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Home , Herbert Hoover, Hooverville, Hoover Commission

Herbert Hoover Dealing with disaster

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential

This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: When I think of , this is what I think.

SONG FROM ''

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It's a song from the musical, 'Annie.' The is raging, and there's a scene where stumbles into a , which is what they called the shantytowns that sprung up when millions of Americans lost their jobs and their homes and were starving on the streets during the Depression.

The word ‘Hooverville’ was, of course, a jab at President Hoover, who was in the as the country spiraled downward. So, this was basically the extent of my image of Hoover -- a failed president during the Great Depression. This week, we are going to get a much richer picture of him, starting with the fact that Hoover, like Annie, was an orphan.

I'm Lillian Cunningham with , and this is the 30th episode of “Presidential.”

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Last week with , we spent a lot of time talking about economics. So, this week, even though we're now at the Great Depression and there are a lot of interesting economic questions to explore, we're not actually going to get too into the weeds on economic policy.

Instead, I'm interested in the fact that Hoover entered the White House looking extremely qualified for the role. He was a self-made millionaire, an astute businessman. He had led the U.S. Food Administration. He had helped lead relief efforts in , and he had served as secretary of Commerce. So, why was his presidency so unsuccessful?

Exploring that question with me this week is biographer Rappleye. He recently published the book, 'Herbert Hoover in the White House.' So, Charles, thanks for being my guide for Hoover this week.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Nice to be here.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, let's just start at the beginning of his life.

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Yes.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, Herbert Clark Hoover was born in 1874 in a small town in , West Branch. I know that both of his parents died when he was young, but could you give me a bit more of a vivid picture of what his childhood was like?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: I mean, they were poor. And that was their life. It was in a poor community. His father was a small-time entrepreneur -- opened a blacksmith shop. Sold some dry goods. Hoover was 6 when his father died, and then it was three or four years later that his mother got sick and died. She was a Quaker who was invited to preach at meetings. In fact, that's when she got sick and died – she was walking home from a meeting a couple of miles away from West Branch.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: She caught pneumonia.

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: She caught pneumonia. Soon after that, he was sent out in care of an uncle to . So, Bert grew up pretty lonely. He had his older brother with him at first, but then they were separated. He helped his uncle in chores. It was not a warm environment. When he was 14 and 15, he was working at the counter for the land company that his uncle had started up, selling off lots. He slept on a cot behind the counter. He studied math in his spare time.

He didn't attend school after grade school. He spent all his time in the office. So, he was a very isolated fellow and socially held back. But in his 18th year, a college recruiter came through -- a guy representing the new College that was being started in Palo Alto in California. And somehow, he found Bert Hoover and administered a test to him and was impressed with his diligence in his industry and invited him to join the college -- with the one proviso that he had done poorly on the writing and English, so he had to get some tutoring.

He was a little bit handicapped in English. He had real trouble with it. After his four years at Stanford, his one barrier upon graduation was he was also held back to be tutored in English. And they had to give him dispensation to graduate.

And the irony being that later in his life, after his presidency, Hoover spent the rest of his years producing volumes and volumes of books -- taking the one thing that he was considered to be the least skilled at. Of all the intellectual endeavors he could have pursued, writing became his principal occupation. And it says something about Hoover, because Hoover is full of contradiction and never accepted the limits that he was faced with -- personally or otherwise.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, why don't we pause here for just one second. Why is the detail that he grew up Quaker important? You know, in a number of biographies about Hoover, that's that sort of a detail that's brought to the forefront. What insight does that give us about his character or his values -- the way he saw the world?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Certainly, his Quaker upbringing informed his worldview. He was a Pacifist.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 And that does not mean he was against war in any case, but he was always anti-militarism. But I think it's a mistake to consider Hoover an active Quaker. A number of biographers -- it's true -- have portrayed Hoover as the Quaker president and have looked for his character in light of his Quaker upbringing. But I think that has largely been over-emphasized. Herbert Hoover, after he left West Branch, had little to do with the Quaker church.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So he enters Stanford, and this is the very first class at . It's the year that it starts. And he ends up majoring in geology.

