Defining Moments: The First One Hundred Years of the Hoover Institution 0817922741, 9780817922740

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Defining Moments The First One Hundred Years of the Hoover Institution BE R TR A ND M . PATENAUD E

DEFINING MOMENTS

DEFINING MOMENTS

THE FIRST ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF THE HOOVER INSTITUTION BERTRAND M. PATENAUDE

HOOVER INSTITUTION PRESS STANFORD UNIVERSITY

S TANFORD, CALIFORNIA

With its eminent scholars and world-renowned library and archives, the Hoover Institution seeks to improve the human condition by advancing ideas that promote economic opportunity and prosperity, while securing and safeguarding peace for America and all mankind. The views expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution. www.hoover.org Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 701 Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, California 94305-6003 Copyright © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher and copyright holders. For permission to reuse material from Defining Moments: The First One Hundred Years of the Hoover Institution, ISBN 978-0-8179-2274-0, please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of uses. Efforts have been made to locate the original sources, determine the current rights holders, and, if needed, obtain reproduction permissions. On verification of any such claims to rights in the articles reproduced in this book, any required corrections or clarifications will be made in subsequent printings/editions. Hoover Institution Press assumes no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Design: Bob Aufuldish, Aufuldish & Warinner First printing 2019 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8179-2274-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8179-2276-4 (EPUB) ISBN 978-0-8179-2277-1 (Mobipocket) ISBN 978-0-8179-2278-8 (PDF)

CONTENTS

Foreword by George P. Shultz . . . . . vii

1 FOUNDATIONS . . . . . 1



Remember the Lusitania! . . . . . 6

2 THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER . . . . . 31



The Nazi-Soviet Pact . . . . . 33 Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . . . 43 Herbert Hoover and Poland . . . . . 49 The Okhrana Collection Revealed . . . . . 54 Alexander Kerensky at Hoover . . . . . 55 Nicolas de Basily Room . . . . . 59

3 HOOVER BECOMES A THINK TANK . . . . . 65



Truth as a Weapon: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty . . . . . 68 Ten Landmark Books by Hoover Fellows . . . . . 72 George Stigler . . . . . 86 The United States in the 1980s . . . . . 90

4 INTO A NEW CENTURY . . . . . 101



Robert Conquest . . . . . 104 Gorbachev at Stanford, 1990 and 1992 . . . . . 107 Microfilming Soviet Communist Party Documents . . . . . 108 Thatcher on the Quad . . . . . 112 President George W. Bush and the Hoover Institution, 2006 . . . . . 117 Hoover Nobel Laureates in Economics . . . . . 118 Firing Line . . . . . 122 Honors and Awards . . . . . 124 Chiang Kai-shek’s Diaries . . . . . 130



Notes . . . . . 135 About the Author . . . . . 143 Acknowledgments . . . . . 144 Illustration Credits . . . . . 145 Index . . . . . 151

GEORGE P. SHULTZ

Hoover Tower as seen from the Stanford Quad during a Hoover event.

FOREWORD What is the Hoover Institution about? Its purpose is to look toward the future and develop policies that will have an impact on the betterment of society and our prospects for peace. Yet even as it looks ahead, Hoover can find inspiration from its past. Reflecting on my association with Hoover over the past three decades, here are a few experiences that have stayed with me. In 2006 I was invited to a gathering in Brussels to honor the memory of Herbert Hoover. The event was called “Remembering Herbert Hoover and the Commission for Relief in Belgium.” An exhibition was set up with documentation and a room filled with memorabilia from the days of Hoover relief described in these pages. Top Belgian government officials were in attendance. The exhibition and the discussion focused on the actions that Hoover took when the Belgians were threatened with starvation during World War I. The Germans had invaded and occupied nearly all of Belgium in the early weeks of the war. Germany’s enemy, Great Britain, had responded by imposing a naval blockade on Germany, which included the ports of German-occupied Belgium. As a food-importing population before the war, the Belgians were desperate, as their native food supply was quickly running out. Hoover came along, negotiated successfully with both the Germans and the Allies, and, as head of the neutral Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), worked with the Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation (National Food and Relief Committee) to import food to Belgium, using funds he himself secured to pay for the food and shipping. Throughout this effort, the food delivered by the CRB was efficiently distributed by Belgians under the oversight of Hoover and his commission. The Belgian civilian population—more than seven million people—was saved from starvation by Herbert Hoover. When the CRB finished its enormous undertaking shortly after World War I, Hoover used some of the remaining funds to establish a foundation to help worthy Belgians study in the United States. Known today as the Belgian American vii

Educational Foundation (BAEF), it is still active nearly a century after its founding. Belgian economist Jacques Drèze, a good friend and colleague who visited me at the University of Chicago, attended the 2006 Hoover ceremony in Brussels at my invitation. As the event ended, he said that his life had been transformed by his BAEF scholarship, which allowed him to study economics at Columbia University. On another occasion, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev visited me at the Hoover Institution in 1992. At an exhibition set up especially for his visit, A Century of Revolutions: Lenin to Gorbachev, he viewed a map showing the operations of Herbert Hoover’s post–World War I American Relief Administration (ARA) in Soviet Russia during the famine of 1921–22. On the map he saw a marker of an ARA relief station near his little hometown in southern Russia. Tears filled his eyes as he recalled his parents talking gratefully about the ARA. Herbert Hoover was inspired by idealism, yet he placed a premium on efficiency and was immensely practical as a mining engineer, humanitarian, secretary of commerce, president, and adviser to President Truman. This dual legacy has been carried forward in the outstanding intellectual contributions made by Hoover fellows over the years. I remember Milton Friedman’s 1980 documentary series Free to Choose and the book of the same name that he wrote with his wife, Rose. They showed the way to a strong economy here and elsewhere. The TV series was viewed by millions, and the tie-in book topped the bestseller lists for months on end. Then there was historian Robert Conquest, who, with the help of the Hoover Archives, wrote hard-hitting books about the history of the Soviet Union, especially the Stalin era. He got some backlash from historians who believed he had an ideological axe to grind, but the opening of the Soviet archives after 1991 confirmed that Conquest had it right. Put it all together and you have in the Hoover Institution an inspiring history of human outreach, organizational skill, and economic and historical excellence. There is much to inspire and much to live up to. I recently attended a conference at Stanford on artificial intelligence. It was a stirring event addressed by such notables as Bill Gates, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Henry Kissinger. The conference was held in the Traitel Building, a magnificent new addition to the Hoover Institution that provides a venue for the lively exchange of ideas to the entire Stanford community. I use this building regularly for conferences related to my project on governance in an emerging new world, which starts from the observation that the world is changing rapidly and radically. We need to understand these developments and generate ideas for how to respond to them in ways that take advantage of new opportunities and, as much as possible, head off potential downsides. We hold deep discussions of papers on viii

various subjects in Hoover’s Annenberg Conference Room and then move to the new Hauck Auditorium for panel discussions that are open to members of the greater Stanford community, who come to listen and ask searching questions. So even with its independent funding, Hoover is very much a part of this great university. I have always felt that Hoover has a great advantage over the many stand-alone think tanks located in Washington, DC. Whereas they are almost inevitably drawn into immediate issues and controversies, Hoover can take a strategic point of view from a distance. We can then bring that viewpoint to the nation’s capital with the help of our wonderful new Johnson Center in Washington. From the seed of an idea planted a century ago by Herbert Hoover in the form of an ambitious enterprise to document the causes and consequences of World War I and thereby promote peace among people all over the world, Hoover has grown into a vibrant institution filled with interesting, collaborative, and energetic people who are making a difference and enjoying a chance to—in Hoover’s famous motto—contribute “ideas defining a free society.” We look forward to the next one hundred years. — g eorge p. shultz Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, California

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CHAPTER 1

FOUNDATIONS PARIS TO PALO ALTO, 1919

Detail of photo of Herbert Hoover in his Paris office, 1919, see page 3.

On April 23, 1919, a telegram arrived in Palo Alto from Herbert Hoover in Paris, addressed to his wife, Lou Henry Hoover. The cable was sent through Hoover’s offices in New York City, relayed by Edgar Rickard, Hoover’s financial manager and confidant. Folded between an opening line about the construction of the Hoovers’ family home on the Stanford campus and a closing suggesting that Mrs. Hoover come to Paris with the couple’s two boys was a message she was asked to convey to Stanford University president Ray Lyman Wilbur and Stanford history professor Ephraim D. Adams, both longtime friends of the Hoovers. She should advise them, Hoover wrote, “that if they keep it entirely confidential we can find cost of their sending at once suitable mission to Europe to collect historical material on war provided it does not exceed fifty thousand without further consideration.”1 The Hoovers were both graduates of Stanford. Herbert Hoover, a member of the Pioneer Class of 1895, was among the first resident students to arrive at the new campus in 1891. He earned a degree in geology and went on to achieve phenomenal success and great fortune as a businessman in the mining industry, which took him all over the world. In April 1919, when he sent his telegram, he was in Paris administering America’s massive postwar food-relief campaign across Europe as executive head of the Allied Supreme Economic Council and serving as adviser to the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, which had opened on January 18. The message in his cable caused some head-scratching at Stanford over what exactly Hoover had in mind. Professor Adams assumed it must have to do with the records of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the neutral humanitarian undertaking to deliver lifesaving food to Belgian citizens under wartime German occupation that had brought Hoover worldwide fame. Adams had designs on those records going back to the early days of the First World War. 1

Herbert Hoover telegram to Lou Henry Hoover, April 22, 1919. facing page Herbert Hoover in his Paris office, 1919.

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In September 1914, as the trench warfare on the Western Front settled into a stalemate, German-occupied Belgium had been threatened with famine. A densely populated and highly industrialized country, Belgium depended on imports for half its food, including three-quarters of its grain. The German occupation authorities refused to assume responsibility for feeding the Belgians and blamed the British naval blockade for preventing the country from being able to feed itself. For its part, the British government, which sought to tighten the economic noose around Germany and its armies, declared that feeding the Belgians was the responsibility of their German occupiers and that, in any case, the German authorities were likely to seize imported food to support their own armies. As the situation became dire, Hoover stepped forward and agreed to head up a neutral commission to deliver food supplies to Belgium. At the time, Hoover was a businessman living in London. He had made a name for himself beyond the business world in August 1914, when he arranged to furnish nearly two hundred thousand American tourists stranded in England by the war with emergency funds and transportation to the United States. After weeks of negotiations, on October 22 his Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) was established. Great Britain agreed to let food relief pass through its naval blockade, while Germany promised not to requisition the food once it arrived in Belgium. In the winter of 1914–15 the CRB extended its operations behind the German lines into an industrialized region of more than eight thousand square miles in northern France, between the war zone and the Belgian frontier, with a population of about two and a quarter million French civilians. In the end, over its fourand-a-half-year existence, the CRB provided relief worth more than $860 million (well over $15 billion in 2019 dollars). The mission launched Hoover’s wartime and early postwar career as the Master of Emergencies, in an epithet of that era, whose philanthropy was grounded in hardheaded business principles — he was also called the Master of Efficiency — and muscular diplomacy. In February 1915, as the CRB’s operations were winning Hoover laudatory headlines, Professor Adams wrote to him at his London headquarters asking that the CRB’s records be preserved. “The thing is unique and it will seem even more so fifty years from now than it does today,” he wrote, “Every bit of record that can be preserved ought to be preserved just as if these were government archives.” He then ventured to express the hope that those records might eventually be deposited at Stanford. Such a collection, he wrote, would “reflect greatly upon Stanford such as nothing else has done” in years to come. Hoover replied positively to the idea three weeks later: “I think that your suggestion is of extreme value and I will see to it that every atom of material is preserved, which it has Foundations

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top S.S. Lynorta, “Virginia Relief Ship to Rotterdam.” Relief ships used for Belgium (whose port of call was neutral Rotterdam) were often identified with a sponsor state in the United States, in this case Virginia. center Belgians in Saint-Gilles, a suburb of Brussels, express their gratitude to the Commission for Relief in Belgium with banners and, in the foreground, a photograph of President Wilson. bottom Herbert Hoover on the frontispiece of Vernon Kellogg, Fighting Starvation in Belgium (1918). Kellogg was a Stanford professor of entomology from 1894 to 1920. He went on to work as a diplomat and administrator for Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium, the US Food Administration, and the postwar American Relief Administration in Poland.

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Ephraim D. Adams, 1920s

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been from the beginning, and it will be a fine idea to store them at Stanford University.”2 In May 1915, Adams again wrote to Hoover with the Belgian commission records in mind, although a major preoccupation was the sinking of British passenger liner RMS Lusitania on May 7. Nearly 1,200 of the total 1,959 men, women, and children on board perished that afternoon, 128 of them Americans. Adams described the shock delivered by the news and speculated that it would ultimately draw the United States into the war. “The whole thing is a horror, and the one bright spot in it is the work being done in Belgium, for that at least has in it an ideal of humanity and is an evidence of the real American spirit,” he wrote, before turning to his central consideration. “The more I think of all this, the more I anxiously hope that Stanford may some day have the historical records of the Belgian Relief Commission.” His motive was not self-interest, Adams maintained, but “rather a desire to see Stanford preeminent in the documentary materials of a great movement.”3 Adams sent Hoover further such missives that year and the next. When the United States entered the world war in April 1917, the American relief workers attached to the CRB were withdrawn and operations on the ground handed over to a neutral Spanish-Dutch committee. Otherwise, the enterprise continued to be directed by Hoover and his American CRB colleagues. President Woodrow Wilson brought Hoover from London to Washington, DC, to take the helm of the new United States Food Administration, an institution whose purpose was to mobilize the nation’s food resources for the war effort. Hoover took full advantage of the opportunity. He arrived in Washington hailed as the “savior of Belgium.” Wilson placed him in charge of the country’s entire wartime food supply, which meant provisions for both the military and the civilian populations as well as the Allied countries. As food administrator, Hoover employed a mixture of compulsion and appeals for voluntary rationing in order to encourage food conservation. Americans underwent “meatless” and “wheatless” days and were subject to hortatory and moralistic advertising campaigns built around the theme “Food Will Win the War.” So closely identified was the name of the food administrator with his program that the verb “to Hooverize” for a time almost replaced “economize” in the American vocabulary. In February 1918, Professor Adams wrote to Hoover in Washington to say that a group of Stanford historians was starting a documentary collection related to the contributions to the war effort of Stanford students, faculty, and alumni, the goal being to create a historical record of Stanford’s participation in the war. “You will remember,” Adams wrote, “that early in 1915 I urged upon you the keeping of all kinds of materials relating to Belgian relief, and that in reply you told me what 5

REMEMBER THE LUSITANIA!

On the afternoon of May 7, 1915, the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine about a dozen miles off the southern coast of Ireland. The ship rapidly began listing heavily to starboard and sank by the bow in only eighteen minutes, killing nearly 1,200 people.

The story of the Lusitania’s fate, and the mysteries and

controversies surrounding it, run like a thread through the history of the Hoover Institution, from Herbert Hoover’s account of how the idea of collecting materials on the Great War occurred to him while on a dangerous English Channel crossing through submarine-infested waters in the winter of 1914–15, to historian Thomas Bailey’s pioneering research on the sinking in the Hoover War Library in the 1930s, through the mounting of a centennial exhibition called Remember the Lusitania! Discoveries from the Shipwreck in the Hoover Tower Rotunda, from May 20 to 24, 2015. That exhibition showcased artifacts recovered from the wreck of the Lusitania on loan from the owner of the wreck, together with photographs, posters, documents, newspapers, medals, maps, and other artifacts permanently housed at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. 6

Irishmen: Avenge the Lusitania, Great Britain, 1915.

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you were doing and stated that Stanford University should ultimately have all the archives of your work.” Adams was by now hoping to nail down the specifics of the promised CRB bequest. “I am writing . . . to inquire where these Belgian archives are kept and as to when Stanford can hope to get possession of them.”4 There is no evidence that Hoover replied to this letter. After the Armistice in November 1918, Hoover accompanied Wilson to Paris to act as adviser to the American delegation to the peace conference, his principal duties involving the administration of American relief to Europe. Thus, entering through the food-supply door, Hoover joined the ranks of the statesmen responsible for settling the peace and shaping the postwar order. In Paris Hoover continued to serve as Food Administrator, though he accumulated other titles. In November 1918 he was made director general of relief for the Allied governments, essentially confirming his status as food administrator for the Allies, and in January 1919 he was named principal executive of the Allied Supreme Economic Council. However he was addressed, Hoover felt duty-bound to retain American control over food distribution, resisting the encroachments of what he called the “pinheads of bureaucratic Europe.”5 The United States having most of the money and the food, Hoover was able to have his way. The entire operation of relief and rehabilitation in Europe during the Armistice period was directed by Hoover. The vast majority of the money to support the operation was provided by the US government through the US Food Administration and its controlled organizations. In January 1919, at Hoover’s suggestion, Wilson asked the US Congress for an appropriation of $100 million for European relief, a request that was granted on February 25. One purpose of these funds was to support the relief of the liberated countries that had not been declared allies of the United States during the war — a category that, by law, had to be dealt with separately. To manage the $100 million congressional appropriation, Hoover arranged for the president to establish a separate government agency, the American Relief Administration, with Hoover as its director general. During the nine months following the Armistice, Hoover organized the distribution of over four million tons of food and clothing, valued at more than $1 billion (nearly $15 billion in 2019 dollars), to children and adults across Europe all the way to the shifting borders of Bolshevik Russia. To carry out this enormous undertaking, Hoover built a staff from among his CRB and Food Administration veterans and enlisted as his field workers hundreds of demobilized US Army and Navy officers. On January 14, a few days before the opening of the peace conference on January 18, Stanford historian Eugene Robinson had written to Hoover in Paris, requesting that the records of the US Food Administration be deposited at Foundations

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top left James Montgomery Flagg, Wake Up, America!, United States, c. 1917. bottom left Food Will Win the War, United States, c. 1917. below Herbert Hoover, US Food Administrator, c. 1918.

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Stanford in conjunction with the historians’ project on Stanford’s participation in the war. The following day, the persistent Adams again wrote to Hoover to remind him of his earlier pledge regarding the CRB’s records.6 As it turned out, neither of these letters ever reached Hoover, a fact of which Adams was unaware, so he naturally assumed, upon reading Hoover’s April 22 cable to Lou Henry Hoover about sending a “suitable mission” to Paris, that Hoover’s suggestion had to do with the records of the CRB. In fact, Hoover had something much more ambitious in mind. Lou Henry Hoover and President Wilbur inquired of Edgar Rickard in New York, who had relayed Hoover’s telegram, what exactly Hoover might be proposing. Rickard confessed he was stumped, but knowing Hoover as well he did, he suggested that Professor Adams proceed at once to Paris and defer further arrangements until his arrival there. In the meantime, Rickard said he would cable Hoover for clarification. “I have no idea how the whole question originally started and I wish I could be of greater assistance in the matter,” he told Wilbur. In his query to Hoover, Rickard wrote: “Adams ready to go at once with wife as secretary but requires information as to whether his investigations will cover C.R.B. or war in general.” This elicited a terse telegraphed reply, sent on May 15, from “the Chief,” as Hoover’s associates referred to him: “My idea is simply collect library material on war generally.” Rickard passed this message along to Wilbur at Stanford with the comment: “Seems to me that it will be impossible to secure more information by cable and consequently suggest Adams should leave immediately.”7 As Adams later recalled, “Speed seemed to be required if Peace Conference materials were to be secured and in the result Mrs. Adams and I started for Paris on May 22, 1919, as a ‘suitable commission,’ leaving for later determination the scope and nature of the work and its organization.”8 Arriving in Paris on June 12, as Adams later reported to President Wilbur, “I found that Mr. Hoover . . . had no other idea in regard to [the proposed collection] save that it should consist of materials suitable for a general Historical Collection, and covering the period 1914–1919, inclusive.” Hoover’s only suggestions were that Adams should secure materials illuminating general food conditions and food administration, and that it would be “inadvisable to place any special emphasis on the military side of the War.” As Adams wrote in 1921: “The Collection, as it developed in the process of organization, followed these lines but expanded the food idea to include everything and anything on the general industrial, economic, social and political characteristics of nations, whether belligerents or neutrals.”9 Adams’s immediate aim in Paris was to use the occasion of the peace conference to collect the so-called “delegation propaganda” from the seventy states and nations that had sent representatives to Paris, in the rush for Foundations

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American Relief Administration food distribution in Vienna, Austria, c. 1919.

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recognition encouraged by Woodrow Wilson’s call for “the selfdetermination of peoples.” As an American attached to the peace conference, Hoover was inundated by the publications of the various interest and pressure groups vying for recognition, many of these items slipped under his door at the Hôtel de Crillon. This literature may well have helped inspire Hoover’s decision to start a war history collection at Stanford. These publications would ultimately be brought together as the Official Paris Peace Delegation Propaganda Collection, the beginning of the library of the Hoover Institution. Paris in the summer of 1919, Adams found, was a propitious time for collecting. He acquired government documents, propaganda pamphlets, and other “fugitive literature” generated by the delegations to the peace conference. “Mr. Hoover’s name was the most powerful one in Europe,” he later wrote, “and individuals and States were eager to contribute anything they had for us.”10 The new venture was called the “Hoover War Collection” — the “war” referring, for the time being, specifically to the Great War that had just ended. As Adams would note repeatedly in these first few years, the association with Herbert Hoover proved essential to the project’s early success. “It is needless to expand upon the fact that his name has been the one greatest asset in our enterprise.”11 And Hoover’s name would grow more powerful still. Upon the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, on June 28, the Food Administration expired by law. Three days later, the American Relief Administration’s distribution of the Congressional appropriation of $100 million having been completed, Hoover created a private successor to that government agency: the American Relief Administration European Children’s Fund, though its full, formal name was used only on paper and within the organization: everyone knew it as the ARA. The private ARA had its headquarters in New York and branch organizations in every state of the union to raise funds for its European operations. Together with other private American philanthropic organizations, Hoover organized the European Relief Council to launch a joint fund-raising drive across the United States, which brought in approximately $40 million. The ARA received the unspent allocation earned by the Food Administration in its operations during the Armistice, which amounted to something like $40 million. Altogether, from 1919 to 1921, this private ARA delivered food worth over $150 million (worth about $2 billion in 2019 dollars) to children in twenty-one countries in Central, defining moments

Eastern, and Southeastern Europe and the Near East, functioning either independently or in conjunction with other private relief organizations. Its operations required a close involvement in matters of transportation and communications. This was of course unavoidable on a continent torn apart by war, but Hoover had a knack for making the most of it, as Hoover biographer David Burner describes: Hoover coordinated the distribution of food and the means of financing its purchase, restored to useful service river craft and rolling stock, took charge — or attempted to — of ports and canals and traffic on the Rhine, the Elbe, the Vistula, the Danube, rebuilt telegraphic and postal communication, renewed coal production for homes and industry, eradicated much contagious disease including typhus, and arranged barter where food could be moved in no other way. He coordinated Congress, the Treasury, the Shipping Board (where he could), the armed forces, and his own agencies. Anyone wishing to communicate among European countries had to do so through Hoover.12 This enormous organizational reach provided Hoover with a vast network of contacts throughout Europe, including the hundreds of relief workers of the ARA, many of whom would moonlight as informal collectors and facilitators for the Hoover library. As dispensers of food in a time of great hunger, these young men commanded extraordinary authority. They enjoyed access to the highest government officials and remarkable influence in political matters, while their “Hoover passports” served them as laissez-passers to points on the map off-limits to ordinary mortals. Acting in tandem with the relief workers throughout Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe were teams of unofficial American “technical advisers,” who counseled government officials on economic reconstruction, with an emphasis on the revival of transport. General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, called Hoover the “food regulator for the world.”13 Wilson remained wary of Hoover while regarding his services as indispensable. The president had been warned by his close adviser Colonel Edward M. House, a Hoover booster, who told Wilson in April 1917 that the savior of Belgium was “the kind of man that has to have complete control in order to do the thing well.”14 Adams spent nearly five months in Paris, June to October 1919, then moved on to Belgium and Germany, along the way recruiting assistants for the cause. In Berlin he enlisted First Lieutenant Ralph H. Lutz. A Stanford graduate from the class of 1906, Lutz had been a student in Adams’s European history course. He went on to receive a doctorate in history from the University of Heidelberg Foundations

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top left Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover with their two sons, Allan Hoover (left) and Herbert Hoover Jr., c. 1917. top right Ralph Lutz, c. 1941.

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in 1910 and became assistant professor of European history at the University of Washington, Seattle. Adams found Lutz attached to the American military mission in Berlin and put him to work collecting in Germany. On September 6 Lutz received his official discharge from the army and that same day joined the ARA. He soon embarked on his first collecting trip for the Hoover War Collection, a meandering journey through Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Italy, and Switzerland, where possible using ARA headquarters as his base of operations and establishing a network of contacts among book dealers, librarians, and government officials along the way. “I was still in uniform,” he later recalled. “I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if I had not been in unifrom.”15 Lutz would prove to be an especially resourceful collector and a vitally important figure in the development of Hoover’s institution. After his return to the United States, Lutz was brought to Stanford and given a joint appointment as associate professor of history at Stanford and a director, with Adams, of the Hoover War Collection. By 1920, Adams and Lutz were joined by another historian, Frank A. Golder, of the State Agricultural College at Pullman, Washington. Golder, who had emigrated from Russia as a boy, earned his BA and PhD in history from Harvard University, had extensive experience researching in Russian libraries, and was the author of pioneering studies on the history of Russian-American relations. He had also witnessed some of the most important and dramatic developments in modern Russian history. He was in St. Petersburg in 1914 when Russia entered the Great War, and he was in Petrograd in 1917 when defining moments

top left Frank Golder, c. 1925. top right Frank Golder’s American Relief Administration passport for Soviet Russia, 1921.

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the February Revolution brought an end to the Romanov dynasty. Golder taught summer courses in modern European history at Stanford in 1920. That September he resigned his position at Pullman, and went to Europe on what was intended to be a yearlong collecting mission for the Hoover library, principally in the Baltic countries and other states bordering Russia, the places Lutz had been unable to reach in 1919. Golder’s expedition turned into a three-year sojourn of enormous importance for the Hoover library. Golder traveled in 1920–21 throughout Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe and the Near East, collecting books, manuscripts, periodicals, government documents, personal papers, fugitive documents, and posters and arranging their shipment to Stanford. All the while, he was hoping to get into Soviet Russia, an opportunity that finally arrived in the summer of 1921, when a major famine had descended on the country and the Soviet government was forced to accept outside assistance in the form of a massive supply of food and medicine provided by Hoover’s ARA. The ARA entered Soviet Russia in August 1921 to fight the famine, and it fed and saved millions of people over the next two years. Golder reached Moscow with one of the first ARA parties and remained in Russia for most of the next twenty-one months. He built on past contacts with archivists, scholars, librarians, and cultural figures to acquire an enormous amount of documentary and other material on late Imperial Russia, the 1917 Revolution, and the emerging Soviet state for the Hoover library, including books, periodicals, manuscripts, documents, posters, and artworks. He also acquired the personal 13

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papers of individuals, including the diaries kept during the revolutionary years by a Petrograd archivist and a Moscow historian. Returning to Stanford in 1923, Golder was made associate professor of history, and in 1924 full professor, at which time he was also made a director of the Hoover Library. Lutz and Golder had laid the foundations of the Hoover Institution’s unparalleled collections from Central and Eastern Europe, with Germany and Russia the countries at their core. These included not only material directly bearing on the world war but also a sweeping record of the revolutionary movements that agitated Central and Eastern Europe in the war’s aftermath — materials relating to the revolutions of 1917, 1918, and 1919, and to the fragile new states of the region. Adams, Lutz, and Golder, the pioneer collectors, would return to Europe repeatedly during the 1920s to collect for the library, all the while enlarging the network of individuals in each country who would continue the work of collecting published and unpublished materials in their absence. This unusual — in some ways unique — method for building a preeminent historical collection would remain a Hoover hallmark in the decades ahead. Charles G. Palm, who directed the Hoover Institution Library & Archives for fifteen years, from 1987 to 2002, described this method of operation: An emphasis on contemporary and fugitive materials requires a collecting methodology that differs substantially from the librarians’ traditional reliance on commercial vendors, publishers’ trade lists and booksellers’ catalogs. Frequent trips abroad, networks of private collecting agents, cash purchases from street vendors, direct contacts with the individuals and organizations that attempt to influence political, social, and economic change — all became common features of a collecting strategy designed to save materials that appear only briefly and in limited numbers.16

Aleksandr Apsit, God proletarskoi diktatury: Oktiabr’ 1917–Oktiabr’ 1918 (One Year of the Proletarian Dictatorship, October 1917–October 1918), Soviet Russia, 1918.

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From the first, the collecting was broad in scope, as indicated by the categories Adams used in his first report on the Hoover collection, published in 1921: society publications; government documents; books and pamphlets; posters, proclamations and orders; newspapers and periodicals; war propaganda; and special collections. A major question from the start, and one that would persist, was where to draw the line when it came to the scope of the collecting, which seemed to defy delineation. For example, the Hoover annual report for 1923 pointed out that “the general policy has been to secure from each country a file of a newspaper that was in sympathy with the government and of two opposition papers, representing the Left and the Right respectively.” That was the official policy, but it was often ignored in practice. According to the same report, “The 15

French, German, and Russian collections far exceed this norm; if fragmentary sets be counted the Russia lists include 150 newspapers.” After the first $50,000 had been spent, Herbert Hoover continued to finance the collecting with large grants. The first Hoover annual report, in 1920, quoted the founder saying about the work of collecting: “It must go on for the next twenty-five years.” The catalogers could not keep up with the flood of acquisitions. Hoover found it hard to work up much sympathy when confronted with expressions of concern about this state of affairs. As he wrote to President Wilbur in 1924, in words that have become part of Hoover lore: “There will be a thousand years to catalogue this library but only ten years in which to acquire the most valuable of material.”17 By the summer of 1920, only a year into the work, the collection had secured, through purchases and gifts and from many countries, some 70,000 titles: books, pamphlets, and periodicals. Already by then it was believed that the Hoover War Collection would have no equal in the United States, “There will be a thousand years save perhaps the collection on the world war housed in the Library of Congress. It was with that institution that the to catalogue this library but Hoover War Collection made a special arrangement to have only ten years in which to first choice in the exchange of duplicate materials desired by either collection. The idea of acquiring duplicates does not acquire the most valuable of sound especially romantic when compared to the adventures material.” of collecting on the ground in remote countries, but in this early period, when the Hoover Collection was just getting off the ground, it was an arrangement that served the institution well. By the end of that first year, it had already brought to the Hoover Collection, free of charge, the wartime issues of more than thirty German newspapers. Tallies of the number of “titles” in a collection refer to the titles of publications. Archival collections are another matter entirely. The first archival collections in the Hoover War Collection were the files of the CRB and the ARA (both the US government iteration and the private organization that followed). Delivery of the CRB documents to Stanford was a promise kept, and the CRB files were routinely referred to in early Hoover descriptions as the “nucleus” of the collection. First to arrive, in January 1920, were the CRB’s Rotterdam files, in twenty-six packing cases. In 1922 came the files, in sixty-one cases, of the London office, which had conducted the business of CRB operations in Belgium and northern France. The New York files, documenting the local CRB fund-raising drives conducted across the United States, arrived during the 1923–24 academic year, completing the CRB archive. The American Relief Administration records would soon follow, in much greater quantities, as they covered operations in about two dozen countries. 16

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One might easily assume that the records of the CRB and the ARA deal narrowly with matters of food supply, which is how many people thought about Herbert Hoover. It was a misconception about Hoover that Edgar Rickard, his right-hand man in matters of the administration of relief, was impatient to dispel. “People speak of Hoover as a food expert or food administrator,” Rickard told the New York Times in September 1919, as Hoover was returning to the United States from Paris. “Somehow the impression might be gained that Hoover limited his work to purely food questions. Hoover’s job was a greater one than determining whether the nation should eat doughnuts or bran muffins. Hoover is an economist above all, and if such a term were possible I’d say he was an engineering economist.”18 By then, others were ready to describe Hoover’s achievement in grander terms. The Manchester Guardian said of Hoover in 1919: “He made himself — or was made — in reality supreme economic dictator, and in Europe the economic factor swamps everything else at present.”19 John Maynard Keynes paid generous tribute to Hoover in his classic 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace: Mr. Hoover was the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation. This complex personality, with his habitual air of weary Titan (or, as others might put it, of exhausted prize-fighter), his eyes steadily fixed on the true and essential facts of the European situation, imported into the Councils of Paris, when he took part in them, precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity, and disinterestedness which, if they had been found in other quarters also, would have given us the Good Peace.20 To appreciate the value of the archival records brought to Stanford, one must understand the vast scope of Hoover’s humanitarian organizations, including the kinds of records they kept: detailed and insightful reports on political, economic, and social conditions and forces — far more than the distribution of food — in each country where they operated. As official ARA historian Harold H. Fisher testified: These archives are of great interest to the historian because the relief operations were conducted on the basis of periodic reports on economic and health conditions made by local and American investigators and because the operations involved negotiations with many governments and government agencies and were concerned with a vast number of activities; river, rail and sea transport, fuel production and distribution, Foundations

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universities, schools and hospitals, clothing manufacture and distribution, sanitation, and the hazards of political and military policies.21 So vast were these ARA files for Europe and for Soviet Russia that Fisher was brought to Hoover in 1924 to serve as curator of the ARA archive, at which time he was also made a member of history faculty. It was the broad, inclusive nature of these founding collections that would influence the increasingly ambitious aims of the Hoover library’s collecting activities in the coming years. Their expansion to include the postwar reconstruction and the political and social revolutions and movements engendered by the war thus seemed a natural — indeed inevitable — development. As the scope of the collecting grew in the years ahead, it was easy to lose sight of the central importance of  “peace”  in the Hoover triad of war, revolution, and peace. The search for peace, for a way to prevent a recurrence of total war and the revolution that inevitably springs from it, was at the heart of Herbert Hoover’s project. As head of the Belgian relief, he had been a direct witness to the horrors of the First World War. In 1914, he was moved at the sight of Belgian citizens silently lining up for food and expressing a heartfelt “Merci” in return. In his memoirs he recalled receiving an invitation from the German authorities to visit the German lines of the Western Front in summer 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. Through powerful field glasses he observed in the far distance “the unending blur of trenches, of volcanic explosions of dust which filled the air where over a length of sixty miles a million and a half men were fighting and dying. . . . On the nearby road unending lines of Germans plodded along the right side to the front, not with drums and bands, but in the silence of sodden resignation. Down the left side came the unending lines of wounded men, the ‘walking cases,’ stumbling among cavalcades of ambulances. A quarter of a million men died, and it was but one battle in that war. . . . It was all a horrible, devastating reality, no romance, no glory.”22 In 1969, at the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Hoover Institution, Admiral Lewis L. Strauss — naval officer, businessman, and former commissioner on the United States Atomic Energy Commission — was among the speakers. Strauss had served as private secretary to Herbert Hoover during the Food Administration and ARA period and thus was present at the creation of the Hoover Institution. In his remarks, Strauss chose to emphasize the centrality of peace in Herbert Hoover’s motivation for establishing his collection: Mr. Hoover had observed that a recurring phenomenon associated with the “dear-bought experience” of war is that in the euphoria of victory, peace is presumed to be permanently achieved. It is mistakenly believed, 18

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each time, that the final and ultimate war has been fought — “to end all war.” In consequence, important records of how wars start are consigned to what George Orwell called the “memory hole.” There is no interest in the preservation of such papers and they are neglected and soon are lost or destroyed. (This happens quickly to the archives of the vanquished.) Then, when in the course of time, history begins to repeat itself, there is no remembered way out of the labyrinth, no signs pointing to safe exits. Nations begin once more their dismal slide over the precipice of war. Hoover, Strauss testified, “did not intend his growing archive to be a mausoleum of documents but, on the contrary, a place of living research, where the mistakes of governments, so costly in human lives and misery, could be studied and remembered.”23 The idealist in Herbert Hoover aspired to create nothing less than a war collection to end all war. HOOVER WAR LIBRARY

Already in 1920 the Hoover War Collection was referred to informally on campus as the Hoover “library” as it steadily grew. The rapid growth and rising reputation of the collection led in 1922 to a new name, the Hoover War Library. At the time, that library was located in two of the lower floors of the stacks of the University Library, a building that opened in 1919 and is today known as the Cecil H. Green Library. Professors Adams and Lutz divided the administrative chores between them in these early years, with Adams described as “Director of the Collection in larger plans” while Lutz served as “active Director in charge.” As the academic year 1920–21 began, several students entered Stanford specifically in order to do research work in the Hoover collections. The first Hoover annual report confidently predicted, “It is inevitable that there will be a considerable increase in the number of such students from year to year.” Estimated at approximately 80,000 items in March 1921, the Library’s holdings grew to an estimated 110,000 items by September 1922. Acquisitions continued to be made along the selected lines of government documents, newspapers, books, pamphlets, and manuscripts, as well as the personal papers of individuals. Alonzo Taylor, the director of Stanford’s new Food Research Institute, founded by Herbert Hoover in 1921 to investigate the issues of food production, distribution, and consumption, reported to Hoover in August 1921 that “the material from Europe is rolling in at an astonishing rate.”24 In the years 1922 and 1923 the outstanding acquisitions were the result of Professor Golder’s work in Soviet Russia. “One shipment alone from Russia consisted of 102 packing cases, and 23 others are now on the way,” noted the 1922 annual report. Foundations

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top Reading room of the Hoover War Library, c. 1922. bottom Ralph H. Lutz (left) and Ephraim D. Adams, standing alongside unopened materials at the Hoover War Library, c. 1924.

