AUTHOR OF "HEADQUARTERS NIGHTS," ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEDICATED
TO MY COMPANIONS OF THE
C. R. B.

PREFACE

No man can have reached the position in the public eye, can have had such influence in the councils of our own government and in the fate of other governments, can have been so conspicuously effective in public service as has Herbert Hoover, without exciting a wide public interest in his personality, his fundamental attitude toward his great problems and his methods of solving them. This American, who has had to live in the whole world and yet has remained more truly and representatively American than many of us who have never crossed an ocean or national boundary line, is an object of absorbing interest today among the people of his native land. He is hardly less interesting to millions in other lands. He has carried the American point of view, the American manner, the American qualities of heart and mind to the far corners of the earth. He has no less revealed again, as other great Americans have done before him, these American attributes to America itself.

Many questions are being asked about the life and experiences of this man before he entered upon his outstanding public service and about the details of his personal participation in the work of the great wartime private and governmental organizations under his direction.

This book is the attempt of an observer, associate and friend to tell, simply and straightforwardly, the personal story of the man and his work up to the present.

V. K.