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Yes.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, he also falls in love with the only woman at Stanford, who's also a geology major. Her name was Lou Henry. Tell me a bit more about his temperament. If I were Lou sitting in one of these geology classes with him and then being asked out on a date by him, who's this man that I would encounter?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Well, he was shy and retiring, very sort of close-mouthed. But he was also very smart. He had a self-deprecating and warm sense of humor. He liked the outdoors -- he loved the outdoors, as did Lou. They shared that. I mean he was brilliant, and she was attracted to that. At one point on the campaign trail, somebody observed to Lou, 'Oh you're very accomplished as well. You've also got a geology degree at Stanford.'

She said, 'Yes, I majored in geology at Stanford, but I've majored in Herbert Hoover ever since.' She was very committed to Bert, and he graduated two years before she did and he left Stanford and toiled in mines in California.

He worked under a mining engineer who saw his talent, and received a query from a European firm seeking a manager for new mining operations in Australia. And Hoover went to Australia and then, after he'd been away for a couple of years, he proposed to Lou. And they went out to Australia and then Asia and together. They were running mining operations in China during the . And Lou was packing a pistol and minding the perimeter and feeding other ex- Pats who were trapped behind the lines, and it was an adventure. They lived a life of adventure together. They were in Russia. They were all over the world, and they had their two little children - - two boys.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I think I came across in my bit of research that, by the time they came back to the U.S., she could speak eight languages, and that there would be times when they would talk in Mandarin together when they didn't want people to overhear what they were saying to each other.

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Yes, she was quite a linguist. Also, she had great knowledge of botany, of biology. She was the leader on their collaboration, the hobby that they did together, which was to take an ancient Roman mining text and translate it for the first time. They used to give volumes as gifts to people.

They were celebrated in the world of mining and mineralogy. They were quite the accomplished couple, and Hoover had a consultancy with offices on six continents and headquarters in . And that's where he was when World War I broke out, and he moved into public life.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. So he ends up having this very successful career as a businessman, even though, all the way back when he was at Stanford, he was doing jobs on campus to try to pay for his schooling. He really is one of those stories of a self-made millionaire. So, how is it that he then transitions into public service?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: By age 40, he had made his fortune, and he was looking for a more useful role -- a public role. And his initial instinct was not to run for office. He was thinking of buying a newspaper. He was thinking of engaging in some kind of public life. He was in London, and he was talking this way, thinking about what his next move would be in terms of career, when the war broke out.

And very quickly, it appeared that there was something of a crisis for Americans stranded in Europe. And so, he and Lou became very active in setting up a sort of instant charity of providing for these people, finding places for them to stay, working on their transportation and giving them money to tide them over.

And they were excited and energized by this project of theirs that they had sort of fallen into. And the next thing that developed rather quickly was the appearance of a humanitarian crisis in . There was immediate prospect of starvation, and so Hoover got very active. In collaboration with the government of Belgium, which was a neutral government, he started a fundraising project: Belgian Relief. And it rapidly became one of the biggest operations during the war -- the biggest charity maybe the world had ever seen.

At one point, Hoover had 600 ships sailing under his neutral flag of Belgian Relief and getting boatloads of food into Belgium. It was a huge operation. He developed a cadre of people working under him, who were very loyal to him. It was probably Hoover's greatest hour. And he proved himself to be an amazing administrator of emergency situations. He came away with a couple of colloquial titles -- one was 'The Great Humanitarian' and the other was 'The Master of Emergencies.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And so, it's these humanitarian efforts that catch the eye of President at the time. And what's their relationship like? They belonged to different parties, even. Wilson was a Democrat. Hoover was a Republican. But he brings him into the folds of his administration, right?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: True. Although, at that point Hoover was not a Republican. Hoover was an ex- Pat. Hoover had no party. And so, when Woodrow Wilson brought him into his administration, Hoover was just the man from Europe.

And he came in. He was appointed as food administrator, and he was very successful there, as well -- just as in Belgian Relief. He was able to bring about substantial changes in American consumer habits. In light of the war effort, they were conserving on different things. Some days they were conserving on meat. He had 'Meatless Mondays,' and they were asking civilians not to use lard and not to use different things. And it was all voluntary, and that was a hallmark of Hoover's effort -- to avoid rationing, to avoid price controls, to use exhortation and publicity campaigns to get people to follow the new policies. The phrase came into usage to 'Hooverize.'