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In January 1922, a designated reading room of the Hoover War Library was opened to the public, located to the right of the main entrance of the University Library building. Presiding in the reading room was librarian Nina Almond. Almond came to Stanford as a member of the cataloging staff of the University Libraries in 1916 after graduating from the University of Indiana. In 1921 she was appointed librarian at Hoover, a position she held until her retirement in 1947. By the fall quarter of 1922 the reading room was reported to be “in constant use by graduate students and by others investigating some special ‘war problem.’”25 Typical users in those early days were advanced students in the Stanford History Department. The library now began routinely to supply research material for seminars and lecture courses, and to facilitate the research of students in master’s and doctoral programs: five of each during the 1922–23 academic year. “Simultaneously with the opening of the Reading Room began the stupendous task of cataloguing and classifying the collection,” Almond wrote. A library cannot serve its researchers unless its holdings are cataloged, and here the Hoover War Library was supremely challenged, as new acquisitions overwhelmed the attempts of the catalogers to keep up. The problem was becoming urgent as the number of researchers using the reading room climbed. “The Hoover library needs most of all a larger cataloguing force,” Almond asserted. “When one considers that there are over 100,000 items now in the library and that it is constantly growing by leaps and bounds, the impossibility of one or two cataloguers keeping pace with its growth can readily be seen.”26 The challenge was especially daunting for the Hoover staff because the publications in question were in widely diverse languages and contained many unique items, so the usual bibliographical tools were inadequate for the job. Much of the library’s material would remain uncatalogued through the 1920s, although a system was improvised in order to make it available to researchers. In 1921 the cataloging crisis was at the center of a more general discussion — the first of many — as to how to administer this growing monster. From the beginning, questions defining moments

of administration and control over the new collection created tensions between the founder and his associates and the Stanford administration, questions that would persist through the decades. The summer of 1921 was the first time that matters came to a head. By then Herbert Hoover was in Washington serving as US secretary of commerce in the Warren Harding administration. Hoover was adamant that his collection should be kept separate from the rest of the University Libraries’ collections. Alonzo Taylor, of the Food Research Institute, weighed in on August 9, when he wrote Hoover was adamant that to Hoover to ask what the founder meant in insisting that his collection should be his collection be kept segregated: did he mean physically or merely administratively? “I beg to point out that the use of kept separate from the rest the Bancroft Library in the University of California has been of the University Libraries’ greatly reduced through postponement of thoroughgoing cataloguing, and it is highly desirable that the War Collection collections. be catalogued as rapidly as possible,” Taylor wrote. He had a suggestion: “It is my own conviction that the material can be partially merged and partially held separate; with custodianship, cataloguing and administration segregated in such a way as to enhance the total value of the collection.” Hoover’s reply was firm. He understood the desire to keep down costs. “I do feel strongly, however, that in upbuilding a collection of this kind we must have the psychology of a separate body of material. Its mere exhibition and the knowledge of it in its physical situation attracts to itself valuable additions.”27 Hoover nonetheless agreed to compromise, and in November 1921 the collection was turned over to the Stanford Library for administration and cataloguing, though not for acquisition. President Wilbur made it clear in reaching this agreement that the collection should be “preserved as a distinct entity.”28 Hoover now went about raising funds for his library in the hope of shoring up its independent status. The CRB was in the process of liquidation, with a substantial cash balance still in hand. In mid–1922, at Hoover’s request, the CRB’s directors established a trust fund of $200,000, the income from which was to be used to store and maintain the organization’s records. The ARA, meanwhile, also had a modest surplus after the close of its operations. Hoover’s idea was to use that money largely to support the maintenance and expansion of the ARA’s files. In September 1923 the ARA donated its records to Stanford and $250,000 to be used for their upkeep. As with the CRB’s gift the previous year, the only portion of the ARA gift to be made available was the interest, and only for purposes of maintaining the collection. The CRB and ARA bequests, Hoover wrote to Wilbur, had the capacity to yield $20,000 to $22,000 annually for “support of the records” and for “acquisition of material to maintain and complete these two Foundations

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national collections.”29 As it happened, the formal contract with Stanford ended up permitting the use of the trust fund to support cataloging and administration as well as acquisition. Hoover went along with this compromise, but in 1924 he was not pleased to discover that fully 70 percent of the income from the combined endowments was being used to cover all Hoover War Library expenses, including acquisitions, administrative appointments, and general maintenance. In March 1924 a reorganization plan was agreed on and implemented. The plan provided for a ten-member board of directors, to be appointed annually by the Stanford president. The directors were to be Herbert Hoover, the Stanford president, and the University Librarian as ex officio members, plus seven others: the chairman, two members from the History Department, one from Economics, one from Political Science, one from the Food Research Institute, and the curator of the ARA archives (Harold Fisher, the only person to hold this title). Adams was named chairman and Lutz named secretary. The following year, Adams resigned as chairman and was replaced by Lutz, whose position as secretary was taken by Fisher. Under the new system, all administrative functions, including new acquisitions, were centered in the hands of the director of the University Libraries, while all problems of general policy were to be decided by the board of directors. The $450,000 endowment and the new organizational arrangements did not usher in a new era of harmony on campus. The competition for limited space, along with ambiguous lines of administrative authority, inevitably created tensions between the Hoover War Library and the University Libraries. These tensions were exacerbated by a fundamental disagreement between the Hoover Library directors and the university librarian, George Clark, over the role of the Hoover Library. Clark, a book collector, believed that the library ought to devote its resources chiefly to the accumulation of published records, while Adams and Lutz wished to emphasize periodical and primary sources such as newspapers, handbills, pamphlets, posters, proclamations, private papers, and photographs. Another source of disagreement from the beginning was that Adams and Lutz wanted the books of the Hoover War Collection to be cataloged according to the Library of Congress system, whereas Clark insisted on cataloging them according to the Dewey Decimal System, used by the University Libraries, which Adams and Lutz considered obsolete. A perennially contentious topic was the scope of the Hoover War Library’s collecting. With the founder’s blessing, the scope was expanded in 1923 to include the reconstruction period after the war. The collecting scope was broadly defined by Adams, as chairman of the board of directors, in the Stanford 1924–25 Announcement of Courses as follows: “The Hoover War Library is a collection 22

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Hoover chairman Ralph Lutz with librarian Nina Almond (right) and secretary Mabel Junkert, 1935.

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of material for research in the causes, conduct, and results of the Great War, covering also the period of reconstruction since the end of the War.”30 But this left open the question of how far back one should look to find the “causes” of the war and how far forward one should trace the “results.” A three-member Committee on Policy delivered a report in May 1925 that attempted to sort out the matter. Conceding the obvious point that “there are no well-defined limits to these subjects,” the committee recommended that “intensive efforts” be made “to cover political, economic, and social developments in the years 1919–24 in Europe.” There should be no attempt to cover the postwar period intensively outside of Europe. So a tentative closing date of 1925 was established, although it was in fact never rigidly adhered to. According to the new guidelines, the Hoover Library was to gather documentation on World War I and its aftermath, while the University Libraries would concentrate on general European history and on the underlying causes of the war.31 Here, too, the letter of the policy was not faithfully followed, creating another source of friction. Russia was the outstanding exception, as the report of the 1925 Committee on Policy noted. “It is still too early to set time limits to the Russian collection,” the report stated, “but the directors should consider from time to time how far it is consistent with the general scope of the Hoover War Library to extend the collection beyond 1924 in the Russian field, and also to survey the possibilities of utilizing the unique collection which is being developed here.” In fact, the wildfire expansion of Hoover’s collections on late Imperial and Soviet Russia would serve to encourage the library to collect more broadly, before 1914 and beyond 1924, for other European countries. Attesting to the uniqueness of the library’s Russia collections, in that same year (1925) the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund awarded Stanford a grant of $25,000 to establish a Russian Revolution Institute at Hoover, the first award by an American foundation for Russian studies. Other American universities would launch Russian-studies programs only after the Second World War. 23

Hoover’s unmatched Russia collections greatly benefited from the practice, endorsed by the 1925 Policy Committee, of special representatives, usually meaning Stanford professors, undertaking collecting trips abroad. The committee also recommended the use of resident agents abroad, especially in countries where the book trade was poorly organized and thus contacts who could be utilized for acquisition purposes were scarce. During the interwar period, some of these collecting agents were designated as Hoover “curators.” The most outstanding of these special agents was a distinguished Russian émigré and military historian in Paris by the name of Nicholas Golovine, a former Russian army general. In February 1926 the Hoover War Library reached an agreement with General Golovine to act as its agent in securing the papers of White Russians living in Europe, papers dealing mostly with Russian military history during the First World War and the Civil War of 1918–1921, as well as with the various activities of the Russian emigration. As the Hoover Library’s special agent, Golovine had an immediate impact, securing the papers of White Russian army generals and also the archives of the Imperial Russian Embassy at Paris for the period 1917–1924 (1924 being the year the French government granted diplomatic recognition to Soviet Russia). Golovine was eventually named the Hoover Library’s curator of Russian military collections and research associate. His collaboration with Hoover lasted almost two decades, until his death in German-occupied Paris in 1944. WAR, REVOLUTION, AND PEACE

In the early years, the Hoover War Library had two major competitors among the world’s greatest collections on the First World War and its immediate aftermath: the Weltkriegsbücherei (now the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte), at Schloss Rosenstein near Stuttgart, and the Bibliothèque–Musée de la Guerre, at Vincennes, a suburb of Paris (today the La Contemporaine: Bibliothèque, Archives, Musée des Mondes in Nanterre and Paris).32 The German library was founded in August 1915 by a wealthy Swabian industrialist named Richard Franck. The French library was established in the very first days of the war by the married couple Louise and Henri Leblanc, both from Parisian industrialist families. The Hoover War Library ultimately surpassed those formidable European libraries in the scope and richness of its collections, as well as in making those collections available to researchers and students. Each of the three libraries began as a collection on the causes and course of the Great War, and each soon expanded its scope to cover the various consequences of the war. But the Hoover War Library expanded more broadly and innovatively, so that within a decade its collections were regarded as more extensive and impressive than those of the libraries at Rosenstein and Vincennes. 24

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The first five volumes, published from 1932 to 1935, in the Hoover War Library Publications series.

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A distinctive feature of Hoover was its extraordinary archival collections, containing the papers of the Hoover relief organizations as well as collections of the diaries, letters, and manuscripts of individuals, both famous and obscure, of the war and postwar years. Rosenstein and Vincennes had almost nothing like it. Another thing that set Hoover apart was its publications activity, especially the volumes of its rare documents, presented in translations that made them accessible to a wider public. Fittingly, the first Hoover Library publication was A Catalogue of Paris Peace Conference Delegation Propaganda in the Hoover War Library, published by Stanford University Press in 1926 as “Bibliographical Series No. 1 of the Hoover War Library.” In 1932 the Hoover War Library Publications series was launched with Fall of the German Empire, 1914–1918, two volumes of documents selected and edited by Ralph Lutz. Eighteen more volumes, most of them authored or edited by Hoover archivists and Stanford historians, were issued during the next decade, devoted to topics as varied as the diplomatic history of the Balkan Crisis of 1875–78, the history of the United States Food Administration, the rise to power of the British Labour Party, Raymond Poincaré and the French presidency, Allied propaganda during the world war, China and the First World War, the blockade of Germany after the Armistice, the dissolution of the AustroHungarian Empire in 1919, and the Bolshevik Revolution. The Hoover War Library Publications series, published by Stanford University Press, consisted of not only 25

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Felix Albrecht, Arbeiter der Stirn, der Faust: Wählt den Frontsoldaten Hitler! (Workers who work with the head or the fist: choose the frontline soldier Hitler!), Germany, 1932. This was a political campaign poster for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in the German presidential election of 1932.

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documentary collections selected and edited by library staff or visiting scholars working in collaboration with staff, but also memoirs and narrative histories relating to the subject matter within the scope of the library. The prestigious series added luster to Hoover’s reputation for scholarly excellence. Yet while Hoover had surpassed its two early competitors, unlike those revered institutions it did not have its own premises. Throughout the 1920s, as Hoover’s holdings expanded, there was mounting concern about the need for additional space, both in the stacks and the reading room. The Hoover Library was fortunate that the recently opened University Library building had ample unused space. Stories of steel stacks could be constructed to accommodate the overflow. Yet by 1925, when the Hoover Library occupied two full floors of the stacks of the University Library, the idea of erecting a separate building had gained traction. A campaign to raise funds for its construction began, led by Edgar Rickard, and architects drew up a preliminary plan for the building. The building campaign, although it attracted numerous small donations from individuals who had worked in Herbert Hoover’s various organizations, fell far short of the required funds. A major factor was that Secretary of Commerce Hoover was reluctant to engage in fund-raising for his institution while serving in the president’s cabinet and thereby risk creating the appearance of a possible conflict of interest. Hoover’s election as president in 1928 meant that a building drive was out of the question. The onset of the Great Depression would present a different kind of obstacle to fund-raising after Hoover left the White House in 1933. The worldwide depression galvanized political and social movements that threatened democracy and a new world war. Responding to the crisis, in 1932 the Hoover War Library expanded the scope of its collecting to include these mass movements — communism, fascism, and national socialism. The library’s holdings on these subjects increased markedly, as forces that were once thought of as repercussions of the Great War were now perceived as portending a new world war. Communism had fallen within the Hoover Library’s scope since early on, and by 1938 the institution could boast that its collection on communism “probably constitutes the largest in the world today.”33 Similar attention was now focused on fascism and German National Socialism, and materials on these topics now expanded dramatically. A sign of the times was that the Russian Revolution Institute, established in 1925, was complemented a decade later by a German Revolution Institute, an initiative inspired by Hoover chairman Ralph Lutz. Also part of the marked expansion of the Hoover Library in the 1930s was the addition of the enormous Ray Lyman Wilbur Collection on Social Problems. This consisted mostly of the records and data collected by the White House 27

Title page and cover from first edition of Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, volume 1. Mein Kampf, published in two volumes (1925 and 1927), both of which are held by the Hoover Library, is a considerable rarity.

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Conference on Child Health and Protection, the White House Conference on Housing and Home Ownership, Better Homes in America, and other organizations administered by Wilbur when he served as secretary of the interior under President Hoover. The Wilbur Collection formed a special unit under a new subject area called “Post-war United States.” In 1934 new collecting fields related to American domestic affairs were added, among them “the New Deal,” “taxations, national debts, and fiscal conditions,” and “Americanism.” Research scholars from across the country came to Stanford to make use of the Hoover Library and its archival materials. The library’s reading room was now extensively used by undergraduates as well as graduate students. In 1932 the Hoover War Library offered its first course of instruction, and before long it added several more. What had started out as a collection of documents on the Great War had grown into a major research library on twentiethcentury history. To reflect these broader interests and activities, in 1938 the name of the library was changed to the Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace. The 1938 annual report, in marking the occasion, laid stress on the vital importance to Hoover’s mission of research into primary documents. It articulated this in a way that conveyed the anxieties of the era. “True historical knowledge must be based on fugitive literature and contemporaneous documents rather than on the rationalized opinions from memories and biased government publications defining moments

in after years,” it stated, echoing the sentiments of the founder and the men and women who helped launch his library. It continued: This preservation of fugitive material of the actual experiences of individuals from personal records, diaries and documents, the publications of ephemeral societies, the propagandas and their daily results, are of inestimable importance in building a true picture for history. They are more important than the formal records of governments or the biased statements of protagonists in these times when truth is so often distorted.34 Herbert Hoover, in remarking on the renaming of his institution in 1938, observed, “This will transform it from a dead collection to a live one. It has been suggested that we use the title — ‘War, Peace, and Revolution.’ This is a little less optimistic. Perhaps we had better have the title wind up with Peace.”35 Hoover’s comment was made against the backdrop of the gathering war clouds that threatened Europe and the world. When war broke out in Europe the following year, the directors of the Hoover Library decided to include the new conflagration within the Hoover Library’s collecting scope. The next war would be collected in real time.

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CHAPTER 2

THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER BUILDING THE TOWER

The shortage of space needed to accommodate stacks and researchers was a perennial problem at the Hoover Library from early on due to the rapid expansion of its collections within the Stanford University Library. Hoover associate Edgar Rickard, who would play a central role in solving that problem, later recalled: When I visited Stanford in 1925 I was astonished and grieved to find that the space allocated — although generous considering the necessity of maintaining the University’s growing needs — did not allow for proper filing or display. There were hundreds of cases containing valuable documents in the basement of the Administrative Building. These cases had never been opened, because of lack of room and personnel to handle them.36

Tower dedication ceremony as seen from Memorial Auditorium, June 20, 1941.

The idea of creating a separate facility had first been proposed by Hoover director Ephraim Adams in the early 1920s. In 1924, Herbert Hoover suggested that his library be combined with the proposed Stanford War Memorial Building, for which $100,000 had already been raised. In October 1925, Rickard, as head of the Building Committee, made the first appeal for funds to support the construction of a Hoover War Library building. His letter asking for voluntary subscriptions was sent to individuals who had been associated at one time or another with the “Hoover Organizations.” That appeal resulted in 452 individual gifts, from one dollar up. The total funds collected, some $81,000, were the foundation of the Building Fund. The plan for the Stanford War Memorial Building called for a small lecture hall and a central lobby featuring memorial displays honoring the men of Stanford University who died serving in the Great War. Hoover had the idea 31

to attach to this design the stacks, reading rooms, offices, and archive and film vaults required for his library. Fund-raising proved difficult, especially given the founder’s reluctance to engage in raising funds while he was serving as secretary of commerce. By 1929 the Hoover War Library had accumulated more than 1,400,000 items — both archival and published materials — and the need for additional space had become acute. The fund-raisers and the Hoover War Library’s directors were forced to reconsider their plans, and for a time in 1930 even considered constructing an inexpensive “utilitarian building” connected to the University Library. One result of the delay — felicitous, in retrospect — was the separation of the Hoover War Library from the proposed Stanford War Memorial building, which was completed in 1937, without a tower, and is today known as Memorial Auditorium. Herbert Hoover’s departure from the White House in 1933 meant that he was no longer inhibited from fund-raising for his institution. By then, the need for additional space inside the University Library was becoming critical, not only in the stacks and the vault but also in the reading room, as undergraduates began to use the library in greater numbers. In 1930 Hoover Library materials occupied the entire ground level of the stacks of the University Library building and had overflowed into the second level. The opening of a Hoover archives room in 1934 — to house the papers of the CRB, the ARA, the Food Administration, the Herbert Hoover Collection, and the Ray Lyman Wilbur Collection on Social Problems — helped relieve the congestion, but before long the need for additional space again became pressing. Meanwhile the search for building funds continued. The major breakthrough came in May 1937, when the American Relief Administration finally liquidated and endowed more than $140,000 to Stanford for the erection of a building to house the Hoover War Library. In late 1938 the Belgian American Educational Foundation, a legacy of the CRB whose president was Rickard, donated $300,000 toward construction of the proposed building, with the proviso that the university cover the $100,000 still outstanding and assume the costs of maintenance. The university’s trustees agreed. John Rockefeller Jr. gave $50,000, and the balance of the $600,000 required funding came from numerous smaller individual donations. The question of what kind of structure to build had been decided in favor of a tower, which would relieve the low roof lines of the campus’s Spanish Mission– style quadrangle. The design was contracted to Arthur Brown Jr., of the firm Bakewell and Brown, who had designed several buildings on campus, including one of its architectural gems, the University Library, as well as San Francisco’s Beaux Arts city hall (after the original was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake) 32

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THE NAZI-SOVIET PACT The most notorious treaty of the twentieth century was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Nazi-Soviet Pact. It was signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov. The public part of the treaty was a statement of nonaggression and friendship between the two countries. The treaty’s secret protocols stipulated that “in the event of a territorial and political rearrangement” the Soviet Union would be given preponderant influence in the Baltics and that Poland would be divided into German and Soviet sectors. On their part, the Soviets pledged to remain neutral in the event of a war between Germany and Poland or between Germany and the Western powers.

The shock produced by the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact can

hardly be exaggerated. The two powers were viewed as ideological opposites, yet here they were declaring their mutual friendship. The treaty would not last even two years before being dramatically nullified by the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. For the time being, it gave Hitler the free hand he wanted for Germany to invade Poland, which it did September 1. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. On September 18, German forces moving eastward into Poland met the westward-bound Soviet forces at Brest-Litovsk. Poland had disappeared from the map.

The Hoover Archives holds two albums of photographs of Ribbentrop’s visit

to Moscow to sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The photographs, taken by Ribbentrop’s private photographer, provide a unique and vivid record of the event. Because we know the aftermath, there is a surreal quality to the images of the signing ceremony, the apparent good cheer of the participants presenting a striking counterpoint to the enormous human misery about to be unleashed by the pact. The albums came to the Hoover Archives in 1968 as a gift from Colonel William R. Philp, a retired US Army officer living in San Francisco. Philp had been an intelligence officer who advised on the Normandy invasion plans, served with General George Patton on the continent, and was the chief of intelligence for the US Army dealing with the prisoners awaiting trial at Nuremberg. Philp’s Joseph Stalin smiles for the camera and shakes hands with German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, as Red Army chief of staff Boris Shaposhnikov (center back) and German SS officer Richard Schulze look on. Photographs are from Ribbentrop’s personal album.

the view from the tower

collection included X-rays of Hitler’s head and teeth, taken after the failed attempt on his life on July 20, 1944 — another of Hoover’s archival treasures.

33

Hoover Tower blueprint.

34

and its Art Deco Coit Tower. Incorporating the tower motif, Brown designed a monumental structure that, as Herbert Hoover understated the matter, “would add to the ornamentation of an open space campus.”37 On December 8, 1938, Stanford president Ray Lyman Wilbur publicly unveiled the plan for the new building. On the Stanford campus and in the local community, the building’s harshest critics spoke the loudest — which is often the way radically new architecture is received. The design that aroused this criticism was soon altered, though not in order to appease the critics. Brown’s original plan envisioned a spacious entrance hall and two stories of offices, from which would arise a tall tower with a sloping red-tiled roof, with a reading room at the top. On May 19, 1939, three months prior to groundbreaking, Wilbur received a telegram from Hoover in New York informing him that “the carillon of thirty-five bells in the Belgian Tower of the World’s Fair might be obtained for the library building. The bells weigh eighteen thousand pounds including electric clock which operates timing of bells.” The total cost would be at most $15,000. Hoover had two questions for Wilbur: “First is construction of tower such that bells could be installed and second do you want bells at all?”38 The answers, it turned out, were yes to the second and no to the first. Architect Brown immediately began redesigning the tower to accommodate an eighteenthousand-pound carillon. His revised plans changed the sloping rectangular roof to a dome, moved the reading room down to the first floor, and turned the fourteenth floor into a belvedere just large enough to serve as a belfry. The revised blueprint increased the height of the tower and capped it with the red-tiled, domed belvedere. Aside from its functional utility in accommodating the bells, the dome had the advantage of resembling the (much smaller) twin domes atop the Stanford Union building. This and the fact that the redesign was said to have been modeled on the sixteenth-century cathedral in Salamanca, thereby clinching the building’s Spanish pedigree, may have helped soothe local opinion. Details about the carillon were late in coming, and the architect and builders had to make last-minute improvisations in order to make everything fit. The 1,350-pound main bell, or bourdon, bears an inscription in Latin that translates as: “Because I am called Leopold the Royal / for peace alone do I ring over the waves of the Atlantic.” And so, in the end, Herbert Hoover’s singular connection to Belgium and the special Belgian-American bonds he helped forge influenced the development of his library at Stanford in pivotal ways: from the conversation, begun in 1915, about the records of the Commission for Relief in Belgium that helped inspire the library’s founding, through the deposit of the CRB’s prodigious archive as the library’s founding collection, through the construction of its tower building twenty years later, to the ringing of its bells ever since. defining moments

Herbert Hoover and Ralph Lutz, Hoover Tower, June 20, 1941.

the view from the tower

Two weeks after the library building’s groundbreaking in mid-August 1939, war broke out in Europe. Hoover had acted in anticipation of these events. In the spring of 1939, on the strength of $100,000 he was able to raise from one of his foundations, Hoover sent Ralph Lutz, now the library’s director, on a collecting mission to Europe. “I didn’t want to go,” Lutz later recalled, “but he just had me up to the house one day and he said, ‘You’ve got to get back there.’ He said, ‘There’s imminence of war and this time I want you to collect materials from the totalitarian states.’ He told me, ‘Go to every country.’”39 Lutz was in Europe when the war began. For several months he traveled across the continent, collecting materials for the library. Along the way, he arranged with the library’s old and trusted book dealers in Germany, Austria, France, and Italy to set aside items for the Hoover collections until such time, after the hostilities ended, when Hoover staff could return to retrieve the material. Lutz promised to compensate them for their acquisitions and their efforts at war’s end. On his journey, Lutz must have paused to reflect on how his current assignment was a kind of mirror image of his collecting work twenty years earlier, in immediate post–World War I Europe. As Hoover biographer George H. Nash writes of this undertaking, “It was a brilliant innovation. No other library had ever employed such a strategy; no other even had representatives in Europe at the time. Once again, thanks to the founder’s farsightedness and timely financial support, and to Lutz’s own astuteness and zeal, the Hoover Library would reap a historical bonanza and remain unchallenged in its field.”40 That was all still to come. Meanwhile, back at Stanford, construction of the Hoover Library building proceeded apace. Its skeletal girders rose above the plane of the central campus skyline, eventually reaching a height of 285 feet above ground level. Librarian Nina Almond planned and directed the complex operation of transferring the library’s holdings to the new building, a feat accomplished in three weeks’ time. As the tower was nearing completion early in 1941, Hoover asked that the formal dedication of his library building be 35

made part of the university’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, and of course his request was granted. The dedication ceremony took place on June 20. The dedication assembly was held at Memorial Auditorium, directly across from the tower, at 3:30 in the afternoon, with Stanford president Wilbur presiding and featuring speeches by Charles H. Brown, president of the American Library Association; Sidney B. Fay, professor of history at Harvard; and Charles Seymour, president of Yale University. The proceedings were marked by somber reflections about the previous war and the new conflagration. This ceremony was followed at 4:30 by a carillon concert from the tower given by Kamiel Lefévère, carillonneur of Riverside Church in New York. Lefévère, a Belgian-American carillonneur and composer, had arrived at Stanford along with the bells. He oversaw the dismantling of the carillon in New York, its transport by ship from Brooklyn to San Francisco, and its reassembly inside Hoover Tower. The concert was followed at 5:00 by formal exercises of dedication in Library Plaza, as the area in front of the tower was then called. The ceremony was broadcast live by NBC affiliate KGO, San Francisco. It opened with the carillon playing “America the Beautiful” and ended with “The Star Spangled Banner.” Presiding was Leland Cutler, chairman of the Stanford Board of Trustees. The invocation was delivered by Stanford chaplain David Elton Trueblood, a longtime friend of Herbert Hoover’s. Among the speakers at the podium on the steps of the Tower, Yale president Seymour was not alone in invoking the war, revolution, and peace of the Hoover Library’s name: The significance of the collections here housed cannot be overstated, for they will serve not merely historians but mankind. The chief dangers now threatening civilization proceed, I think, from ignorance, from disease, and from war. Only through a knowledge that will guide us to the discovery of a political substitute for war can we hope to conquer the other dangers, to control the revolution that inevitably springs from total war, to attain the peace that will enable us to fight disease instead of men and will guarantee the free enlightenment of the mind.41 In his remarks, Hoover employed an incantatory device to describe the collections amassed in the Tower behind him:

Hoover Tower under construction.

36

Here are not alone published books. They are easy to obtain. But here are the fugitive documents which quickly disappear. Here are the inner records of governments, of minutes of war councils and war departments, records of peace negotiations, economic and social organizations over defining moments

above Tower dedication ceremony as seen from Memorial Auditorium, June 20, 1941. top right Tower carillon bells, undated photograph. bottom right Herbert Hoover speaking at the dedication ceremony.

the view from the tower

37

all the nations who have been involved in war. Here are records of every social movement from Communism through Fascism, Nazi-ism, and in the democracies. And here are the only records of the great intervention of America which saved the lives of hundreds of millions in Belgium and from the aftermath of the Great Famine and Pestilence which swept over Europe after the last war. Here are the records of the efforts to make and preserve peace. Hoover placed particular emphasis on the role of war propaganda in fomenting and fueling the First World War. Propaganda in various forms — posters, handbills, pamphlets, and other such fugitive documents — had become something of a Hoover specialty, starting with the collection of peace delegation propaganda in Paris in the summer of 1919. “It was in the last war that war propaganda first became a major strategy of war,” Hoover continued. “Here lies the proof which comes with retrospect that propaganda moves by tainting of facts, suppressing the facts, by synthetic facts, as well as perversion of facts. Here is the proof of organized promotion of hate, fear, and dissension.” “I suppose,” Hoover observed, acknowledging the doomsayers in his audience, “some one will wonder why all this trouble and expense to preserve these records. They embrace the campaigns of armies, the negotiations of statesmen. They tell the great drama of superlative sacrifice, of glory, of victory, of death, of sorrow, of frustration and defeat. If we assume that humanity is going to abandon the lessons of its own experience, the whole of this collection is useless, except to the casual visitor. But sometimes the voice of experience does call out to stop, look, and listen. And sometimes peoples respond to that call.” In his peroration Hoover declared, “The purpose of this institution is to promote peace. Its records stand as a challenge to those who promote war.”42 Two days later, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union; six months after that came Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the Second World War. WARTIME

facing page Bernard Perlin, Avenge December 7, United States, 1942.

