Was Herbert Hoover America’s Most Misunderstood President?

22:35David Frum:They have their own flags. They have their own powers of immunity. They have their own powers to negotiate treaties, and they have their own set of volunteers. And it's, all run by volunteers. And essentially, they bring all the food into Belgium, unload it into ports, and then volunteers within Belgium distribute it under the watchful eye of the Germans and the watchful eye of the English who don't want the Germans to be, they don't want to be feeding or allowing for the feeding of their enemy army. So it was a, this process, it took about 10 weeks to get underway. And then it lasted until the end of the war.

23:10David Frum:Hoover is the only individual, they say, at the Treaty of Versailles, I think John Maynard Keynes said he was the only individual to emerge from the ordeal in Paris with his reputation enhanced. I mean, it was just this extraordinary sort of endeavor that actually ultimately creates the model for international humanitarian food relief.

23:30Margaret Hoover:And he then repeats the experiment inside the area of what had been the Russian Empire during the Russian Revolution, feeding millions of people in Russia and Ukraine.

23:38David Frum:He becomes so popular that Wilson realizes he has to be in his wartime captain. And nobody knew if he was a Republican or a Democrat, but he actually, in this post of Wilson's government, persuades the U.S. Congress to feed Bolshevik Russia because Russians are also about to starve. And so there were U.S. outlays in the budget to feed communist Russia. Maxim Gorky said that he's the most impactful person in the 20th century at that time. Of course, he's been completely forgotten in Russia since then. But it was this notion that America could feed her enemies and still sort of win a war, that food wouldn't be a weapon of war.

24:14David Frum:And it was also the first time that Hoover or that the United States had really deployed humanitarian relief in a way that became like legitimate American soft power, even though, you know, it was voluntarily orchestrated at first and then it became part of U.S. policy. Like this is a charitable American volunteerism turned outward to the world and what becomes this extraordinary display of soft power and then becomes one of sort of the arsenals of our diplomacy in the 20th century.

24:51Margaret Hoover:Let me add a point here because one of the things, we're having a little resurgence of communism in contemporary America. And one of the things communists are very bad at is telling the truth about history. One of the myths that communists and their apologists promote is the United States and the other countries tried to strangle the Bolshevik revolution in its cradle, which would have been a good thing to do if it had been done. It was not done because Russia under Lenin became a kind of de facto ally of the Germans who are still fighting. The Bolshevik revolution is in the fall of 1917. They become in 1918 an important source of food and assistance to Germany still battling the Western allies.

25:26Margaret Hoover:And so the United States and others were suspicious. There were American troops and other troops as well on the territory of the Russian Empire. But through all of this, the Americans are feeding Russian people, more and more of them. And this feeding will continue until past the war into about 1920, correct?

25:43David Frum:That's right. He did two rounds because there were basically two seasons in which Lenin requisitioned the grain. And so it had, there were two full sort of harvest seasons that where they were entirely depleted of foodstuffs. And so Hoover fed them both times. You know, Hoover writes at this time, eventually this pamphlet, it's called American Individualism from which I riffed my own title, but which is, and the title is often misunderstood, but he writes about the feeding of the Bolsheviks in that period that as deadly and bloody as the revolution was. It was important for humanity to see for itself with its own eyes that the idea of Bolshevism and of communism, which is theoretically a beautiful idea, had proved itself in rivers of blood.

26:34David Frum:And that Hoover believed this was, as horrible as it was, this necessary experiment for humanity to then learn from because this idea practically applied simply doesn't work. It had proved itself in rivers of blood. And this is, you know, Hoover developing his own political philosophy about what made the U.S. of his time so extraordinary and the ideas of these other sort of new nations, nations that had swept off monarchies, czars, old forms of power, flirt with new sort of isms that had ultimately and were ultimately failing before all of our eyes. They forget that part, the modern communists, I think, and the modern socialists.

27:17Margaret Hoover:So Hoover then returns to the United States after the Russian Revolution.