He became a very popular public figure. His reputation was for competence and for sobriety and for doing things the right way. Hoover became very famous during the war as a sort of do-good

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 public figure.

He was friendly with Woodrow Wilson. He wrote a book about Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson showed him a lot of respect. But this was all toward the end, and he supported Wilson in his effort to get the U.S. to sign on to the . And he was disappointed, as Wilson was, when that failed.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, by 1920, when Wilson is leaving office because of all these good deeds that, you know, have attracted some public attention to him, his name actually comes up as a potential Republican presidential candidate. But this is the year that Warren Harding ends up getting the nomination instead. Harding, when he's president, though, makes Hoover his secretary of Commerce, which is his next big government role.

Harding's administration overall was known for having a lot of scandal, but Hoover and the Commerce Department were one of the, sort of, rare exceptions.

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Yes.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, what was his tenure like as secretary of Commerce?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Harding -- when he was elected -- he went to Hoover and said he could have basically any position he wanted. He wanted Hoover in his Cabinet. And Hoover elected for Commerce, which was, at that point, the most recent and one of the least consequential Cabinet posts.

But Hoover changed that over the course of the next seven years. He was a dynamo as secretary of Commerce. And it was a time -- of course, the 1920s, the -- of amazing technological innovation and transformation. The advance of the automobile and the radio and aviation -- all of these things were dramatic. They were unexpected. And Hoover had a hand in implementing and managing and integrating all this stuff into the American economy. He was also obsessed with the idea of industrial waste, which he considered to be anything from labor strife to inefficiency.

And, again, continuing this process of making himself a household name. He was sort of the crown bureaucrat of this very bureaucratic era. The Department of Commerce grew dramatically under his tutelage. They warred with other departments for things like agricultural statistics. He was trying to steal them from the Ag department and put them under Commerce, and he rubbed some people the wrong way. He's sort of the Boy Scout who was always telling people what to do. But he was also very popular, and his reputation was for technical mastery and for competence.

And it sort of peaked in 1927 with the Mississippi flood, when President Calvin Coolidge sent him out to Mississippi to coordinate the disaster relief. And this was confirmation of his preeminent role in the Cabinet, and also of his role as master of emergencies.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: From what we see of him as a humanitarian during World War I and then leading the U.S. Food Administration and then as secretary of Commerce -- what's the leadership style that we're seeing emerge for him? It seems like someone who's proactive, jumping in and solving problems.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Absolutely -- all of that. And something of an autocrat, which is not part of his usual profile. But that was really his mode -- he would issue decisions, and he would have minions who would follow them closely and work very energetically to make them happen. He was very good at directing these kind of projects -- following instinct and going on his gut. That was his mode and it was very successful, all the way up to his presidency.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Underneath it all, what do you think was driving him? Do you think that he wanted power? He wanted to be in the center of things? Do you think he was just driven by the goals he was trying to accomplish? What fueled him?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Well, I do think his difficult childhood led him to a conflicted core, where he wanted attention; he wanted acknowledgement and some degree of adulation. But he's also very retiring. He remains socially awkward. One close friend called him a gregarious hermit. He would go off in the woods. He loved to go off in the woods -- where, a lot of times, people go there to be by themselves -- but he always wanted people around. He didn't want to do it by himself. He was constantly conflicted on the question of friends and associates, on the question of politics.

When he ran for president, he made a total of five speeches, and he wouldn't talk to reporters. He wouldn't talk to people. He didn't like talking to people he didn't know. He didn't like the glad- handing and the handshaking -- quite the opposite of , his rival in the '28 election, who loved the whole process of politics and the backslapping and the laughing and the chatting with reporters on the train.

And you get these accounts from the reporters who loved covering Al Smith and hated being assigned to Hoover because it was so deadly. There was nobody to talk to. He would occasionally come out and make some gruff utterances. People didn't recognize this as the same guy who had been so helpful and so useful at the Department of Commerce.

