By Thomas F. Schwartz
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The question of who was filling in the blanks from the sketchy notes left behind by Irwin “Ike” Hoover was a topic of great conversation by people close to President Coolidge and President Hoover. Edgar Rickard, Herbert Hoover’s long-time friend and financial consultant, forwarded to Lou Hoover a letter that Grace Strother, wife of Hoover’s secretary French Strother, wrote to George Lorimer, publisher of the Saturday Evening Post. Having attended a Christmas Party at the White House described in one of the articles, Strother complained: “Just before March 4th, 1933 Ike read to Mr. Strother all he had written and asked that when he finished his story if Mr. Strother, who was a trained writer, would not smooth it up, rearrange and put it in proper shape for publication. It was a pity he died before he got fairly started with his story. The few chapters he did write were very good. He was a diplomat and glassed over some unpleasantness in a very nice manner. I know he never intended his notes to be published for they were hastily written down to serve as a reminder to him in after years. If Wesley Stout, who is compiling this, had any knowledge of Ike Hoover these notes would have opened up great vistas to him and he could have made a wonderful thing of it.” She then proceeds to describe in detail how the Christmas Party was misrepresented in the article.
Grace Coolidge and Lou Hoover agreed that the articles and later book were misleading and seemed at odds with their conversations with Ike Hoover and what he intended. On March 2, 1934, Grace Coolidge wrote to Lou: “It does seem a shame that these articles should be printed under Usher Hoover’s name for they consist in so large a measure of material which he would have been the last to sanction. My conversations with him in relation to the subject of his collaborating with a writer in publishing his memoirs at some time after he was no longer connected with the White House were of the same nature as yours.” She goes on to speculate that his wife’s poor health and perhaps the need for money prompted the publication.
Lou, in an earlier letter to Grace Coolidge on February 8, 1934, also speculated that the editor and publisher took great liberties with Ike’s notes. Claiming: “As I think back over it at this moment, two outstanding incidents of our own time could never have been written by the Usher. One being that I always looked over my own mail! Which I never did if either of my own old secretaries was on duty.” Adding: “Also another one that the old Usher could not have written was the statement that we never ran the elevator. That might have been perfectly true in other times. But certainly I ran up and down alone in the elevator whenever I wanted to, although naturally when I went down to the main floor, rang the bell, and all due form and circumstance met me as the door opened!”
Perhaps the best summary of the mystery of Ike Hoover is contained in a letter Herbert Hoover wrote to friend and reporter Mark Sullivan on October 2, 1934. Hoover wrote:
I have read the unexpurgated book of Ike Hoover. I regret his slaps at you, as they were far from truthful or decent.
During his last years, Ike was prematurely old. He had become obsessed with elaborating the social forms of which he was stage director. He was greatly enthused by his visits to Buckingham Palace and the French Presidency, and was always trying to build up imitations. Both Mrs. Coolidge and Mrs. Hoover were compelled to put daily restraints upon him, and gained his enmity. Beyond that I came to know that he had developed a good deal of the snooper, and on several occasions had to be told as gently as possible that his presence and interest were not appropriate in governmental conference. He also loved to be a hero with reporters and to inspire gossip, for which he had to be curtailed. A desire to be kindly to an old man and an old servant was the only reason he was kept on. In fact, I raised his pay by a thousand dollars a year—the only raise he had had in twelve years. But, as usual, over-kindness to characters like that often provides only impertinence. His untruthful backstairs gossip about Mr. Coolidge is proof that I should have taken the latter’s advice and moved him out of the White House into some Departmental job for the ending of his days.