Rebuilding the 'Great Engineer's' Reputation

...Without quite intending to, however, Smith shows that his subject needed no Democratic propagandists to make him a symbol of philosophic detachment from suffering...

...Nevertheless, he became steadily more vindictive and self-deceiving, twice even deluding himself about his chances of regaining his party's Presidential nomination...

...George Creel, who served under Wood-row Wilson, said Hoover "gave him the feeling of a cockroach sliding around a porcelain bathtub...

...He was often undiplomatic...

...Since the former Chief Executives would not represent any state, they would not unbalance present Senate representational arrangements...

...certainly, a former Commander-in-Chief should have known better...

...We now have several men who would be eligible to play the kind of role I have in mind, each in his own way able and eager to take a more prominent part in our national dialogue...

...In fact, he lacked the personal qualities required for leadership in the Depression more than the political imagination...

...At first, Hoover had deep reservations about the Marshall Plan, though he finally supported it as " a maj or dam against Russian aggression...

...Far more constructive—the highlight of Hoover's post-Presidential career—was his chairmanship of the commission established by Truman to reorganize the Federal bureaucracy...

...Nor can any reassessment of history eradicate the memory of the "Hoovervilles" that proliferated during his term...

...Of course, almost any politician can be criticized for contradictions and inadequacies...

...For in focusing in on Hoover's life after 1933 he shows us that the experience and perspective of ex-Presidents could help compensate for the way our constitutional system, with its division of powers between the Executive and Congress, tends to impose a purely legislative mindset on our lawmakers...

...During the Korean War, he suggested that radioactive dust be spread along the Yalu River to seal off Korea from China...

...Of Roosevelt's Lend-Lease program he said: "Western civilization has consecrated itself to making the world safe for Stalin...

...Instead of the United Nations, he favored a so-called Council of Free Nations, "agrand coalition" that would have pooled the Free World's "moral, spiritual, economic, and military weapons against Communist aggressors"—and would inevitably have exacerbated international discord...

...Still, Smith hardly persuades me that Herbert Hoover achieved his ideal—to be an "uncommon man" —at least if we mean by this someone capable of rising above self-pity, conventionality and muddle-headedness...

...Concentrating on the post-White House years, from 1933-64, Smith, unfortunately, does not seem to have found his man...

...But hebe-came most identified with the Fortress America concept of responding to the Cold War, rather than bipartisan initiatives to counter Communism in Europe...

...John Quincy Adams' 17 distinguished years in the House demonstrate what they might achieve as members of Congress...

...Since 1975 the literature on our 31st President has granted him a certain amount of posthumous vindication, or at any rate sympathy...

...Joan Hoff Wilson, David Burner, George Nash, and Gary Dean Best have produced rehabilitative biographies...

...In An Uncommon Man Robert Norton Smith—who earlier wrote the one solid life we have of Thomas E. Dewey —sets out less to present a new interpretation of Hoover than to paint a more personal and attractive portrait of him...

...Indeed Smith's major contribution may be something he never discusses, yet is implicit in these pages...

...Ellis Hawley and others have examined particular aspects of his public activity...

...But it never subdued his head...

...he thought, for example, that a Jewish state could be set up in the eastern highlands of Africa...

...He was remarkably obtuse about Nazi Germany, approving of the Munich Pact because he thought it would give Hitler easier access to the Soviets...

...In Smith's words, "His heart went out to those in need...

...he had little of the public-relations sense so vital in a democracy...

...In the conclusion to her Beyond the Presidency, Marie Hecht observed: "Once having held the top job in the United States, no ex-President can hope for obscurity...

...He reminds us that the "New Deal did not succeed in unearthing any evidence of wrongdoing against the former President...

...If he is looking down upon all this, he is no doubt somewhat bitter that it came to pass after he had departed from the earth...

...Hoover's reaction to Hitler's atrocities against the Jews, which were already fairly obvious before 1939, was strangely dispassionate...

...author, "Eisenhower and the American Crusades," "JFK" "If you live long enough," Herbert Hoover once told journalist Walter Tro-han, "the wheel turns, the pendulum swings...

...In any case, few of them do...

...Relations with his Republican successors—Alf Landon, Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower—were tense...

...After reading Richard Norton Smith's biography, one cannot help wondering how much this would have benefited Herbert Hoover in the last three decades of his life—and the country as well...

...Smith tells us: "For nearly half a century she remained at his side, uprooting her family whenever a new muse or continent beckoned...

...And he was extremely tolerant of Joe McCarthy, a posture Smith too easily dismisses...

...Quite apart from Hoover's failures in office, his record on the great issues of the day was deeply flawed...

...The book is especially successful in bringing a fresh dimension to this much forgotten woman...

...His desire for self-justification was so obsessive that he would show of f a letter he carried in his pocket from a California lumberman who had praised one of his radio speeches and his belief in old-fashioned principles...

...Reviewed by Herbert S. Parmet Professor of history, Queensborough College...

...And so it has...

...Although revisionists can pay homage to Hoover's durability, intelligence, integrity, and organizing talent as head of the World War I Belgian relief effort, they cannot conceal his limitations...

...Senator-at-large service would give them an institutionalized opportunity to participate in high politics...

...At atimeof relentless provocations from the Axis he was among those who supposed that if the United States, Britain and France stepped aside, the two dictatorships would be obliging enough to destroy each other...

...But it'crafted an image that haunted Hoover and his party, estranging one from the other and both still further from popular influence or political appeal...

...She eased his torment, salved his wounds...

...He also sided with General Douglas MacArthur when President Harry Truman relieved him of his duties...

...Or his rigidity, one might add...

...On the whole, the book seems to miss its mark...

...they, after all, had thwarted his attempt to undo the repudiation of 1932...

...it lacks the kind of penetrating analysis found in other recent works...

...What these works have in common—aside from drawing on materials only recently available at the Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, and the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California—is their avoiding the kind of vituperation that was common when the "Great Engineer" was alive...

...Winston Churchill called him a "son of a bitch...

...Perhaps we should offer every retiring President the choice of becoming a lifetime senator-at-large, with a full staff, voting rights and a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, where advantage could be taken of previous primary responsibility for conducting foreign policy...

...Once cast out of the White House, Hoover turned into a pathetic and isolated figure sustained emotionally by his wife, the devoted and remarkable Lou Henry...