38

“Within days of Pearl Harbor,” writes historian George Nash, Herbert Hoover “initiated a new campaign to acquire ‘fugitive material’ on the current conflict. The files of the America First Committee [a pressure group opposing the potential entry of the United States into World War II], which he personally solicited, were among his earliest prizes. His principal financial ally in the document hunt was an old friend, businessman, and philanthropist, Jeremiah Milbank, whose contribution of $2,500 in late 1941 helped make it possible for Hoover to reopen his library’s Washington office.”43 defining moments

the view from the tower

39

Wartime was a period of transition for the Hoover Library. From the time of its founding, the library was defined not only by its collections but also by the research and teaching that was based on those collections. The first Hoover directors — Ephraim Adams, Ralph Lutz, and Frank Golder — taught lecture courses and seminars and directed the research work of graduate students on campus. During the late 1920s these privileges were extended to those staff members engaged in research of the library’s Russian and German materials. In 1940, the Russian and German “Revolution Institutes” at Hoover (since renamed “research projects”) were consolidated as the Research Institute, Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace. The following year the Stanford Board of Trustees adopted a resolution changing the name to the even more cumbersome Hoover Research Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace, Hoover Library. “This action was taken,” in the words of the 1942 Hoover annual report, “in order to give additional emphasis to the work of the Research Institute, which is now in a position to offer work in the many-sided problems of defense and the struggle for world order, which have been largely avoided or ignored in the curricula of American universities.”44 Hoover’s wartime role as a center for the study of defense and military government came about as a result of the extensive use of Hoover’s collections and staff resources by government officials from various departments and agencies. In particular they examined the materials dealing with large-scale administration of food and relief in territories devastated by war, and materials needed for intensive area studies of certain countries of Central and Eastern Europe — both Hoover areas of specialization. Hoover’s reputation for excellence as a research center was solidified during the war by its central role in three government schools that Stanford was asked to set up for the military services to train officers assigned to civil-affairs duties in liberated or occupied countries. These wartime projects were organized and directed by Harold Fisher, serving as the Hoover Library’s acting chairman after Lutz fell ill in 1943, and then as chairman when illness forced Lutz to retire in 1944. In 1943 the US Army established a Civil Affairs Training School at the Hoover Library, where both men and women officers of the army and navy studied the languages and the economic, political, and social institutions of areas expected to be liberated or occupied by Allied forces. The first courses, taught by Hoover staff and Stanford faculty, prepared officers for postwar work in Central and Southeastern Europe, particularly Germany. Later instruction focused on East Asia, particularly Japan. As Hoover vice chairman C. Easton Rothwell noted, the library quickly proved to be uniquely well suited to this new wartime role. “The problems of administration of occupied or liberated territories have led to the development of 40

defining moments

a new field of specialization — military government — a phase of transition from war to peace. Military government documents first came into the possession of the library in connection with the work of the C.R.B. in Belgium and Northern France. The A.R.A. added to these collections.”45 In 1944 the War Department established a Civil Communications Intelligence School based at Hoover, with courses of instruction that drew on Hoover staff, resources, and facilities, as well as Stanford faculty. The program included a five-month course in the Japanese language and courses on the geography and political history of East Asia. All participants were officers from the army, the Women’s Army Corps, or the navy. Between August 1943 and September 1945 training was given to more than five hundred officers. In 1945, at the request of the US Navy, a School of Naval Administration was established at Hoover to train naval officers to govern the Pacific islands liberated from Japan. In six-month program sessions, students were briefed on the background of the island areas and peoples as well as on the practical, immediate questions of naval policies and programs for the islands. Fisher ran the program with the assistance of Stanford anthropologist Felix M. Keesing, an authority on the Philippines Islands and the South Pacific and on colonial administration. Keesing was in charge of the teaching program, whose instructing staff included eight naval officers with experience as military governors on the islands. Captain Charles E. Crombie Jr., professor of naval science and tactics and commandant of the Stanford NROTC unit, commanded the program. Students researched government documents, periodicals, and books held at the Hoover Library, using as their study quarters the future Lou Henry Hoover Room in the tower. By August 1947, roughly two hundred naval officers had been prepared for administrative duties in the Pacific. It was in part as a result of these activities that in 1946 the name of the institution was changed to the Hoover Institute and Library on War, Revolution, and Peace. A quite different activity initiated in wartime would endure through the postwar years and continues today. In October 1943, due to popular demand and initially only as an experiment, visitors to campus were escorted to the top of the tower in order to visit the eleventh-floor offices of Herbert Hoover and Wilbur, now Stanford University chancellor, and to take in the panoramic view of the Bay Area. These operations were initiated under the direction of Inez Richardson, curator of the Ray Lyman Wilbur Collection, whose office on the ground floor of the tower served as the reception room for these visitors. From October 26, 1943, the first day the experiment was conducted, through August 31, 1944, more than 3,500 people took the elevator ride to the top of the tower. In 1945 the total number of visitors was about 15,000, and by 1950 that number had the view from the tower

41

nearly doubled. “It has now reached the point,” noted Vice Chairman Rothwell in an internal report in 1951, “where this traffic will seriously interfere with the use of the building as a library and research center unless changes are made to isolate the working space from the tourist traffic.”46 And so the entrance to the reading room was sealed off with a glass wall to ensure quiet. Today, the annual number of visitors to the Hoover Tower’s observation platform exceeds 125,000. Hoover Tower figured prominently in the celebrations on campus marking the end of the Second World War. On May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, carillonneur James R. Lawson played a recital on the Hoover Tower carillon. The program included “Victory Rhapsody for Carillon,” composed especially for V-E Day by Percival Price, carillonneur of the University of Michigan. It had been widely distributed and was played simultaneously that day in bell towers throughout the country. The Hoover Tower carillon program also included the national anthems of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. The hymn “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” — “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” — concluded the recital. It had last been played on the Hoover Tower carillon on December 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. POSTWAR BOOM

Hoover chairman Harold H. Fisher (seated) and vice chairman C. Easton Rothwell, c. 1951.

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Hoover’s acquisitions in the first years after the war were more extensive, and more outstanding, than for any period of the library’s history since the arrival of the founding collections in the first years after World War I. Central Europe continued to be a focus, but now Japan and China became major collecting areas. As in the past, the founder took the lead in building the library’s collections on World War II and its aftermath. By the end of 1944, Hoover had raised some $235,000 in gifts and pledges, including $50,000 from his old friend and previous donor Jeremiah Milbank, for acquisitions. And there was much more to come. The global scope of the Second World War, combined with the influence of the training schools for army and navy officers conducted under the auspices of the Hoover Institute, inspired the acquisition of outstanding collections on the Pacific and East Asia. As Hoover librarian Philip T. McLean, successor to Nina Almond, wrote in 1949, “The holdings of the Library have been expanded to global scope. They now document developments in all major regions of the world, with special emphasis upon certain leading countries in each region. The Library’s resources also illumine the history and evolution of universal trends and international movements which have no regional boundaries.”47 The accumulation of new materials in the first five postwar years more than doubled the prewar holdings of the Hoover Institute and Library on War, Revolution, and Peace. defining moments

HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI These three frames were made from film footage taken of the atomic explosion over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. Three days earlier, the US Army B-29 Enola Gay had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Original film footage of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings — the only such film in existence — was donated to the Hoover Library & Archives in 1980 by Harold Agnew, a physicist who monitored the Hiroshima bombing from The Great Artiste, the instrument plane that accompanied the Enola Gay on its mission. Agnew’s papers at Hoover include the original strike orders for both bombings. the view from the tower

43

Curator of the China collection Mary Wright, Hoover director Easton Rothwell, and assistant curator Eugene Wu (foreground) examine a shipment of documents.

44

The postwar collecting boom involved the participation of numerous Stanford students, faculty members, and alumni, many of whom were able to contribute valuable material they had acquired during their service in the armed forces at various fronts in many countries or while carrying out postwar occupation duties. Among the contributing alumni, of course, was Herbert Hoover himself. In the spring of 1946, President Harry Truman tapped the great humanitarian of the World War I era to travel the world in order to, as Hoover later put it, “coordinate the food supplies of all the nations of the world to meet the greatest famine of all history — the inevitable consequence of the Second World War.”48 Major alumni contributions now put Japan in Hoover’s sights. After the Japanese surrender, members of the Stanford University Alumni Association of Tokyo began to collect documentation for the Hoover Library on the movements and forces within Japan that had driven the country to war. In November 1945, the library established a Tokyo office under the direction of Yoshio Higashiuchi, a Stanford University graduate (class of 1937), and the informal supervision of Lieutenant Colonel Hubert G. Schenck, a Stanford geology professor on military leave, at the time serving as head of the Natural Resources Section, General Headquarters, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. Herbert Hoover’s visit to Japan in 1946 on behalf of President Truman facilitated these collecting activities by bolstering the cooperation of the US Army. Between November 1945 and December 1947, the Tokyo office shipped almost 300 boxes of Japanese materials to Hoover. By late 1949, the Tokyo office had shipped a total of 450 boxes including about 5,000 items, many of them rare books. In order to process the flood of incoming material, in 1949 a curator for Japan, Nobutaka Ike, was appointed. By 1950 the library had acquired an outstanding collection on the revolutions in Japan from the time of Commodore Perry, in the mid-nineteenth century, to that of General MacArthur. One of the early fruits of the new collections on Japan was Robert J. C. Butow’s 1954 book Japan’s Decision to Surrender, based on his Stanford doctoral dissertation. The book, with defining moments

General Joseph Stilwell (right) with Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang, April 1942. Photograph by Clare Boothe Luce.

the view from the tower

a foreword contributed by Edwin O. Reischauer, one of the country’s leading specialists on Japan and East Asia, is still regarded as the classic work on the conclusion of the war in the Pacific. It was No. 24 in the Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace Publications series. The materials on Japan were certainly impressive, but China was the Asian country where Hoover collectors would achieve their greatest successes in these postwar years. The Hoover Library’s acquisition of Chinese material had begun in the interwar years. In 1933, Stanford history professor Payson J. Treat acquired for the library the materials collected by Jay Calvin Huston, a former Stanford student who served as American consul in China until his death the previous year. Huston’s collection was described in the 1933 Hoover annual report as “an extremely valuable and extensive collection of materials dealing with political, economic, and social conditions in modern China, with special reference to the influence of Soviet Russia and communistic agencies.” In the postwar years, Hoover built on these modest beginnings in a major way. The revolutionary upheaval in Asia, particularly in China, was regarded as comparable in historical significance to the revolutionary upheaval in Europe and Russia during and after World War I. Just as in that earlier time of historic change, Hoover collectors were on the scene. From 1946 until the spring of 1947, the Hoover Library’s principal representatives in China were historians Mary and 45

above The “Big Four” in Yan’an: left to right, Po Ku, Zhou En-lai, Zhu De, and Mao Zedong, 1937. Photograph by Helen Foster Snow. facing page Phili (Pierre Grach), Libération, France, 1944.

46

Arthur Wright. They were living in Peking (Beijing) when the Japanese invaded and were interned there until the city was liberated by American paratroopers in October 1945. Answering a call from the Hoover Library for assistance with collecting, the Wrights, with Peking as their home base, traveled extensively throughout China, picking up newspapers, pamphlets, and books along the way and shipping them back to Peking and then on to Stanford. Courtesy of the US Air Force, Mary Wright was able to fly to Yan’an, headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party before it fell to Nationalist troops on March 19, 1947, and collect materials there. In 1947 the Wrights returned to the United States. Arthur joined the faculty at Stanford University, while Mary accepted an appointment as curator of the China collection at the Hoover Library. (She obtained a PhD in history from Radcliffe College in 1951.) “Thanks to the generosity of Mr. Milbank and the ability and energy of Mrs. Wright, our Curator for China,” noted a 1951 Hoover internal report, “we have what is acknowledged by all competent authorities to be the outstanding collection on contemporary China. These materials are indispensable for the study of the nationalist and communist movements. The closing of China to the Western world [in 1949] has enormously increased their importance and their value.”49 The Hoover Library proceeded to build on these sturdy foundations. It acquired the papers of Joseph Stilwell, one of the most colorful American officers of World War II. When the United States entered the war, its chief focus was on defeating Hitler first; the war in Asia would have to wait. But in the meantime, it was important to keep China from falling to the Japanese. To help bolster the military effort of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, in 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt designated Lieutenant General Stilwell to serve as commanding general of US Army forces in the China-Burma-India theater. Relations between “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek were seldom cordial and slowly turned venomous, ultimately leading to Stilwell’s removal. Stilwell kept a diary for most of his life, and its coverage of his time in China and his troubled relationship with defining moments

the view from the tower

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Chiang Kai-shek is the most interesting and valuable component of his collection. Barbara W. Tuchman drew heavily on the diaries and Stilwell’s other papers at Hoover in writing her Pulitzer Prize–winning book Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45, published in 1971. Hoover later acquired the papers of General Albert C. Wedemeyer, Stilwell’s successor in China. And decades later would come Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries, illuminating Generalissimo Chiang’s view of his relationships with these and other American soldiers and diplomats. The Chiang Kai-shek papers are complemented by other rare collections documenting China’s Nationalist government. These include the papers of T. V. Soong, foreign minister during World War II and later finance minister, and those of Chang Kia-ngau, an economist, scholar, diplomat, founder of the Central Bank of China, and later minister of railroads and communication, who spent the last decade of his life as a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Other China collections acquired by the Hoover Library in the postwar decades document Mao’s Communist insurgents. In 1944, the United States sent an observer mission to Yan’an, called the Dixie Mission, in order to establish contact with the Communists there as a way to explore the potential for collaboration in the war against Japan. The Dixie Mission is thoroughly documented in several Hoover collections, notably the papers of Colonel David Barrett, its first senior officer. The Nym Wales Papers constitute one of the most important collections in the Hoover Archives. Nym Wales was the pseudonym of Helen Foster Snow, wife of journalist Edgar Snow, author of Red Star over China (1937). Helen Snow made her way to the Communists’ headquarters in Yan’an and spent four months there in 1937. She interviewed and photographed Mao and his comrades, and, upon her return to Peking, published articles and eventually a book, Inside Red China (1939), under the pen name Nym Wales. A highlight of the Nym Wales Papers is a collection of twenty-four black-ink sketches made during the so-called Long March, the grueling trek undertaken by Mao and the Red Army in 1934 in order to break out of the encirclement by the Chinese Nationalists and be free of the harassments of local warlords. Their route took them from their base in Jiangxi province in southeastern China around the country’s western periphery to the northern province of Shaanxi. Over the course of one year, the marchers journeyed six thousand miles across often treacherous terrain, struggling against hunger, disease, and freezing cold, and battling hostile forces along the way. The sketches were the work of Huang Zhen, a member of Mao’s cadre in the 1930s, who rose to the rank of general in the Red Army, later to become a diplomat and, in 1977, China’s minister of culture. As China’s ambassador to the United States, he worked with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to plan President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972. 48

defining moments

HERBERT HOOVER AND POLAND After World War I, Herbert Hoover’s American Relief

a central square in Warsaw, the nation’s capital. During

Administration (ARA) fed millions of people across

the Second World War, Hoover headed the Commission

hunger-stricken Europe and the Near East. Poland was

for Polish Relief, which assisted hundreds of thousands

among the leading beneficiaries of ARA relief. At Hoover’s

of displaced Poles. And in 1946, he returned and renewed

initiative, thousands of tons of condensed milk, flour, and

his contact with Poland before the Cold War set in.

wheat began arriving in Poland in the spring of 1919. By



summer, hundreds of kitchens were feeding more than

in the 2006 Hoover exhibition Herbert Hoover in Poland:

five hundred thousand Polish children per day. Within a

Pioneer Humanitarian at Work. The installation featured

year the operation would feed as many as one and a half

rare photographs, correspondence, newspaper accounts,

million children and nursing mothers each day. American

and video testimonials by Polish beneficiaries of Hoover’s

food was supplemented by massive shipments of cloth-

relief efforts. The exhibition was first shown in 2004 and

ing, shoes, and medical supplies. Meanwhile, extensive

2005 in Warsaw, Kraków, Katowice, Łódź, and Poznań,

technical assistance from American advisers helped

where it drew large crowds.

Hoover’s special relationship with Poland was explored

rebuild Poland’s railways and communications networks.

During a visit to Warsaw on August 14, 1919, Hoover

was honored in an emotional ceremony, with many thousands of children demonstrating their gratitude. In 1922, the Legislative Assembly of the Polish Republic passed a resolution granting Hoover national citizenship, the first foreigner ever to be so honored. The same year, on October 29, a sculpture honoring Hoover was unveiled in the view from the tower

top left Herbert Hoover with Polish war orphans, Warsaw, April 2, 1946. top right Herbert Hoover in Poland: Pioneer Humanitarian at Work, exhibition postcard, Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion, 2006.

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In the postwar years, the Hoover Library’s European collections also prospered, if less dramatically than the Asian collections. As soon as France was liberated, Hoover research associate and associate professor of history Merrill T. B. Spalding was dispatched to Europe to set in motion the postwar collecting operations. Spalding was followed by other Hoover representatives, including the well-known Associated Press correspondent Louis Lochner, who did serious collecting work for Hoover in the areas of Germany liberated by the United States and in Great Britain. In nearly every country these representatives traveled to, they found that the agents enlisted in the cause by Ralph Lutz back in 1939 had carried out, sometimes at great personal risk, their promise to Lutz to collect for Hoover. Eastern Europe at the end of World War II experienced a revolution of a different kind from the one happening in Asia: a Stalinist revolution from above, facilitated by Soviet occupation forces. This state of affairs made collecting there difficult, especially once the Cold War set in. Several valuable collections of Polish documents ended up at Hoover as a result of diplomatic developments toward the end of the war, when the United States and Britain withdrew recognition of the London-based Polish government-in-exile in favor of the Sovietbacked government in Lublin, Poland. With the writing on the wall, the Polish political and military authorities in London decided to transfer some of the collections under their control to a safe location in the United States, settling on the Hoover Institution. These unique archives, and other valuable holdings acquired before and since the Second World War, made the Hoover Institution home to the largest collection of twentieth-century Polish documents outside Poland. Most of the Polish library and archival collections that were brought to Hoover after World War II came as part of three deposits: that of Poland’s wartime ambassador to the United States, Jan Ciechanowski, in 1945, which included the archives of the Polish embassies in Washington, London, and Moscow-Kuybyshev; that of foreign minister Aleksandr Zawisza, in 1959, consisting of the archives of the Polish Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and that of Polish army general Władysław Anders. The Anders papers, transferred to the Hoover in 1946, included his collection of the transportation orders of forty thousand Poles held captive in the USSR during the war, and the depositions he took from thousands of ex-prisoners. The US government used these documents to fix the location of hundreds of Stalin’s forced-labor camps. Based on this information, the American Federation of Labor constructed a map identifying the location of labor camps across the USSR, known collectively as the Gulag, the Soviet acronym for the camp system. The map was given wide circulation when the Saturday Evening Post published it in 50

defining moments

Student shipping clerks at work in the receiving room in the basement of Hoover Tower, c. 1949.

the view from the tower

1951. Among the most important documents in Zawisza’s Ministry of Information collection are some ten thousand original release certificates issued by the Soviet political police, the NKVD, in the second half of 1941 to Polish citizens freed from Soviet camps. The Hoover Library’s ability to attract such outstanding collections on wartime Poland owes a great deal to a remarkable Pole named Jan Karski. As a young Polish diplomat when the war broke out, Karski had joined the Polish underground resistance. He arranged to be smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto in order to observe conditions there, and he witnessed the transportation of Jews to the extermination camps, barely escaping death in the process. He made his way to London and then to Washington, DC, to sound the alarm about the unfolding Holocaust. Karski’s name is best remembered in this context for a conversation he had during his stay in Washington with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, to whom he was introduced by Poland’s ambassador to the United States, Jan Ciechanowski. At Frankfurter’s Georgetown home one evening in 1945, Karski spent a half hour recounting what he had witnessed of the ghetto and the camps, but Frankfurter found it all unfathomable. “Mr. Karski, a man like me talking to a man like you must be totally frank. So I must say: I am unable to believe you.” Ambassador Ciechanowski was incredulous and asked if Frankfurter was calling Karski a liar. “Mr. Ambassador,” Frankfurter replied in a tone of resignation, “I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.” In April 1945 Karski, on the strength of his excellent contacts with the Polish government-in-exile in London and the Polish embassy in Washington and other connections, was drafted by the Hoover Library to help collect materials on Poland. He had great success in collecting documents from the underground press, photographs taken in Nazi-occupied Poland, and a large number of books and periodicals. In July 1945, after the United States withdrew recognition of the Polish government-in-exile, the London office advised Ambassador Ciechanowski in Washington to turn over the embassy papers to the Hoover Library; he did so in the care of Karski. Karski continued his collecting in Paris, Switzerland, and finally Rome, where he helped to secure the Władysław Anders papers for the Hoover Library. Farther west, in postwar Germany, where US Army officers were on the scene, opportunities for collecting were more promising. For weeks after V-E Day, Berlin was, in the words of an American eyewitness, “one great junk yard.”50 Among the junk was seven thousand pages of loose paper found in the courtyard of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, which was under Soviet occupation. The paper was removed by an amateur junk dealer, who later recognized something peculiar about it: not only its superior quality, but the oversize typescript. By 51

Microfilming in “the dugout,” in the tower basement, 1951.

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word of mouth, the existence of this unusual haul came to the attention of Lieutenant Colonel William Heimlich, a civilian American intelligence officer attached to the American occupation force who identified the author of the text as the late Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who, loyal to his Führer to the end, had committed suicide in Hitler’s bunker in May 1945. Heimlich gave the junk dealer two cartons of cigarettes in exchange for this treasure, which turned out to be Goebbels’s diaries for 1942 and 1943. Heimlich later claimed to have brought the seven thousand typed pages to the attention of his superiors in Berlin, as he was required to do, and that they expressed no interest in his find. He was then persuaded by Hoover associate Frank Mason to hand the papers over to Herbert Hoover when he came to Germany in February 1947. Hoover’s trip was part of a fact-finding mission on behalf of President Harry Truman to assess that divided country’s food and other supply requirements and to report on the occupation policies in the three Allied zones. It was Hoover’s second visit to Germany in as many years. His main mission was humanitarian, yet, just as in the days of the Treaty of Versailles, during these postwar trips he was also on the lookout for documents for his library at Stanford University. The previous year in Germany, Hoover had been handed another document retrieved by Lieutenant Colonel Heimlich: a notebook containing the handwritten entries of Goebbels’s diary from 1925 to 1926, a total of 192 bound pages salvaged from Hitler’s bunker by American intelligence officers. Subsequent collections would build upon these Nazi-era holdings, notably the diaries of Heinrich Himmler, future head of the SS (Schutzstaffel) as a young man, six notebooks from the period 1914 to 1924. These came to the Hoover in a more roundabout way. The notebooks came into the possession of an American GI rummaging through Himmler’s villa in Bavaria, were later turned over to an American intelligence officer, and were eventually acquired by the Hoover Institution in 1957. Related collections include the papers of American diplomat Robert D. Murphy, an invaluable resource on the Allied occupation and division of Germany. defining moments

Herbert Hoover in his office in Hoover Tower, August 13, 1951. Herbert Hoover in front of Hoover Tower, 1951.

the view from the tower

Historian William L. Shirer drew upon Hoover’s collections on Hitler’s Germany in researching his classic 1960 study, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, winner of the National Book Award. The cataloging and organizing of this new material was an enormous challenge. It was in these years that Hoover gradually established the curator system it has today. In the interwar years, the collection was not differentiated by areas. As the library’s mission grew during World War II from a Europe-oriented undertaking to one encompassing much of the world, and especially as interest increased in the non-Western world, the collection was divided into various geographic areas, with each area assigned a curator and usually curatorial assistants. These curators were either historians or political scientists. Aside from their duties in acquiring materials and offering assistance to researchers, they conducted their own research and taught advanced university courses. By the mid-1950s there were curators for Western Europe, Russia and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia. The new and rising field in the 1950s, during the years of decolonization, was Africa. The Africa collection traced its origins back to 1919, when the Belgian government presented Herbert 53

THE OKHRANA COLLECTION REVEALED

Some Hoover collections contain material that is so sen-

with Stanford that the crates — marked only with his ini-

sitive, they must remain locked away for decades before

tials and “Tagil,” the name of a town in Siberia — be kept

being made available to researchers. The story of how the

under seal and their existence remain a secret for thirty

records of the Paris branch of the Russian Imperial secret

years. After thirty years had passed, Maklakov, fearing

police, known as the Okhrana, ended up at Stanford is

for his safety should his act of deception become known,

a tale of deception and intrigue. When France finally

requested that the crates stay sealed until three months

granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in

after his death. He died in Switzerland in July 1957. That

1924, it was obliged by international law to turn over the

October, the seals on the crates were broken. The revela-

former Russian embassy building and all of its contents

tion that the Okhrana files had survived and were being

to the Soviets. The last Russian ambassador to France

opened and cataloged on the Stanford University campus

before the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, Vasily

made national headlines and attracted the attention of

Maklakov, who was caretaker of the building, convinced

both intelligence agents and scholars of espionage, sur-

the new Soviet authorities that he had incinerated the

veillance, and terrorism. No other archival collection can

Okhrana records — when in fact he had quietly moved

match the Okhrana files in their vivid documentation of

them to a safe location. The Hoover Library’s “special

Russia’s revolutionary underground in the two decades

agent” in Paris, former Russian army general Nicholas

leading up to the fall of the Romanovs. The Okhrana files

Golovine, persuaded Maklakov to have the files secretly

were featured in the 2015 Hoover Institution exhibition

shipped to Stanford using diplomatic channels.

Double Exposure.



This secret shipment of eighteen wooden crates,

each weighing more than five hundred pounds, arrived on campus in 1926. Maklakov stipulated in his contract 54

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ALEXANDER KERENSKY AT HOOVER It sometimes happens that the visit to Hoover of a prominent historical figure helps spotlight collections whose value has been underappreciated. This was the case with Alexander Kerensky, the charismatic leader of the Provisional Government that held a tenuous grip on power in Russia between the fall of the Romanovs in February 1917 and the storming to power of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution later that year. In 1955, the exiled Kerensky decided to visit Stanford. He was inspired after reading a report published the previous year by Witold Sworakowski, assistant director of the Hoover Institution, challenging the common assumption that there was little documentation about the Provisional Government available outside Russia. Hoover had plenty of it, Sworakowski maintained. He published a statement to this effect in a 1954 survey of Hoover’s collections on Russia. That document came to the attention of Kerensky, who was living in New York and thinking of writing his memoirs. In the summer of 1955, he came out to have a look for himself. Kerensky was amazed by the wealth of Russia material he found at Hoover, and his planned twoweek trip lasted two months.

Late in 1955, inspired by Kerensky’s presence, the Hoover

Institution decided to publish a multivolume collection of documents on the Provisional Government and invited Kerensky to participate as compiler and editor. He would help select the documents for translation into English and work with a translator to annotate them. Kerensky accepted facing page, left Hoover staff members Witold Sworakowski and Marina Tinkoff opening the first crates of the Okhrana Collection at the Hoover Institution, October 1957.

the invitation, and in February 1956 he was named a research

facing page, right Single page from Okhrana album of mug shots, including those of Lev Bronstein (Leon Trotsky, upper right), who was eighteen years old when the photograph was taken.

tion The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents,

above Witold Sworakowski (left) and Alexander Kerensky, Hoover Institution, late 1950s.

be purchased for thirty dollars. It remains an invaluable

the view from the tower

associate at Hoover. His collaborator on the project was the historian and Stanford graduate Robert Paul Browder.

In the fall of 1961, the three-volume documentary collec-

coedited by Kerensky and Browder, was published by Stanford University Press as No. 27 in the Hoover Institution Publications series. The entire one-of-a-kind set, which contained 1,400 documents translated into English, could resource. 55

above Agnes Peterson, curator for Western Europe, being interviewed for Richfield Oil’s Success Story, February 7, 1957. facing page Advertisement for Richfield Oil’s Success Story live broadcast devoted to the Hoover Institute and Library, February 7, 1957.

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Hoover with a collection of official Belgian documents and reports, many of which pertained to the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. An Africa curator, Ruth Perry, was brought on part time in 1956. Her two trips to Africa — in 1956 and 1958 — brought a great many items from British West Africa. In 1959, Peter Duignan was hired as a fulltime curator for Africa, and an extensive collecting program was launched in the early 1960s, as funding for acquisitions once again became available. Duignan, together with Lewis H. Gann, edited a five-volume documentary series, Colonialism in Africa: 1870–1960, published by Cambridge University Press (1969–1975). Both Duignan and Gann became Hoover senior fellows. Hoover’s Middle East collection, formally established in 1948, also traced its origins back to 1919 and the founding of the Hoover War Collection. The World War I collections relating to the Ottoman Empire were its basis. The institution’s voluminous documentation on the Paris Peace Conference contained much material on the Middle East, which was one of the principal regions for the application of the new mandate system devised by the peacemakers for administering territory previously held by the defeated states. The first Middle East curator, Christina Phelps Harris, was named in 1948. The Latin American Collection, which named its first curator in 1963, would also trace its roots back to the Paris Peace Conference, mostly in the form of “delegation propaganda” collected there by Professor Adams in the summer of 1919. A Hoover Institution brochure published in 1957 boasted that the curatorial staff represented some fifteen nationalities and covered twenty-five languages. That breadth of linguistic and cultural knowledge had become one of Hoover’s hallmarks. That tradition continued into the twenty-first century in the Library & Archives, which as of 2019 had seven curatorial areas organized geographically — defined as Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, North America, and Russia & Eurasia — and curators for thematic initiatives not circumscribed by geographical boundaries. the view from the tower

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CHANGING FORTUNES

By the early 1950s the postwar boom in collecting had come to an end, in part because the most valuable materials had been scooped up — but only in part. As a 1963 Hoover Institution booklet noted, “The flow of materials to the Hoover Institution in the late ’forties was tremendous. After that the volume declined considerably, in part because in the middle and late 1950s financial difficulties forced the Institution to curtail its activities.”51 As acquisitions declined, the budget for research and publications also dried up. A major source of Hoover’s change of fortune in the 1950s was the political tensions between the founder and the Stanford administration, including the Hoover Institution’s directors. In 1952, Harold Fisher retired as chairman and was succeeded by C. Easton Rothwell. Rothwell had come to Stanford for graduate study in 1932, drawn to the campus by the collections of the Hoover Library. He wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Ralph Lutz, who was his academic advisor. He later joined the State Department in 1941. In 1945 he served as executive secretary of the San Francisco Conference that drafted the Charter of the United Nations. He left the State Department in 1946 to become a senior staff member at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. In 1947 he was named vice chairman of the Hoover Institute and Library, then was named director (the title replaced chairman) when Fisher retired, in 1952. Like Fisher before him, Rothwell was not a skilled fund-raiser, and with the founder growing more distant from his institution, it is no wonder that it began to falter financially. In 1957 the institution underwent a final name change, to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. The change came as the directors decided to make a concerted effort to turn its financial situation around by launching an endowment drive, boosted by a nationwide publicity campaign. “The library has an annual budget of $275,000,” the New York Times reported on March 31, laying out the facts of the situation. “From current sources — cash gifts and allocations from Stanford University — it gets a yearly income of $175,000. Now, for the first time, it is conducting a national endowment drive to raise $2,500,000, which, conservatively invested, will yield the additional $100,000 needed annually.”52 In connection with the drive, the Hoover Institution organized a series of dinners throughout the country and arranged a tour of its archival treasures to generate favorable publicity. The Goebbels diaries, the Stilwell diaries, a Gestapo arrest list for England, Polish rarities — Hoover took these and other treasures on the road. As part of the drive, on Thursday, February 7, 1957, at 7:00 p.m., a live half-hour broadcast originated from Hoover Tower as part of Richfield Oil’s television series Success Story, aired by NBC affiliate KGO. 58

defining moments

NICOLAS DE BASILY ROOM

At the time of the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, Nicolas de Basily, a diplomat and lawyer, was serving as chief of the diplomatic chancellery at imperial army headquarters at Mogilev. It was Basily who drafted the text of the tsar’s act of abdication that brought the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty to an end. He preserved his abdication drafts and other, related documents and left behind a memoir of those fateful days. These provide a fascinating account of the agonizing and calculating that went on behind the scenes as Basily and his colleagues maneuvered to save the Russian monarchy and, with it, the Russian empire from collapse.

After the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, Basily

fled Russia and settled in western Europe, where he took up the life of an émigré art connoisseur and financier, traveling throughout Europe and the Americas, collecting artworks and books, and socializing with the remaining Romanovs and other “White” Russian émigrés. In 1964, a year after his death, his wife, Lascelle Meserve de Basily, donated his extensive collection of rare books and a selection of his papers to the Hoover Institution. Two years later, she donated the couple’s formidable art collection, noteworthy for its portraits by eighteenth-century Russian masters of four generations of Romanov emperors and empresses, and for paintings by major Italian and English masters. In accordance with her wishes and endowment, selected artworks, sculptures, furniture, and historical mementos from the Basilys’ collection were assembled in a designated room inside Hoover Tower. A striking evocation of an old-world drawing room, the Nicolas de Basily Room, dedicated in 1967, reconstitutes something View of the east wall, right corner, of the Nicolas de Basily Room, Hoover Tower.

