The study took a pragmatic and generous approach to peacemaking. Hoover wanted to avoid sowing the seeds of a future war. Free trade must be guaranteed and Germany should not be dismembered. The former enemy nations must be disarmed and their leaders tried as war criminals. The Allies should construct machinery to permanently ensure peace. The treaty would build in methods for the peaceful resolution of disputes, such as arbitration and mediation. The most vexing long-term problems ought to be settled after a cooling-off period once the participants at the original conference had been dispersed. Such problems might be delegated to separate international commissions. The book received critical praise for its ideas, logic, and common sense. Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas, who had opposed the League of Nations, endorsed Hoover’s analysis, as did journalist William Allen White, who had differed with the former president over foreign policy prior to Pearl Harbor. The elder statesman was gratified to learn the book was being used in some college classrooms.14
Hoover also embarked upon his longest project, finally published in 2011 as Freedom Betrayed, still incomplete at the time of his death and withheld for decades by his sons and other heirs because they considered it too controversial. The lengthy manuscript was written as a criticism of FDR’s foreign policies before and during World War II and expanded to include the early years of the Cold War. One prominent theme was the opening Roosevelt’s leadership provided for Communist expansion and the shrinking of the free world. The former president remained convinced that entry into the war had been a mistake, blaming Roosevelt and Stimson. Hoover built a case indicting the policies of FDR’s administration, listing some fifteen crucial blunders in statesmanship. He told a friend that the first chapter must include the fatal step taken in allying the United States with the Soviet Union. “When Roosevelt put America in to help Russia as Hitler invaded,” he said, “we should have let these two bastards annihilate themselves.”15 During the war Hoover also began work on three volumes of memoirs. The last was ultimately entitled The Great Depression, 1929–1941. He expected the books to be published posthumously, but he outlived his own expectations, and the final volume was published in 1951.
In January 1943 Hoover attempted to silence any speculation that he might become a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination once more. Well in advance of the following year’s convention, he publicly took himself out of the race. He wrote a reporter, Kent Cooper of the Associated Press, dispelling rumors that he would seek the nomination. This time he was firm. The ex-president said he would even decline a draft. “I wish to reiterate again my statement that I will not again accept political office,” he wrote. “I hope such misstatements will cease. I believe I can be of more service to my country at my time of life with an occasional discussion or by providing advice upon public affairs. I should like to be able to do so free from political imputation.” For the first time since he had departed from the White House, Hoover had disavowed beyond question any desire to hold the office of president again. In addition, Hoover took no public role in the nominating campaign. He had reservations about virtually all the candidates. Unfortunately, the man he favored privately, Ohio senator John W. Bricker, was probably the weakest of the top four contenders.16
Republicans looked hopefully toward the presidential contest of 1944. The chief candidates were Willkie, Dewey, California governor Earl Warren, and Bricker, perhaps the most conservative of the serious candidates. Willkie had coveted the nomination since his defeat in 1940, and the interim had been one long campaign for him, but he dropped out of the race after losing badly in the early primaries. Neither Warren nor Bricker waged vigorous primary campaigns, and Dewey was clearly the front-runner. Hoover was not enthusiastic about Dewey, and the New Yorker kept a distance from the ex-president. The Chief considered Dewey able and intelligent, but vain and coldly calculating in his bid for votes. Hoover’s speech at the convention once again was better received than that of any other speaker. Dewey received the nomination as expected. He offered second place on the ticket to Warren, who declined, then to Bricker, who accepted.17
The ex-president played no active role in the campaign. Dewey did not invite him to take part and Hoover did not offer. The incumbent won a fourth term, although by a smaller margin than in his earlier campaigns. The Democratic standard-bearer appeared weak and barely able to light a cigarette or hold a coffee cup because of trembling hands, yet he concealed his declining health from the public. Dewey’s defeat only confirmed Hoover’s belief that the GOP had nothing to gain by straddling issues and running candidates who seemed pale images of the New Deal.18