It's as if the closer he got to the presidency, Hoover withdrew more into himself. He talked about the dignity of the office and how he wouldn't want to compromise it. But it seemed like the closer he got to being president, the more fearful he got that he actually would be discovered to be the person who wouldn't measure up to that job. When you look at Hoover, it's hard to resist a little bit of pop psychology to try to figure out what it was that was so conflicted in this guy, who had so much yearning for that kind of power and prominence; but at the same time, when it came to him, he froze in the spotlight.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: By the time the conventions roll around in 1928, Hoover is basically a shoo-in for the Republican presidential nomination. And in his acceptance speech, after he's officially nominated, he says, “In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than ever before in history of any land. The poorhouse is banishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”

But the country was not nearer a final triumph over poverty. In fact, it was just the opposite. The devastation of the Great Depression would come crashing down not long after Hoover took over the presidency.

Hoover enters the White House in 1929. And so, Charles, what kind of impression do we get of the

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 type of leader that he wanted to be in that role, and what he had hoped he would be able to accomplish in his presidency? And then where do we start to see the cracks emerging?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: He was very committed to this idea of cooperation, as opposed to government coercion. He was very anti the idea that the government would tell people what to do. But at the same time, he had big ambitions for what the government could do. He launched his presidency by calling a special session of the Congress to deal with agriculture. Throughout all the heyday and the success of the Roaring Twenties, agriculture had been largely left behind. So, there were a number of initiatives that he asked the Congress to undertake.

But having convened the special session of Congress, he then stood back and sort of took his hands off the wheel -- and the discussions in Congress quickly sort of reeled off. Particularly, they opened up the question of the tariff. And so, his party in Congress took on supporting agricultural through agricultural tariffs. Except once the tariff question got opened up, it was quickly inundated with requests for higher tariffs from the various industries across the country.

And this process, which was supposed to be quick and supposed to be focused, quickly became sprawling, unmanageable. It dragged on for 18 months and it resulted in the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which many economists considered to be a disaster, and some believe led to the Great Depression. I think the general consensus today is that it wasn't that big a factor -- that trade was already in terrible shape.

But it was a political disaster for the Hoover administration. It first exposed to the American public that there was a president there who tended to shy off from political controversy, political dispute; who was not really suited to the give-and-take of the Democratic political process; and who resented the horse trading and backslapping that needed to be done to get his agenda through Congress.

In 1930, his second year in office, the Congress had pretty much turned against him. They had rejected a Supreme Court nomination for the first time in, like, 80 years -- and that by a Congress controlled by his own party. This was politically devastating. Walter Lippmann, the great pundit of the time, composed a cover story of a national magazine under the title, 'The Peculiar Weakness of Mr. Hoover.'

And suddenly, it was there for the whole nation to see that the president that they'd elected -- this technocrat, this master of emergencies -- was not the master of the Congress, not the master of the White House and, in fact, was beleaguered and widely considered ineffectual. This all happened before the Depression arrived. So you get the prospect of the wounded and damaged -- politically damaged, compromised -- president, then being confronted with the greatest economic challenge the nation had ever seen.

It just makes the whole situation look a little more dire, because you see Hoover and his handicaps in political office coming into play.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And the presidency was actually the first elected office that Hoover had held. He had never served in Congress. He had never served in a state legislature. Was it just that lack of experience, you think, that was really at the root of his inability to understand how to be an effective political operator?

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 CHARLES RAPPLEYE: I guess the question would be, you know, would a couple of terms in Congress have taken off some of the rough edges? Would it have learned him to sort of open up and be more human in his communications with the American people? And I think the answer is probably no. I think Hoover was constitutionally ill suited to the business of being a democratically elected leader.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And why?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Especially when the crisis came on, there was a general understanding something had to come from the White House – just in the way of some kind of reassurance -- so that people would know that there was somebody listening, somebody paying attention to their situation, trying to do something about the problem.

That's a lot of the game right there -- just to instill that sense that they're not alone. Hoover failed in that role. I don't think it was a matter of his lack of experience. I think it was a matter of his character. It was just a poor fit. He just didn't have the makeup for that office. And I think he learned that, and the American people learned that, somewhere around the same time -- and not very far into his presidency.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So it's in October of 1929, toward the end of his first year in office, when we get the beginning of the . What did Hoover see as his responsibility here? How does he begin to respond?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: When the Depression hit, he was among the first to recognize what a dire threat it was -- that major unemployment was likely to follow from the stock market crash. And he got very busy on trying to respond to it. But again, his goal was to do it through voluntary action and not by coercive government fiat. So, he called in leaders of business and industry from all over the country in a series of conferences and spoke to them privately. The press was not invited.

