By Thomas F. Schwartz
Most accounts in Ike Hoover’s Forty-Two Years in the White House are positive with certain caveats. Newspaper editor William Allen White who authored the popular early biography of Calvin Coolidge, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge (1938), offered mixed judgments on Ike Hoover as a credible source. In several footnotes White quotes Hoover but adds: “And possibly not. For Ike Hoover loved gossip—who does not—but if he sometime did not get things straight, he was never deliberately malicious.” In another instance White writes: “The head usher apparently is gossiping here about Everett Sanders. But evidently he has mistaken the man.” And finally, he concludes: “Remember always that ‘Ike’ Hoover disliked the President and was liable to misinterpret his actions and to misunderstand the meaning of his sometime Delphic utterances!”
Eyewitnesses to the events described by Ike Hoover often disagreed with his recollections. Dr. Joel Boone, White House physician for Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover gave this assessment to former President Hoover after reading the first installment of Ike Hoover’s memoir in the Saturday Evening Post:
He [Ike Hoover] certainly erred when he said that you did not exercise at those early morning periods. I do not see how anyone could classify them as a joke from the standpoint of exercise. Ike was never present at that time of the day and his observations are blind on that score. So much stuff is written by those who have no first hand knowledge of the things they write about.
In another letter, Boone wrote to former President Hoover:
Ike Hoover’s death was sad to hear but not a surprise for he had been a patient of mine for a number of years and there were times when it was difficult to keep him on the job. You will remember that we discussed his retirement before you left office but he finally decided to carry on. He full well knew his condition for I had been frank with him and I anticipated just the kind of end that he had. During the month that I was at the White House after you left, he frequently came into my office and would sit by my desk or flop on the couch, worn out and mentally distressed because things had taken such a turn from the way he felt the White House should be run. He said all dignity left with you and Mrs. Hoover and that things were now run on such a hit and miss manner. He did not seem to be able to accomplish any system and the lack of punctuality for appointment and form occasions disturbed him. He was a great wheel horse and his going is another emphasis of the unfortunate departure from the stable tradition. Forster must have his secret heartaches. He is so solid and sound and steady.
Other White House staff expressed mixed judgements. Alonzo Fields, who replaced Ike Hoover as Chief Usher, described him many years later in an oral history: “Oh yes, Mr. Ike Hoover, I knew him quite well…He was quite a man in many ways. He was quite a little dictator in many ways. He made it rather difficult. If any problems came up that perhaps the President should know about, or Mrs. Hoover should know about, Hoover would do anything almost, break your neck almost, if it got out to the First Lady.”
Rivalry and gossip among staff is not uncommon but the comment about control is a reoccurring observation in many recollections concerning Ike Hoover. As the final blog will emphasize, so was his commenting on events he did not witness first hand.