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of the “lost world” the Basilys, like so many Russian émigrés, longed to regain. 59

Hoover deputy archivist Charles Palm in his office on the tenth floor of Hoover Tower, 1977.

60

The 1957 endowment drive fell well short of its goal. It was only after Rothwell’s departure in 1959, when Herbert Hoover named a new director and renewed his commitment to his institution, that it began to thrive financially once again (as detailed in Chapter Three). As acquisitions rose again in the 1960s, Hoover’s associate director and curator of the Eastern Europe and Soviet Union collection (as it was now known), Witold S. Sworakowski, made the most of the opportunity. Sworakowski (whose nickname was Swora) was a formidable collector and bibliographer. His most impressive feat in these years was the acquisition of Boris Nicolaevsky’s archive on European socialist revolutionary movements, especially communism. The Boris I. Nicolaevsky collection is arguably the single most important holding on Russia in the Hoover Archives. The product of more than forty years of vigorous collecting, it contains, in more than eight hundred manuscript boxes, a wealth of primary documents from many diverse sources and of various kinds, including correspondence, speeches, memoirs, writings, minutes of meetings, defining moments

and photographs. Its chronological breadth is remarkable, extending back to the middle of the nineteenth century and encompassing such legendary figures as Mikhail Bakunin, rival of Marx and father of Russian anarchism, and the early Russian populist Pyotr Lavrov. It covers political, social, and economic conditions and developments in late tsarist Russia and in Soviet Russia under Lenin and Stalin. A list of individuals whose papers are in the Nicolaevsky collection would read like a “Who’s Who” of the Russian revolutionary movement, as well as of the international socialist movement. The bulk of the collection was acquired by the Hoover Institution at the end of 1963. Nicolaevsky came to Hoover to serve as curator of his collection. He died in 1966, but his presence at the Hoover continued to be felt not only in the collection that bears his name but also throughout the Hoover Library & Archives, in the form of Russian books, newspapers, and journals from before the Revolution. Significant additions to the collection in the 1980s included several hundred original letters exchanged between the exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, banished from the USSR in 1929, and his exiled son, letters previously assumed to have been lost, destroyed, or stolen by Stalin’s secret police. A visual complement to the Nicolaevsky Collection came to Hoover in the 1970s in the form of the Herman Axelbank Motion Picture Film Collection. Herman Axelbank spent more than half a century compiling a motion-picturefilm record encompassing the twilight years of Imperial Russia, the Russian Revolution, and the Soviet Union. The fruit of his efforts — 271 reels containing more than 250,000 feet of film, most of it raw footage — constitutes the single most impressive collection of its kind outside Russia, much in demand by researchers and documentary filmmakers over the years. As the Hoover collections began to flourish again in the 1960s, the curators not only engaged in retrospective collecting but also documented ongoing events, such as developments in the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the rise of the New Left. The priority was always given to primary materials to serve research on matters related to war, revolution, and peace. The 1960s and 1970s brought steady growth of the holdings as well as the development of programs in access and preservation that had been deferred in earlier times. The foundation for much of the advancement during these years was the establishment of the Hoover Archives as a discrete organizational unit of the institution. While the library housing all published materials — i.e., books, newspapers, and periodicals — was well developed, the organization of the archival, or unpublished, holdings was not. The new department, now designated the Hoover Institution Archives, was organized in 1969 by Hoover’s first archivist, Franz G. Lassner, who was followed in 1974 by Milorad M. Drachkovitch and in 1984 by Charles Palm. The new organization Foundations

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Hoover Tower reading room in the twenty-first century.

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brought together special collections, archives, personal papers, manuscripts, and other unpublished materials that had been scattered about in various locations and under inadequate control. Professional standards for accessioning, describing, and providing access to the collections were adopted, and the archival collecting and other programs were placed on a firm and systematic footing. By the 1980s, it became apparent that a significant portion of the library and archival holdings had reached an advanced stage of deterioration. Many of these materials were printed on poor, highly acidic paper typically used during periods of war and revolution. In 1983, Hoover launched a preservation program led by Judith Fortson. Over the next ten years, powered by sixteen grants totaling $4.3 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education, Fortson and her staff copied and stored many of Hoover’s most important collections on microfilm. In addition, Hoover’s immense collection of twentieth-century political posters, numbering about 68,000 items, was captured on photographic slides. As a consequence, all of these materials are permanently preserved for future generations. And because these formats are easily converted to digital, most of the collections that were stored on microfilm and slides in the 1980s and 1990s now have been digitized and are readily accessible in Hoover’s digital collection. While Hoover’s collectors undertook no new collecting adventures between 1960 and 1989 comparable to those that followed the two world wars, the growth of the archival holdings was substantial. Of all the individual collections acquired up to 1989, more than 70 percent were obtained during these three decades. The third landmark period of Hoover collecting, comparable to the collecting surges that followed World Wars I and II, would come in 1989, as the Cold War wound down and the Soviet bloc began to unravel (described in Chapter Four). All the while, though seldom in a way that made headlines, Hoover kept collecting books and periodicals. The collection of these secondary materials increased precipitously in the 1960s and beyond. One result was that the Hoover defining moments

Library, as described by future director Charles Palm, “was able to provide more general and comprehensive coverage on international affairs and politics. This new development relieved the University Libraries of the responsibility for collecting secondary literature that otherwise would have been needed to support the University’s small but growing research and instructional programs on international affairs and area studies. Because of its expertise in foreign languages, the Hoover Library at the time was better equipped than the University Libraries to fulfill this need.” This arrangement, Palm explains, remained in place until 2001, when, “after joint discussions with the director of the Stanford University Libraries, the Hoover Institution made a strategic decision to give up coverage of secondary materials and to concentrate all its resources on collecting primary materials. . . . In accordance with this plan, the Hoover Library transferred responsibility for acquiring general library materials (books, periodicals, major newspapers, and other secondary materials) to the University Libraries. The realignment enabled the Hoover Library to focus attention exclusively on gathering special collections or primary materials.”53 The 2001 realignment with the University Libraries thus renewed the Hoover Institution’s emphasis on the founding mission — reaffirmed by Herbert Hoover at the dedication of the Tower in 1941 — to capture the fugitive documents and primary records that are the essential building blocks of historical investigation and scholarship.

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CHAPTER 3

HOOVER BECOMES A THINK TANK LAYING THE GROUNDWORK: THE 1960s

Tanner Fountain was completed in 1978 between Hoover Tower and Memorial Auditorium.

The year 1959 was the most significant in the history of the Hoover Institution since its founding in 1919. It was the year that Herbert Hoover redefined his institution, expanding it beyond a special-collections research library on war, revolution, and peace utilized mainly by historians to a center for advanced study devoted chiefly to economic and security policy. Hoover’s emergence as a think tank would unfold over the course of the subsequent decade — much as the original Hoover War Collection of 1919 had needed several years to evolve from a division of the Stanford University Libraries into a stand-alone library and archives. But 1959 was the pivotal year, and the founder himself took the decisive steps. By 1959, the Hoover Institution’s financial woes had become acute, to the point where the institution was in danger of relinquishing the independence within the university library system it had managed to maintain since its founding in 1919. The funding needed for acquisitions in order to sustain the peerless quality of the collections dwindled, as had the budget for research and publications. This was partly due to the absence of a serious fund-raiser at the helm, but it was also the result of growing estrangement between the founder and his institution. Herbert Hoover had grown wary of the ascendancy of liberal-to-left political influence at his alma mater, which extended, as he saw it, to senior Hoover staff. A major endowment campaign had been launched in 1957, and yet, without the enthusiastic backing of “the Chief ”— his willingness to take the lead and recruit his friends to contribute to the cause — the campaign faltered and was shut down within a year. Donations to Hoover fell off from nearly $215,000 in 1956–57 to $128,408 in 1958–59. Meanwhile, Hoover’s budget in 1958–59 was $390,000, most of it devoted to a losing battle to maintain the collections at their historic levels of excellence. In the midst of this crisis, in 1958, director C. Easton Rothwell proposed to relinquish Hoover’s independence and merge its collections with those of the 65

Stanford University Libraries. In Rothwell’s assessment, which he formulated in an internal report, “The Hoover Institution as a national asset has not caught the imagination of enough people, even in the Bay Area, despite a quite successful campaign of public relations during the past two years.” The conclusion he drew from this was that “the Hoover Institution should be regarded for budgetary purposes as a regular unit within the University, and the University should assume full responsibility for the total budget.”54 Needless to say, this was not a course of action Mr. Hoover would have endorsed. When Rothwell announced his resignation as director in December 1958 — effective June 1, 1959 — in order to become president of Mills College, the founder took full advantage of the opportunity to seize the reins. Hoover had been thinking for some years about a broader mission for his institution. One indication was the expanded scope of the collecting after Hoover left the White House, in 1933, as the Library & Archives introduced collecting categories related to American politics and society, such as “the New Deal” and “Americanism” (today best rendered as “American exceptionalism”). He was also impatient to remove his institution from under the administrative control of the Stanford University Libraries and, increasingly, the Stanford faculty. During World War II, Hoover expressed his concerns in a letter to Stanford president Donald B. Tresidder, in which he proposed that his library have a full-time director, not merely a chairman of the board of directors. The director would be accountable directly to the Stanford president, “and not subject either to the History Department or the University Librarian,” Hoover wrote. “I have never been satisfied that the purpose of the War Library was really recognized by placing it under the University Librarian and thus casting it in the mould of just a library adjunct. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to build up a great research institution upon the most vital of all human questions — War, Revolution and Peace.”55 Hoover was then able to secure the change of nomenclature he desired — Rothwell’s title was director — but without achieving the enlarged institutional autonomy it was meant to signify. Now, in 1959, the announcement of Rothwell’s retirement gave Hoover an opening to redefine his institution. As a first step, Hoover prevailed upon Stanford’s president, J. E. Wallace Sterling, and its board of trustees to approve a restructuring of the relationship between the Hoover Institution and the university. The trustees accepted the new arrangement on May 21, 1959, in the form of a resolution governing the purposes, administration, and policies of the Hoover Institution. A key paragraph of the resolution spelled out the formula for choosing the new Hoover director:

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defining moments

The Director of the Institution shall be recommended to the Board of Trustees by the President of the University for appointment by the Trustees. He shall have been previously approved by Mr. Hoover. Such recommendation of the President shall not require approval of the Advisory Board of the Academic Council of Stanford University.56

Herbert Hoover (left) with Stanford president Wallace Sterling (center) and Hoover director W. Glenn Campbell. This photograph was taken on the occasion of a Hoover Advisory Board meeting, 1962.

This arrangement gave Herbert Hoover veto power over the selection of the director and removed the faculty from the equation. A similar balance of power was struck with respect to staff appointments at Hoover: the university president would have to approve such appointments, but they would not be subject to the scrutiny of any faculty committee. Thus, the new agreement left the Hoover Institution director with a free hand to shape his staff, a measure of freedom enjoyed by no chairman of an academic department, whose decisions were subject to the approval of faculty committees. Herbert Hoover was able to have his way in part by threatening to withhold his personal archive, including his presidential and other government papers, from the university. Another influential factor was President Sterling’s long association with the institution. Sterling wrote his doctoral dissertation for the Stanford History Department based on the Hoover collections, and he edited a documentary volume in the Hoover Library Publications series. Sterling and the trustees also assumed that, with Hoover in his mid-80s, the new arrangement was bound to be short lived. But for the moment, Herbert Hoover had forced the hand of the university.

hoover becomes a think tank

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TRUTH AS A WEAPON: RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY The Cold War was fundamentally a contest of ideas. One way the West waged that contest was through Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which broadcast news and features from Munich to the “captive nations” behind the Iron Curtain starting in the early 1950s: Radio Free Europe broadcast to the Soviet satellite states, while Radio Liberty broadcast to the USSR. The two organizations were merged in 1976. The “radios,” as they were called, tapped the resources and talents of émigrés from Eastern Europe to offer an alternative to the highly censored programming of the Eastern Bloc. Despite continual Soviet jamming, threats to their funding during the détente years of the 1970s, and even a Communist-sponsored terrorist attack at Munich headquarters in 1981, RFE/RL continued their broadcasts, even beyond the revolutionary year 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union two years later.

At the end of the Cold War, the operation was

moved to Prague, at the invitation of former dissidentturned-president Vaclav Havel. In 2000, an agreement was signed to deposit all RFE/RL corporate and broadcast records up to 1995 in the Hoover Library & Archives. This immense collection of millions of documents and more than 140,000 sound recordings provides scholars with an extraordinarily rich record of the personalities, events, and developments inside the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War and the years of transition to democracy. The project archivist for the collection is Anatol Shmelev, a Hoover research fellow and the Robert Conquest Curator for the Russian and Eurasian collection. A 2001 Hoover exhibition, Voices of Hope: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, surveyed the history of RFE/RL and some of the overall themes Cover page of a Radio Free Europe brochure, c. 1959.

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in the broadcasters’ programming over the years.

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Nor was this all. The May 1959 resolution included a preface authored by Herbert Hoover that served as the institution’s new mission statement. This statement is revealing as a reflection of the founder’s new way of thinking about the purposes of his institution. Passages that would have seemed completely out of place in 1919, and which seemed bracing in 1959, seem entirely apt today: “This Institution supports the Constitution of the United States, its Bill of Rights, and its method of representative government. Both our social and economic systems are based on private enterprise from which springs initiative and ingenuity,” the statement declared. “The Institution itself must constantly and dynamically point the road to peace, to personal freedom, and to the safeguards of the American system.” And the statement’s prescription of minimalist government has become a Hoover hallmark: “Ours is a system where the Federal Government should undertake no governmental, social or economic action, except where local government or the people cannot undertake it for themselves.” Implicit in all of the above was a point made explicit in a short, declarative sentence that would be much quoted in the years ahead: “The Institution is not, and must not be, a mere library.”57 The fact is, however, that the Hoover Institution had never been a “mere library.” Research, publications, public exhibitions, and teaching had been part of its mandate since the early 1920s. But Herbert Hoover’s intention was to point the way emphatically toward a dramatic reorientation of his institution, setting it on a path to expand into a public-policy research center focused on American freedoms and values. Just as revealing of Hoover’s new thinking, and of immediate consequence to his institution’s new direction, was his selection of the institution’s new director, a thirty-five-year-old Canadian-born economist named W. Glenn Campbell. Campbell was director of research at the American Enterprise Association (AEA; later renamed the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research) in Washington, DC. He had been brought to Herbert Hoover’s attention by Raymond Moley, the former New Deal brain truster and Hoover confidant. Campbell had earned a doctorate from Harvard University and taught economics there for five years before going to work as an economic analyst for the US Chamber of Commerce, and from there, in 1954, to the AEA. Campbell would draw on his Washington and other East Coast connections in the coming decade to reshape the Hoover Institution. Campbell became director of the Hoover Institution on January 1, 1960. In February, a Hoover-published brochure appeared in print that made public for the first time the May 1959 Hoover-Stanford restructuring arrangement and quoted in full Herbert Hoover’s mission statement for the institution. The text appeared over the signature of Hoover Institution backer David Packard, hoover becomes a think tank

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president of the Stanford Board of Trustees. The Stanford faculty was alarmed to learn of the new arrangement with Hoover, which granted the institution unusual independence. One passage in the new mission statement immediately gained special notoriety: an archly worded sentence in which Hoover, in uncompromising terms, rededicated his institution to the struggle against communism. “The purpose of this Institution must be, by its research and publications, to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx — whether Communism, Socialism, economic materialism, or atheism — thus to protect the American way of life from such ideologies, their conspiracies, and to reaffirm the validity of the American system.”58 Other parts of the mission statement raised eyebrows, but this particular sentence struck a nerve, raising concerns on campus about Hoover placing constraints on free inquiry. The appearance of the Hoover brochure stirred up major controversy. On April 14, 1960, Sterling wrote to Hoover in New York City: “During the past several weeks, the Stanford campus has been in something of an uproar about the Hoover Institution.”59 Telephone calls from the faculty demanded explanations from the administration and the trustees. The administration disassociated itself from Hoover’s mission statement by insisting that it was part of a preface to the resolution and not part of the resolution itself. As for the resolution, the administration promised moving forward to give Hoover’s policies “intensive scrutiny.”60 Campbell’s directorship seemed to be off to an inauspicious start, yet behind the scenes Herbert Hoover was laying the groundwork for major developments. “In late 1959 the foundation of his friend Alfred P. Sloan Jr. granted $250,000 for the Hoover Institution’s general support,” notes Hoover biographer George Nash. “A few weeks later his friend Jeremiah Milbank pledged $125,000 more. A few months later the Lilly Foundation $100,000 — and so it went.”61 In 1960, the advisory board set four objectives for the Hoover Institution: (1) to recruit an outstanding staff of scholars; (2) to undertake an intensive and high-quality research and publications program; (3) to increase expenditures for library acquisitions to restore and maintain the collections at their historic levels of excellence; and (4) to assure the availability of necessary funds to implement the program on an efficient long-term basis. The 1960 Hoover brochure had been published to help launch a new fund-raising drive. The new mission statement, while controversial on campus, was written in such a way as to attract the kinds of donors needed to get the institution back in the black. Among other things, it served as a clear signal that Herbert Hoover, now age eighty-six, was fully committed to revitalizing his institution. One of the stipulations of the 1959 Hoover-Stanford agreement was that Stanford would provide the institution with no less than $125,000 annually, 70

defining moments

with the understanding that this money would be used exclusively to support the library. Hoover would have to generate its own funding for research and publications, and that was what Herbert Hoover and Campbell now made their principal focus — and with remarkable success. On January 25, 1961, a year into his tenure, Campbell boasted in the Stanford Daily that “the Hoover Institution has the potential to become the leading center for advanced study and research on problems of social, political and economic change in the twentieth century.” A Hoover report published in 1963 summed up the recent progress: “During the past three years Mr. Hoover has again taken the lead in organizing a fund-raising campaign which has produced some $2 million in cash contributions and firm pledges of future donations. Several scores of foundations, corporations, and individuals have made contributions.”62 Campbell was careful to credit the founder with the turnaround in Hoover’s fortunes, yet he proved himself to be a prodigious fund-raiser. One key to Campbell’s success was his overhaul of the Hoover Advisory “Basic research need not be Board, which by 1962 had been expanded from twenty-seven fifty-six members, from fifteen states and the District of antiquarian or static; it can be to Columbia and representing all sectors of the US economy.  An timely and dynamic as well.” important tool in the fund-raising effort — and a landmark document in the Hoover Institution’s transformation into a public-policy research center — was a 1963 booklet describing the institution’s purposes, past achievements, and aims. The document stated clearly that the institution was still centered on its library and archival collections, and reassured readers that it remained committed to basic research and the publication of documentary studies. But it emphasized that “basic research need not be antiquarian or static; it can be timely and dynamic as well,” that priority would be given to “research projects which can be of direct aid in solving the major problems of our troubled age,” and that Hoover’s research program would be designed “to study problems where the findings can make important contributions to national policy.”63 Reading this publication today, one can sense the future think tank struggling to break out. “The purpose of this Institution is to promote peace,” Herbert Hoover had declared in his speech at the tower dedication ceremony in 1941. That statement was now routinely invoked to legitimize the new direction of the institution. The words “peace” and “change” — and in combination as “peaceful change” — were deployed to justify the growing focus on US domestic policy. As the 1963 booklet stated: Peace is indivisible. Its disturbance at any point may lead to expanding conflict within and among nations. Foreign wars often start or end in hoover becomes a think tank

71

TEN LANDMARK BOOKS BY HOOVER FELLOWS 1. Herbert Hoover, American Individualism (1922)

typically reserved for Nazi Germany while expressions of support

Now nearly a century old, Herbert Hoover’s book of reflections on

for, or tolerance of, the Soviet system were quite common. As the

the American national identity retains its freshness. Hoover, then

Cold War set in, Popper revised The Open Society to cast the Soviet

US secretary of commerce, makes a case for what would today

Union as a totalitarian nemesis. Popper was a Hoover Institution

be called American exceptionalism. At its core is the notion that

senior research fellow from 1986 until his death, in 1994. His papers

individualism is a uniquely American quality, far superior to the

are held by the Hoover Archives.

collectivist alternatives, notably the communist experiment then under way in the Soviet Union. “In Russia under the new tyranny,”

4. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

Hoover writes, “a group, in pursuit of social theories, have destroyed

(with Rose D. Friedman, 1962)

the primary self-interest impulse of the individual to production.”

A dazzling economic scientist, Milton Friedman also became a

Biographer George H. Nash, author of an introduction to a 2016

great communicator of his ideas to the general public through

Hoover Institution Press edition of the book, makes a persua-

his journalism and his books. These ideas extended well beyond

sive case for the continued relevance of Hoover’s argument “that

the field of economics into the social-political arena. Friedman’s

America can make steady, sure progress if we preserve our individ-

point of departure — and his fundamental message — was that eco-

ualism, preserve and stimulate the initiative of our people, insist on

nomic freedom is as vital to a free society as political freedom.

and maintain the safeguards to equality of opportunity, and honor

Friedman’s first attempt to reach a popular audience came in 1962

service as a part of our national character.”

with Capitalism and Freedom, in which he argued in favor of a volunteer army, freely floating exchange rates, a negative income tax,

2. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944)

and education vouchers, among other policy proposals. Capitalism

In Hayek’s classic volume, dedicated “To the Socialists of All Parties,”

and Freedom, which has been widely translated, inspired numerous

he warns of the dangers of state economic planning and explains

younger readers to take up the study of economics. Friedman was

the virtues of the free market. The Road to Serfdom became a best-

named a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution in 1977. His

seller, especially in America, where it prompted strong reactions

papers are held by the Hoover Archives.

both for and against it. The University of Chicago Press published the book on September 18, 1944, and it sold briskly, with second

5. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer (1964)

and third printings ordered before the end of the month. In April

Economist Martin Anderson’s The Federal Bulldozer offered an

1945 a condensed version appeared in Reader’s Digest, which was

incisive critique of the liberal idea that cities could be renewed

reprinted and offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Eventually

through massive government programs. At the time, the notion

more than one million of these reprints were sold. The Road to

that urban-renewal programs could clear slums and create new

Serfdom led to the foundation, in 1947, of the Mont Pelerin Society

communities was the conventional wisdom. Anderson’s research

(named for Mont Pèlerin, the Swiss location of their first conference),

revealed that these undertakings were not only hugely expensive

a gathering of liberal intellectuals from various disciplines whose

but also socially destructive. As the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow

goal, in Hayek’s formulation, was “the rebirth of a liberal movement

observed, “Anderson turned his academic work into a devastating

in Europe.”64 Hayek was named a Hoover honorary fellow in 1976.

political attack, and exhibited unusual genius in garnering media

Hayek’s papers, as well as those of the Mont Pelerin Society, are

attention.”67 Anderson’s book has slipped into relative obscurity, but

held by the Hoover Archives.

it launched his policy career and would lead, in 1971, to the author’s recruitment as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he

3. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

spearheaded the launch of the Domestic Studies Program. His

Karl Popper, the twentieth century’s greatest philosopher of sci-

papers are held by the Hoover Archives.

ence, has been called the greatest critic of Marxism, largely on the strength of this volume. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that the

6. Gary Becker, Human Capital (1964)

book contained “the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of

In the assessment of economist Justin Wolfers, Gary Becker was

the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living

“the most important social scientist in the second half of the 20th

And yet the first edition of The Open Society offered only

century.”68 Becker’s scholarly reputation was built on his 1964 book

writer.”

65

subdued criticism of the Soviet Union. Popper called the book “my

Human Capital, his study of how investment in an individual’s edu-

war effort,” addressing the faulty philosophy that led to German

cation and training is similar to business investments in equipment.

totalitarianism.66 Yet during the war, the label “totalitarian” was

The book’s elaborate subtitle, A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis,

72

defining moments

power, under Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet citizens in every corner of the country came forward with tales of the Gulag that validated Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal. In the tumultuous year 1989, portions of The Gulag Archipelago were published in the Soviet Union, and all three volumes appeared in print the following year, helping to usher the Soviet Union out of existence. Solzhenitsyn was named a Hoover honorary fellow in 1975, during his first visit to the Hoover Institution. He returned the following year to continue his research in the Library & Archives. with Special Reference to Education, spells out its particular focus.

9. Robert E. Hall and Alvin Rabushka, The Flat Tax (1985)

Becker went on to pioneer the application of economic analysis to

Robert E. Hall and Alvin Rabushka’s The Flat Tax, first published

human behavior in other areas, such as family choices, home life,

in 1985, was christened “the bible of the flat tax movement” by

racial discrimination, and illegal drug use — areas once considered

Forbes.70 The book was widely praised for presenting clear explana-

peripheral to the study of economics. “For a long time my type of

tions of the labyrinthine US tax system, with its myriad deductions

work was either ignored or strongly disliked by most of the leading

and exemptions, and for offering a simple, practical, and fair-minded

economists,” Becker later recalled. “I was considered way out and

alternative: a proposal to tax all income, once only, at a uniform rate

perhaps not really an economist.”69 Becker was a member of the

of 19 percent. The nightmarish raft of paperwork that taxpayers are

Hoover Institution’s Domestic Studies Advisory Board at its found-

confronted with every year would be replaced with a straightfor-

ing in 1973 and was named a senior fellow in 1990.

ward flat-tax postcard. “Hall and Rabushka present a remarkably lucid and persuasive analysis of what is wrong with our present tax

7. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (1968)

system and offer a radical, yet thoroughly practicable alternative,”

Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror was widely acclaimed in 1968

commented Milton Friedman, an early and ardent advocate of a flat

as a brilliantly written work of scholarship. At a time when Soviet

tax. “Substitution of their simple flat-rate tax for our present incred-

archives were inaccessible to Western scholars, Conquest made

ibly complicated tax system would be a major step forward toward

innovative use of Stalin-era Soviet newspapers, the testimony of

revitalizing the U.S. economy.”71 Hall and Rabushka published a

Soviet émigrés, and Soviet publications from the less restrictive

revised version in 2007, by which time their flat-tax concept had

Khrushchev years to provide a general account of Soviet repression

been adopted by more than thirty countries. Hall and Rabushka are

in the Stalin era. Although left-leaning Sovietologists in the 1970s

senior fellows at the Hoover Institution.

were skeptical of relying on Soviet émigrés and dissidents as historical sources, raising questions about the accuracy of Conquest’s

10. Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and

book, the opening of the Soviet Union’s archives after its collapse

Martin Anderson, editors, Reagan in His Own Hand,

vindicated Conquest. In the twilight years and aftermath of the

with foreword by George P. Shultz (2001)

Soviet Union, The Great Terror, in English and in Russian translation,

Tucked away in the archives for two decades, the pre-presidential

became the most influential Western publication on Soviet his-

manuscript writings published in Reagan, In His Own Hand rev-

tory among Soviet and post-Soviet readers. Conquest was a senior

olutionized the way most readers thought about Ronald Reagan.

research fellow at the Hoover Institution and served as curator of

The book shattered the stereotype of Reagan as merely a great

the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States Collection

communicator of other people’s ideas. Revealing an active mind

between 1981 and 2007.

wrestling with the problems of a stagnating US economy, social pathologies, welfare reform, and the Cold War struggles with the

8. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Soviet Union, this volume’s never-before-seen documents, many

(three vols. in English, 1974–76)

reproduced in his own handwriting, demonstrate that Reagan was

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was an epic exposé

the prime intellectual force behind his administration’s ground-

of the USSR’s labor-camp system. (See p. 88–89) The book ener-

breaking policies. The documents were selected and annotated by

gized the human rights campaign inside the Soviet Union, where

Hoover Institution fellows Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and

it was read surreptitiously in samizdat (self-published) form or in

Martin Anderson. Ronald Reagan was named an honorary fellow

copies smuggled in from the West. During the final years of Soviet

of the Hoover Institution in 1975.

hoover becomes a think tank

73

domestic unrest and upheaval. Thus the work of the Institution focuses as much on internal as on external strife. Some of the research projects seek to uncover conditions and public policies and actions conducive to peaceful progress as well as those tending toward conflict and combat. The Institution’s staff is concerned with discovering the etiology of political, economic, and social change so that this and future generations can know more about the causes and results of unrest and war, of reform and progress.72

above W. Glenn Campbell (seated, right) with senior staff (left to right) Roger Freeman, Witold Sworakowski, Stefan Possony, Peter Duignan, and Karol Maichel, 1963. facing page Hoover poster announcing the conference Fifty Years of Communism, 1967.

74

Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first US president and Stanford’s leading alumnus, a member of its Board of Trustees from 1912 to 1962, lived to read and savor the 1963 booklet. He died the following year, on October 20, at age ninety. In his final years he had been able to rejuvenate his institution and reinforce its sturdy foundations. Campbell now set about making optimal use of this platform, launching a drive in 1964 to increase the Hoover endowment by $5 million. The campaign was directed by David Packard and Thomas P. Pike, chairman of the board of the Pike Corporation of America, both men Stanford trustees. In connection with this campaign, Campbell announced that Hoover would need an annex building to hold both special collections and offices for staff and visiting scholars, which would cost at least $1 million. On May 1, 1964, Campbell announced that defining moments

the institution had received a matching grant of $750,000 from the Scaife family foundation for the construction of a new building, a gift made in honor of the founder’s ninetieth birthday. This grant would eventually lead to the construction of the Lou Henry Hoover Building, completed in 1967. Meanwhile, Campbell ramped up Hoover’s publications program. More than one hundred Hoover-sponsored books appeared in the 1960s, almost twice as many as during the institution’s first forty years. The publications program received a boost from the launch of the Hoover Institution Press in 1963. By the mid-1970s, the Hoover Press was putting out as many titles as some leading university presses: twenty-six new titles, ten co-published titles, and five reprints in 1977 alone. By the end of 1984, the Hoover Institution Press had turned out almost four hundred titles. Meanwhile, Hoover fellows and associates continued to publish an equally impressive number of books and articles through other university-based or commercial presses, or in academic journals. Campbell wasted no time setting out to meet the advisory board’s charge “to recruit an outstanding staff of scholars.” The recruiting would be broad and multidisciplinary, adding to the research staff not only historians, the mainstay of the past, but also economists and political scientists, “as well as persons broadly trained and experienced in international law and social sciences generally,” in the words of the 1963 Hoover booklet.73 Two individuals stood out among Campbell’s senior recruits: economist Roger A. Freeman and national security affairs specialist Richard V. Allen. These two senior fellows helped set the tone at Hoover in the 1960s. Campbell knew Freeman from their association at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where Freeman had published economic analyses and served as vice president of the Institute for Social Science Research, a study group created by AEI. At the time Freeman was brought on board in 1962, he was the only economist on the Stanford campus one could call a free-market advocate. He wrote academic and popular articles and gave public speeches on topics such as reducing the size of federal domestic spending, tax credits for college tuition, and the progressive income tax. A target of liberals on campus, Freeman was nonetheless a respected figure. The liberal Nation magazine wrote of him in 1969 that “Freeman does keep the ‘market place of ideas’ concept alive by teaching frequent colloquia, and by presenting his arguments in good faith and with trenchant wit.”74 hoover becomes a think tank

75

Rita Ricardo-Campbell addressing the Hoover Advisory Board on the eleventh floor of Hoover Tower, July 19, 1967.