27:21David Frum:So he comes back and he's so popular, Harding puts him in the cabinet. Harding wins. Harding puts him in his cabinet. He has this like backwater agency called the Commerce Department, which didn't really do anything except for it was the beginning of the roaring 20s. And he thought, huh, well, there's these new frequencies, perhaps radio. We can grab radio and television. He's the first person to appear on television. His image is the first image of a face to be transmitted through television to television waves. You can see that. You can see the television itself at the Hoover Library. So when they tell you that it's FDR who's the first president on television, actually, Hoover was the first president on television, but he wasn't president at the time.

27:57David Frum:Sorry. There's always little quibbles with FDR's legacy.

28:01Margaret Hoover:A little family pride, yes. thing.

28:03David Frum:But yeah, so he really, I mean, he standardizes industry essentially, which allows for a housing boom, which allows, when I say standardizes industry, I mean, we all take for granted that two by fours all come in the same dimensions. And we take for granted that bricks are all in the same dimensions. And screws and nails and nuts and bolts and tires and bedsheets are kings and queens and twins and eggs come in half dozens and dozens and milk comes in liters and courts, all of that happened as Hoover was overseeing the Commerce Department, not because he decided, here's how we're going to do it, but he believed, and this is part of his philosophy of government, that government had an important role in terms of convening industry and convening stakeholders.

28:45David Frum:And so there are parodies of all of the conferences that he hosted in the Commerce Department because he would invite the farmers and the dairy people and the distributors, all the different players to the table, and exhaustively they would talk and then ultimately decide that, sure, we'll do half dozens and dozens of eggs or whatever it was. And ultimately, this created an efficiency because of the convening of the government and then the agreement of the stakeholders that allowed for massive booms in every era of industry throughout the 1920s.

29:17Margaret Hoover:My impression is the most enduring or the most significant thing he did as Secretary of Commerce was the United States, Louisiana, Texas were hit by a devastating hurricane in the second Coolidge administration.

29:27David Frum:It was a flood. A flood.

29:30Margaret Hoover:Okay, my mistake. It was 1927 Mississippi River flood. Thank you. And just as no one had ever before had the idea that you could feed people in a war zone, no one had ever thought that it might be the responsibility of the federal government to organize aid to victims of a natural disaster. But that was another Hoover innovation.

29:45David Frum:Well, you know, Silent Cal, who is, of course, the sort of begrudging president, begrudging of Hoover a bit, he was, Hoover had earned such a huge reputation. He was called the Secretary of Commerce and the Undersecretary of Everything Else. And it was just sort of bothered the president. But the president really didn't believe there was, to your point, a role in emergency relief. But Hoover, who had really cut his teeth in emergency relief in Europe, thought certainly there are things that can be done. Because it was 50 million acres that was flooded, David. So it was the entire Mississippi River Valley all the way down through Missouri, Alabama, Louisiana.

30:24David Frum:the entire portion of the South, I mean, like a third of the agricultural land in the South. And by the way, there's a lot of black Americans who are farming and growing cotton on those lands essentially are wiped out. But the thing about a flood is that you know it's coming. And so what he did is he worked with local authorities to move people out of the rising part of the flood days before it would hit. So he would go to the local mayors, he would go to the governors and say, look, we're building a tent city over here. You have to take all your things and get out. And sometimes they would agree and sometimes they wouldn't.

30:58David Frum:But as soon as word got out that this was happening up the river, people started listening. And essentially, he organized these massive tent cities that had vaccines, food, water that were temporary that people could then live in until they were able to go back and rebuild. And this was the largest, to your point, sort of weather event up until Katrina. And, you know, Hoover basically took charge, but then also deployed this sort of spirit of volunteerism. He got the American Red Cross involved in a way the American Red Cross had never been involved at this large of a scale. And through massive telethons and fundraising drives, they didn't take a, like, there was no congressional money deployed to help in the 1927 Mississippi River flood.

31:43David Frum:It was all voluntary donations distributed through the American Red Cross that helped the country rebuild in that time. And so Hoover had this very strong philosophy that if you asked Main Street for what you needed, Main Street would deliver tenfold. Because there was something about his experience with the American people as opposed to peoples in sort of all over the world, and literally he had been in every other continent except Antarctica, that really felt committed to communities they were part of. And he observed this in the American people. He observed a sort of deep embedded degree of philanthropy on a local level that he felt could be harnessed in a way unlike anywhere else.

