National Affairs: House Guest

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In the small Circarama theater in the U.S. pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair, a white-haired man sat expressionless, arms folded, as the circular screen showed movies of U.S. great scenery and U.S. great works. It was the Fourth of July. Suddenly, when the screen showed an aerial view of scarred old mountains and a broad lake and in the midst of them the Colorado River's gleaming Hoover Dam, the old man acknowledged the applause of a small group of Americans standing around him. Thus was Herbert Clark Hoover, 83, happily reminded of his days as President of the U.S. (1929-33) as he served his Government still another time as President Eisenhower's personal representative at the U.S. National Days at the World's Fair.

But Herbert Hoover had also gone to Brussels, in a sense, as an honored house guest of the Belgian people. He went first to Brussels in 1914, a distinguished engineer, as head of the Belgian Relief Commission, which helped save the Belgian people from starvation in World War I. And it was in his role as a house guest even more than in his role of presidential representative that Herbert Hoover was able, as he delivered a formal Fourth of July address in the Grand Auditorium that night, to command attention and respect with a sentence: "I would not be your friend if I did not speak frankly now . . ."

Beacon in the Tower. At 83, and just two months away from a gall-bladder operation, Herbert Hoover moved about a little stiffly but the trip to Brussels was, in fact, just another event in a still-crowded life. "You should not retire from work," he said in 1956, "or you will shrivel up into a nuisance . . . talking to everybody about your pains and pills and income tax." In his apartment-office in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Tower, Herbert Hoover keeps busy up to 16 hours a day, keeps two of his three fulltime secretaries on hand seven days a week. He has just published a thoughtful biography and tribute to his onetime chief, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (TIME, April 28), is now working in longhand on a series of five other books called Forty Years of Fighting Famine.

He puts in an astonishing amount of time and energy on activities ranging from The Boys Clubs of America to Keep America Beautiful Inc. (antilitter), on steady promotion in public speeches and statements, in private conferences and dinners, of the reports of the Hoover Commissions of 1947 and 1953 on streamlining Government operations.*

Danger in Discouragement. He had put much thought and time on his Brussels speech, had, in fact, cleared it with the U.S. State Department. Specifically he concentrated on two basic misrepresentations about the U.S.—sedulously fostered by Communist propaganda—that underlie much of the anti-Americanism in the world today.

Misrepresentation No. 1: that the U.S. economy is oppressive. Hoover eloquently defended "our system of regulated economic freedom . . . its built-in impulses of initiative, energy, ambition and opportunity," with its 70-year-old antitrust laws that safeguard "the fundamentals of fair and open competition."