76

Richard Allen arrived at the Hoover Institution in 1966 from the Center for Strategic Studies at Georgetown University. Allen was recruited to edit Hoover’s Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, first published in 1967. Allen also became much in demand as a public speaker, earning a reputation as a staunch anticommunist. Although Campbell and the institution had been careful to play down Herbert Hoover’s controversial lines from the 1959 mission statement about “the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx,” the fact is, anticommunism served as the common denominator of Hoover activities, in both the domestic and international realms, from 1960 to the end of the Cold War. That year, Hoover associate director Witold Sworakowski was moderator of a television series called The Red Myth: Communism from Marx to Khrushchev. The following year, Stefan T. Possony, one of the nation’s leading analysts of communism, was appointed senior fellow and charged with directing the institution’s International Studies Program. Possony was brought on board as part of a new initiative to study world communism. In fact, five broad new research projects on international communism were launched that year: (1) History of the Communist International, 1919–1943, a three-year study headed by Senior Fellow Milorad Drachkovitch and Dr. Branko Lazitch; (2) Power, Machines, and Technology — Communist China as an Economic Power, a study of China’s economic capacity, directed by Yuan-Li Wu, professor of economics at the University of San Francisco; (3) Communism in Africa South of the Sahara, led by Peter Duignan; (4) Relations between the Comintern and the Yugoslav Communist Party, 1919–1941, also directed by Drachkovitch; and (5) Lenin and the Total Critique of Society, led by Gerhart Niemeyer, professor of political philosophy at Notre Dame University and coeditor of The Handbook on Communism (1962). In the 1963 Hoover Institution booklet, the description of current research opened with the statement that “the need for greater knowledge of international communism has become increasingly apparent.”75 In the 1960s, Hoover hosted a series of major international conferences on such themes as Marxism and the Modern World, One Hundred defining moments

top left W. Glenn Campbell confronts student protesters on the steps of Hoover Tower, May 27, 1969. top right W. Glenn Campbell, c. 1976.

hoover becomes a think tank

Years of Revolutionary Internationals, Marxist Ideology in the Contemporary World: Its Appeals and Paradoxes, and, in 1967, Fifty Years of Communism in Russia. Hoover Institution Press followed suit and completed, among other projects, the publication of Stalin’s Collected Works (1967), whose printing had been discontinued in the Soviet Union as a result of the de-Stalinization campaign introduced by Nikita Khrushchev. Theodore Draper, an expert on the history of the Comintern, or the Communist International, joined the Hoover staff in 1964 — the year Khrushchev was deposed as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1966, Bertram D. Wolfe, a pioneer of Sovietology, became a senior research fellow (the first to be appointed to this term position). Wolfe was the author of scholarly books on communism, notably his 1948 classic, Three Who Made a Revolution, a collective biography of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin that he researched in part at the Hoover Library & Archives. Hoover scholars’ special focus on communism and leftist politics was reflected in press articles and speeches that ranged across topics as varied as Soviet foreign policy, China’s economy, Western aid to Yugoslavia, trade with the Eastern Bloc countries, and the rise of the New Left. Campbell supported this kind of “outreach” by Hoover fellows — another break with the institution’s past. As Campbell knew from his time at AEI and his recent discussions with potential donors, there was a market for Hoover’s brand of conservatism, both in its domestic and international dimensions, as reflected in the success of fund-raising from foundations and private donors. “The institution was also an early beneficiary of wealthy western conservatives,” observed author James A. Smith, “many of whom 77

had been drawn into politics by the surge of activity surrounding the Goldwater campaign.”76 By the end of the 1960s, the money was in place for an ambitious expansion of the Hoover Institution’s research agenda. NEW DIRECTIONS

Hoover’s increasing emphasis on domestic studies was animated in part by the rise of leftist radicalism in the United States, a movement fueled by mounting opposition to the Vietnam War. Many institutions on the Stanford campus were singled out by antiwar activists in those tumultuous years, but Hoover’s conservative credentials made it an obvious target. Campbell had raised this profile when he took leave to advise senator Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential campaign. In 1968, California governor Ronald Reagan appointed Campbell to a sixteen-year term on the Board of Regents of the University of California. In 1969, Hoover’s ties to the Nixon White House sealed its image on campus as a pillar of the establishment. Four Hoover fellows joined the new administration. Roger Freeman was named White House economic adviser; Richard Allen served as an aide to national security adviser Henry Kissinger; and Dennis J. Doolin and Yuan-Li Wu, both specialists on communist China, were named deputy assistant secretaries of defense. That same year, 1969, was one of protests and disruptions on the Stanford campus, as it was on university campuses across the country. Hoover was not the first target that year of the student protesters, who had first occupied buildings in the engineering, business, and medical schools, but its turn was inevitable. On May 27, antiwar activists denouncing Hoover’s “counterinsurgency activities” gathered in front of Hoover Tower with the intention of entering and occupying it. Campbell stepped out the front door, locked the door behind him, and walked up to a microphone that the demonstrators had set up on the steps. Campbell was shy and could be awkward and uncomfortable in personal conversation — he was often described as “dour” and “prickly” — but he was not one to back down from a confrontation. Campbell carried on an argument with the students for about an hour, withdrawing into the tower when the protesters proceeded to set fire to an effigy of him. Hoover withstood the attempted takeover, and contrary to the experiences of other US university libraries, no Hoover book or document or card catalog drawer was destroyed during the years of turmoil. In that turbulent year, Hoover was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. In November 1969 the institution sponsored a three-day conference on the theme Peaceful Change in Modern Society. Distinguished scholars and eminent leaders from a wide variety of fields and backgrounds in the humanities, sciences, and legal and political worlds addressed the conference. The proceedings were kicked 78

defining moments

First meeting of the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers, Nicolas de Basily Room, Hoover Tower, July 26, 1971.

hoover becomes a think tank

off with a pre-conference fiftieth-anniversary dinner celebration. In his remarks to the guests, Campbell quoted Herbert Hoover’s statement, from his tower dedication speech, that the purpose of the institution was to promote peace, adding, “It is our firm intention to continue to pursue this noble objective in the coming fifty years.” Campbell also described the institution as facing “new challenges.” He said that the founder’s goal to “promote peace” was more urgent than ever, given the conflict and violence roiling the country. “Never has his lifelong interest in the causes and effects of social change been more applicable than it is to the rapid transformations we are witnessing in American life today,” said Campbell. “These considerations help to explain the increasing attention the Institution is giving to peace research as such, and to issues of domestic policy.”77 Campbell announced that evening the establishment of Peace Fellowships, enabling scholars to pursue advanced research projects on peaceful change, both domestic and international. (The first Peace Fellow, in 1970–71, was future senior fellow Dennis Bark.) Also announced on that occasion was a plan to launch the following year a National Fellows Program to support young scholars studying modern history, political science, economics, and sociology. Already in place by then was the Public Affairs Fellowship Program, begun in 1967. (The first Public Affairs Fellow was Edwin J. Feulner Jr., future president of the Heritage Foundation.) The National Security Affairs Fellowship, which offers members of the US military and government agencies the opportunity to conduct research 79

Martin Anderson addressing the Stanford Club of Los Angeles, November 28, 1984.

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on topics relevant to their respective branches of service, also was launched in 1969. Campbell was careful to state that the ultimate success of all of these programs hinged on the availability of the necessary funds  —  and as it happened, under Campbell the funding never fell short. The annual budget had expanded rapidly during the 1960s: from $390,000 in 1959–60 to $2,153,000 by 1970–71 (and would increase to $2,393,400 in 1971–72, and $3.5 million in 1975). Among the twenty-five major individual donors to Hoover in the late 1960s, fourteen were past or present members on the Hoover Advisory Board, establishing a precedent that would continue in the decades to follow. During the 1960s, endowment and reserve funds increased from approximately $2 million to $10 million ($12 million by 1972), and endowment and interest income rose from $90,000 in 1959–60 to approximately $450,000 in 1970–71. As Campbell proudly noted, “This was the first time that the Institution had raised a sizeable amount of new capital since the 1920’s, when Mr. Hoover obtained the initial endowment funds.”78 No mere library could have attracted funding on this scale. Reflecting Hoover’s new status and financial independence, in January 1971 the Stanford board of trustees approved the Hoover Advisory Board’s recommendation that the responsibilities and roles of the Hoover board be more clearly defined, that the procedure for selecting the institution’s director be clarified, and that the name of the board be changed to the Board of Overseers. As succinctly summarized years later by Charles Palm (Hoover deputy director 1990–2002), “The creation of a board with national distinction and enhanced authority over the direction of the institution, including the selection of the director, served as a guarantee of the institution’s integrity and independence.”79 The first meeting of the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers took place on July 26, 1971, in the Nicolas de Basily Room, on the ground floor of Hoover Tower. All the pieces were now in place for the launch of a major programmatic initiative: a domestic studies program comparable in size and quality to Hoover’s international studies program. Several factors prompted this move, which had been incubating since Herbert Hoover appointed Campbell to take the helm of the institution in 1959. A proximate cause was the campus unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Campbell’s confrontation on the steps of Hoover Tower was an influential moment. Another such moment occurred on March 31, 1971, the first of several nights of student attacks on campus buildings to protest Stanford’s ROTC program. Protesters targeted the business school, the bookstore, the sciences and engineering buildings, and the president’s office. An especially vulnerable building on campus was the Lou Henry Hoover Building because of its large windows, and most of these were smashed or cracked that day by the protesters’ stones. defining moments

“When all the windows were broken,” Senior Fellow Rita Ricardo-Campbell told a journalist in 1973, “we couldn’t say, ‘Let’s ignore domestic problems.’” Glenn Campbell stated the matter more philosophically: “If you’re talking about an institution whose mission is to promote peaceful change, a domestic program is as important as an international one.”80 Another factor that made Hoover’s transition to domestic studies so seamless was the interests of four senior members of the institution: Glenn Campbell; Rita Ricardo-Campbell, an economist whose expertise was health-care policy and social security; Roger Freeman, whose academic work was focused on public finance and taxation; and a new recruit by the name of Martin Anderson, an economist and recently special assistant to President Nixon who was appointed a Hoover senior fellow in April 1971. Anderson had made his mark with his much-acclaimed 1964 book, The Federal Bulldozer, which challenged the liberal consensus that cities could be revived through large-scale government programs. As Dun’s Review, a journal published by Dun & Bradstreet, “Every now and then it seems wrote of him in those years, “Anderson’s basic attitude toward any problem is that government solutions rarely work and to be a good idea for an that a market approach is always best.”81 organization to ask itself some Anderson’s major achievement during his brief service the Nixon administration — the adoption by the United hard questions about what it is in States of a volunteer army — demonstrated that he was an doing and where it is going.” ideas man with a knack for putting his ideas into action. The Nixon administration abandoned military conscription as a way to defuse the opposition to the Vietnam War and the military draft that was sweeping the country. Anderson first persuaded Nixon of the wisdom of the idea, and then recommended what became known as the Gates Commission, led by former US secretary of defense Thomas S. Gates, to study the question. Anderson also ensured the proper make-up of the commission, whose members included economist Milton Friedman, and then drafted the legislation establishing the volunteer army. Anderson departed the Nixon administration early and came to Hoover, where he had an immediate impact. Campbell asked him to take the lead in outlining a program for domestic studies (initially conceived as a Center for American Studies) for presentation at the December 1971 Board of Overseers meeting. The result was a seminal document, a paper titled “The Research Program of the Hoover Institution in the 1970’s,” presented to the overseers on December 17, 1971. Anderson’s opening line portended the big changes to come: “Every now and then it seems to be a good idea for an organization to ask itself some hard hoover becomes a think tank

81

questions about what it is doing and where it is going.” Anderson was careful to invoke Herbert Hoover in making his case for the new direction he was proposing, citing a passage from Hoover’s classic 1922 volume, American Individualism, where Hoover stated: We cannot ever afford to rest at ease in the comfortable assumption that right ideas always prevail by some virtue of their own. In the long run they do. But there can be and there have been periods of centuries when the world slumped back toward darkness merely because great masses of men became impregnated with wrong ideas and wrong social philosophies.

First meeting of the Domestic Studies Advisory Committee, October 27, 1973. Members are (left to right) Edward Banfield, Jack Hirshleifer, William Baxter, Moses Abramovitz, William Meckling, Gary Becker, George Stigler, and Hendrik Houthakker.

82

Anderson laid out the evidence of the gradual emergence of domestic policy studies at Hoover over the course of the previous decade. International studies continued to be the principal focus at Hoover, he noted, and yet, “Recently the question has been raised as to whether or not this current balance of interests is the best one. Should we continue as we are, or should we consider the possibility of refocusing our efforts in somewhat different directions?” There was no question, Anderson stated, of the need to continue to expand the scope and quality of Hoover’s international studies program. Hoover must continue its extensive foreign area studies program, the research and publications on Western Europe, East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Soviet bloc. “But now we also have serious troubles at home, and we are being tested here as well as abroad. Our own personal world is changing — culturally, politically, economically. During the last ten years we, ourselves, have felt the rumbles of revolution.” It remained vitally important, Anderson acknowledged, to understand the political and social changes taking place in countries throughout the world. But the time had come to undertake a serious examination of the changes taking place here at home. “And we are badly prepared. We probably know more about the causes of the cultural revolution defining moments

in China than we know about the causes of the cultural revolution that swept over our young people during the last ten years.” What was needed, Anderson asserted, was “vast amounts of sound, rigorously documented, clearly written studies in economics, politics, and other areas of social concern here at home.” Hoover was well positioned to undertake such an effort. It had “the nucleus of what could be one of the leading research centers in the world on political and social change — if not the leading one.” That research would now have to have “clear policy implications in the near future,” Anderson maintained: Thus, the proposed future expansion of the Hoover Institution would be guided by the following principles: 1. The current program of library acquisitions and research work in the international field would continue, and provision would be made for expansion as circumstances warrant. 2. The domestic program would be expanded, with the goal of making it comparable in size and quality to the international area. 3. In both the foreign and domestic areas there would be more emphasis on analytical studies than on historical description. 4. While continuing to focus on basic, fundamental research, special attention would be given to research work with future policy implications.82 A fifth point noted that Hoover had established a working relationship with the American Enterprise Institute (whose headquarters in Washington, DC, served as the meeting place for the December 1971 Hoover overseers’ gathering). The two institutions had recently initiated a joint publication program, and the assumption going forward was that, by collaborating, each institution could benefit from the other’s strengths. The AEI, with its experience influencing Washington policymaking, would focus on “issues with more immediate policy implications” while Hoover would be “concerned with more basic, longer range studies.”83 (At the time, William J. Baroody Sr., president of AEI, was a member of the Hoover Board of Overseers, while Campbell served as one of AEI’s program advisers.) The arrangement quickly fell away, as Hoover found it was able to raise funds from the same foundations as AEI, and because the Hoover directors realized that they did not need to concede the field of immediate policy to AEI. The overseers gave unanimous approval to Anderson’s outline for a domestic studies program. It took another year and a half to convert the outline into a genuine program. The first priority was to secure adequate funding for the hoover becomes a think tank

83

launch and sustained activity of the program. In 1972 the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts provided a lead grant of $750,000 over three years for the Domestic Studies Program. The Lilly Endowment contributed $600,000 over three years. Hoover was the beneficiary of more than $1.2 million of Hewlett-Packard Co. stock presented by Mr. and Mrs. David Packard. Additional endowment funds of $800,000 were provided by Emma Roush, and smaller contributions came from several other sources. By the summer of 1973, everything was in place. At the meeting of the Board of Overseers on July 19 a resolution was introduced to redefine the Hoover Institution: WHEREAS: The events of the past decade have now brought us to the point where it is just as important to thoroughly understand the background and causes of the social and political changes taking place in the United States as it is to understand those changes taking place in other countries throughout the world, RESOLVED: Recognizing the urgency of this situation and the great need and importance of a domestic studies program the Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution endorses the concept that the domestic studies be accorded equal priority and importance with international studies in the future growth and development of the Hoover Institution and encourages and urges the staff to proceed with this development in the most expeditious manner possible.84

Senior Fellow Thomas G. Moore, director of the Domestic Studies Program, c. 1975.

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The resolution passed unanimously. The shift toward domestic studies at Hoover was reflected in two related adjustments. At the same meeting, Anderson announced that the National Fellows Program, which in the past had supported almost entirely scholars in the field of international studies, would in the future have about half of its fellows working in the domestic studies area. At the overseers’ meeting in December, Campbell announced that on the international studies side he expected in the future to devote more resources to investigating the changing nature of US interests abroad and the major issues facing American policy makers in key regions and countries across the globe. As part of the expansion, Hoover planned to erect a third building, which became the Herbert Hoover Federal Memorial Building, completed in 1978. Martin Anderson served as acting director of the Domestic Studies Program until he was succeeded in 1974 by Thomas Gale Moore, an economist from Michigan State University, who directed the program for the next decade. Helping to shape the work of the new program was a Domestic Studies Advisory defining moments

Committee with a distinguished membership and chaired by University of Chicago economist George Stigler. Its inaugural meeting was held at Hoover on October 27, 1973. Stigler would remain chairman until the committee was discontinued in 1990. CONSERVATISM ON THE MARCH

Former president Gerald Ford speaking at the dedication ceremony of the Herbert Hoover Memorial Building, July 20, 1978.

hoover becomes a think tank

There was a reason that the 1973 resolution inaugurating Hoover’s Domestic Studies Program spoke of the “urgency” of the situation and the need to act “in the most expeditious manner possible.” The principals behind the launch of the program sensed that this was conservatism’s moment and that it had to be seized — that there was no time to lose. An article by Robert Shogan titled “Conservatism: New Attention, New Respect” in the Los Angeles Times of March 15, 1973, took note of the tectonic ideological shift under way in the culture at large: “In their long underdog struggle against liberals, conservatives are now commanding increasing attention and respect, even in quarters where they had often been ignored or rebuffed.” Conservatives were beginning to generate the kind of intellectual energy usually associated with liberals, resulting in a lively national debate. “What is at stake,” the Times wrote, “is the shape of public opinion and, ultimately, the thrust of national policy for years to come.” This sense of an opportunity not to be missed animated Hoover’s embrace of a domestic studies program. Three years later, the conservative upswing continued. “Conservatism is on the march again,” noted a feature piece by Gerald R. Rosen in Dun’s Review for April 1976 titled “The New Conservative Idea Men.” The “idea men” under discussion were not just any conservatives. “The men who have gained new respectability are economic conservatives,” the article noted. Among them were seasoned economists such as the University of Rochester’s W. Allen Wallis, author of An Overgoverned Society (1976), and the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman and George Stigler. They had nurtured a new generation of  “free-market idea men” who insisted that “big government cannot solve the nation’s problems — and often exacerbates them.”85 85

GEORGE STIGLER

Economists (left to right) George Stigler, Milton Friedman, and Aaron Director at the Hoover Institution, February 11, 1982.

Milton Friedman would become a household name, but

named the Emma and Carroll Roush Distinguished

George Stigler’s influence on the field of economics is just

Scholar at Hoover. Carroll J. Roush, a Bay Area business-

as significant as that of his better-known colleague. “It

man (he was chairman of the board of the O-N-C Motor

was Stigler,” wrote economist Thomas Hazlett in Reason

Freight System) and a member of the Hoover Advisory

magazine in 1989, “who burrowed deep inside the intel-

Board, together with his wife established the Roush Fund

lectuals’ lair and largely turned professional economists

at Hoover to encourage instruction and research on the

from sleepy apologists for state intervention into skepti-

US economy, “with primary stress on the private economy

cal investigators of the motives, and results, of govern-

and its contributions to American well-being.”87 At the

ment regulation.” Unlike Friedman, who authored popular

time, Stigler was chairman of President Nixon’s task force

books, Stigler worked largely out of the public eye, but no

on antitrust laws and policies.

less effectively. “George Stigler blazed a trail by roam-



ing the regulatory landscape in search of evidence of the

versations at Hoover about the possibilities for estab-

actual effects of government,” Hazlett remarked. “Upon

lishing a domestic studies program. Campbell tried

finding the evidence, he discovered that it correlated only

unsuccessfully to lure Stigler to Stanford to serve as

roughly with the publicly announced aims of regulation.”

director of this initiative. He later said of Stigler that as

Stigler was quoted in Hazlett’s article as taking special

chairman of the Domestic Studies Advisory Committee

pride in the fact that “economists have been the premier

he deserved much of the credit for the excellence of the

‘pourers of cold water’ on proposals of the reformers and

Domestic Studies Program. “As a result of his and the

philanthropists who seek to uplift mankind.”

committee’s advice, we brought several excellent econo-



Stigler, the Walgreen Professor of American

mists to the Hoover Institution, including Thomas Moore,

Institutions at the University of Chicago, came to Hoover

Thomas Sowell, Robert Hall, Kenneth Judd, Edward

as a visiting scholar in the winter of 1969, when he also

Lazear, Thomas Sargent, and finally Gary Becker himself

taught in the Department of Economics. Stigler was

as a part-time Senior Fellow.”88

86

86

Stigler was thus a participant in the preliminary con-

defining moments

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn speaking at the entrance to Hoover Tower, June 6, 1975. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at work on the eleventh floor of Hoover Tower, 1976.

hoover becomes a think tank

It is no wonder that Campbell tapped Chicago’s George Stigler to head up the Domestic Studies Advisory Board. The Department of Economics at the University of Chicago was the intellectual hub of free-market economics. The most famous representative of the “Chicago School” was Friedman, leader of the counteroffensive against the Keynesian School, who became a Hoover senior research fellow in 1977. Chicago graduates and faculty members held major economic posts in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Among them was George P. Shultz, lately dean of the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, who served under President Nixon successively as secretary of labor, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and secretary of the treasury. One of the “new breed” of economists noted in Dun’s Review for “their ability to zero in on concrete policy problems” based on detailed studies was the Hoover Institution’s Thomas Moore. His changing professional fortunes were an indicator of the changing ideological times. Moore, whose research focused on the economic consequences of government regulation — for example, in his 1972 book Freight Transportation Deregulation, published by the American Enterprise Institute — emerged from relative obscurity in September 1974 when President Ford was exposed to his views at a White House economic summit on inflation. Moore was a proponent of the complete abolition of such regulatory agencies as the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board. Ford was not about to go that far, but he was ready to support partial deregulation as a way to bring down transportation costs. During the Carter administration, Moore 87

was one of the principal architects of the airline-deregulation bill cosponsored by Democratic senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Howard Cannon of Nevada, which became law in 1978. The 1976 US presidential campaign reflected the new mood among American voters. A New York Times/CBS poll that year reported that 63 percent of the respondents felt that most federal health, education, and welfare programs would be more effectively run at the state “I spent two months in the level. In the Republican primary campaign, President Ford library and archives of the and Ronald Reagan each portrayed himself as the more genuine “conservative,” and both made “big government” and Hoover Institution, though federal spending chief targets of criticism. Meanwhile, on the I would have happily stayed Democratic side, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter positioned himself to the right of the mainstream liberal Democrats. another six.” Carter, too, could be heard on the campaign trail assailing big government and vowing to curb government regulation of business. The Hoover Institution, with its many policy papers and op-eds in the areas of government regulation, income redistribution, health, social security, energy, tax policy, and proposals to limit government expenditures, was at the center of this national conversation. SOLZHENITSYN AT HOOVER

The conservative wave of the 1970s also had an international dimension. As détente between the United States and the USSR failed to translate into the promised end of the superpowers’ Cold War rivalry, and as Soviet interventions in Latin America and Africa in the late 1970s soured Americans on the alleged achievements of US-Soviet summitry, trade, and space exploration, the Hoover was prepared to seize the moment. A 1978 New York Times Magazine profile of the Hoover Institution summed it up: “As talk heats up about a new cold war and more and more people regard détente as a dirty word, the staunch antiCommunism that unites the Hoover scholars, whatever their differences of opinion on other matters, no longer seems out-of-step with the times.”89 Those scholars now included physicist Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb,” a senior research fellow at Hoover since 1975 specializing in international and national policies concerning defense and energy. A landmark moment for Hoover was the 1975 visit to the institution of the exiled Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Survivor of Stalin’s Gulag, political novelist, fearless dissident, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, he is best remembered for The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental epic that combined oral histories of camp survivors with political analysis, philosophical 88

defining moments

ruminations, and the author’s own memories of the camps. The publication, in Paris in December 1973, of volume one of the original Russian-language version resulted in his deportation from the USSR. He arrived in West Germany in February 1974 a celebrated author with a reputation as a moralist and prophet of Tolstoyan proportions. The Hoover Institution was Solzhenitsyn’s first announced visit in the United States in 1975. He came to investigate its library and archival collections on Russia and the USSR. On the occasion of his arrival, on June 2, 1975, Solzhenitsyn was named a Hoover honorary fellow. He spent eight discovery-filled days at Hoover. “The documentation I have examined at the Hoover Institution is outstanding and, in many respects, unique,” Solzhenitsyn commented during his visit. “It is the kind of original source material that the Soviets, in order to rewrite history, either destroyed or refuse to make available to scholars.”90 Solzhenitsyn returned to Hoover in April 1976 for eight weeks of further research for a series of historical novels about the fall of Imperial Russia and the birth of the Soviet Union in the wake of the Revolution of 1917. His time at Hoover was transformative, as he described in a memoir written two years later: top left Chairman Paul L. Davies presiding at the July 1978 Board of Overseers meeting in the newly opened Stauffer Auditorium. At back right is Ronald Reagan, and to his left is Allan Hoover, son of the founder. top right Sidney Hook, senior research fellow, c. 1978.

hoover becomes a think tank

For forty years I had been preparing to write about the Revolution in Russia — 1976 being forty years from my initial conception of the book — but it was only now at the Hoover Institution that I encountered such an unexpected volume and scope of material that I could leaf through and drink in. It was only now that I truly came to see it all, and seeing it caused a shift in my mind I did not expect. . . . Encountering 89

THE UNITED STATES IN THE 1980s

This landmark publication appeared in print on July 1, 1980, four months before Ronald Reagan’s election as US president. In 1980, William F. Buckley’s Firing Line devoted back-to-back programs to The United States in the 1980s, featuring six Hoover fellows discussing the policy proposals advocated in the book. Buckley introduced the broadcast by remarking, “The Hoover Institution of Stanford, California, is a caravanserai for worldly scholars who seek to advance public policy toward freedom and security.”91

During a 1985 meeting in Moscow with secretary of

state George Shultz, Soviet Communist Party general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev conveyed the Kremlin’s understanding that the book was a policy handbook for the Reagan administration. “We know what you think,” Gorbachev told Shultz. “We have read this book and watched all its programs become adopted by the Reagan Administration.”92

top left A special two-part episode of Firing Line was devoted to a discussion of the Hoover Institution publication The United States in the 1980s. Guests seen with host William F. Buckley (left) here are (left to right) Edward Teller, Peter Duignan, and Richard Staar. top right (Left to right) Firing Line host William F. Buckley with guests Alvin Rabushka, Rita RicardoCampell, and Martin Anderson. above Alvin Rabushka (left) and Peter Duignan, editors of The United States in the 1980s, c. 1980.

90

defining moments

top left Milton Friedman standing to make a point at a tax conference held in Stauffer Auditorium, January 1981. top right Free to Choose publicity poster, 1982. bottom right Publicity photo for television series Free to Choose, 1980.

hoover becomes a think tank

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the materials from the Hoover Institution, I was overwhelmed by these tangible fragments of history from the days of the February Revolution and the period leading up to it. . . . Without this towering, growing heap of living material from those years, how could I have ever imagined that it went like this? “I spent two months in the library and archives of the Hoover Institution,” Solzhenitsyn recalled, “though I would have happily stayed another six.”93 BREAKTHROUGH top left President-elect Ronald Reagan addressing the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers, January 6, 1981. top right Presentation of the Private Treptow poster to President Reagan in the Oval Office, 1981. Left to right are (seated at far back) Roger B. Porter, director of the White House Office of Policy Development; (seated) secretary of state Alexander Haig; (standing) chief domestic policy adviser Martin Anderson; Reagan; secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger; and (in background) national security adviser Richard V. Allen.

92

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the second person to be named honorary fellow at Hoover. The first was Ronald Reagan, who was given this distinction on February 1, 1975, when he deposited his gubernatorial papers at Hoover, thereby building on a relationship that extended back into the 1960s when he appointed Glenn Campbell to the University of California Board of Regents. Hoover’s connection to Reagan was now reinforced by Senior Fellow Martin Anderson. In 1976, the thirty-nine-year-old Anderson took leave from the Hoover Institution to serve as Reagan’s top consultant in the primary campaign that aimed to unseat President Ford. That campaign turned out to be unsuccessful, but it served as a dry run for the watershed 1980 campaign. Hoover, meanwhile, was diversifying its talent. Aside from Edward Teller, non-economists among the new recruits included two widely respected scholars: philosopher Sidney Hook was made senior research fellow in 1973, and sociologist defining moments

President Reagan and (far left) presidential adviser Anne Armstrong greet W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell at the Board of Overseers dinner at the White House, January 1982.

hoover becomes a think tank

Seymour Martin Lipset was made senior fellow in 1975. By the late 1970s, Hoover’s operating budget had increased more than tenfold since Campbell had taken over, from less than $400,000 to more than $4 million. Various publications noted Hoover’s increasing political influence, and Campbell told the New York Times in 1978, “If the Republicans win in 1980, I’d expect a certain number of my staff to ask for leave.”94 Anderson and Hoover Senior Research Fellow and Associate Director Darrell Trent signed on to the Reagan 1980 campaign staff, joining former senior fellow Richard Allen. Hoover’s breakthrough year was 1980. Among the seminal moments was the publication of The United States in the 1980s, coedited by Hoover fellows Peter Duignan and Alvin Rabushka. In the book, thirty-two experts address major domestic and foreign policy questions facing the United States in the coming decade. The authors analyze core issues, describe policy options, and recommend specific courses of action. The book’s target audience included opinion leaders at the federal, state, and municipal levels of government, members of the academic and business communities, and the general public. The year 1980 also marked the appearance of Free to Choose, both the blockbuster book and the television series written and hosted by Milton Friedman. Free to Choose (the book co-authored with his wife, Rose Friedman) was a lively exploration of the virtues of the free market and the vices of government control. It was written as the companion volume to a ten-hour television series by the same name, which aired on public television. Individual programs in the series were devoted to Friedman’s key concerns in the areas of market economics and a free society, and they gave him a platform to advocate for favorite causes such as the earned-income tax credit, the flat-rate income tax, school vouchers, and the privatization of social security. It was in part Friedman’s singular effectiveness in communicating his ideas to a mass audience that inspired Margaret Thatcher to remark, “Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty when it had been all but forgotten. He was an intellectual freedom fighter. Never was there a less dismal practitioner of a dismal science.”95 Free to Choose has held a special resonance for Hoover fellows who have championed the idea of limited government, from Alvin Rabushka and Robert Hall’s flat-tax prescription to the economic theories and policy prescriptions of Gary Becker, Michael Boskin, John Cogan, Edward Lazear, Thomas Moore, Thomas Sowell, and John Taylor. Friedman’s book inspired Hoover’s advocacy of charter schools and the role of private initiative in education reform, exemplified at Hoover by the work over the years of fellows Checker Finn, Eric Hanushek, Caroline Hoxby, Terry Moe, Paul Peterson, and Margaret Raymond. The momentous event of 1980 — for the nation and the world, as well as for 93

top President Reagan and W. Glenn Campbell, named chairman of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board, in the Oval Office, September 13, 1985. center Former president Jimmy Carter and W. Glenn Campbell, Nicolas de Basily Room, Hoover Tower, July 15, 1983. bottom (Left to right) Rita RicardoCampbell, W. Glenn Campbell, and Jimmy Carter walking through the rotunda of Hoover Tower, July 15, 1983.

94

defining moments

top left Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell speaking at a Hoover seminar in Washington, DC, February 14, 1986. top right Senior Fellow Henry Rowen shaking hands with President Reagan in the White House, early 1980s.

hoover becomes a think tank

the Hoover Institution — was the election of Ronald Reagan as US president. During 1980–81, a Hoover archivist was assigned to the Reagan campaign and systematically gathered up all the campaign and transition files (about five hundred linear feet). It was the first time any presidential campaign included an archivist for that purpose. This collection, together with Reagan’s gubernatorial records, deposited at Hoover in 1975, was later transferred to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, contributing to the historical record of the Reagan administration. In effect, Hoover served as a Reagan Library before there was one. On January 6, 1981, president-elect Reagan, addressing the Hoover Board of Overseers at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel in Washington, DC, called Hoover “this ‘brightest star’ in the constellation of think tanks,” and noted that “during the recent campaign I called on more people from the Institution to help with my campaign than from any other institution. Some, such as Glenn and Rita Ricardo Campbell, served on my policy task forces. Others, such as Martin Anderson, Darrell Trent, and former Senior Fellow Dick Allen, worked on my campaign staff. All are now assisting me in the transition to a new administration.”96 President Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address, delivered on January 20, 1981, paid homage to Private Martin Treptow, an American soldier killed in France in World War I, by quoting lines from Treptow’s diary. Reagan’s speechwriters did not want him to use the Private Treptow story because they were unable to verify it. He used it anyway. That is why he was genuinely pleased when he was soon after presented with vivid authentication of Private Treptow’s story, courtesy of 95

the Hoover Institution, in the form of the original Liberty Loan poster depicting his death and confirming his quoted pledge: “I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost as if the whole issue of the struggle depended on me alone.” Hoover fellow Martin Anderson presented an original copy of the poster to President Reagan at a White House cabinet meeting. On January 11, 1982, the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers convened for a dinner at the White House, where President Reagan addressed the gathering. “Over its distinguished career,” the president said, “the Hoover Institution deserves to be singled out for its service, its standards, and its contributions.” With Hoover’s Treptow poster in mind, Reagan remarked, “I have reason to know nothing is impossible to the Hoover Institution.”97 Hoover fellows played key roles inside the Reagan administration, especially during Reagan’s first term. Roger Freeman was a member of president-elect Reagan’s Inflation Policy Task Force and Spending Control Task Force. Martin Anderson served as the White House director of policy development during the 96

defining moments

facing page President Reagan with speechwriters during an Oval Office meeting to discuss the upcoming G7 Economic Summit, May 18, 1987. Seated at center of the facing couch is future Hoover research fellow Peter Robinson. above President Reagan making his Berlin Wall speech at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, June 12, 1987.

hoover becomes a think tank

97

first year of the Reagan presidency and in 1988 published an acclaimed book about Reagan’s first term, Revolution: The Reagan Legacy. Richard Allen served as national security adviser from 1981 to 1982. Other Hoover affiliates who served for a time in the administration were Annelise Anderson, associate director of the Office of Management and Budget; Glenn Campbell, chairman of Reagan’s Intelligence Oversight Board and a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; Rita Ricardo-Campbell, a member of Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board; Senior Research Fellow Philip Habib, special envoy to the Middle East; Senior Research Fellow Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the Treasury; Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell, a member of the president’s Economic Policy Advisory Board; Edward Teller, a member of the Federal Emergency Management Advisory Board and of the Advisory Council to Reagan’s science advisor; and Darrell Trent, deputy secretary of the Department of Transportation. Future Hoover Distinguished Fellow George Shultz chaired Reagan’s Coordinating Committee on Economic Policy during his election campaign and through the first eighteen months of his presidency. The committee sent president-elect Reagan a policy memo that encouraged him to focus on long-term policy goals and to resist the temptation to modify his policies for short-term political gain. “As the conviction grows that the policies will be sustained in a consistent manner over an extended period,” the memo advised, “the response will quicken and a healthy US economy will restore the credibility of our dollar on world markets, contribute significantly to smoother operation of the international economy, and enhance America’s strength in the world.” The committee urged Reagan to “convince the financial markets and the public at large that your anti-inflation policy is more than rhetoric. Get the budget under control.” In the event, Reagan was unwavering, and as Shultz later recalled, “The long-run results were spectacular. President Reagan showed courage as he held a political umbrella over Paul Volcker at the Fed, despite warnings from political advisers of a recession and political losses in the midterm election. He took the view that inflation must be dealt with and he accepted a short-term hit in order to achieve long-term gains for the economy. By early 1983, inflation was under control, tax-cut incentives had kicked in, and the economy was taking off.”98 Hoover’s influence in Washington during the Reagan years was much more extensive than the sum of its fellows participating in the administration. The cornerstone was the defining ideas researched and developed at Hoover during the Campbell era. “The past few years have witnessed a profound transformation in national policies,” the Hoover annual report for 1986 noted with evident pride. “This transformation, which began with a series of innovative public policy proposals in the 1960s and 1970s, had spread by the 1980s to virtually every 98

defining moments

dimension of government policy. Monetary policy, taxation, government regulation, strategic defense, and federal social welfare and health policies have all been reviewed, reconsidered, and reformed.”99 Among the Hoover scholars centrally involved in the making of the Reagan administration’s foreign and security policies were Hoover’s “Cold Warriors,” so called by many of their peers because of their hardline proposals for countering the Soviet Union: national security adviser Richard Allen, Henry Rowen, and Edward Teller. Rowen served as chairman of the US National Intelligence Council in the early 1980s. He was named a Hoover senior research fellow in 1983 and became a senior fellow in 1986. It was Rowen who persuaded key figures in the administration, including Secretary of State George Shultz, that the United States could outspend the Soviets militarily and thereby win the Cold War. Toward that end, Teller championed a missile-defense system, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly dubbed “Star Wars.” The idea for a system of space-based defense weapons had been developed for the transition team of the incoming Reagan administration by a committee of experts that included Hoover Senior Fellow Stefan Possony, an early and influential proponent of the concept of strategic defense. Many expressed skepticism about SDI’s feasibility, but its role in adding to the enormous pressure on the Kremlin in the Cold War’s final years is widely recognized. The essential ally of these “Cold Warriors” in the eventual unraveling of the USSR was Shultz, who played a vital role in facilitating Reagan’s pursuit, in his second term, of arms-control negotiations with Soviet leader Gorbachev. In 1983, Reagan had called communism “the focus of evil in the modern world” and labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Reagan’s turn to negotiation with the Kremlin did not inhibit him from delivering such bold rhetorical thrusts, as he did on June 12, 1987, in an address at the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall. In that speech, which was written by future Hoover research fellow Peter Robinson, Reagan issued his historic challenge, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Two years later, the wall came down. Two years after that, the USSR collapsed. The demise of Soviet Communism, one of the century’s major turning points, coincided with — and influenced — a period of transition at the Hoover Institution.

hoover becomes a think tank

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CHAPTER 4

INTO A NEW CENTURY 1989

Aerial view of Hoover Tower and Stanford Campus.

