Heroes: The Humanitarian

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"Final Farewells." Each four years, Hoover appeared at Republican National Conventions as his party's beloved elder statesman to declare his undying enmity toward Big Government and unbalanced budgets-and at the last three conventions through 1960 in Chicago, to deliver his "final farewell." Once he was out of office, the warmth and wit that had long delighted his personal friends finally broke through his public reserve. "When I comb over these accounts of the New Deal," he ad-libbed in one speech, "my sympathy arises for the humble decimal point. His is a pathetic and heroic life, wandering around among regimented ciphers, trying to find some of the old places he used to know."

At 62, Hoover assumed the chairmanship of the Boys' Clubs of America. At 84, he published his sympathetic account of The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson. Throughout his own last ordeal, a 26-month struggle against a variety of major illnesses, he worked on a history of modern Communism.

Hoover survived surgery for abdominal cancer in 1962. After a massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage in June of 1963, his doctors considered death imminent. Yet Hoover sat up in bed one morning, ordered scrambled eggs and his pipe, told his startled nurse: "Now I am back in business again." Stricken again last February, this time by a kidney ailment and pneumonia, he recovered, remained alert and productive right up until still another gastrointestinal hemorrhage sent him last week into a painless and final coma.

The passions of the 1964 presidential campaign were temporarily stilled as all four national candidates joined in mourning at a simple funeral service at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. There thousands filed past Hoover's bier, and even more paid last respects as his body lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington. He was buried on Sunday on a peaceful knoll overlooking the West Branch cottage of his birth.