Word: hooverness
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...unremarked phenomenon of Herbert Hoover is that he has been so long out of a regular job and has kept himself so busy. It is 19 years since he became, at 58, that white elephant of American politics, an ex-President (the only living one). Most recently he has been living and working in the tower of Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, mainly putting together the notes which he has jotted down during ocean voyages and waits in railway and air terminals. The notes are his recollections of 70-odd years-his memoirs, his convictions and his self-vindication...
...Hoover's basic convictions have not changed, although they have suffered many interpretations. His enemies attach him as a hopeless reactionary. ("That old cuss word 'reactionary,' " he notes.) His friends see him as a last hope of sensible liberalism. He is a large, whitehaired man, who appears to be a little disconsolate in the company of strangers. His voice is low and husky, and as he talks, he abstractly fingers a couple of worn coins. As on an old coin, the familiar face has grown a little indistinct. Heavily framed spectacles sometimes slip down...
...Hoover is an orderly man. At the bottom of him is his Quakerism. Not all reformers look like Mahatma Gandhi. Some reformers, of a statistical turn of mind, look like Herbert Hoover. The Indian and the engineer once met. Hoover was pleased to discover that each carried the same make of cheap watch (Gandhi's was pinned to his loincloth). "A mark of our common humility," said Hoover. The urge to straighten things out, shared by Gandhi, is what has kept Hoover so busily at work...
...limited himself to exhortation. He has thrown himself into many worthy projects: into programs of relief for the hungry; into studies of such topics as revolution, war & peace, and the chaos in the executive departments of the U.S. Government (from this last, he produced the monumental Hoover Commission Report); into organizations like the Boys' Clubs and the Salvation Army, in which he takes his participation very seriously. A friend remembers him, travelling west by train one day, getting a wire from the Salvation Army which urged him to buy a doughnut in the Army's doughnut campaign. Hoover...
...complex character, but there is another Hoover-a man of deep personal attachments and sense of family, a quietly prideful grandfather, a gentle sentimentalist. Although it is a private matter which only his intimates know about, he has supported, sometimes for long periods, numerous college classmates, old associates and relatives down on their luck. One of the great facts of Hoover's life was his devotion to his wife, who died in 1944. To Lou Henry Hoover he has dedicated one room of the Hoover Library at Stanford University, and there he has assembled a small collection...