The year 1989, which ushered in the collapse of Soviet Communism, marked another major turning point in the history of the Hoover Institution. It sparked a surge of collecting by the Library & Archives (as the collecting and preservation arm of the institution came to be named) comparable to those that took place after World Wars I and II. It was also the year that George Shultz came to Hoover as a distinguished fellow. John Raisian was named interim director of the Hoover Institution in September 1989 and would become director the following May. And, as it happens, 1989 was also the year that future director Thomas W. Gilligan first came to the Hoover, as a national fellow. Distinguished Fellow George P. Shultz (later the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow), arrived at Hoover in 1989 after a long and remarkable career in government, academia, and business, capped by his service as the sixtieth US secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. He is one of only two people to have held four cabinet-level positions, having served as secretary of state, Treasury, and labor, as well as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Shultz’s decision to make Hoover his home base during his post-governmental career has had an enormous impact on the institution. In the thirty years since he arrived, Shultz has been one of Hoover’s intellectual leaders. He has convened conferences, received prominent visitors, attracted funding, authored and edited numerous books and influential op-eds, helped bridge the divide between Hoover and Stanford, and given impetus and direction to many of Hoover’s programs. He has chaired collaborative research efforts on a wide range of policy topics, including energy policy and governance in an emerging new world. Shultz arrived as the Glenn Campbell era was coming to an end. Campbell had directed the Hoover Institution for twenty-nine years. During that time, the institution’s team of scholars increased from six in 1960 to some seventy resident 101

top Distinguished fellow (later to be named the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow) George P. Shultz at the Hoover Institution, early 1989 or 1990. bottom Director John Raisian, in the 1990s.

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fellows in 1989. Campbell had developed Hoover into a major research institution with an endowment of more than $125 million and a $17 million budget. In its December 21, 1991, issue, the Economist magazine lauded the Hoover Institution in a feature piece titled “The Good Think-Tank Guide,” which rated the most prestigious think tanks around the world. Hoover was ranked number one. “The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace is hard to match for sheer intellectual firepower,” the article stated. Hoover printed an excerpt of the article on a tote bag, which became a must-have Hoover item in the early 1990s. Campbell’s successor, John Raisian, built impressively on these sturdy foundations, bringing significant growth to the Hoover Institution. When he took the helm, Raisian was a forty-year-old economist specializing in labor-market and human-resource issues. He had received his PhD in economics from UCLA and had taught at the University of Washington and the University of Houston. In 1981, he joined the Reagan administration, serving in the US Department of Labor, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy, in two capacities: first as special assistant for economic policy and later as director of research and technical support. After leaving government, he headed a consulting firm in Los Angeles. He arrived at Hoover in 1986 as a senior research fellow, eventually serving as associate director from 1986 to 1988 and deputy director to Campbell from 1988 to 1889. After several months as interim director, in May 1990 he was named director, later the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution. Raisian’s style was markedly different from that of his predecessor, yet he proved to be as formidable a fund-raiser, if not more so. He would expand Hoover’s donor base to support a wide variety of activities at the institution in the coming years, and would take the lead in launching and directing research task forces and hosting Hoover retreats, conferences, and seminars. Hoover retreats were one of Raisian’s innovations and were designed to provide opportunities for Hoover fellows, visiting scholars, and invited speakers to discuss policy and interact with Hoover fellows, overseers, defining moments

and donors in an intimate setting and to learn more about the institution and the research projects of its scholars. The first donor retreats were held at Saint Helena, California, in June 1992 and at the Hoover Institution in October 1992. George Shultz delivered the keynote address at the inaugural retreat, and Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and Gary Becker participated in a panel on economic growth and trade issues. Friedman, Condoleezza Rice, and Thomas Sowell delivered the keynote addresses at the fall 1992 retreat, which featured more than twenty-five Hoover scholars during the two-day event. Retreats remain a potent Hoover tradition, a venue in which Hoover fellows and other leading public-policy analysts present their latest research to the institution’s friends and supporters. Raisian’s genial personality had an immediate impact in helping to soothe Hoover-Stanford relations, which had become strained in the 1980s as Hoover’s influence in Washington rose and as controversy swirled around a proposal to locate Ronald Reagan’s presidential library on the Stanford campus. The end of the Cold War greatly eased the tensions on campus. Over the years, especially since Herbert Hoover’s 1959 rededication of his institution to, among other things, combating “the evil doctrines of Karl Marx,” Hoover had been accused of exaggerating the threat posed by communism and exacerbating the Cold War. In the academic field of Soviet studies, Hoover fellow Robert Conquest’s books on Soviet Communism, including his landmark 1968 study of Stalin’s Great Terror, was at first regarded by many as an ideological polemic that would not stand the test of time. But the demise of Soviet Communism and the unraveling of the USSR validated Hoover’s anticommunist viewpoint as the political repressions and economic hardships of daily life behind the Iron Curtain were revealed in the testimonies of citizens of the East Bloc countries and documented in the newly opened Soviet archives. Hoover’s staunch anticommunism, in other words, turned out to have been justified, and Robert Conquest’s scholarship was vindicated. THE END OF COMMUNISM

Communism has been a principal focus of the Hoover Institution since the founding in 1919. The first Hoover curators documented the Russian Revolution and Civil War and the birth and evolution of the Soviet state under Lenin and Stalin. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hoover Institution fellows and curators were well prepared and positioned to document the demise of Soviet Communism and the transition to market economies and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The collecting work was conducted resourcefully and innovatively. The remarkable accumulation of materials — including posters, proclamations, periodicals, correspondence, memoirs, and diaries — was accomplished largely by old-fashioned legwork and personal networking, in the into a new century

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ROBERT CONQUEST One of the principal figures at the Hoover Institution associated with the study of Soviet communism was Robert Conquest. A renowned historian of Soviet politics and foreign policy, Conquest spent twenty-eight years at the Hoover Institution, where he was a senior research fellow and served as curator of the Russian/Soviet and East European collections, later the Russian and Commonwealth of Independent States (a league of former Soviet republics) collection between 1981 and 2007. Conquest, the author of twenty-one books on Soviet history, politics, and international affairs, was best known for his landmark book The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, published in 1968. It remains one of the most influential studies of Soviet history and has been translated into more than twenty languages. In the words of George Shultz, Conquest “set the Robert Conquest (left) with Christopher Hitchens on the set of Uncommon Knowledge, March 2000.

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gold standard for careful research, total integrity, and clarity of expression about the real Soviet Union. He taught us all and he will live on in that spirit.”100 defining moments

Tomasz Sarnecki, Solidarność: W samo południe, 4 czerwca 1989 (“Solidarity: At high noon, June 4, 1989”). In the Polish national elections of June 4, 1989, Solidarity, the nongovernmental trade union turned political party, won 99 percent of the freely elected seats in the Polish parliament. This campaign poster employed an iconic image from American pop culture—Gary Cooper as the sheriff in the classic American film High Noon—here outfitted with a Solidarity logo above his badge and carrying a voting ballot where his holstered gun would normally appear.

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tradition of the founding collectors, Ephraim Adams, Ralph Lutz, and Frank Golder. The effort was launched and led by Charles Palm, associate director for the Library & Archives from 1987 to 1990 and deputy director of the Hoover Institution from 1990 until 2002. (Major collections acquired under Palm’s leadership include the papers of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Karl Popper, and George Shultz, and the archives of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and William F. Buckley’s television program Firing Line.) Spearheading the collecting drive, curator Maciej Siekierski spent two years working out of a Hoover office in Warsaw. In collaboration with Joseph Dwyer, deputy curator of the Russia collection, Siekierski traveled throughout the region gathering material on the former communist states and emerging democracies. More than 2.6 tons of materials were collected and brought back to Stanford as a result of this effort. Among the items were hundreds of underground leaflets and posters, issues of the first independent newspapers in former communist states, founding documents of new political parties, and opposition periodicals. One artifact collected in these years stands out: a graffiti-spattered fragment of the Berlin Wall, later complemented by a second such fragment. Collecting in the former Soviet bloc countries would continue in the years ahead under the direction of Hoover archivist Elena S. Danielson, who served as director of the Library & Archives from 2002 to 2005. Notable additions to these holdings were the KGB files of the formerly Sovietcontrolled Georgia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and the collections from the family of Boris Pasternak, author of the novel Doctor Zhivago, which was published in the West in 1957, earning the author the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature and the lasting enmity of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Bridging the eras of the Cold War and its aftermath was the Hoover Institution Press’s acclaimed Studies of Nationalities series, which examines the histories of the principal ethno-national groups in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, exploring issues of identity and conflict, political and social organization, and modernization. 105

Hoover fellows also played visible roles during the early post-Soviet years. A team of Hoover economists, among them Annelise Anderson, Mikhail Bernstam, and Edward Lazear, made several trips to Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union to provide advice to the Yeltsin government on the transition to a market economy. In 1995, the Hoover Institution published one of the fruits of that effort, Economic Transition in Eastern Europe and Russia: Realities of Reform, a book edited by Lazear, who contributed an essay, as did Hoover fellows Anderson, Larry Diamond, Charles McLure Jr., Thomas Moore, and Sherwin Rosen. By the mid-1990s, the initial euphoria that accompanied the downfall of communism was wearing off as newly liberated societies faced daunting economic and political realities. “The collapse of communism and rapid retreat from socialism and central planning, together with global recognition of the virtues of democracy and free markets, encouraged many political leaderships in former communist and developing countries to initiate dramatic transitions during the first half of this decade,” Raisian wrote in the Hoover annual report for 1995. “Unfortunately, those first years of transition were deceptively easy, as change seemed to move forward without significant opposition. More recently, it has become apparent that these transitions to democracy and free markets are much more difficult to accomplish than first imagined and that in many countries the process of reform is coming under serious challenge.”101 The institution’s response was to adjust to the new circumstances by refocusing its research and scholarship on analyzing the particular challenges confronting the newly enfranchised but increasingly disillusioned electorates. These challenges varied from country to country and from culture to culture as fledgling democracies struggled to gain stability and legitimacy and to perform effectively. An enduring Hoover contribution to societies transitioning from communism took the form of an initiative called the Diplomat Training Program. Established in 1990 with the generous support of the Pew Charitable Trusts, and under the direction of Hoover associate director Richard Sousa, the Diplomat Training Program was designed to help prepare young diplomats from the emerging democracies of former communist countries for positions of leadership by exposing them to the intellectual and academic resources of the Hoover Institution and Stanford University. In eleven separate sessions during the program’s six-year span, 138 diplomats from the foreign ministries of Armenia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine spent an academic quarter in residence at Hoover engaged in rigorous course work in economics, international relations, statecraft, and security affairs. Site visits to prominent California 106

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GORBACHEV AT STANFORD, 1990 AND 1992 On June 4, 1990, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev visited Stanford University, where he delivered a nationally televised speech in Memorial Auditorium. Thanks to George Shultz, the best-remembered moment of the event was Hoover inspired. Shultz presented the Soviet leader with an original 1921 Soviet political poster from the Hoover Archives: a literacy poster quoting the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin: “Long live the sun! May the darkness be hidden!” Gorbachev was visibly moved by the presentation.

In 1992, a year after the dissolution of the USSR, for-

mer president Gorbachev returned to Stanford, and on that occasion he visited the Hoover Institution with his wife, Raisa. The visit included a tour of a Hoover exhibition specially organized for the occasion, A Century of Revolutions: Lenin to Gorbachev, featuring treasures from the Russian and Soviet collections. At the exhibition, Gorbachev was drawn to two items in particular. One was a map of feeding stations of Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA) in Soviet Russia in 1922 that showed Gorbachev’s hometown in southern Russia. He recalled his parents speaking favorably about the good work done by the ARA. Gorbachev also lingered over the drafts of the 1917 abdication statement of Tsar Nicholas II — perhaps pondering his own nonviolent ouster from power in the context of the last Romanov tsar’s tragic fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

In the 1990s, the Hoover Institution concluded an agree-

ment with the former Soviet president and the Gorbachev Foundation to undertake a Cold War oral-history project. About forty of Gorbachev’s key advisers were interviewed, as were an equal number of US officials who had been on the other side of the process that brought the Cold War top Distinguished Fellow George Shultz presents Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev with an original copy of a 1921 Soviet literacy poster from the Hoover Archives at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium, June 4, 1990. The poster caption translates as: “Long live the sun! May the darkness vanish!”

into a new century

bottom Director John Raisian (far left) and Distinguished Fellow George P. Shultz (far right) with Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, in the Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion during the Gorbachevs’ May 1992 tour of the Hoover Institution.

to an end. The records of all the interviews are held in the Hoover Archives. They served as the basis for the Hoover Institution Press book Turning Points in the Ending of the Cold War (2007), a collection of essays edited by Hoover fellow Kiron Skinner.

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MICROFILMING SOVIET COMMUNIST PARTY DOCUMENTS

documents relating to the party’s crimes. Finally, the project filmed the inventories and finding aids describing all the holdings of the three Russian participating repositories; they constitute a definitive

On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved and

accounting of the surviving records of the Soviet Communist Party

the seventy-four-year dictatorship of the Soviet Communist Party

and State in these repositories.

came to an end. Four months later, on April 17, 1992, the Hoover



Institution concluded a historic agreement with the government

Hoover Institution to use the materials that were copied in Moscow.

of the Russian Federation to microfilm the records of the Soviet

Their research topics include the Soviet economy, foreign relations,

Communist Party, as well as selected records of the Soviet state

the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War, the operations of the Gulag,

government. During the next ten years, under the direction of Hoover

and purges and repressions, to name a few. Major publications

deputy director Charles Palm, the project copied ten million pages of

based on the collection include a collection of essays edited by

documents on 11,676 reels of microfilm. In exchange (on a reel-for-

Hoover fellow Paul Gregory, Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command

reel basis), the Hoover Institution provided microfilm copies of its

Economy: Evidence from the Soviet State and Party Archives (Hoover

Russia collections to the Russian State Archives for use by scholars

Institution Press, 2001), Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum, which

in Russia. It was the largest international archival exchange project

won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize, and Paul Gregory’s, The Political Economy

ever undertaken by an American research institution.

of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives (2004), which



Among the materials copied in Moscow were the records of

won the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize, awarded annually to an out-

the highest policy-making bodies of the Soviet Communist Party,

standing publication on the political economies of the former Soviet

including party congresses and conferences; the Central Committee;

Union, Eastern Europe, and their transitional successors.

the Party Control Commission; and the party secretariat. In addi-



tion, the massive records of the NKVD’s Gulag, which administered

materials produced by the Hoover project have been made available

the Soviet labor camps, were filmed, as well as the records of the

to libraries and scholars around the world. Since the conclusion of

Constitutional Court for the 1992 trial of the Soviet Communist

the project, the Russian government has closed access to some of

Party. The latter included incriminating secret Politburo and KGB

the original records in Moscow. Because of the Hoover Institution’s

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Hundreds of scholars from around the world have come to the

Thanks to a distribution partnership, microfilm copies of all the

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creative thinking and decisive action during a relatively brief window of opportunity, important documentation on the history of Soviet communism has been saved and recorded for all to see, thus accomplishing a principal mission envisioned by Herbert Hoover when he founded the institution in 1919. In conjunction with the microfilm project, Hoover and Rosarkhiv (the state archival service of Russia) jointly sponsored an exhibition, Making Things Work: Russian-American Relations, 1900–1930. The exhibition opened in the Russian Parliament Building in Moscow on November 17, 1992, and traveled to Stanford the following March. The presence of the Soviet microfilm at Hoover has attracted scholars to the archives and inspired collaborative research projects.

In the early 2000s, Gregory initiated the Soviet Archives

Workshop, an annual summer event that brings together international research teams of economists, historians, and political scientists to investigate the materials microfilmed by Hoover in Moscow. Results include the publication of numerous books and articles over the years. The workshop has recently expanded its scope under the direction of Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin, a historian and biographer of Stalin, and is now called the Workshop on Authoritarianism and Democratic Breakdown. Its members continue to draw on microfilmed Soviet archival documents. Research areas include China, Taiwan, Iraq, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Baltic States. Workshop participants have worked productively with a number of Hoover collections, including the records of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, records of the Lithuanian section of the Soviet KGB, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty collection, the Chiang Kai-shek diaries, the records of the Chinese Kuomintang Party, the archive of the Chief Administration of Labor Camps (Gulag) of the Soviet Union, and the Ba’ath Party papers from the Iraq Memory Foundation Collection.

facing page Hoover deputy director Charles Palm and head librarian Judith Fortson with boxes of microfilm from the Soviet microfilm project, 1995. top Paul Gregory, research fellow, examining a reel from the Soviet microfilm project, c. 2006. Bottom Stephen Kotkin, senior fellow, in Stauffer Auditorium, January 2018.

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The pavilion of the David and Joan Traitel Building.

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agribusinesses, high-tech companies, financial institutions, and news organizations were an integral part of the program, as was participation in cultural and social events. Near the conclusion of each session, participants spent a week in Washington, DC, to gain firsthand exposure to many of the national and international institutions they had studied during their stay at Hoover. Included were the Department of Defense, the US Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, the National Security Council, the Environmental Protection Agency, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Finally, they visited their respective embassies in Washington and met with their ambassador to the United States and embassy staff. Soon after their return to their home countries, many of the program’s alumni assumed new and expanded responsibilities in their ministries, were posted to positions in the United States, or were assigned to the US desks in their home offices. Several of the participants rose to prominent positions within their foreign ministries. Ambassadors and foreign ministers praised the program for its many contributions to their countries’ futures, as well as for enhancing their countries’ relations with the United States. defining moments

IDEAS DEFINING A FREE SOCIETY

At the start of his tenure as director, John Raisian enlisted the Hoover fellows in the task of defining and describing a guiding vision for the institution’s research programs in the post–Cold War era. “I distinctly recall chatting with Milton Friedman at an early stage in this process and asking him what he felt Hoover should stand for,” Raisian later recalled. Friedman’s reply was emphatic: “Freedom, freedom, freedom  —  political, economic, and social freedom.”102 Raisian took this as his cue, launching interdisciplinary research initiatives grouped under three programs, each with freedom as its core theme: Democracy and Free Markets, American Institutions and Economic Performance, and International Rivalries and Global Cooperation. Under the auspices of the American Institutions and Economic Performance initiative, Hoover fellow John Cogan organized a conference at Hoover in May 1992 titled Visions of America: Reforming American Institutions, which brought together Hoover fellows, business leaders, and government officials. It was the first of the major post–Cold War conferences at Hoover whose goal was to generate fresh ideas for revitalizing American institutions, and it set the tone for the institution’s expanding agenda in the area of domestic reform in the decade ahead. The conference participants examined four major topics: Congress and the executive branch, the economy and financial institutions, education reform, and Congress and the budget. It was Raisian who, in the mid-1990s, introduced Hoover’s tag line, “Ideas Defining a Free Society,” a motto that has held up remarkably well over the years as an encapsulation of Hoover’s fundamental mission. In 1995, the institution launched a five-year fundraising campaign titled Ideas Defining a Free Society . . . Investing in Knowledge and Scholarship. The campaign was aimed at supporting the continued growth of Hoover’s Library & Archives collections, expanding its public-policy research, ensuring the continuity of its scholarly excellence, and significantly increasing both its output and its outreach. The campaign set ambitious goals: to raise $75 million and to double the donor base, cultivating a new generation of supporters who shared Hoover’s commitment to strengthening individual freedom, private enterprise, and representative government. The campaign invoked the philosophy and values of the founder, Herbert Hoover, in particular his charge that his institution “must constantly and dynamically point the road to peace, to personal freedom, and to the safeguards of the American system.” The five-year campaign, which concluded on August 30, 2000, was the most successful fund-raising drive in the institution’s history, surpassing its three financial goals by considerable margins. The overall goal for the campaign was to raise $75 million in new gifts and pledges. In total, more than $101 million into a new century

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THATCHER ON THE QUAD British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was named an honorary fellow of the Hoover Institution in 1991. She visited Hoover that year and again in 1993, 1995, and 2000. The last visit was the most memorable, as Thatcher was the speaker at a Hoover Institution dinner on the Stanford quad, the first-ever such event, held on July 19, 2000. Her speech was titled “A Time for Leadership.” Addressing an audience of more than 1,200 guests, Thatcher remarked, “During my time top left Margaret Thatcher, flanked by Hoover director John Raisian (left) and overseer Richard M. Scaife, arriving at the main entrance to the Stanford University Quad, July 19, 2000.

as leader of the opposition and then as prime minister, the Hoover Institution

top right Margaret Thatcher is introduced by Hoover director John Raisian at the Dinner on the Quad, July 19, 2000.

struggle between freedom and communism and their first cousins, capitalism

was quite simply the world’s most important institute of research into political, economic, and international affairs. Its full title — the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace — and the date of its foundation, 1919, themselves remind us how much Hoover’s scholars have been involved with illuminating the and socialism.”103

facing page Title page of Margaret Thatcher’s speech delivered July 19, 2000, at Hoover. The annotations read, in part: “World still a dangerous place”; “COLD WAR’S OVER. WHAT NEXT”; “Working Copy— very rough, but the brain works faster than the hand can write.”

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defining moments

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CHAIRMEN OF THE BOARD OF OVERSEERS Dean A. Watkins..................... 1971–73 Jack S. Parker........................... 1973–76 Paul L. Davies Jr...................... 1976–79 Joseph J. Burris*.................1979–1980 Emil G. Mosbacher Jr...................1980 Paul L. Davies Jr...................... 1980–82 Emil G. Mosbacher Jr........... 1982–85 Dean A. Watkins..................... 1985–86 John C. Shepherd................... 1986–88 Robert H. Malott................1988–1991 Paul L. Davies Jr...................... 1991–93 Martin Anderson.................... 1993–96 Herbert Hoover III.................. 1996–99 Peyton M. Lake...................1999–2002 W. Kurt Hauser........................ 2002–05 Peter B. Bedford..................... 2005–08 David T. Traitel......................... 2008–10 Herbert M. Dwight................. 2010–13 Thomas J. Tierney.................. 2013–16 Joel C. Peterson...................... 2016–19 *Joseph J. Burris, elected in July 1979, died in March 1980. The remainder of his term was filled by Emil G. Mosbacher Jr. Note: The Board of Overseers was established in 1971. Before that time, an Advisory Board provided oversight of the Institution.

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was raised, 35 percent above the campaign goal. The campaign established as a goal doubling its donor base. During the campaign, the donor base increased by 142 percent. As its third, and operationally most important, goal, the campaign sought to increase its level of annual giving for expendable, base-budget purposes to $10 million by 1999–2000. This goal was reached two years ahead of schedule when $10 million was raised in 1997–98. That level of giving was sustained in subsequent years: $11.4 million was raised in 1998–99 and $11.7 million in 1999–2000. The most generous gifts to the campaign were provided by members of the board of overseers, whose chairman in those years was Herbert “Pete” Hoover III, the founder’s grandson. In fact, the overseers donated nearly 70 percent of the $101.6 million campaign total. This continued the historical pattern of board members contributing 60 to 70 percent of Hoover’s overall gift support each year. There were 37 gifts of $1 million or more. As it entered the new century, the institution’s annual budget for its programs and activities was more than $25 million. Campaign funding supported several programmatic areas that included (1) expanding the acquisition of library and archival materials, ensuring these materials are preserved, and promoting access to them; (2) developing the institution’s research by recruiting new resident scholars, enhancing scholars’ support, and convening scholarly forums; (3) strengthening outreach and thus the impact of ideas generated by members of the Hoover community; and (4) establishing a discretionary fund to enable the director to take advantage of strategic opportunities and to strengthen the institution’s infrastructure. With this financial support, and drawing on an enlarged Hoover fellowship —  twenty-three new fellows had been appointed since the start of the campaign in 1995 — the Hoover Institution rapidly expanded its activities. By 2002 there were nine ongoing initiatives, involving scholarly teams across a variety of research fields. These included Property Rights, the Rule of Law, and Economic Performance, led by fellows Terry Anderson, Richard Epstein, and Henry Miller; and the National Security Forum, led by fellows Bruce Berkowitz, Sidney Drell, George Shultz, and Abraham Sofaer. The latter initiative took special interest in the rising threats of biological and chemical weapons and the growing threat of cyberterrorism. “Hoover intends to provide understanding and to offer innovative solutions to these relatively new but very serious problems,” the 2000 annual report noted.104 The September 11, 2001, coordinated terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would catalyze Hoover’s research and policy studies on the threats posed by weapons of mass destruction, the new technologies of terrorism, and Islamism. The late Senior Fellow Fouad Ajami codirected the Islamism and the International Order working group with Research Fellow defining moments

top John Raisian, the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution, c. 2010. bottom Richard A. Epstein, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow, April 18, 2016.

into a new century

Charles Hill, who continues the project with Senior Fellow Russell A. Berman. It seeks to foster the pursuit of modernity, human flourishing, and the rule of law and reason in lands with majority-Islamic populations — developments that are critical to the very order of the international system. The first and most ambitious of the new working groups was the Initiative on American Educational Institutions and Academic Performance, whose centerpiece was the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, launched in 1999. The initiative examined issues such as vouchers, charter schools, and student testing and made recommendations on education policy designed to bring about positive change in K–12 education in the United States, emphasizing private solutions (both within and outside the public-school system) that stressed choice, accountability, and transparency. The K–12 task force inspired the creation of the quarterly journal Education Next, one of the nation’s premier journals of opinion and research about education policy. At its launch, Hoover fellow and task force member Paul Peterson served as the journal’s editor-in-chief, while Hoover fellow and task force member Chester Finn was senior editor. Another high-profile undertaking during the decade was the Nuclear Security Project, headlined by Hoover fellows George P. Shultz and Sidney D. Drell, working together with former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger and former secretary of defense Sam Nunn. Shultz and Drell teamed up in 2006 to initiate a program at Hoover intended to explore approaches to achieving a world free of nuclear weapons. The collaboration led to a landmark Wall Street Journal op-ed of January 4, 2007 (updated on January 15, 2008), a conference at Hoover on October 24 and 25, 2007, and the 2014 Hoover Institution Press publication Nuclear Security: The Problems and the Road Ahead. Seeking to capitalize on the worldwide attention garnered by the publication of the op-ed, the four authors created the Nuclear Security Project. Coordinated by the Washington, DC–based Nuclear Threat Initiative in cooperation with Hoover, the Nuclear Security Project seeks to galvanize global action to reduce urgent nuclear dangers and build support for reducing 115

top Michael Boskin, the Wohlford Family Senior Fellow. bottom Senior fellows Robert Hall, today the Robert and Carole McNeil Senior Fellow, and Alvin Rabushka, today the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow, Emeritus, testifying before the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, July 27, 1982.

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reliance on nuclear weapons, with the ultimate aim of abolishing them as a threat to the world. By 2010 scholarly teams included, in addition to the Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order, the Working Group on Critical Junctures in American Government; the Working Group on Economic Policy; the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy; the Working Group on Health Care Policy; the Koret-Taube Task Force on National Security and Law; the John and Jean De Nault Task Force on Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity; the Working Group on the Role of History in Policy Formation; and the Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society. These teams involved experts from a variety of backgrounds, yet as in previous decades, economists often had the greatest impact. Hoover economists played key roles in the administrations of George H. W. Bush — Michael Boskin served as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers — and George W. Bush (see sidebar on page 117). Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka continued to refine and advocate for their flat-tax proposal. An updated edition of The Flat Tax was published in 1995, and the book was reissued in 2007 as the first volume in the Hoover Classics series, which features best-selling books published by the Hoover Institution Press over the years. The monetarist tradition begun at Hoover by Milton Friedman thrived, especially as championed by John Taylor, the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics and author of the Taylor rule — a proposed guideline for how central banks, such as the Federal Reserve, should adjust interest rates in response to changing economic conditions for the purpose of achieving short-term stabilization of the economy without jeopardizing long-term growth. In 2007, the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank hosted the conference “John Taylor’s Contributions to Monetary Theory and Policy.” Ben Bernanke, then Federal Reserve chairman, delivered opening remarks praising Taylor’s work, and Janet Yellen, who would later become Bernanke’s successor as Fed chair, led a policymakers’ roundtable.

defining moments

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE HOOVER INSTITUTION President George W. Bush visited the Stanford campus on April 21, 2006, and met with Hoover Institution fellows and overseers at the residence of George P. Shultz. He returned to campus to appear at Hoover’s 2017 Fall Retreat. It was Shultz’s early and vigorous endorsement of then-governor Bush for the Republican Party presidential nomination that set Bush on his course for the White House. During his campaign and his presidency, he sought the counsel of top Former president George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state and the Thomas and the Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy, appearing in Hauck Auditorium at the Hoover fall retreat, October 22, 2017. bottom Edward Lazear, the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow (left), and John Cogan, the Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow.

into a new century

Hoover fellows, several of whom joined him in Washington. Condoleezza Rice, a Hoover senior fellow, was appointed US secretary of state after serving as national security adviser to the president. Senior Fellow Edward Lazear served as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Senior Fellow John Taylor served in a senior post in the Treasury Department, and Senior Fellow John Cogan served as a longtime economic adviser to the president.

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NOBEL LAUREATES IN ECONOMICS Since the Nobel Prize in Economics was introduced in 1968, several recipients of this honor have been affiliated with the Hoover Institution. Kenneth Arrow (1972): Kenneth Arrow was one of the most important economic theorists of the twentieth century. His research launched the academic field known as social choice, and he made fundamental contributions to general equilibrium analysis, introducing equations that represent the interactions between consumers and producers in a market economy. A Hoover Institution senior fellow from 1991 until his death, in 2017, Arrow shared his Nobel Prize with John R. Hicks “for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory.” His obituary in the New York Times noted that “Professor Arrow’s theorems set out the precise conditions under which Adam Smith’s famous conjecture in The Wealth of Nations holds true: that the ‘invisible hand’ of market competition among self-serving individuals serves society well.”105 Friedrich Hayek (1974): Viennese-born Friedrich Hayek’s early area of expertise was money and business cycles, and his writings on these subjects brought him attention in academic circles beyond Austria; for a time he was seen as a potential rival to the world-famous Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes. Hayek, who taught at the London School of Economics during the Great Depression, challenged the emerging consensus at that time, especially in Europe, that some form of socialism was desirable and inevitable. He argued for the essential vitality of capitalism

George Stigler (1982): George Stigler was, like Milton Friedman, a key

and the need to preserve it. Hayek based his case on capitalism’s efficiency,

figure in the Chicago School of Economics. Stigler is best known for devel-

productivity, and encouragement of innovation, but he also put forward

oping the theory of economic regulation, also known as regulatory capture,

the moral argument that economic choices are best left to individuals in

which states that political actors such as interest groups will exploit the

a free society and not imposed by the state. Put simply, the free market is

regulatory powers of government to construct laws and regulations that

about not only creating wealth, but also maintaining liberty. Hayek, was a

serve their own interests. This theory is an integral part of the public-choice

Hoover honorary fellow from 1977 until his death, in 1992. He and Gunnar

field of economics, which Stigler helped pioneer. The Nobel Committee

Myrdal, who shared his Nobel Prize, were cited for “their pioneering work

awarded Stigler his prize “for his seminal studies of industrial structures,

in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrat-

functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation.” Stigler

ing analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional

was chairman of the Hoover’s Domestic Studies Program Advisory Board

phenomena.”

from its inception in 1973 until its termination in 1990.