In these conferences, he went to the businessmen and he said, 'Look, things are going to be really rough. This is going to be very difficult. And it's incumbent on you to not do what businesses usually do when they're faced with a depression, and that is to immediately fire half your people or cut wages or both.'

And he leaned on them to maintain employment -- to double down and to stave off the depression that was coming. It was derided at the time, and later, as sort of not the real effectual action that was needed. But in fact, it did result in wages staying relatively high for quite a while. It was not true that Hoover was caught flat-footed -- that he didn't recognize what was happening, that he didn't respond to it, that he didn't care. That's unfair and not true.

Hoover recognized that trouble was coming. But there's a couple things that have to be kept in mind. One is that the federal government had never, up to this point, taken direct responsibility for the fortunes of the American economy. Hoover was the first to respond that this is something that we're going to have to deal with. We, in the government, have to take this on.

It's also true that the economy in 1930, 1929, was more complex, more sophisticated and more interrelated, more urban than it ever had been before. And the urban economy is much more vulnerable to the shocks of economic setback, like a depression, than a rural agricultural economy. In rural agricultural economies, people have more resources at hand. They can go to a root cellar

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 and find food stored up for the winter. Urban, unemployed people don't have those kind of resources that they can fall back on.

And so, the country was entering a crisis the likes of which it had never seen. And so, Hoover was forced to improvise. And over the couple of years that followed, Hoover came up with important measures in terms of banking and credit facilities that anticipate the bank financing program that was implemented in the in the face of the Great Recession in 2009. Very forward- thinking programs, very sophisticated approach to the question of what was going wrong with the economy, none of which Hoover gets much credit for.

But I can say that, in studying his progress in the face of the Depression, he showed himself to have some of those attributes of creativity and commitment to solving the crisis that he had shown before he came into office and why he got elected in the first place.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, I mean by 1932, about 25 percent of Americans were unemployed. And one thing that just struck me as very interesting in researching Hoover, and that I think is still a question that comes up for presidents every time there's a crisis, is: how Hoover, even though it seems like he did actually understand the stakes and devastation of what was happening, he went out to the public and delivered statements that kind of sounded naive -- statements where he was trying to assure people that everything was fine.

On the one hand, there's a case to be made that a leader should get out there and try to boost the national psyche and that restoring some sort of psychological confidence would perhaps help stabilize and restore economic confidence. On the other hand, it seemed like it had the effect of making him look out of touch with what people in the country were actually going through.

I'd love your thoughts on whether that was a good leadership move, to go out there and paint a picture that things weren't quite as bad as they were -- rather than being more straight with the public about the challenges.

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Well, I think that is one of the principal areas of failure. Hoover couldn't bring himself to identify with the sort of pain that people were running into. And I think there were a couple of factors that go back to his upbringing and his poverty and his loneliness as a young boy.

I think it made it hard for him to feel -- to demonstrate -- a lot of empathy. He'd been through tougher times himself. It was hard for him to feel like people really needed a hand. Since he'd been able to get through it, they probably ought to as well.

He believed that the danger in America -- and he said it -- the greater danger to America is that people would abandon their self-reliance in favor of waiting for somebody to come and help them out and take care of them. And he saw that as eroding the American culture -- the American sort of can-do approach to the world -- the thing that, in his mind, made America different than the rest of the world.

So, he was inhibited from any feeling that it was time to help out, and that became his enduring legacy -- the guy who wouldn't listen to the cries for help. And ironically, the project that he did get behind and support was a TARP program, a bank bailout. Hoover wouldn't give food to hungry people in the rural areas of the country, and he wouldn't provide relief to the urban unemployed, but he would provide millions of dollars to banks. People couldn't understand it. It didn't make

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 sense to them. It seemed cruel and callous, and Hoover has had to live with that legacy for the rest of his life.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And that's, you think, a fair characterization? Or do you think he actually had wanted to help all the people who were suffering, but he just didn't figure out the best way to go about it?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Hoover felt deeply this idea that he was cold and indifferent. I mean, it hurt him to know that that's what people thought of him. Yet, he was principled and committed to his outlook.