The Democrats dusted off Charles Michelson to slay the dragon of Hoover once more during the campaign. Whomever the GOP nominated, the Democrats inevitably ran against Hoover. It seemed like an endless rerun of 1932 newsreels, with stock villains. Roosevelt adviser Tommy Corcoran snidely remarked to a group of fellow Democrats, “We ought to be eternally grateful to Herbert Hoover, who has been our meal ticket for twelve years.” Because Dewey realized this, he studiously avoided Hoover. The proud former president received a curt order from Dewey’s campaign advisers to avoid the candidate. Once again, Hoover seemed ostracized by both parties. During his speech at the convention, Hoover chose to cool speculation and dodged photographers who sought to photograph Dewey near him. This was pragmatism on Dewey’s part; he did chat with Hoover occasionally in private after he was safely nominated. For his part, Hoover’s sparse comments were directed against Roosevelt’s policies.19 He grew increasingly critical of what he considered FDR’s bungling of food supplies during the war. It was riven by a “muddle of uncontrolled food prices, local famines, profiteering, black markets, and stifled farm production.” Having ignored the model that had served the nation well during the Great War, Roosevelt would face a crisis of world famine at the end of the present war, Hoover warned. The administration would be unprepared to deal with it. Hoover continued to hope that he could find a way to provide food relief to the occupied nations of Europe. However, Churchill was adamantly opposed and Roosevelt conceded.20
For Herbert Hoover, 1944 saw the death of his most beloved. Lou cherished the bucolic surroundings and the memories within the walls of her dream house at Palo Alto, but when her husband decided to move permanently into a hotel suite in New York to be near the political action, she loyally followed, never complaining. She adjusted her lifestyle to enjoy the social and cultural amenities of the metropolis. Lou attended plays and concerts, visited museums, shopped and collected, and continued to work with the Girl Scouts and other charities. Her life was never marred by prolonged maladjustment to circumstances. She was content, even proud, to live in Bert’s shadow. Physically attractive in youth, she was still a beautiful woman as First Lady, proudly declining to die her white hair. Her physical vigor declined sharply after leaving the White House, and she lacked the vitality of her youth, though she remained optimistic and vivacious.21
Lou became slightly more active politically after leaving the White House. Like her husband, she believed the New Deal was harming the country. She objected to FDR’s ideology and considered him obsessed with perpetuating himself in office. She feared the possibility of a dictatorship entrenching itself in America. Lou’s political evolution to the right continued after the 1936 election. If anything, she became somewhat more conservative than her husband, though less vocal, and her emphasis lay in moving forward. Lou helped energize Pro-America, an organization of conservative women that had been created in 1932. During the 1940s Lou became involved in promoting her husband’s books, especially those that emphasized patriotism. Her emphasis was on positive programs, wholesome values, and ethical politics. Like her husband, she retained a steadfast interest in the welfare of children, education, and helping others. Lou could be fun loving and gregarious, but she possessed an inner reserve, a sense of calm and purposefulness. She resembled her husband in possessing a deep reservoir of duty. Like Bert, she never complained.22
On Friday, January 7, 1944, Lou attended a concert by an old friend, Mildred Dilling, a harpist who had performed at the White House for the Hoovers. Lou invited Bunny Miller, Hoover’s secretary, to accompany her. She suggested that she walk home, but she tired quickly and hailed a cab. Often Bunny dined with Lou after concerts, but this evening Lou did not invite her in. Rather, she went straight to her room to rest. Hoover and his old friend Edgar Rickard were at the apartment, preparing to depart for dinner. Hoover stepped into Lou’s bedroom to kiss her good night and found her slumped on the floor, stricken by a heart attack. Hoover cut through her dress, tried to resuscitate her, and summoned the house doctor. The physician pronounced her dead. She was sixty-nine. Although Hoover would live for another twenty years, he would never find another, and would not try. He did not show much emotion—he never did—but he must have felt hollow inside. He rarely mentioned Lou after her death. Franklin Roosevelt transmitted a gracious telegram and Eleanor sent a personal handwritten letter. Hoover responded in kind, with a telegram to FDR and a written note to Eleanor.23 The grieving husband told his family, “I have lived with the loyalty and tender affection of an indomitable soul almost fifty years.” For her part, Lou wrote to her sons in her will: “You have been lucky boys to have had such a father and I am a lucky woman to have had my life’s trail alongside the path of three such men and boys.”24