Milton Friedman (1976): Milton Friedman’s credentials as a pioneering

James M. Buchanan Jr. (1986): James Buchanan was one of the most

economic scientist rest on his outstanding contributions to economic

intellectually versatile of Nobel-winning economists. Best known for

theory, particularly in the areas of consumption analysis, monetary history

his work on public-choice theory, his research focused on how the self-

and theory, and stabilization policy. More generally, Friedman led a coun-

interest of policymakers and bureaucrats influenced their decision mak-

terrevolution against Keynesian economics — which had held sway since

ing. In the words of economist Thomas Romer, Buchanan believed that,

the 1930s — that radically altered the way economists and policymakers

“in proferring policy advice, economists should focus on the underlying

perceive economic processes. Whereas Friedrich Hayek elucidated the

institutional structure, and keep the interaction of economics and politics

fundamental advantages of the market and the dangers of state planning,

firmly in mind.”106 Buchanan wrote extensively on philosophical issues,

Friedman fought Keynes on the battlefield of macroeconomics, especially

especially ethics, which he applied to the study of economics. A member

in the area of monetary theory. The Nobel Prize was awarded to Friedman

of the Hoover’s Domestic Studies Advisory Board in the 1980s, Buchanan

“for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary his-

received his Nobel Prize “for his development of the contractual and con-

tory and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization

stitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making.”

policy.” Friedman was a senior research fellow at the Hoover from 1977 until his death, in 2006.

118

defining moments

Gary Becker (1992): Gary Becker was drawn to studying economics at the

Michael Spence (2001): Michael Spence is an American economist best

University of Chicago by the dynamic instructor Milton Friedman. Later

known for his job-market signaling model, in which (potential) employees

an economics professor at Chicago, Becker went on to enlarge the field

send signals to employers about their ability level by obtaining education

by applying economic principles to the study of nontraditional subject

credentials. The concept of signaling grew out of the idea of asymmetric

areas, such as sociology, criminology, and demographics. Becker’s guiding

information, the notion that in some economic transactions, inequalities

principle was freedom of choice: the fundamental idea that, just as in the

in access to information can distort the market for the exchange of goods

marketplace, human beings can and should have a say about important

and services. In his seminal 1973 article “Job Market Signaling,” published

decisions in their lives. In time, Becker earned the recognition and the

in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Spence proposed that a solution to

accolades long denied him outside the Chicago School of Economics.

the problem of asymmetric information was for one party in a transaction

The Nobel Committee awarded Becker the prize “for having extended the

to send a signal that conveyed relevant information to the other party.

domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour

Spence, a Hoover senior fellow since 2004, shared his prize with George

and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour.” Becker was a Hoover

A. Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz (see below) “for their analyses of markets

senior fellow from 1990 until his death, in 2014.

with asymmetric information.”

Douglass C. North (1993): Douglass North was an American economist

Joseph E. Stiglitz (2001): is an American economist who has made sig-

best known for his groundbreaking studies in economic history. Together

nificant contributions to the field of economics as a theorist, policymaker,

with economist Robert Fogel, North pioneered the branch called “new

and prolific author. He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers

economic history,” or cliometrics (named for Clio, the muse of history

under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1995, then served as its chair-

in Greek mythology). North’s research demonstrated that markets are

man from 1995 to 1997. He was chief economist and senior vice president

embedded in political and economic institutions that evolve over time

at the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. His research has focused on the

and are the underlying determinants of economic performance. Fogel and

concept of risk aversion, on efficiency wages, and on the theory of public

North applied the theoretical and statistical tools of modern economics to

finance. Stiglitz shared his Nobel Prize with Michael Spence (see above)

the historical past on subjects as varied as slavery, railroads, ocean ship-

and George A. Akerlof “for their analyses of markets with asymmetric

ping, and property rights. The Nobel Prize was awarded jointly to North

information.” Stiglitz’s contributed to the theory of information asymmetry

and Fogel “for having renewed research in economic history by applying

cited by the Nobel Committee with research on “screening” in insurance

economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic

markets, which helped demonstrate the fundamental importance of infor-

and institutional change.” North was a Hoover Institution distinguished

mation asymmetries to understanding how such markets operate. Stiglitz

visiting scholar from 1995 to 1997, and a senior fellow (adjunct) from 1997

was a Hoover Institution senior fellow (by courtesy) from 1988 to 1993.

until his death, in 2015. Thomas Sargent (2011): Thomas Sargent is an American economist Myron S. Scholes (1997): Myron Scholes, a Canadian-American econo-

who specializes in macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time-

mist who earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago, was coau-

series econometrics. One of Sargent’s early contributions to the field was

thor, with economist Fischer Black, of the Black–Scholes options pricing

the “policy-ineffectiveness proposition,” developed in collaboration with

model. The Black–Scholes model, a mathematical model for the dynamics

University of Minnesota economist Neil Wallace, which posited that peo-

of a financial market that encompasses derivative investment instruments,

ple’s expectations about government fiscal and monetary policy influence

provides a conceptual framework for valuing options. The formula’s pub-

their behavior in ways that are apt to thwart the actions of policymakers.

lication in 1973 legitimized the activities of options markets around the

Sargent is one of the leading proponents of rational expectations theory,

world and sparked a boom in options trading. Economist Robert C. Merton

which maintains that the behavioral choices of consumers can predict

later refined and expanded the options pricing model, which is often called

future outcomes — or the probability of future outcomes — at least as accu-

the Black-Scholes-Merton model. The Nobel Prize in Economics was

rately as economic modeling. The Nobel Prize was awarded jointly to

awarded jointly to Scholes and Merton “for a new method to determine

Sargent and Christopher A. Sims “for their empirical research on cause

the value of derivatives.” (The contributions of Black, who died in 1995

and effect in the macroeconomy.” Sargent has been a Hoover Institution

and was thus ineligible for the Nobel Prize, were recognized by the Nobel

senior fellow since 1986.

Committee in its award citation.) Scholes was a Hoover Institution senior research fellow from 1987 to 1996.

into a new century

facing page Milton Friedman receiving his Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, December 10, 1976. The following year Friedman was named a senior research fellow at Hoover.

119

Throughout the Raisian era, the Library & Archives acquisitions proceeded apace. To take advantage of the new preservation techniques made possible by emerging technologies, the institution developed a new conservation and preservation program, enabled by a generous gift from a supporter. That program involved the construction of new preservation labs; the expansion and enhancement of current facilities; and the purchase of state-of-the-art preservation, conservation, digitization, and audiovisual equipment. Preservation of its holdings, which had always been a Hoover priority, now took a leap forward. With this expanded capacity, Hoover’s conservation and preservation specialists were able to continue bringing their expertise to bear on materials ranging from printed publications and handwritten correspondence to audio and video recordings on disc and tape to the latest digital content. OUTREACH

One of John Raisian’s signature contributions to the Hoover Institution was the expansion of its communications program, implemented by Hoover’s Office of Public Affairs, which initiated an active program of distributing news releases, press advisories, and opinion editorials to media outlets. The Institution stepped up its efforts to utilize television, the internet, and other technologies in order to disseminate its ideas. The Media Fellows Program (now the William & Barbara Edwards Media Fellows Program) enabled journalists and communication professionals to study public-policy issues with Hoover fellows in a scholarly environment for varying periods of time. Today, dozens of media figures visit Hoover every year. Media Roundtables offer journalists intensive face-to-face briefings on Hoover research that increase their understanding of policy issues and introduce the institution as a resource for future reporting. For example, one recent roundtable focusing on the brave new world of cybersecurity attracted journalists from top-tier outlets. Davies Family Senior Fellow Amy Zegart led a simulation that placed participants in the role of a major information-technology firm balancing the 120

defining moments

facing page top Media Roundtable on Cyber Security held in the Annenberg Conference Room of the Lou Henry Hoover Building, May 16, 2016. facing page center Amy Zegart, the Davies Family Senior Fellow, alongside Hoover National Security Affairs Fellows, April 23, 2018. facing page bottom Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson (left) interviews guests George P. Shultz, former US secretary of state and Hoover distinguished fellow (right), and William J. Perry, former US secretary of defense and Hoover senior fellow, October 1997. above A sampling of Hoover Digest covers.

into a new century

121

FIRING LINE

Publicity material for William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line, c. 1973.

When Firing Line began broadcasting in 1966, few would

Regulation? On one side of the lively debate were Hoover

have predicted that a public-affairs program hosted by the

Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell, former Delaware gover-

leader of modern American conservatism, the founder and

nor Pete du Pont, and John Goodman of the National

publisher of the magazine National Review, would capture

Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas. On the opposing

an audience beyond the conservative faithful and remain

side were Stanford University economist and future

on the air for more than thirty years. Yet Firing Line was

Hoover Institution senior fellow Kenneth Arrow, former

an overnight success. Host William F. Buckley Jr. reveled

(and future) California governor Jerry Brown, and Susan

in his reputation as the man liberals loved to hate, yet his

Estrich, University of Southern California law professor

show became a favorite of American liberals and leftists.

and Democratic Party political strategist.

TV critics wrote admiringly of Firing Line’s civic contribu-



tion, often with a nod to its appeal as entertainment. The

launch of Firing Line, and the Hoover Institution Library &

show won an Emmy award in 1969.

Archives, which holds the complete archival collection of



With 1,505 episodes over thirty-three years (1966–99),

original recordings and materials from the show, marked

Firing Line was the longest-running public-affairs show

the occasion with an exhibition titled Civil Discourse:

with a single host in television history. The program fea-

William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line, 1966–1999. Drawing

tured intellectual debates and interviews — an “exchange

on these rich broadcast records and film archives, the

of opinions,” in Buckley’s words — with politicians, religious

exhibition featured photographs, transcripts, film clips,

figures, philosophers, poets, actors, and activists from

viewer correspondence, and other materials highlight-

across the political spectrum. Prominent guests included

ing key debates, moments, and figures in the show’s his-

Ronald Reagan, Groucho Marx, Allen Ginsberg, Margaret

tory. The exhibition included episodes featuring former

Thatcher, Muhammad Ali, Mother Teresa, Timothy Leary,

Hoover fellows, including Milton Friedman, Sidney Hook,

Richard Nixon, and Truman Capote.

and Edward Teller. A commemorative DVD reissue of the



final anniversary episode of the program was produced in

In October 1995, the Hoover Institution was the

setting for the taping of four segments of Firing Line

The year 2016 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the

conjunction with the exhibition.

devoted to the topic Do We Have Too Much Government 122

defining moments

Senior Fellow Larry Diamond speaking at an event at the Hoover Institution in Washington, DC, October 18, 2018.

into a new century

internal fallout of a cyberattack with external relations with shareholders, media, and the public. Hoover outreach was greatly enhanced by the launch, in 1996, of Hoover Digest, a quarterly publication edited by Peter Robinson, now the Murdoch Research Fellow. Then and now, it presents informative writing on politics, economics, and history by the scholars and researchers of the institution. The Digest conveys the breadth, depth, and reach of Hoover’s scholarship, and each issue highlights several compelling stories from the archives. Robinson, a former speechwriter for presidents George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan (he wrote the speech in which Reagan issued his famous declaration, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”), is the host of Uncommon Knowledge, Hoover’s webbased current affairs TV series that William F. Buckley Jr. called the successor to his own show, Firing Line. Uncommon Knowledge began as a weekly television program from May 1996 to June 2005. For the first four years, it was broadcast on KTEH-TV, a PBS affiliate in San Jose, California, before being picked up by public broadcasting networks worldwide in 2000. Beginning in 2006 Uncommon Knowledge became a web-exclusive program, hosted through the Hoover Institution website, YouTube, and now on the FoxNation streaming service. Twenty-three years later it is still going strong. Hoover’s outreach effort under Raisian culminated in the opening of Hoover’s Johnson Center in Washington, DC, in 2013. The purpose of the Hoover Institution in Washington is to promote the academic work of Hoover fellows and to facilitate their engagement in the policy conversations that take place in the nation’s capital. The office packs the schedules of California-based fellows visiting the capital with congressional testimonies, Capitol Hill briefings, and conference appearances. Its near-daily events attract policy makers, Congressional staff, media, and members of the academic and think-tank communities, demonstrating and reinforcing Hoover’s excellent reputation inside the Beltway. In addition to being a base for Hoover fellows visiting from California, the office hosts groups of scholars engaging in research initiatives, conferences, seminars, and events featuring or involving Hoover fellows and their work. The Johnson Center has evolved into a primary forum for policy makers, Capitol Hill staffers, and media to meet and exchange ideas with one another and with Hoover fellows. The office also mentors young people interested in careers in public policy and has hosted more than two dozen interns since it expanded in 2014. An important new dimension to Hoover’s Capitol Hill outreach is the Stuart Family Congressional Fellowship Program, launched in 2016. This highly selective program introduces Congressional staffers from a wide cross section of both major parties and both houses of Congress to Hoover scholars and their 123

HONORS AND AWARDS

The National Humanities Medal, which was presented to the Hoover Institution on November 9, 2006. Oval Office celebration, November 9, 2006, with (left to right) First Lady Laura Bush; Hoover director John Raisian and his wife, Claudia Morgan; Hoover Senior Fellow Edward Lazear, then chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers; and president George W. Bush.

On November 9, 2006, the National Endowment for the

discourse on the most vital and consequential issues fac-

Humanities awarded the National Humanities Medal,

ing our Nation.”107 Five Hoover fellows have won a National

the nation’s highest official award in the humanities, to

Humanities Medal individually: Thomas Sowell (2002),

the Hoover Institution. President George W. Bush pre-

Shelby Steele (2004), Harvey C. Mansfield (2004), Fouad

sented the medal to John Raisian in a private ceremony

Ajami (2006), and Victor Davis Hanson (2007).

at the White House. Since its inauguration in 1997, the



National Humanities Medal has typically honored indi-

Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil

viduals and only a handful of organizations. As a public-

award, given by the US president “to any person who has

policy research center, the Hoover Institution was the

made an especially meritorious contribution to the secu-

first of its kind to receive this prestigious honor. “This is

rity or national interests of the United States, or world

a distinct honor for the Hoover Institution and Stanford

peace, or cultural or other significant public or private

University,” Raisian remarked in accepting the award. “To

endeavors.” Hoover recipients have been Sidney Hook

have the medal awarded by the president to the Hoover

(1985), Milton Friedman (1988), George P. Shultz (1989),

Institution, as an institution, is a wonderful tribute and a

William J. Perry (1997), and Edward Teller (2003). Hoover

huge source of pride for all of us.” The certificate reads

fellows have been recipients of other national honors,

“The President of the United States of America awards

including awards given by the National Academy of

this National Humanities Medal to the Hoover Institution

Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

for its responsible stewardship and its promotion of lib-

and the American Philosophical Society, as well as the

erty and peace. For more than four decades, it has sup-

Presidential Medal of Sciences, and the John Bates Clark

ported many of our leading thinkers and enriched public

Medal from the American Economic Association.

124

Several Hoover fellows have been recipients of the

defining moments

research on the Stanford campus over the course of several days. Participants leave the program with valuable insights to assist them in advising members of Congress, as well as with new relationships with Hoover fellows that yield opportunities on Capitol Hill. NEW FRONTIERS

top Thomas W. Gilligan, the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution. center Eric Wakin, deputy director of the Hoover Institution and the Robert H. Malott Director of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. bottom David and Joan Traitel Building.

into a new century

In the first years of the new century, the size, scope, and financial strength of the institution grew tremendously. During the decade 1998–2008, the annual operating budget doubled, the total number of donors and the total contributions to Hoover tripled, and the endowment grew by more than $200 million. Perhaps most significantly, through the generosity of the institution’s supporters and prudent management, expendable reserves grew from essentially zero to nearly $30 million. During the 2006–07 fiscal year, funding for the Institution’s base budget was $36.7 million, more than double the total for 1991–92, yielding a $2.6 million base budget surplus. The 2006–2007 fiscal year marked the thirteenth straight year that the institution’s expenses were under budget and that revenue exceeded the target. Hoover was thus well fortified to weather the impact of the recession of 2007–09, when revenues decreased and the market value of the endowment declined dramatically. As Hoover approached its centennial year, a new generation of leaders took the helm of the institution. In 2013 Eric Wakin was appointed the Robert H. Malott Director of the Hoover Library & Archives, and in 2016 he was named deputy director of the institution. In 2015 Thomas W. Gilligan succeeded John Raisian as the Tad Taube Director of the Hoover Institution. Gilligan, formerly dean of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, brought to Hoover a combination of policy scholarship and academic leadership experience. Gilligan had been a national fellow at the Hoover Institution in 1989–90, and he taught business economics as a visiting faculty member at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that year and again in 1994. His academic research focused on microeconomics, applied price theory, industrial organization, antitrust 125

above Victor Davis Hanson, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow, October 24, 2017. facing page, top to bottom, left to right John Taylor, the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics (left), and John Cochrane, the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow, 2016. Stephen D. Krasner, senior fellow (left), and Peter Berkowitz, the Tad and Diane Taube Senior Fellow, 2017. Michael A. McFaul, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, 2015. Caroline Hoxby, senior fellow, August 2018. Niall Ferguson, the Milbank Family Senior Fellow. John Cogan, the Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow, August 2018. Condoleezza Rice, the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy, July 8, 2015.

126

economics, and public choice. He was a staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House under president Ronald Reagan. One element of continuity during the transition between the directorships of John Raisian and Thomas Gilligan was the planning and construction of the new 55,000-square-foot David and Joan Traitel Building, located west of Hoover Tower. Fund-raising for the new Hoover building was completed under the leadership of Raisian, who attended the groundbreaking on July 7, 2015. The building was dedicated under Gilligan on October 22, 2017. The Traitel Building represents a continued effort to update Hoover facilities as part of its master plan, a forward-looking effort dedicated to revitalizing and renovating Hoover’s physical spaces in order to accommodate its flourishing programs. The Traitel Building, named after longtime Hoover overseer and former board chairman David Traitel and his wife, Joan, adds much-needed space for Hoover’s staff to work and collaborate. It also provides facilities to host more than four hundred attendees at events in the Hauck Auditorium, named in honor of Hoover overseer Everett “Sparky” Hauck, and his wife, Jane; and Blount Hall, a 440-seat multipurpose and dining room named in honor of Hoover overseer William Blount. Under Director Gilligan, research and scholarship remain the core activities of the Hoover Institution, advancing Herbert Hoover’s prescription that his institution should “constantly and dynamically point the road to peace, to personal freedom, and to the safeguards of the American system.” Research and scholarship promote the fundamental values of the Hoover Institution: economic freedom, private enterprise, and limited government. Today, more than 180 Hoover fellows apply these principles to major policy challenges. Fellows include world-renowned scholars from Stanford and other top universities as well as experts with backgrounds at the highest levels of policy making and industry. Hoover Fellows, with varying interests and areas of expertise, focus broadly on economic prosperity, democratic governance, and national security. In economics, they study the principles and practice of free markets and free enterprise, as well as policy issues such as regulation, monetary policy, and public finance. In politics, Hoover fellows focus not only on democratic institutions but also on the rule of law and federalism. In the area of national security, Hoover fellows study subjects such as alliances, actual and potential rivals to the United States, cybersecurity, nuclear-arms proliferation, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Hoover scholars disseminate knowledge through books, journal and press articles, seminar and conference papers, lectures, and interviews. They also give expert testimony to Congressional committees, consult with departments and agencies of the federal government, and engage in a wide variety of other public-service activities. Many Hoover fellows have joint appointments with defining moments

into a new century

127

H. R. McMaster, the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow, February 27, 2018.

128

Stanford University, where they teach undergraduate courses and direct advanced graduate work. Research at Hoover remains collaborative and interdisciplinary. Hoover fellows understand that areas of inquiry intersect and that policy recommendations from one area may well have impacts on others. Hoover’s carefully developed research model allows fellows to expand the scope of their individual scholarship and pursue major, long-term research projects through working groups, which convene leading experts in relevant fields, drawn from within and outside the institution, to address important questions in public policy. Recently launched initiatives include the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict, led by fellow Victor Davis Hanson; National Security, Technology, and Law, led by fellow Jack Goldsmith; Islamism and the International Order, led by fellows Russell Berman and Charles Hill; and the Initiative on Regulation and the Rule of Law, led by fellows Michael McConnell and Charles Calomiris. A longstanding Hoover program is the Robert and Marion Oster National Security Affairs Fellows Program, which offers representatives of the US military and government agencies the opportunity to conduct independent research at Hoover over the course of an academic year on topics relevant to their respective branches and to the practice of diplomacy. Begun in 1969, it has more than 175 distinguished alumni, including eleven general officers (among them General John Abizaid), two flag officers, twelve US ambassadors (including John Negroponte, later US deputy secretary of state), one member of the House of Representatives (Chris Gibson, R-NY), and former National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, now the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow. Among Hoover’s range of programs for ensuring its ideas have real impact is the Leadership Forum, which brings together a wide range of national and international government and business leaders for intensive briefings with Hoover fellows about particular policy challenges and solutions. Participants learn about the policy issues facing their counterparts in government and industry, and the hurdles policymakers face in implementing policy. defining moments

top left Scott Atlas, the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow (left), and Joshua Rauh, senior fellow and director of research, speaking at the Hoover Institution Summer Policy Boot Camp, August 2018. top right At the Hoover Institution Summer Policy Boot Camp, participants gather for a discussion in Fairweather Courtyard of the Traitel Building, August 2018.

into a new century

An especially innovative outreach initiative is Educating Americans in Public Policy (EAPP), whose purpose is to equip Americans with accurate facts and information, as well as a discerning analytical perspective, in order that they can better perform their civic duties and hold their elected leaders accountable. The program also seeks to provide political leaders with reliable knowledge and analysis — tools that might enable them to assess alternatives in the shaping and execution of public policy. One aspect of the EAPP is an evolving library of original videos under the banner PolicyEd that include short animations, longer series, and several feature-length documentary films to introduce Hoover policy ideas to the engaged public, especially younger people. The ultimate goal is to build grassroots support for Hoover’s ideas by establishing PolicyEd as the premier source for educational content about public policy. Since launching in late 2016, EAPP has grown remarkably and continues to make Hoover policy research more accessible to millions of people. Fifteen series have been released to date, and EAPP videos have been viewed more than sixty million times. Hoover media outreach has kept abreast of new technologies, taking advantage of social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, launching podcasts hosted by Hoover fellows, and supporting new digital publications such as the Aegis Paper Series. A product of Hoover’s Jean Perkins Foundation Working Group on National Security, Technology, and Law, the Aegis Paper Series features long-form essays exploring the intersection of technology and national security. The Aegis series is published in partnership with the Lawfare blog, one of the web’s premier resources on national security issues, including cybersecurity, and is edited by working group chair and Senior Fellow Jack Goldsmith. Another Hoover innovation for sharing its ideas among young people is the Summer Policy Boot Camp. Launched by David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow 129

CHIANG KAI-SHEK’S DIARIES The Hoover Institution has been helping preserve the



Hoover’s formidable East Asian collections were fea-

handwritten diaries of Chiang Kai-shek and his son

tured in the 2011 exhibition A Century of Change: China

Chiang Ching-kuo since late 2004, when members of

1911–2011. The exhibition commemorated the hundredth

the Chiang family deposited these personal diaries at

anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1911, a watershed

the Hoover Library & Archives. The Chiang Kai-shek dia-

moment in Chinese history. Key events, leading figures,

ries, pre-vetted by members of Chiang’s family for public

and social and geopolitical repercussions of the revolu-

review, have been the most requested item annually in

tion were illustrated through documents, photographs,

the Hoover Archives since becoming available in 2006.

posters, maps, pamphlets, artifacts, sound recordings,

The release of the diaries has attracted thousands of

and moving images. They vividly illustrated how China

scholars from all over the world with an interest in mod-

was transformed from a multiethnic empire into a weak

ern China. The diaries provide researchers not only with

nation-state perennially plagued by external threats and

details of major historic events but also rare glimpses into

domestic chaos, and how the nation was divided as a

the human element of history. Armed with these new and

result of the civil war between the Chinese Nationalists

previously unexplored sources, scholars have been given

and the Chinese Communists across the Taiwan Strait.

unique opportunities to reassess the complicated history of modern China and Taiwan with fresh insights and new interpretations. The diaries were utilized by Hsiaoting Lin, Hoover research fellow and now curator of the Modern China collection at Hoover, in the preparation of his book Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan (2015), the product of years of research in the Hoover Archives. 130

top left Chiang Kai-shek diary pages from June 1948, “Month in Review.” Chiang wrote that the Kuomintang had failed in China, not because of external enemies but because of disintegration and rot from within.

top right Exhibition poster for A Century of Change: China 1911–2011 at the Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion, April 12, 2011– February 18, 2012.

defining moments

top left The Hoover Archives reading room. top right Eric Wakin, deputy director of the Hoover Institution and the Robert H. Malott Director of Library & Archives, presenting Hoover archival materials to participants of the Summer Policy Boot Camp in Hoover Tower, August 2018.

into a new century

Scott W. Atlas and Senior Fellow Joshua D. Rauh, the Summer Policy Boot Camp is a robust, fact- and data-based supplement to university public-policy curricula. The intensive, one-week program, taught entirely by Hoover fellows, is designed to give college students and recent graduates the tools they need to think critically about public policy and assess its results. The program offers students an opportunity to work directly with Hoover’s world-renowned scholars and learn about affecting policy change through their own future academic and professional careers. Of course, the most enduring form of Hoover outreach is making its library and archival collections available to researchers and putting material from those collections on display in public exhibitions. For one hundred years the Hoover Library & Archives has acquired, preserved, and made available the most important material documenting war, revolution, and peace and human freedom across the globe — continuing the crucial founding mission of the Hoover Institution, and one that remains a core component of its programs today. The Library & Archives now houses nearly one million library volumes and more than six thousand archival collections from 171 countries. These support the research of Hoover fellows, international scholars, and the public at large, contributing to a broad understanding of political, economic, and social change. Under director Eric Wakin and the team of expert curators, Library & Archives acquisitions have continued to grow in accord with its mission. Among the significant recent collections that have come to Hoover are the papers of Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last communist ruler of Poland; the photographic records of Vietnam War–era newspaper Overseas Weekly, the focus of the 2018 book and exhibition We Shot the War; and the Afghan Partisan Serials collection, comprising thousands of print publications by Afghan political parties across the political spectrum. 131

top Thomas Gilligan, the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution, October 21, 2018. bottom George P. Shultz, the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow, Hauck Auditorium, August 2018.

132

In recent years the Library & Archives has embraced digitization to support the international community of scholars who study its materials and to open its collections to an even broader global audience interested in social, political, and economic change. In 2015 the Library & Archives launched a new digital portal to a continuously growing collection of digitized posters, photographs, documents, sound recordings, and moving images from Hoover collections. Digital access allows the Library & Archives to reach audiences far exceeding the thousands of visitors who use collections in person each year. In the years since launching its online portal, the Library & Archives has established digitization initiatives, including the Collected Works of Milton Friedman; posted hundreds of episodes of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line on YouTube; made thousands of rare Chinese books available; and provided free access to the largest digital collection of Japanese-language newspapers published outside of Japan during the period of the Japanese Empire. Most significantly, it is moving forward in partnership with Stanford University Libraries to digitize almost a century of reporting from thousands of global newspaper titles collected by curators going back to the early twentieth century. In addition to the nearly three thousand visitors the Library & Archives hosts every year in its reading room, tens of thousands of additional patrons use its online collections annually. The unique materials of the Library & Archives have even farther reach, serving as the foundations of books and articles, films and television programs, physical and online exhibitions, course curricula, and dissertations. As long as concerns of war, peace, and freedom remain central to the human condition, Hoover’s treasure trove of print, graphic, manuscript, and audiovisual materials will serve as an indispensable resource for scholars, students, filmmakers, journalists, teachers, and policy makers. The Library & Archives supports the Stanford and global student and scholar community with a number of programs. Annual scholarships and fellowships bring students, faculty, and independent scholars to the Library & Archives for periods ranging from two weeks to one year. defining moments

Five annual workshops (Modern China; Political Economy; Authoritarianism and Democratic Breakdown; Latin America; and the Japanese Diaspora Initiative Workshop) and annual academic conferences allow in-depth analysis of topics in the context of archival collections. Finally, public lectures, a robust exhibition schedule, and a publication program with Hoover Institution Press and with Yale University Press in the Yale-Hoover Series bring the collections and their scholarly use to broad audiences. Over the course of the past century, the Hoover Institution has greatly expanded the range of its activities and the reach and influence of its research. Along the way, it has been ever mindful of the original mission outlined by Herbert Hoover in 1919 and refined by him during the ensuing decades as described in these pages. As reaffirmed by director Thomas Gilligan, the Hoover Institution is dedicated to preserving a system of individual liberty and limited government that enables Americans to build wealth and foster prosperity, to maintain democracy, and to preserve peace. “The work of creating, preserving, and disseminating the best knowledge of recent generations through our scholarship, teaching, publishing, and outreach ensures the preservation of the freedoms we hold dear. This was the vision of our founder, and we remain true to it.”

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133

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE: FOUNDATIONS

Staff member in Hoover Archive stacks.

