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

165 Pages·26.976 MB·English

by  Bertrand M. Patenaude

Defining
Moments
The First One Hundred Years
of the Hoover Institution
BERTRAND M. PATENAUDE
DEFINING MOMENTS

DEFINING MOMENTS
THE FIRST ONE HUNDRED YEARS
OF THE HOOVER INSTITUTION
BERTRAND M. PATENAUDE
HOOVER INSTITUTION PRESS
STANFORD UNIVERSITY STANFORD, 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.
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Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 701
Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University,
Stanford, California 94305-6003
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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

FOREWORD
GEORGE P. SHULTZ
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 Tower as seen from the
Hoover used some of the remaining funds to establish a foundation to help wor-
Stanford Quad during a Hoover
thy Belgians study in the United States. Known today as the Belgian American
event.
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Educational Foundation (BAEF), it is still active nearly a century after its found-
ing. 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 oper-
ations 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 effi-
ciency and was immensely practical as a mining engineer, humanitarian, secre-
tary 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 documen-
tary 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 magnif-
icent 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 radi-
cally. 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
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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 ener-
getic 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.
— george p. shultz
Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow,
Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, California
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