By Thomas F. Schwartz
Memoirs by former presidential staff and White House employees can offer candid assessments of the public officials’ private lives. They can also be extremely misleading, reflecting the author’s personal views, and often contain hearsay recounting events not witnessed but related second-hand. A book frequently cited in presidential biographies and studies of presidential administrations is Irwin Hood “Ike” Hoover’s, Forty-Two Years in the White House. Hoover began his career as an electrician installing wiring for electric lights in the Benjamin Harrison White House. His career went from electrician to one of several White House ushers, and despite sharing the same last name, he was unrelated to President Herbert Hoover. At the time of his death on September 14, 1933, he was Chief Usher.
Before the book’s publication in August 1934, a series of 19 articles based on the book were published in the Saturday Evening Post. The first appeared on February 17, 1934, and the last on November 3, 1934, all edited by Wesley Stout. Ike Hoover, according to the editor, had come to an agreement to publish his recollection serving nine presidential administrations. He wanted to wait until his retirement in 1935 before anything was in print. At the time of his death in 1933 he had only completed chapters through William Howard Taft. The remainder were simply notes and jottings. The editor explained it: “After his [Ike Hoover’s] death, several hundred thousand words of penciled manuscript were found. Because of the preliminary nature of this material, it has been necessary to adapt it rather freely. It has not, however, been rewritten in the usual sense, and the editor has tried to preserve the style as well as the point of view of the author.”
In short, the articles prompted many readers to question whether Ike Hoover was speaking or Wesley Stout. The book’s copyrights belong to Hoover’s widow and son, but it is unclear if the negotiations occurred with Hoover himself or the family. The Irwin Hood Hoover Papers in the Library of Congress contain his diaries and notes. It is unclear, however, if Hoover witnessed events first-hand or the notes record what he heard from others or a combination of both. Certainly, many of the people described in the Coolidge and Hoover administrations took exception and corrected the record in their personal correspondence. Grace Coolidge and Lou Henry Hoover found many of the accounts pure fabrication and President Hoover wrote a lengthy letter to his friend and journalist, Mark Sullivan, explaining Ike Hoover’s penchant for exaggeration and self-importance.
Like all recollected accounts, it is important to know if the diary entries were made at the time of the witnessed event or how much later the account was recorded. A greater lapse of time between witnessing the event and recording it allows for mistakes to occur. Recollections are not like photographs that fade over time. Events constantly need to be recalled to transform into long-term memory. With each recall, additional information mentioned by others becomes part of the memory, making it difficult to know exactly what was directly witnessed by Ike Hoover, what he may have heard from other White House staff, or read. The best way to use recollected materials is to compare statements with independently verified accounts or documents.