32:24Margaret Hoover:And again, the papers on all of this must be a massive collection.

32:28David Frum:It is the largest private collection in the United States, one of the largest in the world. And by the way, it now doesn't just contain the czar's abdication papers and all of the materials from Russia that, by the way, the Bolsheviks would have destroyed, but it also contains enormously important materials from all over the world that deal with war, revolution, and peace. So we have all of the secret papers from Saddam Hussein's Ba 'athist secret police, many of the papers from Adolf Hitler's top tier sort of inner circle cabinet as they litigated the war. We have papers from the Republic of China, from the fleeing parties, the Kuomintang, before they came to Taiwan to establish their own country, papers that for sure would have been destroyed by Mao's revolutionaries.

33:18David Frum:So the idea, and Hoover really became his organizing principle in his later years, was anti-communism, because he had taken the lessons to heart, but realized that the world hadn't. And so these materials are incredibly diverse, long span, and really concentrate on the political history of the 20th century.

33:38Margaret Hoover:Because Hoover lived to an enormous age.

33:41David Frum:He was 90 years old. So up until the point that Reagan died, he had been the oldest president. And up until the point where Jimmy Carter died, he had had the longest post-presidency. And it's often commented that Jimmy Carter, who had this long and enormous post-presidency, also very much modeled his post-presidency on Hoover. There had never been a longer post-presidency up until Hoover. And so there's this pre-presidency part of Hoover's life, but then there's this post-presidency part of Hoover's life that I'll just say, you know, we probably don't have time to get into, but Jared Cohen wrote a very good book called Life After Power that follows different post-presidencies.

34:18And his

34:19David Frum:research, academic research on Hoover's humanitarian work in his post-presidency, of course, he's laying the foundation for the Marshall Plan. He's brought back into public life by Truman two days after Roosevelt dies. He's just, is this elder statesman in his post-presidency, reorganizes the federal government.

34:34Margaret Hoover:He outlives John F. Kennedy.

34:36David Frum:He does outlive John F. Kennedy, sadly. And this is another piece of the narrative that's wrong, but Hoover and the Kennedys were quite close. There's wonderful, like you can listen to these YouTubes of John F. Kennedy calling Mr. President to let him know about the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis. So Joe Kennedy was a dear friend of Herbert Hoover's. There's actually a still living research assistant who worked with Herbert Hoover in the Waldorf Astoria when she was in her early 20s. She's 92 now, 93. And she tells the story of Joe Kennedy calling and thinking, oh God, what are you going to want to do talking to him?

35:11David Frum:And instead he puts him through, he comes to visit. There's a very close, I think, bond between the Kennedys and the Hoovers, mostly because both of them were exiled by FDR from the Democratic Party for some time. So they bonded in their, I think, distaste of FDR, among other things.

35:28Margaret Hoover:And Truman had the same distaste for FDR. And so did he did. I'm going to double back to the presidency, but I want to, so the library is founded in what year?

35:35David Frum:1962. Harry Truman dedicates it in 1962. But Hoover actually acquired his birth cottage of 200 square foot cottage, two bedroom, two bedrooms, sorry, two rooms in which he is born. His brother is born. His sister is born, which is right across from the blacksmith shop that his father works in and the Quaker meeting house that his mother ministers in. And this sighting is incredibly important to Hoover because it suggests a degree of possibility and opportunity that he believes exists. He believes his story could happen in nowhere else besides the United States. So this sighting is all there in West Branch, Iowa, which was, again, then a town of 600 and now a town of 3 ,000.

36:18David Frum:It's on the outskirts of Iowa City, Iowa, where the University of Iowa is. If you happen to be anywhere in the Midwest, It's a very easy day visit, and it tells the story of Hoover's life, of somebody who feeds the world, who serves the world, but is ultimately from just a small, humble beginning. And look, here's the thing. There are a lot of presidential libraries. Now there are 16 that are part of the National Archives and Record Administration system. They have evolved over time. I mean, it is really Eisenhower, FDR, Truman, and Hoover's who begin the process. recognizing that, and Hoover had this innovation.