1 Herbert Hoover to Lou Henry Hoover, April 22, 1919, Hoover Institution Archives. 2 Adams to Herbert Hoover, February 16, 1915; Hoover to Adams, March 7, 1915; cited in Charles B. Burdick, Ralph H. Lutz and the Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1974), 8–9. 3 Adams to Herbert Hoover, May 19, 1915, Ephraim Douglass Adams Papers, box 1, Hoover Institution Archives. 4 Adams to Herbert Hoover, February 27, 1918, Ephraim Douglass Adams Papers, box 1, Hoover Institution Archives. 5 George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Master of Emergencies, 1917–1918 (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), 502. 6 Robinson to Herbert Hoover, January 14, 1919; Adams to Hoover, January 15, 1919, Edgar Eugene Robinson Papers, 1880–1986, box 2, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. In later years, Hoover would cite as his inspiration for founding what would become the Hoover Institution a passage from the 1905 autobiography of Andrew D. White, the distinguished historian and diplomat and the first president of Cornell University. As the story is told, it was the winter of 1914–15, and Hoover was reading White’s book while crossing the English Channel in his capacity as director of Belgian relief. In the book passage in question, White discussed the importance of the personal library he had amassed on the French Revolution. “During my student life in Paris and at various other times, I . . . had collected, in all parts of France, masses of books, manuscripts, public documents and illustrated material on the whole struggle: full sets of the leading newspapers of the Revolutionary period, more than seven thousand pamphlets, reports, speeches, and other fugitive publications, with masses of paper money, caricatures, broadsides, and the like, thus forming my library on the Revolution, which has since been added to that of Cornell University.” Reading these details, Hoover much later recalled, resolved him to undertake the systematic collection of contemporary documents on the European war that was just getting started. Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White (New York: The Century Co., 1905), 1: 489–490. 7 Rickard to Lou Henry Hoover and Ray Lyman Wilbur, May 13, 1919; Rickard to Hoover, May 13, 1919; Hoover to Rickard, May 15, 1919, quoted in Rickard to Wilbur, May 15, 1919, Hoover Institution Records, box 241B. 8 E. D. Adams, The Hoover War Collection at Stanford University, California: A Report and An Analysis (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1921), 8. 135

9 Adams to Ray Lyman Wilbur, February 4, 1920, Hoover Institution Records, box 2021. 10 Ibid. 11 Adams, The Hoover War Collection, 9. 12 David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (New York: Knopf, 1979), 116–117. 13 Pershing to Hoover, December 12, 1918, quoted in Suda Lorena Bane and Ralph Haswell Lutz, Organization of American Relief in Europe, 1918–1919 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1943), 85. 14 Quoted in Burner, Herbert Hoover, 97. 15 Quoted in the Stanford Daily, January 29, 1965, 1. 16 Charles G. Palm and Dale Reed, Guide to the Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1980), 6. 17 Hoover to Wilbur, January 16, 1924, quoted in George H. Nash, Herbert Hoover and Stanford University (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1988), 78. 18 “Vastness of Hoover’s Work Realized As He Returns,” New York Times, September 14, 1919. 19 Manchester Guardian quoted in “Vastness of Hoover’s Work Realized As He Returns,” New York Times, September 14, 1919. 20 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1919), 257n. 21 H. H. Fisher, “The Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 33 (1939): 107–15. 22 The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874–1920 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951), 193. 23 Hoover Institution Annual Report, 1969–72, 57. 24 Taylor to Herbert Hoover, August 9, 1921, Hoover Institution Records, box 241C. 25 Annual Report of the President of Stanford University for the Thirty-First Academic Year Ending August 31,1922 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University), 156. 26 Ibid., 219, 221. 27 Taylor to Hoover, August 9, 1921; Hoover to Taylor, August 17, 1921, Hoover Institution Records, box 241C. 28 Annual Report of the President of Stanford University for the Thirty-First Academic Year, 218. 29 Hoover to Wilbur, September 1, 1923, quoted in Nash, Herbert Hoover and Stanford University, 82. 30 Annual Report of the President of Stanford University for the Thirty-Fourth 136

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Academic Year Ending August 31, 1925 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University), 280. 31 Ibid., 281–2. 32 This section draws on remarks made at the Tower dedication ceremony in June 1941 by historian Sidney Fay. See Dedication of the Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace: Stanford University, June 20, 1941 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1941), 5–15. 33 Annual Report of the President of Stanford University for the Forty-Seventh Academic Year Ending August 31, 1938, 436. 34 Ibid., 436–37. 35 Nash, Herbert Hoover and Stanford University, 104. CHAPTER TWO: THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER

36 Dedication of the Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace, 31. 37 Nash, Herbert Hoover and Stanford University, 106. 38 Hoover to Wilbur, May 19, 1939, Hoover Institution Records, box 22C. 39 Gary Norman Paul, “The Development of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace Library, 1919–1944” (PhD dissertation, University of California–Berkeley, 1974), 32. 40 Nash, Herbert Hoover and Stanford University, 107. 41 Dedication of the Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace, 34–35. 42 Ibid., 36–39. 43 Nash, Herbert Hoover and Stanford University, 118. 44 Annual Report of the President of Stanford University for the Fifty-First Academic Year Ending August 31, 1942, 20. 45 C. Easton Rothwell, “The Hoover Institute and Library. I. 1941–1951: A Ten Year Review,” Hoover Institution Records, box 2024. 46 Ibid. 47 Philip T. McLean, “The Hoover Institute and Library,” The Library Quarterly 19, no. 4 (October 1949): 235. 48 George H. Nash, ed., Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2011), 778. 49 Rothwell, “The Hoover Institute and Library. I. 1941–1951.” 50 Hugh Gibson, “Publisher’s Note,” in The Goebbels Diaries, 1942–43, ed. and trans. Louis P. Lochner (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1948), v. 51 Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 1963, 7. Hoover Institution Records, box 2510. 52 Seymour Korman, “Hoover Peace Library Held World’s Best,” New York Times, notes

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March 31, 1957. 53 Charles G. Palm, “The Hoover Library: Saving the History of War, Revolution, and Peace,” Imprint 21, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2002–2003): 11–19. CHAPTER THREE: HOOVER BECOMES A THINK TANK

54 C. Easton Rothwell, “Some Proposals Concerning the Hoover Institution,” Hoover Institution Records, box 234C. 55 Hoover to Donald B. Tresidder, September 2, 1944, Hoover Institution Records, box 242A. 56 The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, California, 1960, Hoover Institution Records, box 2057. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Wallace Sterling to Herbert Hoover, April 14, 1960, Hoover Institution Records, box 241C. 60 “Remarks of President Sterling in Regard to Hoover Institution, Academic Council Minutes 1960-04-01,” Stanford University, Faculty Senate, records, 1891–2014, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. 61 Nash, Herbert Hoover and Stanford University, 156. 62 Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 13. (1963) 63 Ibid., 21. 64 F. A. Hayek, The Fortunes of Liberalism: Essays on Austrian Economics and the Ideal of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 192. 65 Bryan Magee, Karl Popper (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 1. 66 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: New One-Volume Edition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 508. 67 Doug Bandow, “Death of a Great Reaganite,” American Spectator, January 12, 2015, https://spectator.org/death-of-a-great-reaganite. 68 Brenda Cronin, “Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize-Winning Economist, Dies at 83,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2014. 69 “Gary Becker: Biographical,” The Nobel Prize website, last modified March 11, 2019, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1992/becker /biographical. 70 Cited on The Flat Tax (Second Edition) book summary, Hoover Institution Press (website), http://www.hooverpress.org/The-Flat-Tax-SecondEdition-P470.aspx. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., x. 138

defining moments

The David and Joan Traitel Building, with Hoover Tower in the background.

notes

139

74 Peter S. Stern, “Cold-War Scholarship: The Hoover Institution,” The Nation, September 1, 1969, 180. 75 Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 22. 76 James A. Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 187. 77 Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace: Three Year Report, 1969–1972, 48 (Hoover Institution Library). 78 W. Glenn Campbell, “Report to the Board of Overseers, 1970–71,” Hoover Institution Records, box 2080. 79 Author interview with Charles G. Palm, March 15, 2018. 80 Daniel J. Balz, “Washington Pressures/AEI, Hoover Institution voices grow in policy debates during Nixon Years,” National Journal Report 5, no. 51 (December 22, 1973): 1900. 81 Gerald R. Rosen, “The New Conservative Idea Men,” Dun’s Review 107, no. 4 (April 1976): 42. 82 Martin Anderson, “The Research Program of the Hoover Institution in the 1970’s,” December 17, 1971, Hoover Institution Records, box 2698. 83 Martin Anderson, “The Hoover Institution Research Program in the 1970s,” presented at the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers meeting, July 21, 1972. 84 Board of Overseers resolution, Hoover Institution Records, box 2083. 85 Rosen, “The New Conservative Idea Men,” 39. 86 Thomas W. Hazlett, “Economist! Drama! Prose!,” review of Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist by George J. Stigler, Reason Magazine (May 1989), 53–55. 87 Lecture announcement, Hoover Institution Records, box 232A. 88 W. Glenn Campbell, The Competition of Ideas: How My Colleagues and I Built the Hoover Institution (Ottawa, IL: Jameson Books Inc., 2000), 159. 89 Kenneth Lamott, “Right-Thinking Think Tank,” New York Times Magazine, July 23, 1978, 45. 90 “Solzhenitsyn Accepts Honorary Fellowship at Hoover Institution,” (Stanford. University) Campus Report, June 11, 1975. 91 George Jones, “Thatcher Praises Friedman, Her Freedom Fighter,” Daily Telegraph, November 17, 2006. 92 William F. Buckley, “The United States in the 1980s — Foreign Affairs,” Firing Line 402, February 2, 1980. Transcript at https://digitalcollections.hoover.org /images/Collections/80040/80040_s0402_trans.pdf. 93 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 225–226, 233. 140

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94 Lamott, “Right-Thinking Think Tank,” 45. 95 Philip Taubman, “Gorbachev’s Gloomy America,” New York Times, November 15, 1985. 96 Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace: Report, 1981 (Hoover Institution Library). Glenn Campbell served as chairman of Reagan’s education policy task force; Rita Ricardo-Campbell chaired Reagan’s task force on social security. 97 “President Ronald W. Reagan remarks on the Hoover Institution: The White House, January 11, 1982,” Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace: Report, 1982 (Hoover Institution Library). 98 Shultz quotes in this paragraph are from George P. Shultz, Issues on My Mind: Strategies for the Future (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2013), 31–33. 99 Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace: Report, 1986, 1 (Hoover Institution Library). CHAPTER FOUR: INTO A NEW CENTURY

100 “Remembering Robert Conquest,” Hoover Institution website, August 4, 2015, https://www.hoover.org/news/remembering-robert-conquest. 101 Hoover Institution Report, 1995 (Hoover Institution Library). 102 Hoover Institution Report, 1993 (Hoover Institution Library). 103 Margaret Thatcher, “A Time for Leadership,” Hoover Digest 2000, no. 4, 8, https://www.hoover.org/research/time-leadership. 104 Hoover Institution Annual Report, 2000 (Hoover Institution Library). 105 Michael M. Weinstein, “Kenneth Arrow, Nobel-Winning Economist Whose Influence Spanned Decades, Dies at 95,” New York Times, February 21, 2017. 106 Thomas Romer, “Nobel Laureate: On James Buchanan’s Contributions to Public Economics,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 2, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 178. 107 “Hoover Institution Is Awarded the National Humanities Medal,” Stanford Report, November 9, 2006; Hoover Institution Report, 2008 (Hoover Institution Library).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BERTRAND M. PATENAUDE is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He is the author of The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002), winner of the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize and the basis for the PBS documentary film The Great Famine (2011). In 2006 he published A Wealth of Ideas: Revelations from the Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford University Press), a generously illustrated large-format book featuring rare documents, photographs, posters, and artifacts from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. His 2009 book, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins), was serialized for radio by the BBC. Patenaude teaches history and international relations at Stanford University, where he received his PhD in history in 1987. He is the editor of several books, including The Russian Revolution and Stalin and Stalinism. He lectures throughout Europe for Stanford Travel/Study and Smithsonian Journeys, and he reviews books for the Wall Street Journal.

Hoover Tower as seen from the Stanford Quad.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

144

I wish to thank Eric Wakin and Chris Dauer for shepherding this Hoover centennial book from incubation through to publication. I am grateful to Colin Stewart for early conversations that helped shape the book, and to Thomas Gilligan for his support of the project. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Charles Palm for generously sharing his knowledge about all aspects of Hoover Institution history, for his critical feedback on my initial proposals for this book, and for his close reading of early versions of the manuscript. I am grateful to George Nash for his indispensable books about Herbert Hoover and Hoover’s relationship with Stanford University, and for helping me untie several editorial knots regarding the founder. Thanks to Linda Bernard for cheerfully fielding my many editorial queries, for attentively reading an early version of the manuscript, and for moral support along the way. John Cogan contributed his expertise to the sidebar about the Nobel laureates in economics. Elena Danielson and Peter Robinson assisted me in tracking down individual photographs and facts. Anatol Shmelev and Hsiao-ting Lin answered my several queries related to the Russia/Eurasia and China collections at Hoover. Annelise Anderson shared her memories about the Glenn Campbell years. Paul Thomas was a knowledgeable and amiable collaborator in the Hoover Library. I had important assistance in the proposal phase of the project from Marc Slakey. Sarah Patton offered expert guidance in navigating the Hoover Institution Records. In assembling the illustrations for the book, I was fortunate to be able to collaborate with Lisa Nguyen and to draw upon the advice and assistance of Samira Bozorgi, Jean Cannon, Fiore Irving, Vishnu Jani, Kiera Peacock, Marissa Rhee, and Diana Sykes. Kyle Palermo provided vital support in locating photographs to illustrate recent Hoover history. I had help in tracking down individual images and information from Larry Diamond, Joelle Gabriel, Paul Gregory, John Raisian, Susan Schendel, and Nicholas Siekierski. This book was researched mostly in the Hoover Library & Archives, where I greatly benefited from the knowledge, experience, and occasional sleuthing of the staff, starting at the front desk with the essential David Sun, and including Brandon Burke, Daniel Case, Irena Czernichowska, Paige Davenport, Terry Gammon, Emily Gibson, Beth Goder, Lyalya Kharitonova, Jorge Machado, Liz Phillips, Dale Reed, Danielle Scott Taylor, Maciej Siekierski, Max Siekierski, Lora Soroka, and Bree Theodore. Thanks as well to the L&A’s preservation team: Rayan Ghazal, Laura Bedford, James Fayne, Kurtis Kekkonen, and Kat Meler. At the Hoover Institution Press I had the pleasure of collaborating with Barbara Arellano, Marshall Blanchard, and Danica Michels Hodge to refine the text and the selection and placement of the illustrations and to bring the project across the finish line. defining moments

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

CHAPTER 1

Page 2: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives Page 3: World War I pictorial collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 4, top: Raymond L. Bland papers, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 4, center: Commission for Relief in Belgium records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 4, bottom: Hoover Institution Library. Page 5: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 6: Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 8, top left: Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 8, bottom left: Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 8, bottom right: Hoover Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa. Page 10: American Relief Administration, European operational records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 12, top left: Berton W. Crandall photographs, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 12, top right: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives Page 13, top left: Frank A. Golder papers, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 13, top right: Frank A. Golder papers, Hoover Institution Archives Page 14: Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 20, top: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 20, bottom: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 23: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 25: Hoover Institution Archives. Page 26: Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 28, top left, and top right: Hoover Institution Library. CHAPTER 2

Page 30: Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, Stanford Libraries. Page 33, top and bottom: William Russell Philp collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 34: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 35: Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa. Page 36: Berton W. Crandall photographs, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 37, top left: Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, Stanford Libraries. Page 37, top right: Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa. Page 37, bottom right: Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa. Page 39: Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 42: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 43: Harold M. Agnew miscellaneous papers, Hoover Institution Archives. 145

Page 44: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 45: Joseph W. Stilwell papers, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 46: Nym Wales papers, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 47: Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 49, top left: Herbert Hoover subject collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 49, top right: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 51: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Photographer: John Gutmann–PIX. Page 52: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 53, top right: Herbert Hoover papers, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 53, top left: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 54, top left: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 54, top right: Departament politsii. Zagranichnaia agentura (Paris) Okhrana records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 55: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 56: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 57: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 59: Photographer: Steve Gladfelter, Visual Art Services, Stanford University Page 60: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 62: Photographer: Tim Griffith. CHAPTER 3

Page 64: Photographer: Tim Griffith Page 67: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty corporate records, Hoover Institution Archives Page 68: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 74: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 75: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 76: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 77, top left: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 77, top right: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 79: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 80: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 82: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 84: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 85: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 86: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. 146

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Page 87, top left: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 87, top right: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 89, top left: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 89, top right: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 90, top left: Firing Line (Television Program) broadcast records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 90, top right: Firing Line (Television Program) broadcast records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 90, bottom right: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 91, top left: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 91, top right: Free to Choose video tape collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 91, bottom right: Free to Choose video tape collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 92, top left: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 92, top right: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 93: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 94, top: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 94, center: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 94, bottom: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 95, top left: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 95, top right: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 96: Courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Page 97: Courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. CHAPTER 4

Page 100: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 102, top: Hoover Institution Records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 102, bottom: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 104: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 105: Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 107, top: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 107, bottom: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 108: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 109, top: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 109, bottom: Photographer: Patrick Beaudouin. Page 110: Photographer: Patrick Beaudouin. Page 112, top left: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. illustration credits

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Page 112, top right: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 113: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 115, top: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 115, bottom: Photographer: Eric Draper. Page 116, top: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 116, bottom: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 117, top: Photographer: Eric Draper. Page 117, bottom: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 118: Milton Friedman papers, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 120, top: Photographer: Rod Searcey. Page 120, center: Photographer: Eric Draper. Page 120, bottom: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 121: Hoover Institution Press. Page 122: Firing Line (Television Program) broadcast records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 123: Photographer: Paige Mathes. Page 124, top left: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 124, top right: photographer unknown. Page 125, top: Photographer: Tim Griffith. Page 125, center: Photographer: Don Feria. Page 125, bottom: Stanford News Service. Photographer: Linda A. Cicero. Page 126: Photographer: Eric Draper. Page 127, top left: Photographer: Rod Searcey. Page 127, top right: Photographer: Rod Searcey. Page 127, center left: Photographer: Rod Searcey. Page 127, center middle: Photographer: Patrick Beaudouin. Page 127, center right: Photographer: Don Feria. Page 127, bottom left: Photographer: Patrick Beaudouin. Page 127, bottom right: Photographer: Eric Draper. Page 127: Photographer: Eric Draper. Page 129, top left: Photographer: Patrick Beaudouin. Page 129, top right: Photographer: Patrick Beaudouin. Page 130, top left: Chiang Kai-shek diaries, Hoover Institution Archives Page 130, top right: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 131, top left: Photographer: Tim Griffith. Page 131, top right: Photographer: Patrick Beaudouin. Page 132, top: Photographer: Eric Draper. Page 132, bottom: Photographer: Patrick Beaudouin.

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NOTES

Page 134: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. Page 139: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Page 142: Stanford News Service. Photographer: Linda A. Cicero. Page 143: Hoover Institution INDEX

Page 148: Hoover Institution records, Hoover Institution Archives.

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149

INDEX

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn speaking at the entrance to Hoover Tower, June 6, 1975.

Abramovitz, Moses, 82 Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan (Hsiaoting Lin), 130 Adams, Ephraim D., 5, 15, 19, 20, 31, 40, 57, 105 on Hoover War Library scope, 22–23 and origins of Hoover War Collection, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9–12 Aegis Paper Series, 129 AEI. See American Enterprise Institute Africa collection, 53, 57 Agnew, Harold, 43, 43 Ajami, Fouad, 114–115 Allen, Richard V., 75, 76, 78 Reagan and, 93, 95, 98, 99 Allied Supreme Economic Council, 1, 7 Almond, Nina, 20, 23, 35, 42 America First Committee, 38 American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 69, 75, 83, 87 American Individualism (Hoover, H.), 72, 82 American Institutions and Economic Performance, 111 American Relief Administration (American Relief Administration European Children’s Fund) (ARA), 16–17, 32, 41 Burner on, 11 Fisher on, 17–18 Hoover War Collection and, 12–13, 13, 21 Lutz and, 11–12 in Poland, 49, 49 role of, 7, 10, 10–11 in Russia, 13, 107 United States Food Administration and, 10–11 Anders, Władysław, 50, 51 Anderson, Annelise, 73 Anderson, Martin, 72, 73, 80, 83, 90 Domestic Studies Program and, 81–82, 84 Reagan and, 93 Applebaum, Anne, 108 ARA. See American Relief Administration) Armistice (November 1918), 7, 10, 25 Arrow, Kenneth, 118, 122 Avenge December 7, 39 Axelbank, Herman, 61 Bailey, Thomas, 6 Bandow, Doug, 72 Banfield, Edward, 82 Barrett, David, 48 Basily, Lascelle Meserve de, 59 Basily, Nicolas de, 59 Battle of the Somme, 18

Baxter, William, 82 Becker, Gary, 72–73, 82, 86, 93, 103, 119 Belgium, vii–viii, 1, 3–5, 4, 11, 16–17, 34–35, 38, 41 Berlin Wall, 97, 99, 105 Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte (Weltkriegsbücherei), 24–25 Bibliothèque–Musée de la Guerre (La Contemporaine: Bibliothèque, Archives, Musée des Monde), 24–25 Boris I. Nicolaevsky collection, 60–61 Browder, Robert Paul, 55 Brown, Arthur, Jr., 32, 34 Brown, Charles H., 36 Buchanan, James M., Jr., 118 Buckley, William F., Jr., 90, 90, 105, 122, 122, 132 Burner, David, 11 Bush, George H. W., 116 Bush, George W., 116, 117, 117, 123, 124, 124 Butow, Robert J. C., 44 Campbell, W. Glenn, 67, 69–71, 74,74–77, 77–81, 83, 84, 86, 92–93, 94, 95, 98, 101–102 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman, M., and Friedman, R. D.), 72 Carter, Jimmy, 87–88, 94 A Catalogue of Paris Peace Conference Delegation Propaganda in the Hoover War Library, 25 Cecil H. Green Library, 19 A Century of Change: China 1911–2011, 130, 130 Chiang Kai-shek, 45, 45–46, 48, 109, 130, 130 China, post-WWII acquisitions from, 42, 44–48 Ciechanowski, Jan, 50, 51 Civil Communications Intelligence School, 41 Civil Discourse: William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line, 1966–1999, 122 Clark, George, 22 Cogan, John, 111, 117, 117, 127 Cold War, 49, 50, 61, 62, 68, 72, 76, 88, 99, 103, 105, 107, 108, 111, 113 Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), vii– viii, 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 16–17, 21–22, 32, 34. Committee on Policy, 23–24 Conquest, Robert, viii, 68, 73, 103, 104, 104 “Conservatism: New Attention, New Respect” (Shogan), 85 La Contemporaine: Bibliothèque, Archives, Musée des Monde (Bibliothèque–Musée de la Guerre), 24–25 Coordinating Committee on Economic Policy, 98 CRB. See Commission for Relief in Belgium Crombie, Charles E., Jr., 41

151

curators, 24, 52–54 Danielson, Elena S., 105 David and Joan Traitel Building, viii, 110, 110, 125, 126, 139 Davies, Paul L., 89, 114 “delegation propaganda,” 9–10, 25, 38, 57 Department of Education, 62 Diplomat Training Program, 106 Director, Aaron, 86 Dixie Mission, 48 Domestic Studies Program, 72, 78–85, 86, 87, 118 and Anderson, M., 81–82, 84 “Conservatism: New Attention, New Respect” and, 85 Drell, Sidney D., 114, 115 Duignan, Peter, 57, 74, 76, 90, 90, 93 EAPP. See Educating Americans in Public Policy The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes), 17 Economic Transition in Eastern Europe and Russia, 106 Educating Americans in Public Policy (EAPP), 129 Education Next, 115 Enola Gay, 43, 43 European Relief Council, 10 Fall of the German Empire, 1914–1918, 25, 25 February Revolution, 12–13, 59, 92 The Federal Bulldozer (Anderson, M.), 72, 81 Federal Reserve, 116 Ferguson, Niall, 127 Fifty Years of Communism conference, 75, 77 Fighting Starvation in Belgium, 4, 4 Firing Line, 90, 90, 105, 122, 122, 132 Fisher, Harold H., 17–18, 22, 40–41, 42, 58 The Flat Tax (Hall and Rabushka), 73, 116 Food Administration, US, 4, 5, 7, 10, 18, 25, 32 Food Research Institute, 19, 21, 22 “Food Will Win the War,” 5, 8 Ford, Gerald, 85, 87–88 Fortson, Judith, 62, 108, 109 Franck, Richard, 24 Frankfurter, Felix, 51 Free to Choose (Friedman, M., and Friedman, R. D.), viii, 91, 93 Freeman, Roger A., 74, 75, 78, 81, 96 Freight Transportation Deregulation (Moore), 87 French Revolution, 135n6

152

Friedman, Milton, viii, 72, 73, 81, 85, 86, 86, 87, 93, 103, 105, 111, 116, 124, 132 Free to Choose by, 91, 93 Nobel laureate in economics, 118, 119, 122 Friedman, Rose D., 72 fugitive material, 10, 13, 15, 28–29, 36, 38, 63, 135n6 Gann, Lewis H., 57 Gilligan, Thomas W., 101, 125–126, 125, 132, 133 Goebbels, Joseph, 52, 58 Golder, Frank A., 12–13, 15, 19, 40, 105 Goldsmith, Jack, 128, 129 Goldwater, Barry, 78 Golovine, Nicholas, 24, 54 Gorbachev, Mikhail, viii, 73, 90,99, 123 at Stanford, 107, 107 Grach, Pierre (Phili), 47 Great Depression, 27, 118 The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (Conquest), 73, 103, 104 Gregory, Paul, 108–109 Gulag, 50, 73, 88, 108–109 Gulag: A History (Applebaum), 108 The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn), 73, 88 Hall, Robert E., 73, 86, 93, 116, 116 The Handbook on Communism, 76 Hanson, Victor Davis, 124, 126, 128 Harding, Warren, 21 Harris, Christina Phelps, 57 Havel, Vaclav, 68 Hayek, Friedrich, 72, 105, 118 Hazlett, Thomas, 86 Heimlich, William, 52 Herbert Hoover in Poland: Pioneer Humanitarian at Work, 49, 49 Herman Axelbank Motion Picture Film Collection, 61 Himmler, Heinrich, 52 Hiroshima, Japan, 43, 43 Hirshleifer, Jack, 82 Hitler, Adolf, 26, 27, 28, 46, 52 Nazi-Soviet Pact and, 33 Hook, Sidney, 89, 92, 122, 124 Hoover, Allan, 12, 89 Hoover, Herbert, 2, 3, 4, 8, 12, 35, 37, 49, 53, 67 See also specific topics Hoover, Herbert, Jr., 12 Hoover, Herbert, III (“Pete”), 114, 114 Hoover, Lou Henry, 1 2, 9, 12 See also Lou Henry Hoover Building; Lou Henry Hoover Room

Hoover fellows’ landmark books American Individualism, 72, 82 Capitalism and Freedom, 72 The Federal Bulldozer, 72, 81 The Flat Tax, 73, 116 The Great Terror, 73, 103, 104 The Gulag Archipelago, 73, 88 Human Capital, 72–73 The Open Society and Its Enemies, 72 Reagan in His Own Hand, 73 The Road to Serfdom, 72 Hoover Institution, name changes Hoover War Collection, 10 Hoover War Library, 19 Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace, 28 Hoover Institute and Library on War, Revolution, and Peace, 41 Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 58 Hoover Institution Advisory Board, 70, 71, 75, 76, 80, 86 Hoover Institution Archives, organized as department, 61–62 Hoover Institution Board of Overseers, 79, 80, 81, 83–84, 88, 92, 93, 95, 96, 114, 114 “Hoover passports,” 11 Hoover Tower, 6, 30, 31–38, 41–42, 51, 52, 53, 58, 60, 62, 71, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 87, 94, 126, 131, 146 bells in, 34, 36, 37 House, Edward M., 11 Houthakker, Hendrik, 82 Hsiao-ting Lin, 130 Human Capital (Becker), 72–73 Huston, Jay Calvin, 45 “Ideas Defining a Free Society,” ix, 110, 111 Initiative on American Educational Institutions and Academic Performance, 115 Inside Red China (Wales), 48 Islamism and the International Order, 114–115, 116, 128 Japan, post-WWII acquisitions and, 42–45 Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Butow), 43, 44 “John Taylor’s Contributions to Monetary Theory and Policy,” 116 Karski, Jan, 51 Keesing, Felix M., 41 Kellogg, Vernon, 4

defining moments

Kerensky, Alexander, 55, 55 Keynes, John Maynard, 17, 87, 118 Khrushchev, Nikita, 73, 76, 77, 105 Kotkin, Stephen, 109, 109 Krasner, Stephen D., 127

Nobel laureates in economics, 103, 118–119 North, Douglass C., 119 Nuclear Security Project, 115–116 Nuclear Security: The Problems and the Road Ahead, 115

Lawson, James R., 42 Lazear, Edward, 86, 93, 106, 117, 117, 124 Leadership Forum, 128 Leblanc, Henri, 24 Leblanc, Louise, 24 Lefévère, Kamiel, 36 Libération, 47 Library of Congress, 16, 22 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 92–93 Lochner, Louis, 50 Long March, 48 Lou Henry Hoover Building, 75, 80, 120 Lou Henry Hoover Room, 41 Lusitania, RMS, 5, 6, 6 Lutz, Ralph H., 11–12, 12, 13, 15, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 35, 40, 50, 58, 105

Okhrana, 54, 54 The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper), 72 Orwell, George, 18–19 An Overgoverned Society (Wallis), 85

Making Things Work: Russian-American Relations, 1900–1930, 109 Maklakov, Vasily, 54 Manchester Guardian, 17 Mao Zedong, 46, 48 Mason, Frank, 52 McFaul, Michael A., 127 McLean, Philip T., 43 Meckling, William, 82 Merton, Robert C., 119 Middle East, 53 Milbank, Jeremiah, 38, 42, 46, 70 military government, 40–41 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 33 Moore, Thomas Gale, 84, 84, 86, 87, 93, 106 Murphy, Robert D., 52 Nagasaki, Japan, 43, 43 Nash, George H., 35, 38, 70, 72 National Endowment for the Humanities, 62,124 National Fellows Program, 79, 84 National Humanities Medal, 124 National Security Forum, 114 Nazi-Soviet Pact, 33 New York Times, 17, 58, 88, 93, 118 Nicholas II (tsar), 107 Nicolaevsky, Boris I., 60–61 Nicolas de Basily Room, 59, 59, 79, 80, 94 Nixon, Richard, 48, 78, 81, 86, 87, 122

index

Packard, David, 69–70, 74, 84 Palm, Charles G., 15, 60, 62–63, 80, 105, 108, 108 Paris Peace Conference, 1, 7, 9–10, 25, 57 Pasternak, Boris, 105 Peace Fellowships, 79 Peaceful Change in Modern Society, 78–79 Pearl Harbor, 38, 42 Perlin, Bernard, 39 Pershing, John J., 11 Peterson, Agnes, 56 Phili (Pierre Grach), 47 Philp, William R., 33 Poland, 12, 33, 106, 131 Herbert Hoover and, 49, 49 Karski on, 51 Kellogg and, 4 post-WWII acquisitions from, 50–51 Warsaw Ghetto, 51 The Political Economy of Stalinism, 108 Popper, Karl, 72, 105 Possony, Stefan T., 74, 76, 99 post-WWII acquisitions from Africa, 53 from China, 45–46, 46, 47, 48 funding for, 42, 44 from Germany, 51–52 from Japan, 42, 43, 44–45 from Middle East, 53 from Poland, 50–52, 51 from Russia, 54, 54–57, 55, 60–61 scope of, 42, 44 Stanford affiliates and, 43 preservation program, 61, 120 Presidential Medal of Freedom, 124 protesters, 77, 78, 80–81 Pushkin, Alexander, 107 Rabushka, Alvin, 73, 90, 93, 116, 116 Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/ RL), 68, 68, 105, 109 Raisian, John, 101, 102–103, 102, 106, 107, 111, 112, 115, 120, 123, 124, 124, 126

Ray Lyman Wilbur Collection on Social Problems (Wilbur Collection), 27–28, 32, 41 Reading Room, Hoover Library, 20, 20, 27, 28, 34, 42, 62 Reagan, Ronald, 73, 78, 88, 89, 90, 92, 92, 93, 93, 94, 95, 95, 96 96, 97, 98–99, 101, 102, 103, 122, 123, 126 Reagan in His Own Hand (Skinner, Anderson, A., Anderson, M., eds.), 73 Red Star over China (Snow, E.), 48 Remember the Lusitania! Discoveries from the Shipwreck, 6, 6 Revolution: The Reagan Legacy (Anderson, M.), 93 RFE/RL. See Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 33, 33 Ricardo-Campbell, Rita, 76, 80–81, 90, 93, 94, 98 Rice, Condoleezza, 103, 117, 117, 127 Richardson, Inez, 41 Richfield Oil, Success Story broadcast, 56, 57, 58 Rickard, Edgar, 1, 9, 17, 27, 31, 32 Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Shirer), 53 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 72 Robert and Marion Oster National Security Affairs Fellows Program, 128 Robinson, Eugene, 7, 9 Robinson, Peter, 96, 99, 101, 120, 123 Rockefeller, John, Jr., 32 Roosevelt, Franklin, 46 Rosen, Gerald R., 85 Rothwell, C. Easton, 40–41, 41–42, 42, 44, 58, 60, 65–66 Roush, Carroll J., 86 Roush, Emma, 84 Roush Fund, 86 Rowen, Henry, 95, 99 The Russian Provisional Government, 1917 (Kerensky and Browder), 55 Russian Revolution, 61, 103 Russian Revolution Institute, 23, 27 Sargent, Thomas, 119 Scholes, Myron S., 119 School of Naval Administration, 41 Schulze, Richard, 33 SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative Seymour, Charles, 36 Shaposhnikov, Boris, 33 Shirer, William L., 53 Shmelev, Anatol, 68

153

Shogan, Robert, 85 Shultz, George P., vii–ix, 87, 91, 101,102, 103, 104,105, 114, 116, 117, 120, 124, 132 Gorbachev and, 90, 107, 107 Nuclear Security Project with, 115–116 Reagan and, 98, 99, 101 Siekierski, Maciej, 105 Sims, Christopher A., 119 Skinner, Kiron K., 73, 107 Smith, Adam, 118 Smith, James A., 77–78 Snow, Helen Foster (Nym Wales), 46, 48 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 73, 87, 87, 88–89, 92 Soong, T. V., 48 Soviet Archives Workshop, 109 Soviet Union, viii, 33, 38, 42, 54, 60, 68, 72–73, 77, 89, 99, 103, 104, 106, 108–109 Soviet microfilm project,108–109

Three Who Made a Revolution (Wolfe), 77 Tinkoff, Marina, 54 Trent, Darrell, 93, 95, 98 Treptow, Martin, 92, 95–96 Tresidder, Donald B., 66 Trotsky, Leon, 54, 54 Truman, Harry, viii, 44, 52 Tuchman, Barbara W., 48 Turning Points in the Ending of the Cold War, 107

Sowell, Thomas, 86, 93, 95, 98, 103, 122, 124 Spence, Michael, 119 Stalin, Joseph, viii, 33, 33, 50, 61, 73, 77, 88, 103, 104, 108 Stanford War Memorial Building, 31–32 Sterling, J. E. Wallace, 66, 67, 67, 70 Stigler, George, 82, 85, 86, 86, 87, 118 Stiglitz, Joseph E., 119 Stilwell, Joseph, 45, 46–47 Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 (Tuchman), 46–47 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 99 Strauss, Lewis L., 18–19 Summer Policy Boot Camp, 129, 129, 131 Sworakowski, Witold, 54, 55, 55, 60, 74, 76

Wakin, Eric, 125, 125, 131, 131 Wales, Nym (Helen Foster Snow), 48 Wallis, W. Allen, 85 Warsaw Ghetto, 51 Weltkriegsbücherei (Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte), 24–25 White, Andrew D., 135n6 Wilbur, Ray Lyman, 1, 9, 16, 21–22, 27–28, 32, 34, 36, 41 Wilson, Woodrow, 4, 5, 7, 9–10, 11 Wolfe, Bertram D., 77 Wolfers, Justin, 72 Workshop on Authoritarianism and Democratic Breakdown, 109 Wright, Mary, 44, 45–46

Taylor, Alonzo, 19, 21 Taylor, John, 93, 116, 117, 127 Teller, Edward, 88, 90, 92, 98, 99,122, 124 Thatcher, Margaret, 93, 112, 112, 113, 122

Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 76

154

Uncommon Knowledge, 104, 120, 123 United States Food Administration, 4, 5, 7, 10, 18, 25, 32 The United States in the 1980s, 90, 90, 93 Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, 42 Voices of Hope: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, 68

Zegart, Amy, 120, 120

defining moments