Hoover always felt that Churchill was a little more eager to fight than a leader should be. They both live long enough to advise President John Kennedy.Ī: Yes, and they never liked each other.
Their lives run in parallel: around the turn of the century, when Churchill is exhilarated about being shot at with no result in the Boer War, Hoover is feared dead in the Boxer Rebellion before emerging from China with dubious but highly lucrative mining concessions. Hoover was born three months before Churchill and died three months before him, too. Q: He and Winston Churchill were almost exact contemporaries. But everyone I took it to said, “No, no, you have to do the whole life.” So I looked at his life and saw that Hoover was relevant to pretty much everything that happened in the 20th century, from the Great War to the Cold War. I didn’t want to write a biography of Hoover, I wanted to write a story about him and his adventures in Belgium in the First World War, when he almost singlehandedly fed 10 million people for the duration of the conflict-Schindler’s List on a colossal scale. They’re all about finding the epic qualities in the life of “the man who became president,” which makes them fail as biography because you don’t see the character in a human scale. So what brought this on?Ī: Presidential biographies often read like fan fiction. Q: You open this 600-page book with a passing mention that you are not a fan of presidential biography. Few other presidents-perhaps only John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter-had post-incumbency careers that were more significant than their time in office, and for none but Hoover that was true both before and after his presidency. Ken Whyte, whose lengthy career in Canadian journalism includes stints as editor-in-chief and publisher of Maclean’s, is not the only writer to have become fascinated by Herbert Hoover, 31st president of the United States. But Whyte’s new book, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, is the first biography to look at the entire long arc of Hoover’s life and to establish his status one of the most consequential Americans of the 20 th century.
16th March 1933: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945), the 32nd President of the United States of America (right) leaving the White House, Washington DC, for the Capitol on his inaugural day, with 31st President Herbert Clark Hoover (1874 – 1964) beside him in the limousine.
0 kommentar(er)