36:57David Frum:He created a foundation because ultimately he thought private philanthropy would have to sustain the library. Now, as we have moved forward, it has become abundantly clear that the federal government is not going to continue to sustain these temples to presidencies. I mean, if you go to the LBJ library in Austin, Texas, it is literally a temple to LBJ's presidency. And Hoover's is quite small. It is very humble. It represents his Quaker roots and the humility that he very much felt and embodied. Every president gets to tell their story the way they want to tell it. And ultimately, there has been this evolving question about to what degree should the taxpayers be on the hook for that?

37:39David Frum:And so Reagan was really the first to create a massive foundation for his. I mean, he had like a$400 million endowment by the time he died. Nancy continued raising to endow that presidential library and the Bushes and then the Clintons and then the Bushes again. And each president has sort of evolved the way they both present their story and the way they fund the continuing operations of their presidential library. But it is the first four presidential libraries, Eisenhower, FDR, Hoover and Truman, that really created a template for how these other ones should improve upon it. And for those four presidents who, if they're lucky, have completely obsessed descendants who want to continue to tell their story, but most don't.

38:27David Frum:And it's a really hard thing to go about and raise money for a presidential library for dead presidents. I mean, the Obamas have billions of dollars and a huge endowment, and they will have the benefit of young daughters to continue to raise money and support the operations for many, many years, as do the Bushes and as do the Clintons. But when you get down to a great-granddaughter who's four generations down, who never met the president that she's obsessed with, not obsessed with, but who quite inspires me. His presence is quite palpable and was quite palpable in my upbringing because it was such a foundational pillar in terms of growing up in the family I grew up in.

39:05David Frum:But I also am unburdened by a sense of, I don't know, my identity being tied to it. I've really chosen it because I'm quite passionate about Hoover's legacy. I really want a fair accounting of not just his presidency, but his life in the fullness of his contributions, which we have not yet seen, but we continue to near get closer to every year. And so it's a passion project for me. And frankly, it's, you know, it's, well, we can get to the presidency, but I think the, you know, the 800 pound gorilla in the Hoover story is the depression and it continues to cast a long shadow. And I continue to believe that as people take more into account what was known about modern macroeconomics in the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1940s, you know, nobody really knew what to do.

39:54David Frum:And and Hoover did the best he could and probably better than anyone else.

39:58Margaret Hoover:Well, now let's focus on the part of the story that people think they know and that makes the negative sense. So when President Trump explained why he was making this advantageous piece he made in the Persian Gulf, he said, I don't want to be Herbert Hoover because he remembers Herbert Hoover as being associated with.

40:12David Frum:Economic hard times.

40:14Margaret Hoover:With economic hard times. And America had had a very severe depression in the 1890s, but there weren't very good records and numbers in the 80s. So we don't exactly know whether the 1930s are worse than the 1890s. By the 1930s, we're beginning to have statistics. We know what the unemployment rate is. And of course, it's on the edge of living memory. So tell us your understanding of the presidency and how to blame Hoover was or wasn't for the events of the Great Depression. We may have slightly different views on this question.

40:41David Frum:By the way, and I would love to engage with your views on them, David, because you're one of the smartest people I know. But also, I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. And you and I have spoken about this before. And I've amended my thinking in some ways and in other ways I haven't. Hoover, of course, is nine months in. And by the way, the book 1929 that Andrew Rochelurkin just wrote about 1929, about the Great Depression, is a really important contribution to the understanding of the Hoover narrative. Hoover comes to the presidency in March of 1929, and the stock market crashes in October of 1929.

41:15David Frum:So he's there for roughly less than six months. You know, he was basically swept into the presidency almost unopposed. I mean, five states went against him. It wasn't that he was unopposed, but like he wasn't unopposed essentially on the Republican side and on the Democratic side. It was it was a complete landslide. And he had Hoover had been made into this kind of Superman because he had fixed the Mississippi River flood. He had fixed. He had done the Belgian relief. He had done European food relief. He had done all these marvelous things. People just thought, like, of course, he should be a president.

41:45David Frum:He had never been in elective office before. He's the first president literally to ascend to the presidency without ever being elected to public office. Or serving in the military. Or serving in the military. Exactly. My friends have made the American people think of me some sort of Superman. They expect the impossible of me. And should there arise in a land of conditions in which the political machinery is unable to cope, I will be the one to suffer. He knew his reputation was too outsized and too big to meet a moment that a political circumstance couldn't meet. And the Great Depression, to be very clear, was that moment.

