Volume 15, Number 8 · November 5, 1970
What This Country Needs…
By William A. Williams
The Shattered Dream: Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression
by Gene Smith
William Morrow, 278 pp., $6.95
Herbert Clark Hoover almost never laughed, or so Gene Smith tells us; but I have one of those visions that historians occasionally allow themselves: if one arose very early (sometime during that missing hour 'twixt four and five), and moved very quietly along the upper reaches of the McKenzie River east of Springfield, Oregon, there Hoover would be, just barely visible in the mist—in his waders, standing tit-high in that damnably cold water, a string of trout drifting downstream from his suspender button, one hand with a fly rod and the other with the latest New York Times Book Review section, his head and cigar tilted high, roaring at the latest historical account of his failures. His belly laugh would override the rapids because he would already have read a story about voluntary communes in Iowa, Idaho, and Indiana, and another about Julius Lester's beautiful blast at white radicals for having to learn the same thing over and over and over and….
Review, 3603 words
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