The following Monday some fifteen hundred mourners packed into St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church near the Waldorf for the former First Lady’s funeral. There were numerous celebrities, political figures, and old friends, and two hundred Girl Scouts. A Quaker minister read from the Bible. The service was simple, and there was no eulogy. Hoover’s two sons flanked the widower in a pew. Lou’s body then traveled by rail to Palo Alto, where she was interred. At the grave-site services at Palo Alto before her family and a few intimate friends, Ray Lyman Wilbur delivered a brief eulogy in which he said, “She was just as interested in the smallest Girl Scout as in the biggest economic or political person.” Journalistic eulogies also emphasized the many lives she had touched.25 When the West Branch Quaker who had risen to the presidency died in 1964, Lou’s body was disinterred and moved to lie beside his in the small park on the grounds that include the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, where they can be together in death as in life. On his deathbed, Hoover requested that his library close Lou’s papers to researchers for at least twenty years. She had written some angry words about a few people who had maligned her husband during political campaigns, and he did not want to stir those memories. The delay in processing and opening her papers probably contributed to her becoming an underappreciated, sparsely studied First Lady.26
The grieving ex-president was deluged with sympathetic letters and telegrams. Lou’s death left a void in his life that was never adequately filled. He wrote even more furiously and passionately, driving himself ferociously to the end of his life. He leaned even more heavily on his old male friends. Hoover, of course, made some new friends, but they could not displace those he had bonded with in his earlier work. Being in public service or politics together is like fighting a war jointly, or playing a team sport. It produces a bonding that is lifelong. Holed up in his suite in the Waldorf, Hoover was haunted by the memory of his mother and his wife. He was alone with his heaps of book projects, his reading material, artifacts of his travels, honorary degrees, awards, and valuable collectibles. His permanent companion was a Siamese cat he named “Mr. Cat.” Yet he was never bored by idleness, remained in contact with friends, and was visibly stoic.27
The ex-president continued to monitor developments in the war and diplomacy. He received unofficial briefings from the War Department and remained on cordial terms with War Secretary Henry L. Stimson. He learned as early as December 1944 of the race to develop a nuclear bomb. Late in January 1945, when FDR left for a parley at Yalta with Stalin and Churchill, Hoover expressed his skepticism of the outcome of Great Power diplomacy to Ray Lyman Wilbur. He predicted that Roosevelt would return with a bundle of Stalin’s promises, which would flee like frightened antelope. Hoover was distrustful of the agreements reached at Yalta, but he confided to Landon that, publicly, at least, it would be unwise to oppose them because it would only divide the American people—and it would be futile as well. Hoover said that if the agreements had elements of success, he would be gratified, though he was skeptical of that outcome. However, he wanted them to succeed because he wanted world peace. Increasingly, however, Roosevelt’s diplomacy near the end of the European war emphasized realpolitik at the expense of his earlier ideals expressed in the Atlantic Charter. With some resignation, Hoover conceded that the only viable option was to use the new international organization to rectify the shortcomings of the Great Power agreements. Such an arrangement reminded him of Wilson’s strategy at Versailles, which had resulted in a war. Hoover had the disturbing sense of history repeating itself.28
On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Georgia, his private aquatic resort for people with disabilities. Although he had long been ill, his death shocked the nation. Hoover was gracious in his response to the passing of the man who had tried to destroy him politically and had denied him even the minimum courtesies customarily extended to a former chief executive. “The nation sorrows at the passing of its president,” the Chief said in a statement to the press. “Whatever differences there may have been, they end in the regrets of death,” he added. “The new president will have the backing of the country. While we mourn Mr. Roosevelt’s death, we shall march forward.” Although eight years older than Roosevelt, Hoover had outlived his archenemy. In the final days, Eleanor had sought to reconcile the men, but her husband had obstinately refused.29 Hoover hoped to stimulate a revival of conservatism in the post-Roosevelt era. Already he was collaborating in the liftoff of a new conservative journal, Human Events, to compete with liberal and radical journals such as The New Republic, The Nation, and New Masses, which had achieved near dominance in universities and among the intellectual elite.30