42:22David Frum:It is the largest economic calamity in the history of the world, the second largest calamity in the history of the country after the Civil War. And if a quarter of Americans are out of work, that's like way more than a quarter, because only men are working. I mean, there's no downsizing what happened or minimizing how difficult a period that was. What is true is that, and this is like the main point, and you and I can disagree on this perhaps, but when we had the global financial crisis in 2008, Ben Bernanke was at the Fed and is largely credited with having used monetary policy to help stave off what ultimately became, what could have become a Great Depression, another global Great Depression.

43:10David Frum:And it is Ben Bernanke's PhD thesis from Princeton that centered entirely on what happened in 1929, 2030, 31, 32, to begin to understand and develop alternative theories about what happened, that the collapse of the economy and the banks had as much to do with monetary policy that was little understood as it did with fiscal policy. And nobody understood really anything about monetary policy. Very few people did. Keynes wasn't publishing until the 1940s about, you know, stimuluses and how to get us out of the war. Ultimately, I think historians and economists now believe that it was World War II that got us out of the war, not the New Deal.

43:55David Frum:FDR's own sort of kitchen cabinet, Ray Mosley in particular, admits to the programs of the New Deal being essentially like throwing things against the wall to seeing what sticks. And so there's this narrative that maybe Hoover didn't cause it, or maybe he did, but he sure didn't do anything about it. And the truth is, nobody really knew what was happening. What we understand about modern macroeconomics, we understand now because of exhaustive study of that period. And to be clear, the economy bottoms out again in 1937, worse than in 1932. And as you review, I mean, you simply can't look at the details and say, well, the New Deal got us out.

44:36David Frum:If what happened in 1937 rivals 1932, what you have to say is everybody was trying their best. People were making mistakes. Hoover certainly made mistakes. I mean, there's conservatives begrudge him for raising taxes when they shouldn't have for forcing wages to be lower. He tried to get industry to keep wages even and so sort of tampered with the free markets. Certainly there are mistakes that were made on Hoover's side. And yet, you know, it's hard to use a modern and contemporary context and knowledge to judge those, judge him at that time, or even FDR, really.

45:10Margaret Hoover:Here's what I think is one of the most important lessons for living politicians from Hoover's legacy. Supposing somebody got into a time machine right now with Ben Bernanke's thesis and everything that is known about exactly what is the right thing to do and traveled back to the fall of 1929 I said, President Hoover, here's the book from the 21st century of exactly everything you need to do to get everything right, which includes, yeah, a much more stimulative monetary policy. It means getting rid of the tariffs that were, never mind not signing Smoot-Hawley, but getting rid of the tariffs that Republican predecessors passed in the 1920s, which sustains the completely false and inflated reputation on the right of Harding and Coolidge, who had as much to do with the Depression by their tariff policies as anybody else.

45:52Margaret Hoover:Oh, and you have to go off gold when the British do in 1931. Here's the book. And Hoover said, right, I accept the book. I'll read the book. I'll do everything you say. If he had done everything right, American economic recovery would have begun probably sometime in 1931. And that would have been great because you would have missed the terrible year 1932. German democracy might have been saved. No Hitler, no World War II. But Hitler would still have presided over the worst recession in living memory from 1929 to 31. That's in the cake already. And he would still have lost the election of 1932, even if he had done everything right, which he did not do.

46:29Margaret Hoover:And one of the things that is hard for a modern politician, sometimes you can do everything right and you don't get a political reward for it because the timing of doing the thing right comes too late to save your particular career.

46:41David Frum:That's certainly true. I mean, I think the economy actually was getting better in 1931. At least there were some signs that it was getting better in 1931. There were also Andrew Ross Sorkin actually documents very clearly in his book that, you know, the biggest story in the New York Times at the end of 1929 was not the stock market crash. It was Admiral Bode's discovery of the North Pole. You know, nobody realized sort of that there was going to be this cataclysmic effect. But what also did happen, and I think this is where Hoover really failed in his presidency and departed from his previous habits and patterns, something happened with Hoover, and I've heard this both from his biographers and from my father and from this, from my grandmother when she was alive.

