This “fair-handed, surprisingly sympathetic new appraisal of the much-vilified president who was faced with the nation's plunge into the Great Depression…fills an important niche in presidential scholarship” ( Kirkus Reviews).Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first president of the United States, spent six years in Oregon as a boy. Herbert Hoover in the White House is an object lesson in the most, perhaps only, talent needed to be a successful president-the temperament of leadership. He had a first-class mind and a second-class temperament. The Hoover we see here-bright, well meaning, energetic-lacked the single critical element to succeed as president. We see Hoover watching a sunny (and he thought ignorant) FDR on the horizon, experimenting with steps to relieve the Depression. Rappleye describes him as more sophisticated and more active in economic policy than is often acknowledged. In public Hoover was shy and retiring, but in private Rappleye shows him to be a man of passion and sometimes of fury, a man who intrigued against his enemies while fulminating over plots against him. This “gripping” ( Christian Science Monitor) biography shows that the real Hoover lacked the tools of leadership.
But in Herbert Hoover in the White House, Charles Rappleye investigates memoirs and diaries and thousands of documents kept by members of his cabinet and close advisors to reveal a very different figure than the one often portrayed. Many historians dismiss him as merely ineffective. Often considered placid, passive, unsympathetic, and even paralyzed by national events, Hoover faced an uphill battle in the face of the Great Depression. Herbert Clark Hoover was the thirty-first President of the United States. “A deft, filled-out portrait of the thirty-first president…by far the best, most readable study of Herbert Hoover’s presidency to date” ( Publishers Weekly) that draws on rare and intimate sources to show he was temperamentally unsuited for the job.
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