On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered, and Hoover immediately turned his attention to the feeding of postwar Europe, especially the saving of children from imminent famine. Meanwhile, war continued to rage in the Pacific. American marines crept incrementally closer to the home islands, the battles growing increasingly bloody. President Truman sought a negotiated peace but also pondered use of a powerful new weapon, the atomic bomb, which could destroy an entire city. Hoover knew of the attempt to build a superbomb, but its sudden use on Japanese cities revolted him. It lifted war to a new level of destruction and killed noncombatants, including children, indiscriminately. He had consistently opposed the bombing of civilian populations, and he considered the atomic bombs literal overkill. Hoover now faced an uncertain future. Many Americans considered prewar noninterventionists such as Hoover unpatriotic, no different from extreme isolationists or Nazi sympathizers, forgetting the polls that showed a majority of Americans opposed going to war before Pearl Harbor. The new president was a wild card in the deck.31
Hoover opposed the Dumbarton Oaks draft of the United Nations Charter and proposed several amendments, some of which were subsequently incorporated into the charter written at San Francisco in June 1945. Between March 25 and March 28 the ex-president had published four articles outlining his ideas for a successor to the League of Nations. He attempted to apply lessons learned from its failure to the new document. In his unofficial capacity, the GOP spokesman exerted his influence on world politics and, theoretically, as a political philosopher, in trying to shape the framework of the new organization. His desire for an enduring peace had not been dimmed by the maelstrom of war; in fact, it had been enhanced. His articles and public statements mirrored ideas he had previously discussed in The Problems of Lasting Peace. The new organization should be decentralized, with regional peacekeeping bodies. Sufficient time should be devoted to drafting the document in order to get it right. Once done, it could not b
e easily undone. The defeated powers should be disarmed totally and immediately; the victors should be disarmed partially and incrementally. Hoover stated that the UN must ban military alliances and specifically define aggression. It should wrap the skeleton of its framework in spiritual garments and study the causes of war. Ex–New Dealer Raymond Moley praised Hoover’s recommendations. Hoover’s former adversary told the elder statesman that his suggestions for the charter were “exactly what is needed at this time of confusion and drift.” He added that “the country never needed you more than it needs you now” and urged him to speak up. In their elder years, the men had become close friends.32
Although the UN Charter rejected most of Hoover’s recommendations while adopting a few, the GOP spokesman spoke out in favor of the completed document, as he had for ratification of the imperfect Treaty of Versailles. In postwar America, many Republican leaders opposed the successor to the League of Nations. The role that Hoover played in advocating a largely, if not completely, bipartisan foreign policy after Pearl Harbor was significant, though he was not alone in closing ranks. However, the wartime allies had not even waited until the war ended, much less observed a cooling-off period, to draft a tentative plan for peace. Neither had they defined aggression, created regional subgroups, or made immediate plans for disarmament. The Republican statesman disliked the Security Council’s veto power, which he believed might paralyze action, which it often did. The draft did contain a “bill of rights” pertaining to nations, one of Hoover’s suggestions. Despite its shortcomings, he backed the organization on July 18, in an address in San Francisco devoted to the UN, stating that it probably was as good as was reasonable to expect. The Great Humanitarian of the Great War added the caveat that Americans should not expect the updated version of the League to ensure a lasting peace. Enforcement would lie in the hands of the Great Powers, who had already begun to quarrel before the war ended. Hoover followed up with a speech at Long Beach on August 11, where he warned that a growing number of nations were succumbing to the clutches of Communism. A short time later, the ex-president’s longtime nemesis Hiram Johnson, with whom he had reconciled, died. One by one, Hoover was outliving his friends and foes alike. Some of the statesman’s friends suggested him as a temporary appointment to fill the Senate seat, but Governor Earl Warren appointed wealthy publisher William Knowland. Hoover’s appointment was probably unrealistic because he had lived chiefly in New York since 1940.33
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