47:27David Frum:Hoover had been masterful at managing his image in the press really throughout his entire career. I mean, from the time he was in Western Australia, he was getting coverage of the successful mining operations in Australia, all through the good press he got through World War I, you know, the only man to emerge from the Odile in Paris with his reputation enhanced, all through the Commerce Department years. He had very strong relationships with the media, the press, with reporters, journalists, and many people who helped tell his story or tell the story of what he was doing. And something happened in the presidency where he, and this is what my father has told me, but it is complemented by a biographer's accounts, is that he believed suddenly that the American presidency was such a revered position that his ambition should no longer drive the efforts to shape how it was seen.

48:19David Frum:And so he stopped engaging in a robust communications effort. He just stopped. He didn't talk to the press. I mean, he would do press conference or whatever, but he just didn't do all the sort of reputational management stuff that he had previously done. And so nobody was telling his side of the story. And, you know, perhaps he might have done better in 1932 had he bothered to care for his reputation.

48:42Margaret Hoover:In my view, for whatever it is worth, the key moment, because this is where you have to deal with the Wall Street Journal version of history. The Wall Street Journal version of history is that what Hoover got wrong was raising taxes in 1931. And he said, OK, why did he do that? Why did he raise taxes in 1931? And the answer is because the budget deficit was growing. And had the budget deficit continued to grow, the United States would have been put in a position, as Britain was, where it could not stay on the gold standard. and hoover chose the preserving the dollars linked to gold now the wall street journal won't talk about this because they believe in the preserve in putting the united states back on the gold standard and the idea that the gold standard and the tariffs are the vill are the villains of the depression is a story they can sort of accept but sort of can't so he's confronted in 1931 if you continue to run deficits you will be forced off gold like britain and that will be a calamity it won't it's the solution no one but you had to be a very unusual person or a very desperate person in 1931 to understand that being forced off gold was the solution, not the problem.

49:44Margaret Hoover:Especially as a mining engineer. We can't be forced off gold. Therefore, we have to raise taxes in the middle of a depression to keep the link to the gold standard. You know what understood that?

49:54David Frum:I think you're right. I mean, I think the Wall Street Journal's version of history has changed a little bit over time. It used to blame it entirely on Smoot-Hawley. Smoot-Hawley, of course, was the tariff acts that everybody implored Hoover not to sign, that he really didn't want to sign, but he signed it because he was trying to work with the Congress. But everybody says that was definitive. Global trade was what? Less than 3 % of GDP at the time?

50:14Margaret Hoover:No. Also, smooth-holy comes too late. People don't know, and this is very relevant to where we are today. The United States at the end of World War I went back to high tariffs, choked off European exports, forced Europe into debt, made the monetary situation unstable, made the gold standard untenable in any kind of shock. And Coolidge and Harding are villains in the story, but in the Wall Street Journal version of history, they're heroes. And so we have to blame the Hoover tariff, not the Carding and Coolidge tariffs. And above all, never, never, never the gold standard, which for some crazy reason they keep on promoting into the 21st century.

50:48David Frum:Hoover had a quote later on. He said, once upon a time, my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellect and economic power by which I created a worldwide oppression all by myself. Yeah.

51:00Margaret Hoover:I want to say one last thing as we head toward the end here about one of his great contributions. And it's a contribution that is really under immense threat now. And this is, I think, quite an urgent problem. So as you said, because of the New Deal and the war, the United States creates this jumble of regulatory agencies in the 1930s and 40s with very clear, weak and mysterious constitutional basis, very murky limits on their powers that operate outside the constitutional system. And Hoover was one of the people who was really alarmed by this. and President Truman then gave him the mission. And when I say the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, I can feel eyes glaze over, but this is like, along with the Bill of Rights, this is maybe the most important law that you, it's certainly the most important law you've never heard of.

51:48Margaret Hoover:And it's the one that is under direct attack now by the Trump administration. Talk a little bit about his contribution to bringing these agencies back under constitutional review after World War II.

