The old man was one of the last direct ties to a past Americans did not want to lose— a throwback to the days of pioneering, of covered wagons and homesteads, of simple moral values and deeply held religious convictions. He had a sense of history himself, an awareness of the continuity of human affairs; as Chief Executive of the nation he once observed that “No man can be President without looking back upon the effort given to the country by the thirty Presidents who in my case have preceded me. No man of imagination can be President without thinking of what shall be the course of his country under the thirty more Presidents who will follow him. He must think of himself as a link in the long chain of his country’s destiny, past and future.”

Herbert Hoover’s own destiny had begun in West Branch, Iowa, in 1874. Only six years later his father, a blacksmith, died of typhoid fever, and when he was eight his mother succumbed to pneumonia. At the age of ten, Bert, as he was called, left for Oregon to live with relatives. His only material assets, he recalled, were two dimes, the suit of clothes he was wearing, and some extra underwear; but he took with him several intangible possessions: an appreciation for learning, a family tradition of hard work, a “stern grounding of religious faith,” and recollections of a joyous childhood. Those things remained with him always. So, indeed, did the scar left by his parents’ deaths. Seventy-five years later, when a reporter asked his opinion of the greatest change in human existence during his lifetime, he spoke eloquently about the advances in public health and medical science. People no longer died so often in the prime of life, he said, remembering the hillside overlooking West Branch, where his mother and father were buried.

After college he worked for awhile in a mine—ten hours a night, seven nights a week, for two dollars a day. Later, as an engineer, he went out to Australia, to China, to dozens of other countries, travelling incessantly, organizing and promoting mining companies, becoming, finally, a wealthy man. At the outset of World War I he was in London, and because of his organizing talent was asked to take on a succession of humanitarian jobs, among them the administration of Belgian relief. In the starvation days that followed the war, he fed countless millions of people, friends and former enemies alike, in twenty-three countries. By the time he returned to the United States in 1919 he was an internationally known figure. When the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, talked with him for the first time he thought him “a wonder.” Roosevelt added, “I wish we could make him President of the United States. There could not be a better one.” Nine years later, after he-had served as Secretary of Commerce under Harding and