National Affairs: Death of Hoover

President Roosevelt last week sent telegrams to the widows of Presidents Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolidge and to onetime President Herbert Hoover. The messages all carried the same news: the good friend and trusted aide of each & every one of them, Irwin Hood ("Ike") Hoover, longtime chief usher at the White House, was dead in Washington at the age of 62. He had left his cubby-hole office just off the White House foyer one afternoon, gone home, been suddenly stricken with a heart attack. Declared President Roosevelt who had known him since the days of T. R.: "It was Ike Hoover who met me at the door when I came into the White House as my home. . . . His passing is a tremendous personal loss. . . . The nation, too, has lost a true and faithful public servant."

In 1891, Edison Co. of New Jersey sent young Ike Hoover to Washington to wire the White House for electric lights. It was a six-month job. President Harrison, skittish about electricity, asked Ike Hoover to remain, take charge of the "incandescents," the bells and pushbuttons. President McKinley made him chief usher. As major-domo of the White House he ran its social functions, stage-managed the ceremonious presentation of diplomatic credentials, arranged seating lists for dinners, kept a check on calling cards, directed Presidential receptions, herded the Cabinet about, told distinguished visitors, where to stand, what to say. As guardian of the front door, he knew whom to let in, whom to keep out. He managed the White House weddings of Alice Lee Roosevelt to Nicholas Longworth, of Eleanor Randolph Wilson to William Gibbs McAdoo. President Wilson trusted him with the secrets of his romance with Mrs. Edith Boiling Gait, let him arrange their marriage. Tall, immaculate, dignified Chief Usher Hoover's manners were rated second only to those of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

No man knew the private White House lives of the last ten Presidents so well as Ike Hoover. No loose-lipped gossip could have held his confidential job for 42 years. Once he was offered $50.000 to write his memoirs. He refused, saying: "When I pass out, everything I know goes with me."