51:58David Frum:Well, so, I mean, one of the things that, another piece of the history is, as soon as FDR is inaugurated, Hoover is alarmed by the New Deal, and he writes a book called The Challenge to Liberty. The Challenge to Liberty might be among Hoover's least read books, but again, like in the 1946 Administrative Procedures Act, eyes glaze over at roll, this is like Hoover's description of how the exploding of these federal agencies is going to impede and impose upon individual liberty. And so he calls it, he actually has his own word for it. He calls it regimentation. You know, what he ultimately does when Truman brings him back in to feed the world after World War II and help establish a foundation, the Marshall Plan, he also, both through Truman and then through Eisenhower, is asked to assemble a review of how the executive branch and the federal government work.

52:49David Frum:And he has essentially this huge committee, like what's a a congressionally mandated committee that reviews the executive agencies, reviews their authority, and then makes recommendations to Congress, of which 80 to 90 percent of them are passed into law, that sort of are intended to bring efficiencies and accountability to the federal government that had exploded previously. And then Eisenhower brings them back. And so this is called the Hoover Commission. I mean, it had its own title, but like it is sort of known as the Hoover Commission, the first Hoover Commission, and then the second Hoover Commission.

53:26David Frum:And then one of the things Hoover was known for was his ability to operate massively scaled operations in a highly efficient way. And so it was this idea of bringing his abilities at efficiencies to the federal government.

53:41Margaret Hoover:And this is maybe the point of alarm to end on. So the Trump administration is arguing that every administrative agency is a pure expression of the will of the president. The president can give an order to the Food and Drug Administration, to the Federal Trade commission to any agency, even the Federal Reserve. And they have to carry it out just as much as if they are just a member of the military, that his order is absolute and plenary over the entire administrative aspect of the government. And this was a vision that Americans had in the 1930s and 40s from which they retreated in fear and terror and corrected with very much under Hoover's leadership with laws that said the administrative apparatus of the federal government must be bound by law.

54:22Margaret Hoover:It is not a pure expression of the president's will. And this is every day we're having battles with the Trump administration of, is it presidential will that governs the country or is it the law? And you can feel the ghost of Herbert Hoover reminding us of his achievements after his presidency.

54:37David Frum:I think that's right because the point is that one can have professionals in the federal government that are intended to execute the operations of the executive branch and the federal government, despite the person who is in the office. And if you don't, then what you're doing is reverting to a 19th century system of spoils where political appointees are rewarded for their loyalty and placed in positions of power where they can take advantage of the trust placed in the president by the American people to their own ends. This is not the sort of fair administration of the government that is to serve all of us as equally as possible.

55:20David Frum:And it is true. It is, and it's an affront, actually, on sort of the notion that the government is there to operate very specific tasks on behalf of all of us who need it rather equally rather than through privilege or patronage or association with power.

55:43Margaret Hoover:Margaret, thank you. So I know, speaking of family, you have taken time away from your family on holiday to join me today, and I'm very grateful for that. I hope anyone who hears your voice and is anywhere in the vicinity of the great state of Iowa will make a special trip to see what you have accomplished with the renewal of the Herbert Hoover Library. Thank you so much for joining me today.

55:59David Frum:You're so kind to have me, David. It is a great privilege and honor to be on with you.

56:04Margaret Hoover:Bye-bye. Bye.

56:12Margaret Hoover:A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto the David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

56:49It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way.

56:54Margaret Hoover:Find it wherever you listen or watch.

57:00Margaret Hoover:Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology and examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Margaret Hoover for joining me today on The David Fromm Show.

57:35Margaret Hoover:As mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a classic of espionage literature, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, published in 1963 by John le Carré. John le Carré being a pseudonym for an English writer named David Cornwell, who had served as an officer in the English intelligence system in the 1950s. The novels The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is a kind of apply to the success of the James Bond novels. James Bond, written by Ian Fleming, offered a very glamorized view of the life of a spy, full of excitement, danger, lavish expense accounts, and beautiful women. The Spy Came From the Cold is a much grimmer reality of betrayal and mutual betrayal.

