kept the Republican Party alive during its wilderness years. “No one has contributed more to the upbuilding of the Republican Party than you have…. Tuesday was a great vindication to you,” Martin told him.304
The former president hadn’t played a prominent role on the campaign trail, but author Clare Boothe Luce noted that one Republican had been waiting twenty years for a Republican victory and suggested Eisenhower phone Hoover on election night. Eisenhower obliged and the president-elect told Hoover that he’d be calling him in the future for advice.305 He later tapped Hoover to lead another commission that built on his Truman-era work to reorganize the executive branch. The second Hoover Commission, though less successful than the first, published two volumes with recommendations on everything from civilian control of the military to the budget process.306 While 64 percent of the recommendations became law and resulted in $3 billion of budget cuts, the vast majority of those savings were later repurposed to fight the Korean War, which was an unwelcome outcome for a man who was all too familiar with the cost of war. When the work was nearly done, the now eighty-one-year-old Hoover breathed a sigh of relief. He was exhausted, and told the world, “I have never worked harder, nor longer hours than on the present job.”307
There were two firsts for Hoover during the Eisenhower presidency. For the first time since 1933, there was a Republican in the White House. And also for the first time since that same year, Hoover was no longer the sole living ex-president. Harry Truman was now also a member of what Hoover called “that most exclusive trade union.”308
They’d lost touch, but two acts of Congress brought Truman and Hoover together again. As president, Truman had decided to build a library for his papers on his own. In 1955, Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act, a new law that established a system of public and private support for presidential libraries that every president since has followed. Hoover had his archive on Stanford’s campus, but he helped Truman—who’d left office with a sub-30 percent approval rating—raise $200,000 for his own.309
The second law was the Former Presidents Act, which passed in 1958. For the first time, former presidents were provided pensions, starting at $25,000 a year.310 As the only two living former presidents, only Hoover and Truman were eligible. Hoover was much wealthier than Truman, a haberdasher before he entered politics, and he didn’t need the pension. But he accepted the money so as not to embarrass his friend or set unrealistic precedents, writing, “My case is not a precedent for public officials. No man can make any substantial savings from being President of the United States.”311
Both former presidents were showing signs of their age. When he heard that Harry Truman had recently broken two ribs while trying to get out of his bathtub, Hoover wrote him a humorous note, observing that “bathtubs are a menace to ex-Presidents.” He recalled his own experience falling into a tub during a relief mission to Venezuela, where he’d sustained several injuries at the time, including cracked vertebrae.312
Life without politics was simpler for Hoover. In the summers, he was in California, where he attended meetings of the Bohemian Grove, the men’s club in the Redwoods that had been a refuge and a place of annual pilgrimage. There he set up his Caveman Camp, named after a nearby statue of a prehistoric man. In this bucolic setting, he spent his days fishing and waxing philosophic with like-minded men, including many from his class at Stanford. During the winters, he could often be found likewise fishing in Florida, away from Washington. The rest of the year, he was in Manhattan, at home at the Waldorf in 31-A.313
He didn’t waste time. At age eighty-two, he told a young woman, “There is no joy to be had from retirement except by some kind of productive work. Otherwise, you degenerate into talking to everybody about your pains and pills and income tax.”314 He was at his desk most days by 6:00 a.m., and he wore a three-piece suit and hosted dignitaries visiting New York, now home to the United Nations. He often worked for twelve hours a day, reading papers and writing. Children wrote to him, and he’d reply to almost all with the same advice: “Work hard, study, and go fishing.” He smoked constantly, and the International Association of Pipe Smokers offered him the Pipe Smoker of the Year award.315
His real task was writing. He published a landmark book, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, in 1958, the first time that one former president wrote a book about another, although John Quincy Adams tried. Wilson was a progressive icon and Hoover’s conservatism had hardened, but he said his Democratic predecessor was “the only enduring leader of those statesmen who conducted the First World War and its aftermath of peacemaking.” Edith Wilson, then eighty-six years old, wrote to Hoover, “You seem to have really understood [my husband].”316
He kept writing his last words for two decades after the war. He published seven more books by 1964, including An American Epic, a four-volume set covering 1913 to 1963 in minute detail.317 His magnum opus, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War, remained unpublished until 2011, when it saw the light of day thanks to the work of historian George Nash.318 He was incredibly productive, and one of his research assistants from that time, Mary Louise, says that he was so prolific because he wanted to “set the record straight.”319
By 1960, a new generation that didn’t remember the Great Depression had come of age. Historians were starting to revisit Hoover and his legacy. While most still blamed Hoover, a few were breaking ranks, including Harris Gaylord Warren and his work Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression.320
The 1960 presidential election would be Hoover’s last. He knew both candidates well, as he was a friend of Joseph Kennedy, and once called his son, John F. Kennedy, his “favorite senator.”321 Hoover admired Nixon’s anti-communism, and the former president spoke in favor of his nomination at the Republican convention, but that speech was more a swan song than a rallying cry, as Hoover told the audience, “In each of your last three Conventions I bade you an affectionate good-bye. Unless some miracle comes to me from the Good Lord this is finally it.”322
There was no conservative standard-bearer in the 1960 election, as there hadn’t been one in 1952 or 1956. In the weeks before the election, Hoover joined a dinner at the Plaza Hotel hosted by a new magazine called the National Review and its young editor, William F. Buckley, who addressed the group and bemoaned the fact that there was no clear conservative candidate in the race. “We are all of us,” Buckley reported to the assembled conservatives, “in one sense out of spirit with history.”323