He did believe that charity should be undertaken, but not as a function of the federal government. That was for state and local government and for community charities. And he talked a lot about that. He said that if we start using federal government for aide in emergencies and in and things like that, we will eviscerate the culture of charity that was a hallmark of American society at the time.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, in a way, it almost seems -- if you played out the hypothetical scenario -- Hoover might have actually played a much more powerful role in helping people in the Great Depression if he hadn't been president, if he were just a private citizen and the millionaire businessman who saw people around him starving and decided to help.

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: Or even the Cabinet member who was assigned by the president to go out. One of the great problems of the early Depression was a drought in 1930 that swept across the south central region of the U.S. And it was the natural position that Hoover would have been sent down there and he would have been orchestrating the deliveries of food, as he did with the Mississippi flood.

But, yes he probably would have found a much more useful role -- and one that people would have applauded, instead of one that people reviled him for.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Hoover did run for a second term as president in the 1932 election, but he lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet, he went on to have a very active post-presidency, actually the longest post-presidency we've had so far in American history -- 31 years. So, who is the Hoover we see after the White House?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: When Roosevelt won, Hoover started to take it more and more personally that his policies had been repudiated in favor of the Roosevelt program. The rest of Roosevelt's time in office -- and actually years after that, after Roosevelt died -- Hoover devoted his energies to repudiating Roosevelt and to restoring his own reputation.

It put him in a much more partisan role than he had played before. I mean, remember: In 1920, Hoover was actually fielding queries from both parties asking him to run for president. The point being that, until his presidency, Hoover was kind of a nonpartisan sort of guy.

But, in the course of his presidency and in his rivalry with Roosevelt, Hoover really hardened himself into a right-wing position. Hoover railed against the and against Roosevelt's foreign policy. He believed that the U.S. should never have been involved in World War II. For Hoover, it was a constant battle through the rest of his life to debunk Franklin Roosevelt and

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10 restore his own reputation.

I think all he did was harden people's image of him -- as hard as he got in dealing with Roosevelt, people saw him as only just confirming the idea that he was never the right person for the White House and was representing the wrong side of history, really.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What do you think is the most important leadership lesson?

CHARLES RAPPLEYE: It's not enough to be an able administrator. It's not enough to have the right idea -- the right understanding. What's important in a political leader and in the president, in particular, is to be able to forge that connection with the electorate, with the American people, to understand what their concerns and their needs are and to address them in a meaningful way.

And for all his quality and for all his insight and accumen, Hoover was never able to approach that sort of connection to the electorate. That hurt him in terms of failing of re-election. It also hurt him in terms of being able to direct the country through the dark times that prevailed in his term.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: From his home in Palo Alto, California, Hoover did write essays and books and letters on politics. But he also returned to humanitarian work. He chaired an international relief effort for Belgium, and Poland during World War II. Then, under President Truman, Hoover headed the food supply for world famine.

He was then chosen by Congress in 1947 to chair a commission on reorganizing the executive branch of government. It came to be known as the , and it may be one of the most significant ways that Hoover altered the presidency. The commission came up with a number of bureaucratic reforms that strengthened the White House and that became part of the 1949 Executive Reorganization Act.

In foreign policy, Hoover spoke out against Truman's use of the atomic bomb and against U.S. intervention in the Korean War. Throughout his lifetime, Hoover also created, financed and worked to embolden the , which is housed on Stanford's campus and also has a large office here in Washington D.C. It's a think and a research center that has lived on past Hoover's death to become an influential force in policymaking spheres.

The economist Milton Friedman was a Hoover fellow for nearly 30 years and, more recently, an example of a Hoover fellow is former Secretary of State . So, in a way, Hoover succeeded at making sure that his ideas and ideals managed to outlast and reshape his legacy after the Great Depression.

Long after the disappeared, the mission that he left his self-named institute still plays out in American politics today. And that mission, as he put it, was to point the road to peace, to personal freedom and to the safeguards of the American system.

When Hoover died in 1964 at 90-years old, he was buried in West Branch, Iowa. He finally returned home.

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