58:13Margaret Hoover:I won't summarize the plot. It's very complicated and very exciting. And if you haven't read it before, I urge you to read it now. And I will not dim your enjoyment except of this very morally complicated novel. I want to talk instead about the evolution of the spy novel as a form, how it came about that this form was developed in the 20th century, and why we associate it so much with British writers especially. There are American spy thrillers, but they tend to emphasize either technology or like Robert Ludlam's novels, a hero who is so powerful, so tough, so indestructible that he himself as more like Batman or Spider-Man or Superman than he is like a human secret agent.

58:53Margaret Hoover:The British tradition on this, Len Dyton, John Buckham, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, and John Le Corre, emphasizes very human people. Even James Bond, at least in the novels, does not have superpowers. If you shoot him, he will die. Why this particular attraction of British writers to the creation of this particular form? What is it about the spy novel that made it such an important form in the 20th century. I've been thinking about this as I wrestle with The Spy I Came From the Cold. I see two great themes in these books and others like them. The first is that spy novels are novels ultimately about bureaucracy.

59:34Margaret Hoover:They are a person in a government office doing a government job, dealing with expense accounts, which figure large in the work of John le Carré, dealing with all the drabness and meanness of government offices, especially in the pinched years after World War II. and trying to achieve things for their fellow countrymen against the background of this bureaucracy. And it's difficult, and it raises very complicated moral choices. At one point, the British protagonist of The Spy Who Came In From the Pole is confronted by an East German counterpart who asks him, why do you do it? What do you believe in?

1:00:10Margaret Hoover:And he's a little taken aback by the question. The real answer is a kind of personal commitment, a personal vendetta. But under the circumstances of the question, he can't answer. And the East German spy goes on to explain, he's a Marxist. He thinks it's perfectly valid to sacrifice one human life for the benefit of humanity or other human lives for the benefit of the collective. But Britain is nominally a Christian society where each life is sacred in itself. How do they justify sacrificing one life to save others? And that is the kind of moral dilemma of a bureaucratic system, of the one versus the mass, I think haunted the generation that came through the Second World War and the early part of the Cold War, where they saw good people being sacrificed as individuals for some idea of the benefit of many others and not quite able to answer what that benefit was and not being quite so sure that benefit was really there.

1:01:02Margaret Hoover:The second theme that struck me as I ponder this is spy fiction is fiction about people who are secretly powerful. Not the American version. Again, It's about machines or superheroes. But the British novels are about people who look humdrum, ordinary, but who in fact have these giant bureaucracies at their back. And this fantasy of secret power is something that seems especially appealing to a society like Great Britain that had been so powerful and was watching its power ebb through the 20th century and being displaced by a power with which they had some friendly relationship with the United States, but also some relationship of envy.

1:01:40Margaret Hoover:I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that those American writers who, in my opinion, do excel at the spy fiction form, not again in the superhero Robert Ludlum way, are Alan First, Daniel Silva, are both Jewish and are therefore in their own way marginal people. And the way, just as the British are marginal to American power, the First and Silva have experiences that are at the margin of their own society. Spy fiction at its best can be morally challenging in a way that few other forms really are. The particular moral dilemma in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and again, no plot spoilers here.

1:02:18Margaret Hoover:If you haven't read it, I recommend it, is a really heart-rending one because the moral calculus that you see that is revealed by the end of the novel makes a kind of sense, a brutal sense, but it kind of sets. But the human costs of this calculus are extreme and painful, and we are made to feel them and not allowed to escape them. That's something that it's easy to dismiss as you simply read the news and read about espionage as a product of something that reveals information, and not see that behind all of these stories, there are real human beings whose lives are compromised in one way or another.

1:02:54Margaret Hoover:Thank you so much for watching the David Frum show this week. As I mentioned, we are taking two weeks holiday, August 12th and August 19th, or a two-week break. We will be working, but we will not necessarily be producing video content in that period. We will resume in the later part of August and early September. Thank you for watching The David Frum Show. Please, as always, if you can, share and subscribe the show so others find out about it. And as ever, the best way to support the work of this program is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That supports me and all of my colleagues. Again, thank you.

1:03:25Margaret Hoover:See you soon on The David Fromm Show. Bye-bye.

1:03:52Margaret Hoover:This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grain. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto The David Fromm Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

1:04:37Margaret Hoover:Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.