Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, William F. Buckley, and me

Back in the mid- to late seventies, when I was still an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, the conservative intellectual and writer William F.Buckley Jr. visited and spoke at BYU.

I was privileged, along with two others, to pick him up at the airport and to take him to visit for an hour or so with the First Presidency (Spencer W. Kimball, N. Eldon Tanner, and Marion G. Romney).  There were a lot of fun things that came out of the time I spent with him, and I’ll probably write about them at some point.

But I do want to recount one of the several stories that he told during the drive from Salt Lake City to Provo.  I don’t know whether it’s ever appeared in print; he claimed to have been told it personally by former President Herbert Hoover:

Hoover, a Republican nearly two decades out of the White House, was listening to the radio one day.  President Harry S. Truman was giving a speech during his bid for another term in office.

Contrasting his own Democratic domestic policies with those of the inevitably heartless Republican who had been serving as president when the Great Depression began, Truman said, more or less, that Herbert Hoover had been callously unconcerned at the suffering of ordinary Americans.

Now, as a matter of fact, Herbert Hoover is widely recognized as a philanthropist of truly epic proportions.  He cared deeply about the woes of the American working class, and he cared deeply about what Truman had said about him.  He was furious.  And he vowed that he would never speak to Harry Truman again.

As luck would have it, though, somebody on the White House staff called Hoover just a few days later.  Would he be coming through Washington DC anytime soon?  President Truman had a matter that he wished to discuss with Mr. Hoover.

At any given time, the club of presidents and former presidents is a very small and exclusive one.  But, occasionally, issues must arise that only someone who has held the office would fully understand, that a sitting president might not be able to discuss with staffers.

So Herbert Hoover decided that, his personal anger at Harry Truman notwithstanding, he would agree to Mr. Truman’s request for a meeting.  The man was, after all, the president of the United States of America.  But, before they discussed whatever it was that Mr. Truman wanted to discuss, he was darned well going to bring up his displeasure at Truman’s suggestion that he was indifferent to the travails of ordinary Americans.

He kept his vow.

After listening to the indignant Mr. Hoover, President Truman replied “I know.  Wasn’t it horrible?  When I got to that passage, I almost didn’t read it!”

It’s an amusing story, I think.

But I bring it up now because some are wondering how Mitt Romney, a man who clearly holds a low opinion of our President-Elect, can possibly entertain the possibility of serving as Secretary of State in a Donald Trump administration.

I don’t find this at all difficult to understand:  The man will, after all, soon be president of the United States.  And the country and the world are bigger, even, than Mr. Donald J. Trump.