Neither candidate won a majority of the popular vote that November, and the electorate delivered the narrowest margin since Grover Cleveland’s victory over James Blaine in 1888. Razor-thin margins in places like Illinois, with a strong Democratic political machine, led to allegations of wrongdoing. When Kennedy was declared the winner, many Nixon supporters urged their candidate to challenge the results, but Nixon conceded to Kennedy early in the morning.324
Despite Nixon’s concession, the country remained divided, giving Hoover one last public role to play. Vice President Nixon was in Florida for a vacation and to lick his wounds. By coincidence, John F. Kennedy was vacationing nearby, and so, too, was Herbert Hoover. Ambassador Kennedy phoned Hoover to ask if he might arrange for Nixon to meet publicly with his son, in order to show the nation a display of friendship.325
More than willing to do so, Hoover called Nixon and practically ordered him, “I think we are in enough trouble in the world today; some indication of national unity are not only desirable but essential.” Nixon agreed, and the two candidates met in Key Biscayne, Florida, on November 14. The story was front-page news.326
As Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon presided over the Senate chamber during the counting of electoral votes on January 6, 1961. It was a painful moment, and he told the Senate, “In our campaigns, no matter how hard they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win.”327 Hoover admired Nixon, but thought his political career was over, and told him that he would “discover that elder statesmen are little regarded by the opposition party until they get over 80 years of age, and are harmless.”328
Hoover had gone from political pariah to national unifier and he had recovered the self-confidence to do it in the shadows. President Kennedy invited Hoover to be his guest at the inauguration, but bad weather forced his plane to turn back to Miami, and he sent his regrets: “I do wish you every blessing of the Almighty, and I am confident of your great success as our President.”329 When Kennedy offered Hoover a position as the honorary chairman of the newly created Peace Corps,330 he sent his regrets again—he was eighty-six, and he didn’t have another act of public service in him.331
The only thing that could make Hoover change his mind about not serving his country happened in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson became the president, the then eighty-nine-year-old Herbert Hoover wrote in distress to the White House: “I am ready to serve our government in any capacity, from office boy up.”332
Throughout his life, few things gave Hoover more satisfaction than being of service. He had what Harvard professor and social scientist Arthur Brooks has described as the “need to be needed… the essence of being alive… and a question of human dignity.”333 The thought of not having a purpose or meaningful work, as had often been the case for the twelve years of the Roosevelt presidency, was terrible.
When he couldn’t travel the world anymore, his home at suite 31-A was a place where presidents and would-be presidents came to seek advice and pay their respects. President Johnson visited in December 1963, along with Chief Justice Earl Warren. During the 1964 election, Richard Nixon visited to talk politics. Republican candidate Arizona senator Barry Goldwater—a conservative, like Hoover—called to keep him up-to-date.334
Hoover couldn’t make the 1964 Republican convention due to his health, but he sent a message to be read by Senator Everett Dirksen, who called Hoover “the grand old man of the grand old party.” Thirty years after his presidency, the delegates gave Hoover an ovation in absentia.335
Three months later, news of Hoover’s passing came in the form of a short note from his doctor. It included only his name, the date, and the time of death: “President Hoover. Oct. 20, 1964. Time: 11:35 A.M.” Hoover had slipped into a coma in his suite. His two sons were by his side. The Goldwater and Johnson campaigns suspended operations to mourn his passing, and both attended his funeral at St. Bartholomew’s in New York. His body was then transported to Washington, DC, where it was greeted by a twenty-one-gun salute and carried by a military escort to Capitol Hill, where he lay in state. He was laid to rest in West Branch, Iowa, at a gravesite he chose that overlooked the cottage in which he was born.336
After such a long and varied life, the country didn’t know what to make of Herbert Hoover at his passing. The New York Times remembered what had been called the “ ‘Hoover Depression’ by [Hoover’s] political opponents.” But, the obituary continued, “later judgments… have suggested that he was the victim of events that coincided with his tenure.” The paper noted what the thirty-first president had accomplished in his thirty-one years after the White House, and reported that his service to Truman and Eisenhower had “restored him in the affection of millions.”337
There is a powerful lesson in Herbert Hoover’s story. He learned how quickly a life’s reputation can be destroyed, and while he never fully understood how it happened, he focused on the forward. He was determined to once again serve the world, the country, and his party, but recognized that he’d have to work harder than what would be expected of someone at his stage of life. Hoover had an almost dogmatic sense of purpose and view about what needed to be done and what role he could play. The closer he got to recovering what he had lost, the harder he worked. And, as mortality approached, he worked even harder.
Two weeks after Hoover’s death, the 1964 election was over. Barry Goldwater carried only six states, the same number that Hoover had won in his matchup against FDR in 1932.338 Running on its most conservative platform since the 1920s, the Republican Party again looked as dead as it had been the day Hoover left office.
One of the states Goldwater did win was Georgia, with its twelve electoral votes.339 While Goldwater wouldn’t go on to the White House, the voters of Georgia’s 14th district that year sent Hoover’s fellow engineer Jimmy Carter back to Atlanta for a second term in the state senate.340
Twelve years later, the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, was headed to the White House with a story as improbable as the story of the orphan son of a blacksmith who became a multimillionaire globe-trotting humanitarian and president.
Jimmy Carter began his presidency in much the same way that Herbert Hoover did—after one term, unpopular, and with the dawn of a new political age unfolding after him, be it the Age of Roosevelt or the Age of Reagan. Carter’s active post-presidency, at more than forty-two years, was also the only one longer than Herbert Hoover’s. In that time, he’d transform how America understood his legacy, and what is possible in the post-presidency.