Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [61]
Harry Truman and Cole Porter apparently did not cross paths at the Waldorf, though, if they had, they would have had something to talk about: Dean Acheson, Truman’s dear friend and former secretary of state, had been Porter’s roommate at Harvard Law School. Nor did Truman encounter MacArthur in the hotel’s impeccably decorated halls, though the decorous staff surely took measures to prevent such an awkward rendezvous.
If Truman and Hoover met at the Waldorf, the event went unrecorded. Neither former president’s daily calendar indicates a meeting with the other, and there was no correspondence between them from mid-1952 to September 1953. It appears the two men, whose relationship was alternately testy and genial, were having a tiff.
Hoover had once been a genuine American hero, a self-made millionaire-turned-humanitarian who organized relief efforts that saved millions from starvation in Europe during and after World War I. In 1928 he was elected president in a landslide, but less than a year after he took office, Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression rose. After he lost the 1932 election to FDR, Hoover, rendered persona non grata in Washington, retired to California. In 1940 he moved into the Waldorf. When one of Roosevelt’s aides suggested that Hoover might be best qualified to oversee mobilization efforts on the home front during World War II, FDR dismissed the suggestion out of hand. “I’m not Jesus Christ,” he said. “I’m not raising him from the dead.”
It was Harry Truman who did that. Shortly after taking office, he invited Hoover to the White House “to talk over the European food situation.” Hoover accepted the invitation, and on the morning of May 28, 1945, he met with Truman in the Oval Office. It was the first time Hoover had set foot in the White House in more than twelve years.
Hoover was wary of Truman. After the way he’d been treated by Roosevelt, he said he was inclined to tell the Democrats “to all go to Hell.” But when Truman asked him to oversee relief efforts in postwar Europe and Asia, Hoover, ever the humanitarian, could not refuse.
In 1946 Truman appointed Hoover honorary chairman of the new Famine Emergency Committee, but Hoover’s role was anything but ceremonial. He traveled the world in an army transport plane, cajoling and begging grain-producing nations to donate some of their precious stocks to starving nations. In Venezuela he slipped in a bathtub, cracking several vertebrae, but refused to curtail his trip. In Argentina he resolved to “eat even Argentine dirt,” if that was what it took to get Juan Peron to release the 1.6 million tons of grain that Hoover wanted. Hoover got the grain.
Just as he had after World War I, Herbert Hoover had saved millions from starvation. “Yours was a real service for humanity,” Truman wrote him.
On April 30, 1947, Truman undid one of FDR’s more egregious slights against Hoover. He signed a bill restoring Boulder Dam’s original name: Hoover Dam. The gesture moved Hoover greatly. At a Gridiron Club dinner ten days later, Hoover praised Truman’s “high service to our country.” Hoover had come to respect and even like Truman, and the feeling was mutual. “With esteem and keen appreciation to a great man,” Truman scribbled on Hoover’s program that night.
Their budding friendship, however, could not survive electoral politics. In the 1952 presidential campaign, Truman, campaigning for Adlai Stevenson, repeatedly cited Hoover as the embodiment of all that was wrong with the Republican Party: reactionary, ruthless, callous.